Finding the self: A behavioral measure and its clinical implications

We present a clinical model of the development of self . The model focuses on the early learning responsible for linguistic self-referents such as "I" and "me." This model offers an account for why some patients, such as those with borderline personality disorder (BPD), feel that they "do not know who they are" or that their sense of self is controlled by other people, while other patients have a sense of a secure, stable self that is not prey to the whims of others. We administered a new self-report instrument, the Experiencing of Self Scale, which measures the degree to which other people influence the experience of self, along with the Self- Esteem Scale and the Dissociative Experiences Scale to 284 undergraduate students and 14 BPD patients. We found that the degree to which other people influence the experience of self depended on the nature and closeness of the people involved, that those in our BPD sample suffered from excessive influence of other people over the experience of self relative to the undergraduates, and that the degree of influence correlated predictably with high dissociation and low self-esteem. Implications for conceptualizing BPD and narcissistic personality disorder are discussed, and clinical applications are suggested.