Losing ourselves

What happens when we lose ourselves? Not just our life - our direction, but that essence we used to assume is ourselves, our personality at its depths?

Do we merge into the 'other'? Do we become what we perceive? When we watch a movie and end up thinking the main character is cool we, at a base psychological level, assume their movie persona. This naturally results in people wearing the same clothes etc outwardly - or sunglasses a'la Neo - but what is even more fundamental is our characteristic usurpations - moving in the same way, almost thinking in the same way. Dichotomies might be simple reductionism but they may be useful for illustration of clarity - as such, I'm doing some thinking on what might represent the spectrum occupying the aforementioned dissipation of the self and its potential opposite, fullness of the self (for lack of a better description). What if this might be as simple as autism on one end and psychosis on the other? Dissipation, thought, or dissociation (perhaps the process itself) would not all be fear-based. One might be frightened that the self they've known all their life is disappearing (even episodically) but temporarily forgetting their existence, for most people, is entirely joyful.

I believe the essence is the same, except that the former is unexpected and the latter subjectively initiated.

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