Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles

A key text for Psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, as well as trainees in the area. Presenting a clinical model which has close connections with American constructivist psychotherapy and Bowlby’s Attachment Theory.

• Delineates a set of principles in the study of consciousness that place the first-person perspective at the heart of the analysis of emotional disorders
• Differentiates six personality styles, describing the origin of the subjective emotional experience; the ordering and the regulation of the emotional domain, and the psychopathological disorders
• Provides neuroscientific evidence showing that brain activity could be related to personality styles

Praise for Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles:

“Arciero and Bondolfi show in fine detail how the sense of self emerges in first- and second-person experiences, forming a dynamic, emotive and narrative identity; they then brilliantly demonstrate how this self-identity gets distorted and disrupted in the pathologies that directly undermine this process. This is a landmark study that brings together materials from multiple disciplines. Their analysis provides a clear account of how our existential being-in-the-world is modulated by narrative practices. They show how the ongoing construction of personality delineated by the various emotional tendencies that are sedimented in the individual’s life comes to be reflected in personal narrative. Arciero and Bondolfi continuously make insightful connections between research in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and emotion studies and then carry these basic insights into the realm of psychiatry. The psychiatric analyses offered here are thus enriched by clinical vignettes and enlightened by the integration of philosophical (especially phenomenological and hermeneutical), psychological, neuroscientific, and literary dimensions”.

Shaun Gallagher, Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Florida

“Arciero and Bondolfi have written a timely, thought-provoking and challenging book, providing the reader with a refreshingly new account of Self-identity and its disorders. A cogent and novel contribution to psychiatric thought that wonderfully integrates philosophy, psychopathology and contemporary neuroscience. This book will push psychiatry in new directions. A must read!.”

Vittorio Gallese, Professor of Human Physiology, University of Parma ,Italy

“Selfhood, Identity, and Personality Styles is a highly ambitious work of theoretical synthesis: neuroscience, phenomenology, and social constructionism are joined together with the study of both literature and psychopathology. Arciero and Bondolfi offer sophisticated and intriguing discussions not only of mirror neurons and developmental psychology, but also of ideas from Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger, of characters from Dostoevsky, Kleist, and Pessoa, and of patients from clinical practice. A ground-breaking, first attempt to show the relevance of the interdisciplinary study of basic self-experience for our understanding of character styles and personality disorders.”

Louis A. Sass, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University

  “This is a scholarly book which will provide the reader with plenty to chew on. This book will make you think, will illuminate how people function and will help you understand how self disordered experience, such as the feeling that one disappears or doesn’t exist when another leaves, occurs. The authors tackle with great sophistication, the big questions of how sameness, changing experience and temporality are woven together by language and narrative. Refusing to be reduced to the simplicity of objectivist account of functioning they offer profound phenomenological views on identity and emotion that show a deep appreciation of the complexity of what it is to be a person. Their analysis of functioning leads to the specification of inward and outward dispositional dimensions and using clinical and literary examples they provide descriptions of different styles of personality along this continuum ranging from eating disorder prone personalities, focused on the other at one end of the continuum and depression prone personalities focused excessively inwardly, at the other end.”

Leslie Greenberg,Professorof Psychology, York University, Canada