A Phenomenological Critique of John Campbell’s Thought Insertion Analysis

The growing interest of academia in psychiatric phenomena has favored the development of interdisciplinary analyses that combine philosophy with other fields such as medicine, neuroscience and cognitive sciences. For example, John Campbell has attempted to analyze the phenomenon of thought insertion and the constitution of thought agency through the efferent copying model developed by Christopher Frith and other neurophysiologists. Initially, such a model was intended to account for the agency of voluntary movement, making its application to the realm of mental phenomena a challenge. This paper seeks to analyze the model proposed by Campbell based on some of the central concepts in Gallagher’s and Zahavi’s phenomenology and phenomenological psychiatry.