Introspection in the Disordered Mind and the Superintrospectionitis Thesis

This blog post is by Alexandre Billon who presents his argument in a paper recently published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. This paper is a commentary on Kammerer and Frankish's article on what forms introspection could take.

Alexandre Billon

A couple of authors have suggested that schizophrenia and depersonalization disorder (DD) involve an enhancement of introspective abilities regarding certain important features of our experiences --- call that the Superintrospectionitis Thesis.

The Superintrospectionitis Thesis and Schizophrenia

In the phenomenological tradition, Blankenburg argued that reports of some people with schizophrenia ‘reveal, in a kind of immediacy the conditions of possibility of our existence that otherwise remain concealed’ (Blankenburg, 2001, p. 308). Likewise, Kimura (2001, p. 335) suggested that schizophrenia might render manifest, through introspection, the ‘innate structure of all human beings that happens to be hidden in healthy people owing to some mechanism or other’. More recently Stephenson and Parnas (2018) have compared schizophrenia to an ‘amplified mirror image’ that reveals a ‘differentiation or potential alterity implicit in the dynamic nature of subjectivity’.

The Superintrospectionitis Thesis and Depersonalization Disorder

The term ‘depersonalization’ comes from the works of the Swiss diarist Amiel who arguably suffered from it but was quite ambivalent with regard to it. He sometimes described it as an awful psychological disorder, sometimes as a metaphysical blessing and a confirmation of Schopenhauer’s Buddhist views on the unreality of self (Amiel, 1894). This ambivalence about DD is still common. 

Even though DD is usually dysphoric and the strange experiences of people with DD are usually considered misleading, the popular writer Suzanne Segal, aided by her Buddhist teachers, has argued that her DD was the first step of a spiritually enlightening journey (Segal, 1996). She has been followed by some philosophers who saw in DD a confirmation of Buddhist views on the unreality of the self (see  manuscript by Chadha, "Depersonalization and the sense of self") and has led many patients to question the deep meaning of DD (as witnessed by frequent discussions of DD forums).

I consider and reject various arguments for the Superintrospectionitis Thesis (coming from the phenomenological and Buddhist traditions and from evolutionary psychiatry) and I provide a simple, tentative argument against it, the “fine-tuning argument”.

The Fine-Tuning Argument

Suppose you open a radio receiver, choose one wire randomly, and disconnect it, or connect it to a different slot. Suppose that, as a result, you cannot listen to CDs on your stereo anymore. You might still be able to listen to your favorite radio stations. Maybe not. But the chances that it might now better receive the range of radio waves it used to receive, or that it might receive a new range of radio waves, seem extremely meager. The reason why is that a stereo is a fine-tuned system, that is, a system optimized to fulfill a certain set of functions, and whose functioning is extremely sensitive to a set of parameters. 

Accordingly, if you modify these parameters, you are likely to end up with something that cannot properly fulfil some of its functions, and extremely unlikely to obtain something that fulfils some of its functions better. Now, our minds are likewise fine-tuned: they are optimized to fulfil a certain set of functions, including introspection. On the most plausible accounts, schizophrenia, and DD are mental disorders, a mental disorder involves a (harmful) dysfunction of the mind (Wakefield, 1992), and it is extremely unlikely that a dysfunction of a fine-tuned system might make it better at fulfilling some of its (other) functions such as introspection.

The Fine-Tuning Argument does not forbid that some people with mental disorders might become better at introspection after some time, by a form of overcompensation or hyperspecialization (compare with auditory overcompensation to early blindness). Unfortunately, advocates of the Superintrospectionitis Thesis all claim that the earliest symptoms of schizophrenia (in fact the prodromes) and depersonalization disorder reveal a form of introspective enhancement. So overcompensation and hyperspecialization are excluded here.

(For interest, Kammerer and Frankish respond to this commentary here).