Understanding, schizophrenia, and the limits of phenomenology

Karl Jaspers’ assertion of the un-understandability of schizophrenic psychosis, which rests on a division between what is psychologically understandable and what must be explained via natural causation, has faced numerous challenges from within phenomenological psychopathology. But despite significant developments in the phenomenology of schizophrenia, I suggest that this dichotomy, between psychological understandability and naturalistic explanation, is still present in some phenomenological research on schizophrenia today, even in work that explicitly critiques the limitations of empathic understanding and the purported incomprehensibility of schizophrenic delusions. Other theories of subjectivity, particularly those in the Lacanian tradition, offer one way to recognize the impossibility of understanding without turning to naturalistic explanation. These theories may encourage us to better integrate other key insights in phenomenology, most clearly articulated in the work of Merleau-Ponty, that look beyond “conscious” awareness—those that allow for a renewed appreciation of the un-understandable in schizophrenia, and indeed in all human experience.