As you have noticed already, $this
will not work as you expected prior to PHP 5.4. You can read this in the PHP wiki. The reason:
For PHP 5.3
$this
support for Closures was removed because no consensus could be reached how to implement it in a sane fashion. This RFC describes the possible roads that can be taken to implement it in the next PHP version.
An easy workaround is to simple copy $this
up front, then use the new reference/ variable:
$subject = clone $this;