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A long-standing interest in the self, stimulated by analysis of patients with varying degrees of alteration of the sense of reality and of identity, as well as recent work in perceptual psychology have led me to reconsider the concepts of self, self-feeling, and depersonalization from an ego-psychological viewpoint.
The felicitous German expression, "Ich-Gefühl," literally rendered as "I-feeling," can be modified to the lesser barbarism, "self-feeling," to denote as widely as possible the area of present interest. The broad spectrum of disturbances of self-feeling may be conveniently divided into two groups: (1) disturbances in the feeling of personal identity, and (2) disturbances in the feeling of reality of one's own person. The first group of disturbances dealing with the feeling of personal identity may be further subdivided into two groups: those with a relatively permanent disturbance, and those with a circumscribed one.
In the first subdivision are those patients with a chronically shaky sense of personal identity who are forever pursuing an identity which is forever eluding them, as a person out of equilibrium chases after his center of gravity. Others in this same group, while not possessing a sense of personal identity, nevertheless do not make a "thing of it." Some of these are appersonated individuals whose sense of identity derives from an extraordinarily close bond with another person. Such patients will only complain of a lack of feeling of identity when this bond is threatened—for example, in analysis. For