Abstract
This paper seeks to demonstrate the structural difference in communication of schizophrenia and autism. For a normal adult, spontaneous communication is nothing but the transmission of phantasía (thought) by means of perceptual objects or language. This transmission is first observed in a make-believe play of child. Husserl named this function “perceptual phantasía,” and this function presupposes as its basis the “internalized affection of contact” (which functions empirically in eye contact, body contact, or voice calling me). Regarding autism, because of the innate lack of affection of contact, intersubjective perceptual phantasía does not occur spontaneously. Consequently, autistics do not engage in make-believe play but in stereotyped and solipsistic play. Without the formation of perceptual phantasía, there is no differentiation between phantasía and perception. For this reason, people with Asperger's syndrome consider conversation not an immediate communication of thought but a logical transmission of concepts. Schizophrenia is characterized by a distortion in the internalized affection of contact, resulting in a disturbance of perceptual phantasía, and this later is covered by various symptoms—for example, delusion as a pathological kind of communication of thought. This delusion is based on the pathological internalized affection of contact represented by a terrifying Other.
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Notes
Since 2003, I have conducted field work at the National Center for Child Health and Development (Tokyo, Japan) where I concentrate on work with autistic children.
Affection of contact (I used affection d’appel in French) is a concept of my own making. Allow me to cite my own text: “The eye contact of others precedes the perception of his body. In the natural situation of the non-autistic, the experience of others—before being perception of their body—is first of all experience of a glance, the call of a voice or body contact. This experience does not require knowledge of the other and the baby responds to the facial expression of his (her) mother. We call ‘affection of contact’ this primordial experience [...]. (which is an independent [and transcendental] ‘category’ irreducible to other moments of transcendental subjectivity).” (Murakami 2008a, 17)
“Bei einer Theateraufführung leben wir in einer Welt perzeptiver Phantasie, wir <haben> ‘Bilder’ in der zusammenhängenden Einheit eines Bildes, aber darum nicht Abbilder. Wenn Wallenstein oder Richard III auf der Bühne dargestellt wird, so handelt es <sich> sicherlich um abbildliche Darstellungen, obschon es eine zu erwägende Frage ist, inwiefern diese Abbildlichkeit selbst ästhetische Funktion hat. In erster Linier hat es sicher nicht die Abbildlichkeit, sondern die Bildlichkeit im Sinn der perzeptiven Phantasie als unmittelbare Imagination.” (Hua XXIII, 514–515): Husserl considers that the perceptual phantasía is a sort of imagination. But as Richir has showed, a perceptual phantasía does not necessarily have a precise image (Richir 2008).
Therefore, even if an autistic child is so locked on himself (herself) that we cannot make direct contact with him (her; in other words, even if there is no affection of affection of contact), we can play with him. By mimicking his (her) behavior, we can participate in his (her) repetitive play and he (she) meets our gesture (even if he (she) does not respond to us as a person). In other words, Phantasieleib works in him (her) and that allows him (her) this “sympathy” with the gesture of others (but without affection of contact and without forming transcendental telepathy).
Intelligent autistic adults distinguish well between phantasía and perception. But they seem to attribute the same reality to the phantasía as to the perception.
More precisely, as I said, children at this stage do not distinguish perception from phantasía because of the absence of transcendental telepathy which establishes this distinction and this is why the aggression in the phantasía becomes “acting out” in the real world.
Therefore, at the stage of the paranoid–schizoid position, I think there is still no distinction between perception and phantasía, and this is also why the birth of transcendental telepathy as a result of this “survival” shows the differentiation of phantasía and perception.
This “autism” is a feature of schizophrenia and is not the name of the developmental disorder.
I feel close to the theory of schizophrenia proposed by Gisela Pankow (1914–1998, German psychoanalyst who practiced in Paris). She states that: “in the hebephrenic, a gap in the emotional life is completed by a hallucination or by an action without apparent purpose, because the other is not confronted” (Pankow 1987, 29). Pankow believes that the excessive symbiosis (sometimes incest) of schizophrenics with their mother or father and the lack of paternity (hence lack of the social law) are the basis of schizophrenia. When there is no differentiation between the child and mother, there will be no transcendental telepathy, which is communication between independent subjects; [in the family of schizophrenics] “the mother is a part of her own child, so the mother has no children. The child is part of her mother and the child has no mother” (Pankow 1977, 106–107).
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Acknowledgement
I thank Dr. Masutomo Miyao for his kind support throughout the entire research.
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Murakami, Y. Affection of contact and transcendental telepathy in schizophrenia and autism. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 179–194 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9193-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9193-8