Abstract

This paper offers a phenomenological or hermeneutic reading—employing Heidegger's notion of the 'ontological difference'—of certain central aspects of schizophrenic experience. The main focus is on signs and symptoms that have traditionally been taken to indicate either 'poor reality-testing' or else 'poverty of content of speech' (defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III-R as: “speech that is adequate in amount but conveys little information because of vagueness, empty repetitions, or use of stereotyped or obscure phrases"). I argue that, at least in some cases, the tendency to attribute these signs of illness to the schizophrenic patient results from a failure to recognize that such patients—as part of a quasi-solipsistic orientation and alienation from more normal, pragmatic concerns—may be grappling with issues of what Heidegger would call an ontological rather than an ontic type, issues concerned not with entities but with Being (i.e. not with objects in the world but with the overall status of the world itself). An application of the Heideggerian concept of the ontological difference has the potential to alter one's sense of the lived-worlds of such patients, of what they may be attempting to communicate, and of why communication with them so often breaks down.