Abstract

The authors propose a critic view of some of the models concerning identity building emerged in the contemporary debate about self-consciousness in the fields of cognitive neurosciences and philosophy of mind. By examining specific clinical conditions in which self experience is, by definition, profoundly altered, the authors aim at showing that identity building is the result of a complex architecture where different evolutionary and developmentally processes of self-recognition come into play. Self-experience derives from the intertwining of these different processes and cannot simply be explained in terms of the reductionist stance often assumed by contemporary psychiatric orientations.