The varieties of anomalous self experiences in schizophrenia: splitting of the mind at a crossroad.

Splitting of the self and self disturbances were important to Bleuler's concept of schizophrenia (Bleuler, 1911), and a distorted, even loss of a sense of self appears to be a core feature of the disorder (Nasrallah, 2012; Lysaker and Lysaker, 2010). Furthermore, aberrant self experiences are highly salient to those who are diagnosed with schizophrenia (Saks, 2008; Kean, 2009, 2011) from the prodromal stage throughout the course of illness (Sass and Parnas, 2003; Nelson et al., 2008), and may increase vulnerability in those at risk for the disorder (e.g., Nelson et al., 2012; Koren et al., 2013). Thus, elucidating self-disturbances in schizophrenia has significant practical implications for implementing treatment strategies, but self-disorder is not even included in the current DSM-5 criteria. So how should we bridge this gap between the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, as prescribed by the American Psychiatric Association on one hand and the phenomenological first-person accounts of schizophrenia experience that centers around self disturbances on the other? This special issue on the theme of “self and schizophrenia” aims to address this disparity by highlighting recent advances in theories and frameworks for understanding self processing, as well as introducing innovative state-of-the-art empirical research that underscores the diverse manifestations and underlying mechanisms of self disturbances that span pre-reflective, automatic and implicit processes (e.g., corollary discharge, proprioception, body ownership) to higher-order, controlled and explicit cognitive functions (e.g., self-reflection, action monitoring, mentalizing, insight). An obstacle to this effort has been the sheer variety of frameworks and definitionswith respect to the concept of the self (Strawson, 1999). Given a lack consensus and common vocabulary, empirical studies of self disorders and self disturbances diverge further into self-report measures, interviews and experimental tasks, spanning phenomenological, behavioral and neurobiological levels of analyses. Nevertheless, despite the wide range of theories and methodologies, there is a broad agreement on the core features of self pathologies in schizophrenia. Anomalous sense of self in schizophrenia seems to involve a disturbance in the ownership of one's body, thoughts and actions, accompanied by faulty self-monitoring. In this issue, we present a diverse set of approaches to integrate neurobiological, cognitive and phenomenological explanations of anomalous self-awareness, self-monitoring, self-reflection and insight in the schizophrenia spectrum. First, recent advances in theories and models that address the etiology of self disturbances in schizophrenia are presented in three articles. Sass' ‘ipseity disordermodel’ clarifies and expands uponhis earlier theory that places disturbances of the minimal self or ipseity at the