Abstract

A significant cluster of complaints of persons affected by schizophrenia, for example, their feeling ephemeral, lacking core identity, being affected by a diminished sense of existing as a self-present subject, point to the disruptions of structural aspects of the core self. These and similar disturbances aggregate significantly and selectively in the schizophrenia spectrum disorders, occur and are detectable in adolescents at risk of future schizophrenic disorder, and have a tendency to persist. All this led to the proposal that the generative disorder in schizophrenia is a disorder of the self. The phenomenological notion of the self serves to investigate the fact that we live..