Disturbance of the Experience of Self: A Phenomenologically-Based Approach

This chapter is devoted to a specifi c kind of disorders of self-experience occurring selectively in the schizophrenia spectrum disorders. This is a topic that is currently a target of vigorous research (Parnas & Henriksen, 2014). Self-disorders appear to be a fundamental, perhaps even constitutive experiential phenotype of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders. This clinical intuition and nosological idea was ventilated more or less explicitly in all classical texts on schizophrenia (e.g., Kraepelin, 1913; Bleuler, 1911/1950; Jaspers, 1913/1997; Schneider, 1950/1959). In the following, we present a summary of the empirical research, the clinical picture of self-disorders and a theoretical conceptualization of self-disorders.