Realness, Expression, and the Role of Others

I very much appreciate the opportunity to discuss some of the themes raised in my paper, “Depersonalization and the Sense of Realness,” and I am delighted to be able to respond to the insightful and constructive commentaries by Matthew Broome and Shaun Gallagher. In their commentaries, they suggest two different ways of further elaborating the two central themes of the paper. Although this response will not allow me to address the complete range of their points, here I have the unique chance to expand and elucidate some of the central theses of the paper in the service of responding to the commentaries. Let me start with a short reiteration of the aims of my paper.

In my paper (Varga 2012), I attempted to reflect on the experiences of ‘unreality,’ which I believe is a significant issue in both psychopathology as well as philosophy. In short, a careful scrutiny of such experiences may very well help us understand both the normal constitution of the ‘the real’ and its disintegration. I have addressed experiences of ‘unreality’ in connection to depersonalization (DP), which, despite being a common psychiatric symptom, has only received relatively modest philosophical attention. To contribute to recent discussions regarding DP, I attempted to develop a theoretical underpinning for a certain historical hypothesis by drawing mainly on the work of Wittgenstein and the phenomenological tradition. Two ideas have guided the course of the paper, both to a certain extent inspired by prominent exponents of phenomenological psychiatry like Minkowski, Jaspers, and Blankenburg. The first idea was that the characteristic feelings of ‘unreality’ are connected to a diminished sense of ‘realness,’ which—rather than being a question of belief or propositional content—is located on the level of a primordial and pre-intentional relation to the world. The second idea was that the diminished experience of realness is related to an impairment of tacit intersubjective skills.

Whereas Broome focuses on the first idea and explores aspects pertaining to the ‘natural attitude,’ Gallagher suggests an empirical underpinning of the second idea by drawing on developmental psychology. Given their different focuses, the following consideration of their constructive points will fall naturally into two parts, allowing me to keep and elaborate on the original distinction between the two main ideas. This approach provides an excellent opportunity to both expand and clarify some of the central arguments of the paper.

Reality, Realness, and Expression

The first point that Broome draws attention to is the important and basic issue of whether a total suspension of the natural attitude can at all be said to be commensurate with communication. He rightly points out that this issue, far from being an exclusively theoretical matter, has important clinical consequences. Our answer to this question will govern the way in which we interpret the reports of patients with DP. Thus, Broome argues that although patients may complain in this manner, it should not be assumed that there is a loss of contact with reality.

Hence, for someone with depersonalization, saying ‘it as if I am not real’ can only be said against a backdrop, perversely, of a strong sense of reality and the natural attitude. As argued elsewhere, even in those with a psychotic illness such as schizophrenia, if open to inter-subjectivity, communication, and the giving and receiving of reasons, then it cannot be claimed that there is a loss of vital pre-reflective contact with reality, as Blankenberg and Minkowski claim.

(Broome 2012, 116)

Although I think one could read Blankenburg and Minkowski in a more charitable way, I find myself in agreement with Broome’s general point, and this is indeed why I continuously have talked about the ‘diminished’ (not lost) sense of realness. So how are we to interpret the reports of patients with DP? In my paper, I have argued against an assumption that I take to be at the core of the mainstream models, namely that it is our integration of experiences into a belief system that adds a sense of realness to experience. Building on this idea, the ‘inadequate interpretation model’ posits that deficient interpretative integration...