Schizophrenic patients confront the psychiatrist with a wide array of extraordinary experiences. Such patients may assert that other people make their thoughts, actions, and desires. They can hallucinate voices which talk about them, commenting on their actions, praising and condemning them. They may complain that their thoughts and feelings are transparent to the world or insist that their bodies incarnate seemingly random features from the surrounding world. In order to explain experiences like these, psychiatrists have invoked terms and formulations such as ego weakness, ego boundary disturbance, ego pathology, depersonalization and derealization, and the breakdown or violation of the unity of the self (Spitzer 1988, pp. 167–183).