Person, personality, self, and identity

Who is the person, or self, associated with personality disorder and its treatment? How are we to account for a self conceptualized in terms of schemas and representations, that at the same time—as self—scrutinizes these schemas and representations (as in cognitive therapy for personality disorders)? Five approaches to personhood are examined: metaphysical, empirical, transcendental, hermeneutical, and phenomenological. An elementary sense of selfhood is tied to all one’s experiences and activities; this sense of self is experientially irreducible and conceptually connected to a primordial form of self-relatedness. After examining these issues, I formulate four provisional conclusions: (a) the separation between person and roles (functions, personality features) is a modern fiction—persons are not neutral bearers of roles and functions; (b) the concept of personality in DSM-IV refers to nonhomogeneous behaviors such as feelings, moods, inclinations, temperaments, and habits, and these behaviors differ with respect to their distance to the core self; (c) there exists an enormous variety of ways of self-relating and this variety may affect the contents of the core self under certain circumstances; and (d) the concept of person may be primitive; that is, irreducible and referring to a background of unity and integrity