| This dissertation examines the concept of the human self in relation to itself, others, and the world as an emergent entity, within a contextual framework reliant upon a transdisciplinary approach from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, and religion. Through redefining what the self is, as a totality of perceived human experiences, it extends what it means to have and to be a self in everyday human life. Beyond the emergence of the self, it suggests a fragility and transience, focusing on severe mental health diagnoses of psychoses, delusions, and dissociations, as crises which bring about the temporary death of the self. This dissertation suggests the death of the self is not a permanent end to the self in the life of mentally ill individuals. However, severe mental illnesses offer clinical examples of breaks from reality in which an individual's entire existence comes into question. William Hasker's emergent dualism provides the jumping off point from which this dissertation begins the process of showing how the fully emerged self dies and can reemerge many times throughout the course of a human life. The lessons to be learned from mental health practices and human relational consciousness of self, others, and the world, are analyzed and challenge various dualistic and materialistic conceptions of the self. This dissertation also examines the role religion and culture play in the exacerbation of the symptoms of mental illness, as well as their potential therapeutic value for reconciling the death of the self to its formerly healthy state. From a central perspective, a narrative center, this dissertation argues that the self as a totality is breakable, killable, and fluid. It emerges in early human development and then becomes vulnerable to fissure, fracture, and death from a variety of internal and external stressors. As a totality, the fragility of the self comes with an inherent strength of unity, promising the potential for reemergence from death as a new yet familiar and continuous entity. |
