Psychopathology of the Self: Implications for Philosophy
Abnormalities of the self are complex, intriguing cases in psychopathology. 1 will briefly introduce the formal characteristics of the self from a psychopathologist’s perspective plus examples of how these present in patients, such as phantom limbs, loss of body experience, and others that reveal the relationship between the body and the self. I will then focus on autoscopy, a rare phenomenon where a person experiences a duplicate of themselves. I will discuss neurological underpinnings and how the underlying self is a product of multiple sensory representations of the body. I will end by briefly discussing philosophical implications of these phenomena.
Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow 223rd Annual Lecture Series
Date: Wednesday 12 November 2025
Time: 19:30 - 21:00
Venue: Sir Charles Wilson Building LT 201
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Professor Femi Oyebode, University of Birmingham
Femi Oyebode studied medicine at the University of Ibadan, trained as a psychiatrist in Newcastle and has been Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham since 1999. He has published over 250 papers, book chapters and several books. His books including Mindreadings: literature and psychiatry, Madness at the Theatre, Symptoms in the Mind, Psychopathology of Rare and Unusual Syndromes and, most recently (2025), Doppelgänger: Analysing doubles across antiquity, fiction, psychopathology, and neuroscience. Femi is joint presenter of the BBC Radio 4 Series, Is Psychiatry Working? He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2016 and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (the highest honour of the RCPsych) in 2019. He has been Visiting Professor at several universities across the world.