Navigating Contextual Instability

Louis Sass’s interpretation of schizophrenia as a self-disturbance has helped advance phenomenological psychopathology. Nevertheless, his ipseity model has received criticism for allegedly treating schizophrenia primarily through “top-down” reflective processes, neglecting the pre-reflective layers of experience, and lacking empirical support. I address these critiques by drawing on recent neuropsychiatric studies that indicate a correlation between semantic alterations and disturbances in the broader system of relational knowledge, suggesting contextual instability. I argue that these studies support Sass’s claim that a core aspect of schizophrenia is the disturbance of the sense of contex­tual relevance that unfolds on both reflective as well as pre-reflective levels of experience, thus defending the inclusion of passive dimensions of experience in his ipseity model.