To the Delineation of the Notion of Self-Consciousness in Psychiatry: J.Ch. Reil’s Concept

Abstract

The aim was to establish the rst authors of the notion and the conception of depersonalization in psychiatry, to analyze the criteria (signs) of normal and disordered consciousness in its “primary” concept. Method: the analysis of scientic works of G.E. Berrios, M. Sierra, A.A. Megrabjan, W. Maier-Gross, K. Haug, K. Oesterreich, P. Schilder, K. Jaspers, H. Dagonet, Th. Ribot, P. Janet, J. Reil and some other authors. Conclusion: although G.E. Berrios mentioned only two priority “schools” of the ΧΙΧ century developing phenomenology of consciousness and self-consciousness: French and English, we discovered that already in 1803 German physiologist, anatomist and psychiatrist J. Reil presented the original concept of self-consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein) and its deviations that in his psychopathological subtlety of elaboration did not yield to the originated much later concepts of H. Dagonet (1884, 1894) and K. Jaspers (1913). J. Reil highlighted the following properties of self-consciousness: 1) “belonging to oneself”; 2) connection of impressions in unity; 3) demarcation of “I and not I”. According to J. Reil, the nervous system compounds all parts of our body in unity in one main focal point: the brain, similarly the soul strives to processing of various impressions in unity. The state of consciousness is changeable, J. Reil marked its changeability according to ve signs: the loss of ability with necessary clarity for differentiation of subject and object; the predominance of the object with plunge into semi- darkness of the subject; the excessive lighting of the subject with corresponding shading of the external world; I-orientation in time and space; “consciousness of the past”, or continuity of “I”. Concerning the disorders of the state of self-consciousness J. Reil slightly modied these signs in: 1) the disorders of self-consciousness of “objectivity”; 2) the disorders of “subjectivity and own personality”, as a special kind of disorders of subjectivity J. Reil decribed the phenomena that later were designated by the term “depersonalization”; 3) the disorders of the soul and body unity; 4) disorders of continuity of self-consciousness (corresponding to the criterion of “I-identity” of K. Jaspers); 5) wrong reection of place and time.