Summary
Abnormalities of the self are some of the most complex and intriguing in clinical psychopathology. I aim to give a brief introduction to the formal characteristics of the self from a psychopathologist’s perspective and give examples of how these formal characteristics can be affected in patients who present to the clinic. I will introduce conditions such as phantom limb, congenital absence of limbs, significant loss of body experience, and others that reveal the relationship between the body and the self. Finally, I will focus on autoscopy. This is a rare phenomenon where a person experiences a duplicate of themselves. I will discuss its neurological underpinnings and show that the underlying self is a product of multiple sensory representations of the body. I will then briefly turn to the philosophical implications of these phenomena.
