Abstract

As an original philosophic reflection upon the existential question of identity, "Who am I?", this dissertation examines how a human being can ask this question and what asking this question tells us about the being of human beings. ;Traditionally, the question has been directly answered by a general concept or definition of human identity. Such an approach confuses the existential question, "Who am I?" with the generic question, "What am I?" and thus misses the intrinsically reflexive character of this existential question. In raising "Who am I?", I do not seek to answer it but to deepen our understanding of the sense of a person's identity disclosed in the act of questioning. "Who am I?" questions a person's sense of identity: "In that I am, how do I come to be who I am?" Or, "What are the structures which constitute a person's sense of identity?" ;In order to understand the question "Who am I?", I undertake an existential-phenomenological description of a person's sense of identity. This description begins with a fundamental account of human experience which reveals, first, that a human being is essentially and concretely a being-in-relation-with and, second, that a human being comes to be who he/she is in and through his/her relationships with other human beings. However, to fully understand the question "Who am I?" I continue and disclose the ground of these human relationships to be the fundamental structures of lived body and personal name. An existential-phenomenological description of human experience discloses lived body and personal name as the constitutive structures of a person's sense of identity, two structures which make possible the relationships underlying a person's sense of identity. A person's sense of identity is thus founded on a person's experience of his/her body and name. ;To elucidate how lived body and personal name constitute a person's sense of identity, I offer a description of a healthy and an unhealthy sense of identity. This description leads to an examination of certain psychological accounts of identity, mental health, and mental illness. Finally, a suggestion is made concerning an alternative treatment of schizophrenia