The Macedonian dynasty, wonderfully rooted in murder, having been renewed by violence as a peaceful, orderly, administration, a soldier-emperor is installed: Constantine IX, the main subject of the Chronographia, and its potential stumbling block. To deal with his own self-division towards Constantine, Psellos creates an elaborate structure of genres and disciplines – panegyric and history, rhetoric and philosophy – and conflicting roles for himself, to dramatize an odi et amo in which the comic and the tragic infuse each other in continuously changing ways. The effect is exhilating, shocking, and ingeniously balanced, as Psellos sets the failure of an indirect rule by a philosopher (Kaldellis) and his own moral degeneration against the expansive power of panegyric vested in this emperor. For good artistic reasons, Psellos omits the patriarch Keroularios and his attack on Psellos’ orthodoxy, projecting his own displacement onto a highly fictional portrayal of another character. The reign of Theodora, however, is vitiated by his repressed anger with Keroularios, ranting against his proxies in her government. The two reigns exemplify the work’s uneven quality.

This chapter offers a phenomenological reconfiguration of vulnerability in borderline personality disorder (BPD). The focus is on the temporal embedding of self-experience. Departing from dominant biological and cognitive models, the chapter examines how temporal fragmentation and affective instability influence the formation of BPD identity. Drawing on the authors’ previous qualitative findings and Roman Ingarden’s stratified model of identity, the analysis uncovers a paradoxical temporal structure. BPD experience is marked by discontinuity between a detached past and an immersive present as well as entanglement marked by the persistence of the wounding past. The resulting tensions produce a dual-layered identity. The static stratum consists of persistent identifications with wounded historicity and rigid self–world interpretations, while the dynamic stratum manifests as frequent, affect-driven self-recreations. The latter overwhelms the integrative function of the static layer, resulting in a cyclical structure of self-experience that inhibits narrative coherence and developmental change. Consequently, BPD temporality undermines the possibility of novelty, agency, and future-oriented self-regulation, resulting in a form of identity that is both unstable and rigidly structured by past harms. Ingarden’s philosophical framework thus provides a scaffold for the temporal disruption being constitutive of felt vulnerability in BPD.

This chapter focuses on increasing flexibility in self- and emotion-patterns, suggesting a process-oriented and patient-oriented perspective on psychopathology and psychotherapy. Such an approach can take into account the notions of affective atmosphere and the importance of external environmental factors, including social processes, in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. The notion of a self-pattern as a dynamical gestalt allows for a systematic approach to understanding and treating such disorders. Specifically, it allows us to zoom in on the affective factors that include emotions, constituted as their own dynamical patterns, to discover the connections among the various features of self-pattern, and the pervasiveness of the affective in everyday life.

In these pages, the problematic at the centre of the book is introduced. It explores how the concepts of sovereignty and freedom and the human/nature relationship are linked and how they influence the idea of self. This Introduction also displays past and current interpretations of the Romantic conception of subjectivity and of Romantic political philosophy, highlighting the shortcomings of these readings. Indeed, they neglect the political essence of the Romantic Self. This chapter closes with an overview of the structure of the book and a list of the Romantic authors considered.

For the last 150 years, schizophrenia has been considered a brain disease leading to a cognitive impairment. A widespread representation of schizophrenia considers it a form of mental deficit. This chapter evaluates to what extent schizophrenia corresponds to a standard folk-psychological notion of disease (onset, pathological process, insight into illness, etc.). Parnas and Zandersen present examples of phenomenological characteristics of schizophrenia that question its status as a typical disease. Specifically, they portray the affliction of the subject (self-disorder), an affliction that prevents a full insight into illness. Self-disorders typically begin during childhood and adolescence, and dating the onset of schizophrenia becomes a conceptual rather than an empirical issue. Next, the authors discuss a characteristic configuration of psychosis, namely the phenomenon of “double bookkeeping” that implies a persistent parallel double orientation to both a social reality and a private psychotic world. Finally, they look at some characteristics of course and outcome that do not conform to a standard notion of disease. The authors conclude that to progress in our scientific research, psychiatry needs to refocus its interest on the issues of subjectivity and psychological processes involved in schizophrenia.

Chapter 3 analyzes some of the ways that stereotypes harm people’s sense of self and identity. One way is through expressive harm, which is the harm that results from the unwitting and inevitable perpetuation of stereotypes. Stereotypes have a pervasive cultural power that enables them to control people’s thoughts, feelings, behavior, and social interactions even when people actively disavow the stereotype. Other ways that stereotypes harm people’s sense of self and identity are through the internalization of oppressive social scripts, which ascribe motivations and expectations for behavior, and through stereotype threat, in which people inadvertently and paradoxically act in ways that correspond to stereotypes even as they are trying hard to avoid fitting stereotypes. When people with mental illness internalize oppressive social scripts and experience stereotype threat, they incorporate negative stereotypes into aspects of their experience and identity, which damages their identity and sense of self and also diminishes their autonomy.

The Conclusion draws together the book’s various thematic strands: the perceived primacy of the ‘reason’, the right of its possessors to rule, the exculpatory effect of a frenzy diagnosis, and the high cost paid by those who received one. It returns to the larger question posed at the outset: whether the organ of the brain and the faculties of the mind were seen as constitutive of ‘personhood’ in pre-1700s England. The responses to frenzy which we have encountered in this book suggests that they were. The operations of the mental faculties known as ‘reason’, ‘will’, and ‘memory’ (or simply the ‘wits’) were located in (and often colloquially identified with) the brain. The functionality and continuity of these faculties was integral to the maintenance of legal, social, and spiritual personhood. Yet what troubled frenzy’s witnesses the most, the Conclusion argues, was the way it disrupted its sufferers’ predictable ways of being in the world – the values they had once held dear, the ways they had once looked and spoken. It was a disease which had the power to change friends, neighbours, and loved ones beyond recognition.

