What the self does for psychiatry: testimony, cognitive science, and participatory objectivity

Reclaiming The Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narratives for a Humanist Science argues that contemporary scientific psychiatry has sidelined its most essential object of study: the self. Drawing on first-person testimonies of individuals experiencing mental distress, alongside resources from cognitive and behavioral sciences, the book shows that disruptions to agency, narrative coherence, embodiment, relationality, and self-concept are not ancillary features of mental disorder but central manifestations of it. Psychiatry’s methodological commitment to reliability and objectivity—shaped historically by the desire to establish itself as a scientific field—has produced an evidentially thin and ethically fraught framework that obscures these self-related phenomena. To address this gap, the book develops the Multitudinous Self Model (MuSe), a scientifically tractable, empirically grounded framework that organizes selfhood across physical, experiential, social, conceptual, and narrative dimensions. MuSe redefines objectivity as a participatory and integrative practice that brings scientific, clinical, and first-person forms of knowledge into constructive dialogue. By centering the self as a modeling target, Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry offers a vision of psychiatric science that is more empirically adequate, ethically responsive, and capable of supporting human flourishing.