Dr. Richard Gipps (University of Oxford, UK), Contra Ipseity

March 1st, 2022

h. 16.45 CET



Dr. Richard Gipps (University of Oxford, UK), Contra Ipseity

Abstract:
Psychopathologists describe a range of psychotic disturbances that have been called ‘Ichstörungen’, ‘self-disturbances’, ‘I disturbances’ and ‘ipseity disturbances’. Expressions of such disturbances include "My thoughts are not thought by me. They are thought by somebody else.” "Feelings are not felt by me, things are not seen by me, only by my eyes.” "This (thing, event) directly refers to me.” "My thoughts can influence (things, events). This (event) happens because I think it.” "To keep the world going, I must not stop thinking/breathing, otherwise it would cease to exist.” Specific terms for such experiences are ‘passivity’ / ‘made’ experiences; 'delusions of reference’, and ‘delusional perception’. Phenomenological psychopathologists have attempted to theorise such experiences in terms of a disturbance of: a ‘sense of myness / mineness’, ‘ipseity’, ‘self-givenness’ (i.e. givenness to self), ‘first-person point of view’, ‘first-personal presence’, ‘sense of self-coinciding’, ‘auto-affection’, ‘non-thetic self-consciousness’, ‘consciousness’s purely immanent (i.e. non-transcendent) presence to itself’, etc. 

In this talk I will argue that such theorisations are misguided - that they rely on a misconception of selfhood, one which ‘is blown up out of a misconstrue of the reflexive pronoun’ (Anscombe 1975 p. 25). Furthermore, in their attempts to ‘make sense of’ self-disturbances, ipseity theorists create an illusion of understanding which itself prevents us from grasping the depth of the psychotic disturbance. The argument will be that it is instead through grasping how such experiences resist our attempts to understand them in such terms that we can begin to do justice to the inner devastations of the psychotic mind.

Bio:

Richard Gipps, Clinical Psychologist and Philosopher, works as a psychotherapist in private practice and as an academic in Oxford, UK. His book “On Madness” - a philosophical exploration of the intelligibility of psychotic thought - is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (July 2022). Recent works include ‘Ego boundary disturbance in schizophrenia: An enactivist perspective’ (Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2020), ’Schizophrenic autism’ (in Stanghellini et al, The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology, 2019), and Gipps & Lacewing (Eds), ’The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’ (2019).

Academic publications: https://oxford.academia.edu/RichardGipps. 
Blog: http://clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com. 
Twitter: @DrGipps. 

Please contact fbrencio@us.es to receive the link for the meeting. 

Lectures and Discussions will be held in English