On a Certain Symptom of Schizophrenia in the Light of Selected Concepts from Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetics

Abstract

Many patients who exhibit symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, when asked to describe the content of an image shown to them, spontaneously transform themselves from observers describing the content into former or current participants in the events depicted in the image. Typically, these transformations—from observer to participant, from participant to observer—occur multiple times. In this essay, I aim to interpret the aforementioned symptom of the disease by using selected concepts from Roman Ingarden’s aesthetics, which, in my opinion, yields cognitively interesting effects for the mentioned aesthetics.