The Psychopathology of Hyperreflexivity
Rent from DeepDyve- The Psychopathology of Hyperreflexivity
The structure of human embodiment is fundamentally characterized by a polarity or ambiguity between Leib and Körper, the subjective body and the objectified body, or between being-body and having-a-body. This ambiguity, emphasized, above all, by Helmuth Plessner and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is also of crucial significance for psychopathology. Insofar as mental illnesses disturb or interrupt the unhindered conduct of one’s life, they also exacerbate the tension within embodiment that holds between being-body and having-a-body. In mental illnesses, there is a failure of tacit mediations upon which one’s bodily being-toward-the-world is based. Instead of serving as a medium of relating to the world, the body makes itself noticeable as disturbing or resistant. What was taken for granted suddenly becomes unfamiliar or strange; what was implicit becomes explicit and enters the focus of attention. This explication of the implicit always means a certain estrangement from oneself and, as such, already results in increased self-observation. It is even intensified by processes of reflection that revolve around the lost sense of self-congruence and in which the patients try to bridge over or compensate the break incurred. In fact, they generally only achieve the very opposite. Self-centeredness and hyperreflection are thus, on the one hand, the result of the illness, but on the other hand, they often additionally contribute to it. [End Page 239]
Thus, explication of the implicit, self-alienation, and hyperreflexivity are fundamental phenomena in psychopathology. In order to explore their connection in more detail, in what follows, I first explain the implicit or, as one can also say, the transparent structure of embodiment and its relation to reflexive consciousness. In the second part, I will describe the phenomena of explication and hyperreflection by means of psychopathological examples.
The Implicit Structure of the Body
The implicit structure of embodiment may be explained in the following way: The intentional arc of our perception or of our action is aimed at what is in the focus of our attention. 1 This arc is formed by the combination and integration of individual elements—for example, of the letters of which a read text is composed, the individual facial features from which a complete mimic impression results, or of the individual movements that altogether lead to the complete acts of cycling or dancing. It is this integration of single elements into gestalten of perception or movement that is realized in the medium of the body, without the need for an awareness of the individual elements. Thus the body forms the intentional arc of each perception and action in a tacit and implicit manner. In other words, it is transparent with regard to their intentional object.
Michael Polanyi (1967) has analyzed this structure of embodiment as “implicit” or “tacit knowledge.” It is based on processes of gestalt formation that enable us to understand wholes and meaningful complexes instead of individual elements. We understand the facial expression of another person directly without being able to say which features it amounts to. We hear and understand the sentences someone speaks but not the individual sounds; in other words, we hear the sounds as sentences. Similarly, we feel the structure of an object by perceiving our feeling fingertips as the surface we are feeling. A blind man feels Braille print as words; he reads with his feeling fingers. That is, in Polanyi’s terms, through the proximal, which remains in itself implicit or transparent, we are directed to the distal in the focus of our awareness.
Embodied consciousness, by means of a concept of Helmuth Plessner’s, can also be characterized as “mediated immediacy” (vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit). The body mediates between us and the world but [End Page 240] remains transparent itself, and thus, our relationship to the world becomes immediate. On the other hand, this mediation cannot be taken for granted; it is rather prone to various disorders. Mere clumsiness or inability in dealing with objects makes us conscious of the body as a cumbersome instrument. In illness, the body makes itself felt in an unpleasant way, as a burden or as an obstacle: The otherwise transparent medium becomes opaque...
