Neurobiology and its Applications to Psychotherapy

The minimal bodily self: behavioral and neuroscientific evidence

From a phenomenological perspective, three levels of selfhood have been identified. First, there is the implicit awareness that this is ‘my’ experience. Second, there is the more explicit awareness of self as an invariant subject of experience and action. Finally, there is the social or narrative self, which refers to personality, habits, style and other characteriztics of an individual. The concept of minimal, pre-reflective, or core self is currently under debate. It is not clear which empirical features such a self is presumed to possess and which kind of experience occurs in shaping it. This lecture proposes that besides searching for the neural correlates of a pre-defined, explicit and reflective self-knowledge, empirical research should first investigate which kind of experience allows implicit, pre-reflective self-knowledge to emerge. Vittorio Gallese presents behavioral and neuroscientific evidence showing the crucial role of the motor system in enabling the distinction between our bodily self and the bodily self of others. The bearing of such implicit distinction on psychoanalyzis and psychopathology is also discussed.