传统的精神分裂研究,关注的主要是精神分裂的妄想症候群。因为精神分裂中相对特殊的症状,在妄想形式中可以得到最轻易的把握。Blankenburg则认为:精神分裂的本质结构变异是先于妄想的。因此,他致力于在精神分裂的症状贫乏型(主要是青春型和单纯型)中,寻找精神分裂的本质变异。他发现精神分裂异常中的核心缺损是自然自明性的失落。根据胡塞尔的超越现象学,自然自明性失落有四个原因:与世界关系的改变、时间建构的改变、自我建构的改变、交互主体性的改变。Blankenburg的精神分裂理论,作为二十世纪有关精神分裂的最重要工作之一,对于今天的精神分裂研究仍然有极其重要的意义。
The field of schizophrenia research is dominated by the theory which focuses on the delusion. This theory advocates that relative special symptoms of schizophrenia can be observed most easily in the delusion perception. Thus nondelusional schizophrenia which doesn't have obvious symptoms is neglected. In Blankenburg's view, though schizophrenic patients exhibit their world in the delusion more clearly and intuitively than in other psychopathological appearance, it doesn't mean that schizophrenia only manifests itself in the delusion. He tried to search the essence of schizophrenia in the nondelusional and symptom-poor forms, especially the hebephrenic and simple type. Blankenburg belongs to the tradition of phenomenological psychopathology founded by Karl Jaspers, so his methodology is phenomenological. Jaspers proposed that phenomenology should be the preparative discipline of psychopathology because it could help psychiatrists understand what the patients really experienced. The phenomenological psychopathology focuses on the study of subjective experiences and gives high value to the self- descriptions of patients. So it differentiates greatly from the biological psychopathology which focuses on the study of neurological mechanisms. In the last decade, phenomenological psychiatry has undergone a rather prominent recovery because much theoretical and empirical work becomes to be interested in the systematic study of subjective experience of mental disorder. Despite progress in identifying the neural substrates of schizophrenia, phenomenology deserves to be at the center of any effort to investigate schizophrenia, because it makes accessible the symptoms reported by the patient and it can help researchers find out the etiology of schizophrenia. Based on the phenomenological analysis of his patients' self-descriptions, Blankenburg put forward that the loss of natural self-evidence is the core of schizophrenic change. According to the Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, the loss of natural s