Rebuilding reality: a phenomenology of aspects of chronic schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia, like other "pathological" conditions, has not been systematically included in the general study of consciousness. By focusing on aspects of chronic schizophrenia, we attempt to survey one way of remedying this omission. Some basic components of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of human experience (intentionality, constitution, and unbuilding) are explicated in detail, and these components are then employed in an account of exemplary aspects of chronic schizophrenia. We maintain that in schizophrenic experience some very basic constituents of reality--constituents so basic we call them "ontological"--are lost so that the patient must try to explicitly re-constitute those ontological features of the world. Using Husserl's concepts such experiences are described as a weakening of "automatic mental life" so that much of the world that is normally taken-for-granted cannot continue to be so. This requires the patient to actively busy him or herself with re-laying the ontological foundations of reality.