Abstract
The article is part of a research program on the “heuristics of insanity”, which explores the analytical power of sociological tools for the understanding of schizophrenia, as well as the relevance of investigations of schizophrenic experience for social theory, especially concerning its current conceptions of agency, experience and subjectivity. Within this more general program, the paper revisits dramaturgical perspectives on the relation between self and society, intercrossing these perspectives with the psychiatric literature on “schizoid” disturbances of the subject’s relationship with the world and with him/herself. If dramaturgical views of subjectivity criticize, at a theoretical level, the common-sense presupposition according to which there is a “self” that is both stable and clearly distinct from the theatrical masks it “wears” in everyday social life, some disturbances of self-identity or the sense of one’s self in schizophrenia are experientially lived realizations of this dissolution of one’s self into a stream of social roles or identities.
Keywords:
Self-identity; Social role; Phenomenology; Schizophrenia; Dramaturgical sociology