Chapter 9: What Schizophrenia and Autism Can Tell Us

The text argues that the clinical presentation of these conditions mirrors the effects of right hemisphere damage, characterized fundamentally by a loss of the "Gestalt"—the inability to perceive wholes, contexts, and the implicit connections between things—resulting in a fragmented world composed of isolated, meaningless details,. The summary details how this hemispheric imbalance leads to "devitalization," where the living, organic world is experienced as static, inanimate, and machine-like, a state often accompanied by a shift from the embodied self (Leib) to the body perceived merely as a biological object or mechanism (Körper),. Significant attention is given to the distortion of time and space, where the seamless flow of temporal experience ("durée") is replaced by a series of frozen, spatialized instants, leading to a compulsive need to record or reconstruct reality to ensure its existence,. The narrative explores the paradox of "hyper-rationalism" in psychosis, where a loss of intuitive common sense drives patients toward rigid, bureaucratic systematization and an over-reliance on explicit logic and algorithms to navigate social interactions,. Furthermore, the chapter draws compelling parallels between these pathological states and the "modernist" worldview, suggesting that contemporary Western culture’s obsession with abstraction, virtuality, and mechanism reflects a collective drift toward a left-hemisphere-dominated ontology, as described in the works of Louis Sass,.