Two of the greatest phenomenologists of schizophrenia, Eugène Minkowski and Wolfgang Blankenburg, suggested that schizophrenics attempt to compensate for a loss of intuition, of that vital, pre-reflective grasp of reality, by a sort of pseudo-philosophising, or ‘hyper-reflection’ on experience – essentially a disease of over-awareness, in which things that should run smoothly at the preconscious level are yanked into the focus of awareness, where life comes to a juddering halt.
