[Concept of the person in psychiatry]

At first sight, the concept of "person" appears in psychiatric terminology only in the negative sense, i.e., as in depersonalization. However, self-alienation may be regarded as the hallmark of mental illness in general and is based on the ambiguous structure of human personality itself. Thorough analysis of the concept of the person is therefore indispensable to understanding psychopathology. This paper focuses on the contrast of "persona" ("mask" or "role") on the one hand to "person" as an individual self on the other. Their dialectical relation derives from basic anthropological structures such as sociality, self-reference, self-transcendence, and fictionality. As can be shown, the historical and cultural ontogeny of the personality includes experiences of self-alienation which may become relevant for psychiatry as depersonalization syndromes. The example of depression is used to illustrate vital and emotional depersonalization, whereas schizophrenia may be described as "intentional depersonalization." Following this line of reasoning, the classic schizophrenic experiences of alien control or thought insertion are interpreted as a disturbance in the fundamental personality structures.