The bodily self: A qualitative study of abnormal bodily phenomena in persons with schizophrenia Giovanni Stanghellini a,b , Massimo Ballerini c , Stefano Blasi d , Milena Mancini a, ⁎ , Simona Presenza a , Andrea Raballo e , John Cutting f a “G. d'Annunzio” University, Chieti, 66013, Italy b “Diego Portales” University, Santiago, Chile c Department of Mental Health, Florence, 50125, Italy d “Carlo Bo” University, Urbino, 61029, Italy e Department of Mental Health and Pathological Addiction, Reggio Emilia, 42122, Italy f Kings College Hospital in London and the Institute of Psychiatry, London, WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom Abstract Subtle anomalies of bodily experience have for long been described as relevant features of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, however such disturbing and alienating experiences are usually neglected in routine clinical examination. The overarching aim of this qualitative study is to offer an experience-close mapping of abnormal bodily phenomena (ABP) in patients with schizophrenia that might assist clinical examination and inform the development of dedicated assessment tools. We followed a stepwise methodology: first, data from n = 550 clinical interviews were analyzed adopting consensual qualitative research (CQR) inductive method in order to identify relevant clusters of ABP. Then, ABP profiled in schizophrenia patients (n = 301) were contrasted with ABP identified in patients affected by major depression (n = 56). 70% of the interviewees in the schizophrenia sample reported anomalies of lived corporeality, that could be condensed in the following categories: Dynamization, Morbid objectivation, Dysmorphic–like phenomena and Pain-like phenomena. Those appeared to be reducible to two core features that were not paralleled in the affective disorder sample: dynamization (e.g. ongoing bodily feelings of disintegration/violation) and thingness/mechanization (e.g. one’s body experienced as a object-like mechanism). We suggest that dynamization and thingness/mechanization might be considered schizophrenia-specific experiential phenotypes that can contribute to early differential diagnosis of somatic complaints in mental health help-seekers. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The precise characterization of abnormal bodily phenom- ena (ABP) in people with schizophrenia is both of theoretical and clinical interest. The lived body (i.e. the direct, immediate and often implicit experience one has of one’s own body in the first-person perspective) is one of the most important dimensions of self-experience as well as the most primitive form of self-awareness [1–5]. Bodily experience, indeed, is the implicit background of our day-to-day experiences against which we develop a coherent sense of self as a unified, bounded entity, naturally immersed in a social world of meaningful others [3–5]. Such tacit experiential background is often perturbed in schizophrenia, giving rise to apparently unintelligible experiences such as abnormal feelings of violability, transformation (i.e. altered shape/structure or change in composition) or dramatically altered regional sensitivity (see descriptions in Jaspers, Huber, Ey, Cutting [6–9]). In this sense ABP manifest an aspect of the core features of schizophrenic vulnerability, i.e. the disruption in the basic sense of being an incarnated self [10–20]. Since disorders of the embodied self may be a privileged vantage point to understand the experiential psychopathol- ogy of schizophrenia [21], achieving a detailed clinical Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Comprehensive Psychiatry 55 (2014) 1703 – 1711 www.elsevier.com/locate/comppsych ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Psychological, Humanistic and Territorial Sciences, University “G. D' Annunzio", Via Dei Vestini 31, IT - 66013 Chieti (Italy). Tel.: +39 0871 355 5376. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2014.06.013 0010-440X/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.