The Introduction situates the book’s contribution in relation to the historiographies of madness, medicine, emotion, selfhood, and personhood. While mania and melancholy have enjoyed perennial scholarly interest, the same cannot be said of early modern frenzy. The Introduction offers some thoughts as to why frenzy has been neglected, and reflects on some of the conceptual and methodological difficulties which accompany its study. It explains the book’s scope (and limits), and offers short summaries of its six chapters. Sketching out the book’s central claim – that frenzy had devastating effects on personhood, and that these effects drove its early modern observers to unpick the tangle of mind, soul, and brain – it engages with recent claims about the emergence of a distinctively modern ‘cerebral self’. It sets out to test the claim that the possession of certain ‘psychological features, such as memory, consciousness, and self-awareness’ was not constitutive of ‘personhood’ until the end of the seventeenth century.

According to Charles Taylor, the modern notion of the self is closely related to the notion of inwardness, for the self is taken to be something inside of us, accessible through introspection. Some medieval authors paved the way for this conception by identifying the self with the immaterial soul that somehow resides in the body. However, other authors clearly rejected an interiorization of the self, as this chapter argues. They took it to be a set of powers that is essentially related to external things and that becomes manifest in this relation. The chapter presents two case studies to spell out this alternative conception. It first analyzes Thomas Aquinas’s thesis that the self is present in bodily activities: whenever we perceive material objects, we become aware of ourselves as being directed toward them. The chapter then examines Peter of John Olivi’s thesis that the self is present in emotions: whenever we experience them, we cognize ourselves as being related to other people. It is therefore a bodily, relational, and social self that is at the core of two medieval theories.

In Sources of the Self, Taylor suggests that the ancient Greeks, despite possessing various linguistic devices for reflexive self-reference, did not have a way of making “self” into a noun. This nominalization of the self is, in his view, characteristic of the modern sense of selfhood. In fact, Aristotle does nominalize autos, the intensifier that functions in Greek much as “self” does in English, in three passages in Nichomachean Ethics IX where he describes a friend as another self. Taylor cites one of these passages in a footnote, commenting that “this doesn’t have quite the same force as our present description of human agents as ‘selves’”, but does not elaborate. This chapter considers what force it does have, exploring three senses of self in Aristotle. Two of them are familiar – the social self expounded in the first nine books of the Nicomachean Ethics and the more contemplative self emerging predominantly in EN X and in De Anima III. Much less familiar is the bodily self that can be discerned at various points in the De Anima and Metaphysics, and that is rather prominent in the Generation of Animals. This conception of the self has its source in the intimate connection between a psuchê and the particular body of which it is the form.

Mary Astell (1666–1731) relies on a Cartesian account of the self to argue that both men and women are essentially thinking things and, hence, that both should perfect their minds or intellects. In offering such an account of the self, Astell might seem to ignore the inescapable fact that we have bodies. This chapter argues that Astell accommodates the self’s embodiment along two main dimensions. First, she tempers her sharp distinction between mind and body by insisting on their union. The mind and body are united in such a way that they exert reciprocal causal influence and form a whole together. Second, she argues that the mind–body union is good, that the union has its own distinctive form of good or perfection, and that the mind should pursue this good alongside its own.

Self-love is a central yet somewhat neglected theme in Works of Love. While the mission of this text is to distinguish the spiritual from the worldly conception of love, when it comes to self-love commentators tend to presuppose our merely worldly understanding. But there is an essential split between the spiritual and worldly conceptions of self-love, hence this cannot be what Kierkegaard has in mind. To illustrate this, I identify two places where the worldly conception and Kierkegaard’s claims clash. My aim is to explain the spirit’s conception of self-love, thereby to explain Kierkegaard’s claims. I propose to reduce self-love to "willing to be oneself," a self-relation figuring in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death. A person loves herself in that she wills to be herself. Yet she may do this properly or improperly: properly when she takes God as the criterion for the self she wills to be, improperly when she takes a merely human criterion. This account clarifies Kierkegaard’s claims about self-love in Works of Love.

Positing the question concerning the meaning of life in terms of "how should one live so that the value of life be accessible to one," my claim is that Kierkegaard’s answer to this question is "by loving." To explain this answer, I focus on the idea of "God as a middle term" that Kierkegaard presents in Works of Love. Further to interpreting this as saying that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis for loving, I claim that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis also for living. Having God as "the middle" in love, I suggest, is in fact to experience goodness, and by this to affirm one’s existence as valuable. Experiencing this goodness, however, depends on becoming oneself, which, for its part, depends on loving another. Thus, in the context of loving, one in fact sustains three sets of relationships: with God, with the beloved, and with oneself. In the chapter I demonstrate the interdependency of these relationships, and how they constitute a meaningful life.

If the first Italian vernacular poetry of the thirteenth century seamlessly translates the lyrical concept of joi into gioia, the trecento authors Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio transcend the lyrical language of phantasmatic joie d’amour and deploy a new vocabulary. Both Dante and Petrarch create a new form of lyricism in attempting to place lyrics within linear narratives that lead to a form of happiness (beatitudine) or self-knowledge. Moments of love’s joy, however, are characterised by their self-forgetfulness and their lyrical or atemporal escape from narrative. The chapter shows how the three authors posit joy at the crux of important poetic and epistemological questions of concealment and revelation, reinventing the language of love’s joy as one of transcendence. In Dante’s Paradiso, the feeling of joy is the key to Dante’s apprehension of the inapprehensible, whereas Boccaccio uses the phantasmatic nature of lyrical joy to parallel it with spiritual revelation.