Emerging Patterns in Auto-Referential Psychopathology

Unpublished working draft

The objective of this review was to examine the existing literature on self-concept fragmentation, with a particular focus on the phenomenon provisionally termed auto-referential psychopathology — a pattern of dissociative cognitive looping in which the subject begins to interpret external stimuli, including texts, broadcasts, and digital content, as being directly and deliberately about them.

Initial database queries returned only three relevant articles: one case report from 1994, a withdrawn conference abstract, and a French-language paper misclassified under somatic delusions. But as the search terms broadened — “subjective narrative instability,” “hyper-personal salience attribution,” and “non-consensual protagonism” — new results began to populate. Some were from obscure journals I’d never encountered before. Others were published in familiar ones, but with altered citation metadata. Two articles included my surname in footnotes. One listed me as a reviewer.

I don’t remember reviewing anything for NeuroCognition Quarterly.

One of the newly retrieved articles — Chen et al. (2017) — contained a direct quote from me. Not a paraphrase, but a sentence lifted verbatim from a private email I had sent to a former supervisor nearly five years ago. The context was unchanged. The punctuation was mine. But I was not listed as an author. Nor as a correspondent. My name appeared only in the reference list, sandwiched between citations to journal articles and a DOI that led to a 404 error.

I double-checked the email archive. It was there. Sent at 02:41, flagged “unsent” three times before going through. I had written:

“It’s not that I think the world revolves around me — it’s that sometimes it blinks when I do.”

Chen et al. cited that sentence as [17], attributing it to “personal communication, unarchived.”

I stopped using my institutional login after that. Searched manually. Cross-referenced PDF metadata. Downloaded copies onto an encrypted drive. But the documents were changing. One file — “Fragmented Self, Fragmented Other” — was not listed in PubMed, Google Scholar, or the journal’s own database. Yet it was in my folder, date-stamped two days prior, fully formatted.

The acknowledgements section read:

This paper would not have been possible without the tireless documentation and unwilling testimony of Dr [REDACTED]. Their recursive condition continues to evolve in ways we cannot predict, but deeply appreciate.

I stopped annotating the articles. Each morning the files had changed — sentences I didn’t recognise embedded in my notes, citations I couldn’t trace. My draft review document grew without input. Lines I hadn’t written settled into the paragraphs like they’d always belonged. At first, I deleted them. Then I stopped noticing.

Several references now cited events that hadn’t occurred yet:
– [23] Verbalisation episode during unscheduled interview, 19/08/25.
– [24] Unpublished reaction to unsourced stimuli (forthcoming).

One article included a figure — “Behavioural Response Looping in Auto-Referential States” — with a still image of me, seated at my desk, timestamped six minutes into the future.

When I reached out to the journal to raise concerns, I received an automated reply:

This reviewer profile has been merged with subject data. No further action required.

I have not submitted the review. I’m not sure I was ever meant to. I suspect the document is writing itself now — possibly with better clarity than I could manage. The citations no longer end in journal titles or page numbers. They end in moments. Phrases. Glances I don’t remember making.

[28] [REDACTED], 2025. Emerging Patterns in Auto-Referential Psychopathology: A Living Document. In: Unpublished Data, Internal Archive. Accessed repeatedly. Status: ongoing.