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- Title
Body, Image and Alterations to Sense of Self: Experiences of Schizophrenics.
- Authors
Shu-jung Lin
- Abstract
This article focuses on the relationship between schizophrenia and the self in terms of bodily experiences. Jenkins (2004) suggests that schizophrenia should be treated as a paradigm for understanding cultural involvement in shaping basic human disease processes, especially via the domains of ordinary and extraordinary bodily senses, emotions, and faculties. Accordingly, I analyze three schizophrenic-written self-descriptive texts of what Good (1992) refers to as "disordered interpretation" from childhood through the disease period and recurring episodes. The data appear to indicate that alterations in sense of self are not only constructed through long-term interactions between patients and their significant others, but also in the contexts of everyday life, dream accounts, mirror images, and projections experienced during meditation or self-cultivation practices. It is in these diverse contexts that self images are revealed and incorporated into the self-constructed texts and disordered interpretations of personal illness and suffering. I therefore suggest that (a) examining the relationship between the meaning structure of hallucination and a patient's delusional world can lead to greater understanding of the disease process of schizophrenia, and (b) distinguishing between the ordinary and extraordinary is both difficult and in many ways senseless. It also appears that domains treated as either pathological or extraordinary actually reflect the context sensitivity of a culture..that is, personal illness reveals rich information about conflicts, dilemmas, complexes of sentiments, emotions, and motivations, and perhaps thought formations belonging to the domain of "personal myth" that reveal the strongest constraints of a culture. For many Taiwanese, relatedness in the form of social relationships is central to the construction of self systems and identities--not only in family and everyday life, but also in an individual's cosmic world view, including deeds and faults perceived as occurring in previous lives.
- Subjects
SCHIZOPHRENIA treatment; PEOPLE with schizophrenia; EVERYDAY life; HALLUCINATIONS; EMOTIONS; CULTURE
- Publication
Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, 2008, Vol 6, Issue 2, p3
- ISSN
1727-1878
- Publication type
Article