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.
Gallagher applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Self and its Disorders, and reported the following:
The Self and its Disorders presents the case for understanding mental disorders specifically as disorders of the self. This is not a new theory, but my approach to it is new, because I conceive of the self as a self-pattern. The self-pattern consists of a set of diverse processes including bodily, experiential, affective, cognitive, social, normative and narrative processes integrated by their dynamical relations. In several chapters I explain the “pattern theory of self,” I take a deep dive into what the concept of pattern means, and I outline a method for studying the self-pattern. Page 99 falls within Chapter 4, entitled “Dynamical Relations in the Self-pattern and Psychopathology” where I’m exploring the dynamical links between the various processes that make up a self-pattern and how they can go wrong in cases of psychiatric disorders. After looking at some problems with a strictly neuroscientific account of psychopathological changes I consider an alternative approach which involves an analysis of narrative processes in the self-pattern. My claim is that self-narrative reflects all of the other factors that make up the self-pattern, and that we can map out atypical alterations in their dynamical relations by analyzing both the form and content of narratives.Learn more about The Self and its Disorders at the Oxford University Press website.
On page 99 I’m in the middle of analyzing an example of a narrative of someone who is experiencing regret about a past action. The affective processes involved in regret can lead to changes in two other aspects of the self-pattern, the sense of agency for one’s action, and the sense of ownership, i.e., the sense that the past action, and the present regret, are one’s own. Despite some constancy in the sense of ownership, for example, my sense of agency changes from the experience of control over my action to a lack of control over the regret since I seem unable to avoid my regret about that action. Regret can also change self-related social/normative processes. For example, my self-narrative may reflect my identification with the values and expectations of others (“I really should be regretful about what I did”) which in turn may increase my emotional suffering. On page 99 I cite some research that shows how this kind of dynamic can, in some cases, lead to further physical and affective changes including anxiety, insomnia and depression, and thence to additional changes in self-narrative.
My book involves much more about narrative than represented on page 99; it also involves much more than discussions of narrative analysis. Later chapters address various types of therapeutic interventions, including deep brain stimulation, mindfulness meditation, the use of AI in therapeutic contexts, as well as the effects of practices of torture and solitary confinement on the self-pattern. Accordingly, although page 99 does not provide a good sense of the overall topic, it does put you right in the middle of things, so I don’t think you would regret reading it.
--Marshal Zeringue
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