The Self and its Disorders

Shaun Gallagher, PhD, Hon DPhil., is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong. He was a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012-18) and has held Honorary Professorships at Tromsø University (Norway), Durham (UK), and Copenhagen (DK), as well as visiting positions at Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Oxford, and Rome. His areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, social cognition, and concepts of self. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

• Introduction1: A pattern theory of self2: The nature of patterns3: A threefold method for studying the self-pattern4: Dynamical relations in the self-pattern5: Disorder, dissociation and disruption in self-narrative6: Phenomenological anchors: Mapping experiences of agency and ownership7: Autonomy in the self-pattern: Implications for deep brain stimulation and affordance-based therapies8: Artificial transformations of the self-pattern9: Mindfulness in the self-pattern10: The cruel and unusual phenomenologies of torture and solitary confinementBibliography

Gallagher's book is both theoretically innovative and loaded with insightful interpretations of empirical data. He succeeds in giving a clear presentation of the wide variety of studies and approaches that populate the current field of the philosophy of psychiatry, and he sketches a promising path for an integrative solution which could allow us to recognise and analyse the heterogeneity of the constitutive processes and scales constitutive of mental conditions.