With a new Foreword by Shaun Gallagher, Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Florida.

Praise for Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles:

  “This is a scholarly book which will provide the reader with plenty to chew on. This book will make you think, will illuminate how people function and will help you understand how self disordered experience, such as the feeling that one disappears or doesn’t exist when another leaves, occurs. The authors tackle with great sophistication, the big questions of how sameness, changing experience and temporality are woven together by language and narrative. Refusing to be reduced to the simplicity of objectivist account of functioning they offer profound phenomenological views on identity and emotion that show a deep appreciation of the complexity of what it is to be a person. Their analysis of functioning leads to the specification of inward and outward dispositional dimensions and using clinical and literary examples they provide descriptions of different styles of personality along this continuum ranging from eating disorder prone personalities, focused on the other at one end of the continuum and depression prone personalities focused excessively inwardly, at the other end.”

Leslie Greenberg, Professorof Psychology, York University, Canada

“Arciero and Bondolfi have written a timely, thought-provoking and challenging book, providing the reader with a refreshingly new account of Self-identity and its disorders. A cogent and novel contribution to psychiatric thought that wonderfully integrates philosophy, psychopathology and contemporary neuroscience. This book will push psychiatry in new directions. A must read.”

Vittorio Gallese, Professor of Human Physiology, University of Parma, Italy

“Selfhood, Identity, and Personality Styles is a highly ambitious work of theoretical synthesis: neuroscience, phenomenology, and social constructionism are joined together with the study of both literature and psychopathology. Arciero and Bondolfi offer sophisticated and intriguing discussions not only of mirror neurons and developmental psychology, but also of ideas from Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger, of characters from Dostoevsky, Kleist, and Pessoa, and of patients from clinical practice.  A ground-breaking, first attempt to show the relevance of the interdisciplinary study of basic self-experience for our understanding of character styles and personality disorders.”

Louis A. Sass, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University

Winner of third prize in the ‘Specialist Readership’ section of the UK Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Awards, 2010.