The exploration of a schizophrenic lived experience. The resources of a mixed first-person methodology combining semi-structured and micro-phenomenological interviews

Schizophrenia has been the topic of numerous experimental scientific researches, who sought to identify and understand this disorder through a brain-analysis, with hardly any successful results though (exemplarily Ch. Frith). Psychiatry on its side has been endeavouring for decades to describe the properties of schizophrenia (for example L. Binswanger, M. Boss, W. Blankenburg, B. Kimura, A. Tatossian, H. Grivois, more recently J. Parnas), with the goal to help the people who suffer from this disorder. First person testimonies parallelly document the lived experiences of these persons (indicatively: M. Sechehaye, P. Tonka). In the present contribution, I would like to show the relevance of the methodology of the micro-phenomenological interview for a better understanding of schizophrenic disorders. This method indeed has the advantage of allowing a refined description, which is thus able to complement and even to possibly renew the available approaches mentioned above, be they third person (neural) or second person (psychiatric), and it interestingly combines as we will see with first-person narrative testimonies.