Unpacking The Link Between Schizotypy And Somatic Anxiety: The Mediating Role of Cognitive Anxiety

Date

2025-12-9

Author

Bıçakcı, Ozan

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This thesis conceptualizes negative and positive schizotypy not as subclinical phenomena, but as distinct strategies to compensate for the loose knotting of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary registers. The study investigated whether these two modes of compensation follow differential pathways to somatic anxiety, which is defined here as the direct experience of unmediated jouissance. Path analysis was used to test the relationships between schizotypy, cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety, and primary process thinking. The results revealed that cognitive anxiety (through a rigid symbolic link) fully mediates the relationship between negative schizotypy and somatic anxiety and that cognitive anxiety partially mediates the relationship between positive schizotypy and somatic anxiety (and this partial mediation is merely due to the inclusion of suspiciousness subfactor in the positive schizotypy). Moreover, primary process thinking is found to be significant predicting somatic anxiety. Clinically, for negative schizotypy, where worry serves as a failed symbolic link, treatment should aim to modulate rather than eliminate this mechanism, thereby (symbolically) mobilizing repetitive thoughts. For positive schizotypy, which is characterized by the overproduction of unanchored signs, the clinic shifts to slowing down of this production process to open up space for a stable meaning. Even more, synthesizing these empirical findings of the Free Energy Principle, this thesis concludes that jouissance can be conceptualized as a persistent prediction error. Within this framework, then, negative schizotypy represents an attempt with high-precision on the priors, while positive schizotypy represents an attempt with high-precision on the novel data.

Subject Keywords

Schizotypy, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Somatic Anxiety, Ordinary Psychosis, Free Energy Principle

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/117382

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis