Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles

Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles is an interdisciplinary study that describes a new perspective on psychopathology based on the search for the source of personal meaning and identity. The opening section develops a first-person approach to selfhood and personal identity, discussing relevant topics in personality and social psychology, developmental psychology, psychology of emotions and neuroscience. The second part presents five different personality styles distinguished on the basis of their emotional inclinations: Eating Disorder-prone, Obsessive-Compulsive prone, personalities prone to Hypochondria-Hysteria, Phobia–prone and Depression-prone. The classification based on affectivity makes it possible to illustrate the continuity between the study of personality and that of psychopathology. One distinctive feature of this extraordinary book is a discussion of recently published evidence that functional magnetic resonance imaging can show how brain activity may be related to personality styles.

With a new Foreword by Shaun Gallagher, Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Florida.

Praise for Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles:

“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

“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

Winner of third prize in the ‘Specialist Readership’ section of the UK Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Awards, 2010.

Foreword xi

About the Authors xv

Introduction 1

Part One 5

1 Subjectivity and Ipseity 7

2 Ipseity and Language 37

3 Personal Identity 65

4 Emotioning 87

Part Two 107

5 The Eating Disorder-prone Style of Personality 111

6 The Obsessive-Compulsive-prone Style of Personality 133

7 Personalities Prone to Hypochondria-Hysteria 157

8 The Phobia-prone Style of Personality 159

9 The Depression-prone Sty of Personality 199

Message in a bottle 221

References 223

Index 263

Giampiero ARCIERO works in private practice in Rome (Italy) and is a Consultant at the Department of Psychiatry of the University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland;

Guido BONDOLFI is Privat-Docent at the Faculty of Medicine, Geneva University; he is Head of the Affective Disorders Clinic of the Adult Psychiatric Clinic at the University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland

Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles is an interdisciplinary study that describes a new perspective on psychopathology based on the search for the source of personal meaning and identity. The opening section develops a first-person approach to selfhood and personal identity, discussing relevant topics in personality and social psychology, developmental psychology, psychology of emotions and neuroscience. The second part presents five different personality styles distinguished on the basis of their emotional inclinations: Eating Disorder-prone, Obsessive-Compulsive prone, personalities prone to Hypochondria-Hysteria, Phobia–prone and Depression-prone. The classification based on affectivity makes it possible to illustrate the continuity between the study of personality and that of psychopathology. One distinctive feature of this extraordinary book is a discussion of recently published evidence that functional magnetic resonance imaging can show how brain activity may be related to personality styles.

With a new Foreword by Shaun Gallagher, Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Florida.

Praise for Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles:

“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

“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

Winner of third prize in the ‘Specialist Readership’ section of the UK Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Awards, 2010.