The clinical and para-clinical examination of residual self-consciousness in non-communicative severely brain damaged patients remains exceptionally challenging. Passive presentation of the patient’s own name and own face are known to be effective attention-grabbing stimuli when clinically assessing consciousness at the patient’s bedside. Event-related potential and functional neuroimaging studies using such self-referential stimuli are currently being used to disentangle the cognitive hierarchy of self-processing. We here review neuropsychological, neuropathological, electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies using the own name and own face paradigm obtained (...) in conscious waking, sleep, pharmacological coma, pathological coma and related disorders of consciousness. Based on these results we discuss what we currently do and do not know about the functional significance of the neural network involved in “automatic” and “conscious” self-referential processing. (shrink)

While distinguishing between the actions and physical boundaries of self and other (non-self) is usually straightforward there are contexts in which such differentiation is challenging. For example, self–other ambiguity may occur when actions of others are similar or complementary to those of the self. Even in the absence of such situational challenges, individuals experiencing hallucinations have difficulties with this distinction, often experiencing thoughts or actions of self as belonging to other agents. This paper explores the role of ambiguity in self–other (...) differentiation, drawing from developmental, psychodynamic, and neurocognitive perspectives. A key proposal is that engagement in contexts that make distinctions between self and other challenging yet necessary allow reality-testing skills related to agency to develop. Attunement in typical caregiver–infant interactions is framed as a safe but inherently ambiguous environment that provides optimal condition for the infant to develop a coherent self–other sense. Vulnerability to psychosis may be related to limited access to such an environment in early development. However, the perceptual, cognitive, and social skills that contribution to attribution are likely to be malleable following infancy and improve though opportunities for boundary play in similarly ambiguous settings. Using music-making to illustrate, we postulate that engagement in intricate joint-actions that blurs agentic boundaries can contribute to the continued development of an adaptive sense of self and other essential to healthy social functioning. Increased insight into the self–other ambiguity may enhance our understanding of mechanisms underlying “self-disorders” such as schizophrenia and eventually extend the range of social and arts-based therapeutic possibilities. (shrink)

This dissertation in Theory of Practical Knowledge contends that depression is a disorder of the self. Using the existential-phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that if we want to disclose the basic structure of depressed experience, then we must likewise disclose how selfexperience is inseparable from depressed experience. However, even though depression is a contemporary psychiatric category of illness, it is nevertheless a historically and heterogenous concept. To make sense of depression in the context of contemporary psychiatric practice, I show (...) that depression has historically been characterized by two broad models of causation; that is, a phenomenon that is causally explained by either a biological dysfunction or a psychological conflict. But this stark characterization is not limited just to history; by conducting qualitative interviews with psychiatric professionals, I illustrate how this causal dichotomy remains prevalent in contemporary psychiatric practice. On one hand, the clinicians report dissatisfaction with the depression diagnostic criteria (i.e. it is impersonal or vague), while on the other hand, the clinicians also recognize that a depression diagnosis is useful insofar as a diagnosis facilitates access to various resources associated with psychiatric care. Consequently, clinicians have developed a coping strategy that is witnessed in their empathetic desire to distance patients from their depression diagnosis, which led to statements such as, “you are not the problem, the problem is depression.” One consequence of this approach is that depression is artificially cleaved from the person who experiences depression, which subsequently means that depression is viewed to be something independent of oneself. Because I argue that depression and the self are mutually implicated, it is crucial to disseminate some of the most influential contemporary models of selfhood. I show that the brainbound, situated, psychological, and narrative model of self, all have respective strengths and weaknesses. But I also go beyond these models and characterize selfhood as a developmental phenomenon that is expressed as an embodied-style. This style reflects the way in which we establish perceptual contact with the otherness, without which there could be no self-experience. (shrink)