Phenomenology and Social Agent Representation in Psychosis: A Welcome Integration.

Poletti and colleagues question whether the breadth of subjective and inter-subjective experience in psychosis can be reduced to problems with social agent representation. Their question is important, although we note our aim is not reductive and that we hope that a social agent representation approach is one of many possible phenomenological routes to a better neurocognitive understanding of psychosis. A key question phenomenology raises for us is why the experience of illusory social agents tends to emerge from the alterations in intersubjective experience and attunement that authors like Raballo (2017), Fuchs (2015), and Raballo and Krueger (2011) describe. This may suggest a progressive disturbance of social cognition where intersubjective instability is eventually re-cohered into ‘best fit’ social explanations that appear as illusory social agents. In concordance with Poletti and colleagues, we argue that a phenomenologically-informed cognitive science is essential for our future understanding of psychosis.