Ipseity and psychopathology of the living present

Living time has its emblematic pathology: melancholy. Just as ipseity regarding schizophrenia. Tatossian’s latest work refers the living experience related to these two pathologies to the issue of identity according to Ricoeur : any human presence indeed lies within the anthropological balance between idem-identity (i.e. the identity of sameness) and ipse-identity (i.e. the identity of selfhood or ipseity). As far as this idem/ipse balance is concerned, the melancholy or schizophrenic types stand as two opposite polarities, which Wiggins and Schwartz have themselves formalised following two vectors: hypoand hypernomia.

First we intend to connect the notion of ipseity with temporality, intersubjectivity and norm. The notion of “ipseity disorder” is extremely reductive while granted a stricto sensu s such as “a failing of the minimal self” or a failing of the passive syntheses occurring in a constituting ego meant through assessment processes to be independent from any subjectivity. The very processes enabling the construction of selfhood presuppose interaction with some alter ego that is itself originally constitutive. This results in a notion of ipseity participating in the very foundation of ethics. Ethics are related to the values partaking into the continuity of self as in its renewal entailing the necessary changes resulting from the encounter with others and one’s own presence as being-in-the-world One’s own world must include the other’s world and let it be. Thus ipseity is only to be thought of in a context of mutuality, us-belonging, which Kimura names “aïda”.

We shall deal with the living present issue by exploring the mutual implications of this notion together with that of ipseity. The space-time dimension is set together, both in a context of primary or even primal intersubjectivity, and within the reciprocity of two transcendental a-symetries based on here and now, inter-corporeity and the rhythm of presence. In the time of project, ipseity implies some dynamic balance between oneself and the other’s self, between the vulnerability and responsibility of each. This is how we may find our places in a world we are constructing through our progressing together.

We will provide examples for these notions drawn from the contemporary clinical field of psychiatry: 1) the persistence, in spite of adequate biological treatment, of pathologies such as schizophrenia, chronic delusion or bi-polar disorder, only makes sense if we think of the above-mentioned gap referred to as inter- and intra-subjective “aïda”; 2) emerging pathologies such as ADHD or addictions point at specific difficulties within the contemporary world and within the very constitution of present time; 3) psychotherapy relies on the creation of some intersubjective space which allows here and now, in the present, for some mutual tuning on the basis of some shared and transitory rhythm creating intra-subjective space.