Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Michela Summa (pictured above), who works on the Body Memory project at the University of Heidelberg. Here she summarises her paper ‘ The Disoriented Self. Layers and Dynamics of Self-Experience in Dementia and Schizophrenia ’, published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In recent years, several authors have defended a stratified or hierarchical account of the self and self-experience. Some of these accounts have proved to play an important role in the interpretation of psychiatric diseases. In this paper, I addressed the cases of dementia and of schizophrenia in light of the hierarchical model of self and self-experience. Thereby, I set myself two main aims: first, to investigate the potentialities and the limits of applying the hierarchical understanding of the self to dementia and schizophrenia; secondly, to reassess the model itself on the basis of some characteristic traits of both pathologies and possibly to propose some modifications. The paper ...