Reinterpreting Emotional Disturbance in Schizophrenia through Marion's Saturated Phenomena — Epoche C2
A measured dissociation that the deficit model does not accommodate In 1996 Ann Kring and John Neale showed emotionally evocative films to patients with schizophrenia and to control participants, and recorded three things at once: facial expression, coded from video; self-reported experienced emotion; and skin conductance, an autonomic index of arousal. The patients were markedly less expressive. They also reported experiencing as much emotion as controls, and in some conditions more, and they showed greater electrodermal reactivity. The three components of the emotional response, ordinarily concordant, came apart. This finding — replicated often enough since to be called the emotion paradox of schizophrenia — is the empirical fact this essay is about, and it is the fact that the deficit model of emotional disturbance in schizophrenia does not accommodate. The deficit model holds that the emotional disturbances catalogued in schizophrenia — blunted affect, anhedonia, apathy — are what their names say they are: reductions in emotional life. It is not a straw position. It is the model built into the negative-symptom construct on which a great deal of clinical assessment and drug trial methodology rests, and it captures something real, since diminished expression is exactly what an observer sees. The difficulty is that it derives an inference about experience from an observation of expression, and Kring and Neale's design was constructed to separate those two, with the result that the inference fails. The proposal I want to make and then substantially restrict is that a phenomenological framework built for a quite different purpose — Jean-Luc Marion's analysis of what he calls the saturated phenomenon — explains how an excess of experience can present as an absence of it. I shall argue that it does this well for one class of symptom and badly for another, and that the class it does badly is the one the original version of this argument leaned on hardest. The saturated phenomenon, stated precisely Marion's Being Given (1997; English translation 2002) proceeds from the Husserlian schema of intention and fulfilment. In the ordinary case, a signitive intention aims at something under a concept and awaits intuitive fulfilment; the intuition given falls short of, or at best exactly matches, what the intention aimed at. The mathematical object is Marion's limiting case of poverty in intuition, the object of everyday perception the case of adequation. His thesis is that these two exhaust the field only by stipulation, and that there is a third class, in which intuition arrives in excess of any concept the subject can bring to it. That is the saturated phenomenon: not a phenomenon that is obscure, and not one that is merely complicated, but one whose givenness overruns the capacity to constitute it. Marion classifies the varieties by inverting the four Kantian categorial headings, and the inversion is what gives the classification its content: Quantity , inverted, yields the event : a phenomenon that cannot be foreseen, because it cannot be assembled in advance from its parts. Quality , inverted, yields the idol : a phenomenon whose intensity the gaze cannot bear, of which the painting is his paradigm. Relation , inverted, yields the flesh : a phenomenon absolute in the strict sense, unconditioned by any horizon, because it is given in auto-affection rather than at a distance. Modality , inverted, yields the icon : a phenomenon that cannot be looked at, because it looks back, reversing the direction of the regard. Two further features of Marion's account matter for what follows, and without them the clinical application does not get off the ground. The first is his insistence that the recipient of a saturated phenomenon is no longer a constituting subject but what he calls l'adonné , the one to whom the phenomenon is given, whose role is to receive rather than to synthesise. The second, and the load-bearing one, is his analysis of bedazzlement. When intuition exceeds what the gaze can bear, the result is not a vivid perception but the failure of perception: too much light produces the same phenomenal blank as too little. Marion states this explicitly as a structural claim about the idol, and it is the only reason the present argument is not a mere assertion that absence is secretly presence. On his account, an experiential blank has two possible aetiologies, privation and saturation, and the blank itself does not distinguish them. One further point must be made before the application, because it constrains it. Marion's own examples — the historical event, the painting, one's own flesh, the face of another — are exemplary or ordinary experiences. He does not extend the analysis to psychopathology, and nothing in Being Given licenses treating disorganisation as a species of saturation. The extension therefore requires an independent argument for each symptom to which it is applied, and cannot be made wholesale. The case it fits: dread without an object Take the experience patients frequently describe as a pervasive sense of impending catastrophe that will not attach to any particular thing. The deficit model has nothing to say about it, since it is manifestly not a reduction of anything. Marion's schema has something specific to say, and the specificity is what makes the claim more than a redescription. The relevant background result is Heidegger's analysis of anxiety in Being and Time (1927), section 40, which distinguishes fear from anxiety by the presence or absence of a determinate innerworldly object: fear is fear of something encountered within the world, whereas that in the face of which one is anxious is being-in-the-world as such, and is therefore, as Heidegger puts it, nothing and nowhere. Objectless dread is thus not a pathological form at all; it is a structure available to ordinary experience, and any account that makes objectlessness itself the pathology has already misdescribed the phen