Abstract
This edited volume is an interdisciplinary work which reminds the reader of the joys of psychiatry: that which is known and that which can currently only be hypothesized. It brings together philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, psychiatry and neurology in a great flurry of ideas which create as many questions as answers. Where many interdisciplinary works are patchy, this one succeeds in crossing paradigms in ways which enlighten rather than mystify.
Taking schizophrenia as a disorder which involves a disordered sense of self, the authors approach this disintegration from a number of different viewpoints. Some chapters are abstract and theoretical, while others are empirical and based upon clinical material. Most levels of current cognitive neuroscience theories receive an airing, from functional dysconnectivity to laterality, but philosophical perspectives are also given equal space. Unlike many multi-author works, chapter authors refer frequently to other chapters and thus the work is cohesive and not repetitive or redundant.
The first section provides an historical and conceptual discussion of the self and sets the ground for its pathologies. Subsequently the cognitive neuroscience of the self is approached from a number of theoretical viewpoints. In the larger remainder of the book, a number of conceptual and practical viewpoints are utilized to explore how schizophrenia affects, inter alia, the self, agency, selfconsciousness and self-narrative. The editors provide a substantial concluding chapter which seeks, as best possible, to integrate the diverse viewpoints into a theoretical and experimental framework. Some chapters are dense, complex and hard going. There are enough contributors that one can skip to different viewpoints and not become bogged down or disheartened.
This is an eloquent and provocative work. It will stimulate the reader, by exposing them to new ways of regarding complex questions about psychosis. It will alert most to the influence of neurosciences on phenomenology, to novel methods of exploring the fundamental symptoms of psychosis and the ways in which alternative theoretical stances from other disciplines might provide new insights into schizophrenia. Despite its broad ambit and the difficulty of some chapters, this work is a gem and should be considered by both the enthusiastic and the jaded: it has a great deal to offer and skips through a good deal of current cognitive neuroscience research in the process.