Who Owns Anomalous Self-Experience? Dissociation, Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorders, and the Distribution of Interpretive Authority

Anomalous self-experiences (ASEs) and basic self-disturbance have been proposed as core, and specific, markers of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD), operationalized through instruments such as the Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE). Many of the phenomena grouped under the ASE construct, derealization, depersonalization, altered embodiment, unstable self–world boundaries, overlap with detachment-type dissociation, depersonalization/derealization disorder, and trauma-related dissociative presentations. From the vantage of trauma and dissociation research, strong claims that ASEs are specific to SSD are empirically overstated and conceptually troubling. This theoretical paper re-examines ASEs from within the dissociation and trauma field. It first summarizes the self-disorder model and its operationalization through the EASE, clarifying its claims about minimal self-disturbance. It then reviews key dissociation constructs, particularly detachment and structural dissociation of the personality, and maps their phenomenological and structural overlaps with ASEs. It critically evaluates schizophrenia-centered specificity claims, drawing attention to systematic under-recognition of trauma and dissociation in psychosis populations and to the likelihood that unmeasured dissociation is partially captured by EASE scores. Drawing on Fricker’s framework of epistemic injustice, the paper argues that schizophrenia-centered narratives can inadvertently marginalize dissociation frameworks and trauma-informed patient perspectives, conferring credibility excess on psychosis-based interpretations and credibility deficit on alternative accounts. The paper then proposes a transdiagnostic minimal-self/dissociation framework in which disturbances of mineness and self–world boundaries arise via multiple pathways, neurodevelopmental, traumatic, and cultural, and can organize into psychotic, chronic detachment, or structural dissociation trajectories depending on biological vulnerability, developmental history, and social context. Clinical implications include routine assessment of trauma and dissociation in individuals presenting with ASEs, avoiding reification of self-disorder as a fixed constitutional defect, and designing treatments that address both psychosis and dissociation mechanisms. Research implications include systematically measuring trauma and dissociation in EASE validation studies and tempering specificity claims accordingly.Keywords: anomalous self-experience; self-disorder; dissociation; depersonalization; derealization; schizophrenia spectrum; complex PTSD; epistemic injustice; felt sense of anomaly; transdiagnostic