The characteristic of human beings makes us susceptible to an inner division in which we separate from ourselves, is what the capacity for self-consciousness means.The possession of thought seems to be given in the self-consciousness. Weknow that a thought in our consciousness belongs to us. Freud (1962, p. 13) said that “pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary line between the ego and the external world becomes uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly.” and “There are cases in which parts of a person’s own body, even portions of his mental life – his perceptions, thoughts, and feelings – appear alien to him and as not belonging to his own ego.” This means that psychopathological phenomena make it hard to define the line between the self and the non- self. In a disordered condition a part of the mind or body could be perceived as not belonging to the person.
Someone who is aware of some experience in the consciousness and fails to see it as its own, and think it is someone else’s experiences an alienated self. In the alienated self, people experience their own conscious experiences as those of another person and don’t know which of their their own thoughts and feelings, are their own. A case in which one person has direct access to another’s thoughts, introspection is not necessarily a capacity to look in one’s own mind. In those rare cases,a person can have access to experiences in the mind of another. But people are skeptical toward the reality of co-consciousness because they get reported ex post facto.In the case of verbal auditory hallucinations, the person who is hallucinates loses his ego boundaries and confuses the internal with the external.“The voices are strictly the patient’s own verbal thoughts, which he has chosen, presumably without conscious awareness, to project onto the external world” (p. 121).This supposes that the hallucinator is aware of an experience in his own mental life but think the experience is happening outside his mind. The hallucinator thinks that something occurs in the external world when it only happens in his imagination.The error of hallucination is about the cause of the hallucinatory experience and not the location or the hallucinator’s environment.
In schizophrenia, the sense of possession of one’s own thoughts may declineand the patient may suffer from a separation of his thoughts. This makes the pation certain that the thoughts are inserted in to his mind. Delusions of thought insertion are not rare since a survey reported 52 % of schizophrenic patients experiencing them.But the reports of thought insertion could represent the patient’s effort tometaphorically express the feeling that someone else is controllinghis thinking.It’s also possible that only one person is involved in the experience of co-consciousness, the person could be believed to have lost the ego boundaries. The person could be conscious of a thought, but thinks it is happening in another person’s mind, but in reality it’s a thought from the persons own psychological history.
The phenomenon of thought insertion shows that the senses of subjectivity and agency are separable. Patients with delusions of thought insertion, retain the sense of subjectivity of their thoughts.In those delusions the patient loses the sense of self as the agent. Such a lack of ego-boundaries could happen because ofmemory of a past state of mind.
Question
With schizophrenia being real, how could you be sure that your personality is the only personality in your mind, or do they all exist in your mind and you have access to only one, and people with schizophrenia have access to more variation of expressing the self?