Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate
Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate
Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate
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146 PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS AND CLASSIFICATION<br />
perception, or thought from the first-person perspective, the experience<br />
in question is given immediately, non-inferentially as mine, i.e. I do not<br />
first scrutinize a specific perception or feeling of pain, <strong>and</strong> subsequently<br />
identify it as mine. Phenomenologically speaking, we are never conscious<br />
of an object as such, but always of the object as appearing in a certain way as<br />
judged, seen, feared, remembered, smelled, anticipated, tasted, etc.). The<br />
object is given through the experience, <strong>and</strong> if there is no awareness of<br />
the experience, the object does not appear at all. This dimension of selfawareness,<br />
its first-personal givenness, is therefore a medium in which<br />
specific modes of experience are articulated. Following these analyses, selfawareness<br />
cannot be equated with reflective thematic, conceptual, mediated)<br />
self-awareness. On the contrary, reflective self-awareness presupposes<br />
a prereflective unthematic, tacit, non-conceptual, immediate) self-awareness.<br />
Self-awareness is not something that only comes about the moment I<br />
realize that I am perceiving the Empire State Building, or realize that I am the<br />
bearer of private mental states, or refer to myself using the first person<br />
pronoun. On the contrary, it is legitimate to speak of a more primitive type<br />
of self-awareness whenever I am conscious of my feeling of joy, or my<br />
burning thirst, or my perception of the Empire State Building. If the experience<br />
is given in a first-personal mode of presentation to me, it is at least<br />
tacitly) given as my experience, <strong>and</strong> therefore counts as a case of self-awareness.<br />
The first-personal givenness of an experience, its very self-manifestation,<br />
is the most basic form of selfhood, usually called ipseity [30±32]. To be<br />
aware of oneself is not to apprehend a pure self apart from the experience,<br />
but to be acquainted with an experience in its first-personal mode of presentation,<br />
that is, from ``within''. That is, the subject or self referred to is not<br />
something st<strong>and</strong>ing opposed to, or apart from or beyond experience, but<br />
rather a feature or function of its givenness.<br />
Given these considerations, it is obvious that all phenomenal consciousness<br />
is a basic form of self-awareness. Whenever I am acquainted with an<br />
experience in its first-personal mode of givenness, whenever I live it<br />
through, that is whenever there is a ``what it is like'' involved with its<br />
inherent ``quality'' of myness, we are dealing with a form of self-awareness:<br />
`` . . . all subjective experience is self-conscious in the weak sense that there is<br />
something it is like for the subject to have that experience. This involves<br />
a sense that the experience is the subject's experience, that it happens to<br />
her, occurs in her stream'' [33]. More recently, Antonio Damasio has also<br />
defended a comparable thesis: ``If `self-consciousness' is taken to mean<br />
`consciousness with a sense of self', then all human consciousness is necessarily<br />
covered by the termÐthere is just no other kind of consciousness as<br />
far as I can see'' [34].<br />
This primitive <strong>and</strong> fundamental notion of self must be contrasted to what<br />
might be called explicit ``I-consciousness''; an awareness of oneself as a