the first person perspective is an experience given to me as immediately mine

In normal subject, the first person perspective is an experience given to me as immediately mine.11 It is not belonging to me in the sense of a relation, neither implicit nor thematic, of ownership, but rather as an identity of experience, as being me in an un-mediated way, without a gap or a fissure between the experience and the sense of the self. The first person perspective is a way or a form in which the experience manifests itself and is self-aware. This mode of self-articulation or self-awareness of experience is called ‘‘mineness’’ or ipseity (Henry, 1963). The changes in the patient’s introspective field testify to the serious problems in this domain: experiences are at a remove from the subject and do not seem to have their normal sense of mineness, although reflectively the patient acknowledges being the source of these interfering thoughts. This phenomenon is a precursor of a full-fledged psychotic thought insertion (where the patient claims that some of his thoughts are being inserted to his mind by a hostile agency). This progressive undermining of the sense of mineness (called as Meinhafigkeit in German psychiatry) is characteristic in the beginning phases of the schizophrenia spectrum conditions. Our patient has an experience of co-existing multiple tracks with the flux of consciousness undergoing a certain dissociation, and losing its unity. Other patients may exhibit a pronounced splitting of the ego into a functioning or constituting ego, and a second ego, simultaneously reflecting or introspecting (Sass, 2001; pp. 163–264). In sum, there is a pervasive problem of identity at the most basic level. It may involve a sense of ineffable difference from others, a sentiment of ‘‘not being a true or truly alive subject’’, of being ‘‘as if’’ an alien, as a ‘‘time traveller’’ etc. The patient feels in some fundamental way being incomplete and radically different from others—lacking the fullness of embodied self-presence and presence in the world, which the patients often describe in substantive terms (e.g. ‘‘I am only half’’). At the bottom of such complaints there appears to be an insufficiency of normally un-reflected, automatic, non-observational or non-criterial14 sense of being oneself. The ineffable and pre-reflective painful feeling of incompleteness reflectively expressed—e.g. manifest in Maria’s unstable body image and global personal insecurity. Any disorder manifest at a narrative personality level—(such as it is the case in personality disorders outside the schizophrenia spectrum) is probably secondary to this more foundational failure.

References

Cermolacce, Michel, Jean Naudin, and Josef Parnas. 2007. “The "minimal self" in psychopathology: re-examining the self-disorders in the schizophrenia spectrum.” Consciousness and cognition 16 (3): 703–14. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2007.05.013.