Success depends upon the yield. Although I do not accept either Rossman's methods or his conclusions, I think that his account of mentality is worthy of serious consideration and that his attempt to integrate his account into a larger vision of the point and purpose of human life is just the sort of thing that philosophers should be doing. Rossman's method is broadly phenomenological. This is important both for a correct understanding of mental life and for a solution to the experiential problems generated by consciousness, for those problems are authentically resolved only when we experience ourselves and our connection to the world in the proper way. Here, in a nutshell, is Rossman's theory.
Animals have pre-reflective experience.
Humans, on the other hand, require the sort of directed control of their lives that depends upon the capacity to reflect on experience. Reflective experience makes possible the development of conceptual structures that can be integrated into non-reflective, immediate experience and transform it for good or for ill. The self is neither given nor a substance, but the historical product of attempts to integrate different psychologically active forces into a coherent whole. Moral action and a meaningful life depend upon overcoming our strong tendency to think of the self as disconnected from the world. Rossman's method is problematic.