Empathy and Indifference: Philosophical Reflections on Schizophrenia

As a student of philosophy, directed by Prof. Roberta de Monticelli at the University of Geneva/Milano, I first followed the school of ethical philosophy of phenomenology (Scheler, Husserl, etc.) with great enthusiasm, which bases ethics on an analysis of lived experience, empathy and compassion, that is, a basic understanding of the Golden Rule. In the midst of my studies, however, I was caught up in the concrete constraints of life, meeting a sick person who no longer had the ability to feel correctly the relationship to the other, as it is the case in schizophrenia. How can we continue to live with others when we share the same space, but that person isolates himself from a common world of experience (which philosophers call koinos kosmos)? Our work focuses on an anthropological approach to mental illness, describing how schizophrenia can distort our experience of empathy and of the presence in the world through pathological indifference. We describe factual and phenomenological perspectives on a case of schizophrenia, based on the method of Eugène Minkowski (1885-1972). This book focuses on an anthropological approach to mental illness, describing how schizophrenia can distort one's experience of empathy and of the presence in the world through pathological indifference. It describes factual and phenomenological perspectives on a case of schizophrenia, based on the method of Minkowski, at the intersection of holistic understandings of the human being (as the Gestalt, or phenomenology), building on a Bergsonian understanding of the human becoming.