Borderline personality disorder involves a fragmentation of narrative identity, a widely shared view that has been challenged by alternative perspectives emphasizing agency. This article contributes to that debate using a phenomenological approach. It reviews the narrative interpretation, justifies a stratified model of the self based on phenomenology, and draws on László Tengelyi's three layers of self—self-institution, self-formation, and minimal self—to integrate competing concepts from Fuchs, Schmidt, Gold, Kyratsous, and Zahavi. The final section reconfigures the identity-related experiences and manifestations of BPD through this layered phenomenological lens.
Selfhood, even at its most basic level, has a bodily thickness that can be altered in schizophrenia. Drawing on Sartre's concept of coenesthesia—the translucent material of consciousness—and historical research, the authors argue that the minimal self is not a bare point but an embodied, elemental feeling. This phenomenological materiality, or bodily element of ipseity, helps explain anomalies of self-experience in schizophrenia spectrum disorders without reducing selfhood so drastically that it cannot account for experiential changes.