Identity and Difference as Moments of Self

Abstract

Being the self in the sense of relating-to-oneself constitutes the fundamental determination of a human existence. In fact, there are many psychiatric disturbances in which this determination seems to be seriously affected. Most schizophrenics show their first symptoms in adolescence, when juveniles are facing toward an inevitable work to enter into adulthood, that is to say, when the self has now to relate to itself basically otherwise than in childhood. If one fails in coping with this inward task, one must fall into a critical distress of which the most conspicuous manifestations in clinical psychopathology are such typically schizophrenic symptoms consisting in a pathological conviction that the most intimate intention of oneself be radically at disposal of others.