Contemporary researchers have tended to present dysfunction in schizophrenia as the result of biological and social forces. While this has greatly advanced our knowledge, we are still without a full account of the illness’s first-person dimensions. A richer first-person account explains that schizophrenia is a disorder that interrupts the lives of people who must continue to struggle to find and create security and meaning. A range of literature has explored in many directions how schizophrenia is linked to profound changes in self-experience; however, there have not been systematic explorations of the ways in which these views converge and diverge. In response we will explore two different models of the processes which underlie a particular self-experience linked with schizophrenia: experiences of diminished agency. We will present a dialogical model of disturbances in agency and then compare and contrast it with another prominent philosophically based model, one from phenomenology.
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