How to view "your own comments" without the permission view comments?
I think this kind of logic is better handled in a custom module instead of the theme layer. Something like this might work for you:

/**
 * Implements hook_permission().
 */
function mymodule_permission() {
  return array(
    'view own comments only' =&gt; array(
      'title' =&gt; t('View only own comments'),
      'description' =&gt; t('The user will not see comments made by other users.'),
      'warning' =&gt; t('Sometimes this might not work...'),
    ),
  );

}

/**
 * Implementation of hook_query_TAG_alter()
 */
function mymodule_query_comment_filter_alter(QueryAlterableInterface $query) {
  if (user_access('view own comments only') &amp;&amp; !user_access('administer comments')) {
    $query-&gt;condition('c.uid', $GLOBALS['user']-&gt;uid);
  }
}


This defines a view own comments only permission. If this is set and the user does not have the administer comments permission, comments made by other users will be hidden on the node page.

There are a few problems with this solution (and you'll probably have the same problems if you are trying to do this in a template file):


comment count will not be modified
Recent comments block will not be modified