Self-disturbance in schizophrenia: a phenomenological approach to better understand our patients.

A phenomenological approach explains the apparently unintelligible experiences of patients with schizophrenia as a disruption of the normal self-perception. Patients with schizophrenia suffer from a decline of "me," the background core of their experiences. Normally tacit experiences intrude into the forefront of their attention, and the sense that inner-world experiences are private diminishes. These patients lose the sense that they are the origin of their thoughts and actions; their self-evident network of meanings and a solid foundation of life disintegrate. Subsequently, their experiential world is transformed, alienated, intruded, and fragmented. In this article, a phenomenological investigation of the self-experiences and actions of 4 patients with schizophrenia is presented.