Pathologies of body, self, and space

This special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry is devoted to accounts of some of the most bizarre and disturbing abnormalities of human experience precipitated by neurological and neuropsychiatric disorder. All but one of these papers derives from The First Sheffield Psychopathology Symposium, which took place 21 June 2001. The meeting was particularly concerned with those phenomena arising when body and self, soma and psyche become dissociated within or beyond the body’s surface. These conditions share a propensity for changing the subjective sense of the body and its relation either to the mind or the surrounding physical environment. There is some resemblance also in their neurological substrates (where these have been investigated) and certainly a recurrent theme is the complex functioning of the parietal cortex. However, as we shall see, there is by no means universal acceptance of the pathological status of some of these phenomena (see Halligan, this issue), nor is there necessarily an acceptance that a cognitive paradigm (as currently applied) can be used to explain all these symptoms adequately (see Thornton, this issue). We hope readers will find much that is intellectually stimulating as well as clinically relevant in these assembled contributions. In the opening two papers, we were interested in contemporary accounts of spatial neglect and dissociation syndromes, where, for neurological or psychological reasons, awareness of the body is compromised. In each, there is a relative constriction of bodily awareness, disturbing and often reducing the