A room (or dress) of one's own

The Zahavi and Gallagher book, Phenomenological Mind, suggests that schizophrenia patients often report a kind of "disturbed self-experience", which events and intentions are dissociated from the self, so that things seem to be happening and then only secondarily, or by a kind of inference, happening to them.

One of Parnas’ patients reported that the feeling that his experiences were his own always came with a split-second delay; another that it was as if his self was somehow displaced a few centimetres backwards. A third explained that he felt an indescribable inner change that prevented him from leading a normal life. He was troubled by a very distressing feeling of not being really present or even fully alive. This experience of distance or detachment was accompanied by a tendency to observe or monitor his inner life. He summarized his affliction by saying that his first-personal life was lost and replaced by a third-person perspective (Parnas 2003, p. 223).

I am reminded of an experience often discussed in our family of recognizing that an object –usually out of context–that looks like one of yours actually is yours, e.g, "that shoe on the gym floor looks just like a shoe of mine! Oh, it is mine..."

That a thing is yours is just as much a part of it as its color, shape or surface scratches. All can be misperceived. All are «bindings», constructions arising in interaction with the object that constitute what it is.

From this perspective it's interesting to think about the awkward social occasion that occurs when a lady in a fine new dress meets another in the same dress.  What she had made hers, suddenly isn't.

I find myself wondering too about how this observation related to "the uncanny", the sense of unease with an experience that should be familiar but is somehow strange.  Freud developed this notion pretty extensively, and it has gone on into the concept of "Uncanny Valley", the notion introduced by Japanese roboticists and taken up by animators, that experiences too closely approaching the lifelike can suddenly give rise to revulsion.