- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
Some cases could not have been created by therapy, such as that of
Ansel Bourne, who, as far as we know, never had any therapy. In any case,
if even a few of these fascinating cases really happened as described,
they should tell us something very interesting about the relationship
between self, memory, and consciousness. But what?
The distinction between ego and bundle theories may be helpful
here. Prince was clearly an ego theorist, for he believed not only in
the existence of the ‘real Miss Beauchamp’ but in several other dif-
ferent selves who were distinct consciousnesses with separate wills.
So his was a kind of multiple-ego theory: an in-between variant
between the classic ego and bundle notions. Hodgson and Myers had similar
beliefs, and, like many of their contemporaries, their ideas were rooted in spir-
itualist notions of mediumship, possession, and the idea of human personality
as an entity that might survive bodily death (remember that they used the
term ‘personality’ to describe a conscious entity, rather than a set of character
traits). William James thought that cases like this, along with other hypnotic
phenomena (Chapter 13), provided proof of a secondary consciousness or
‘under self ’, co-existing with the primary consciousness. Indeed, he believed
that ‘The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or
coexisting’ (1890, i, p. 401). As we will see later in the chapter, James thinks we
have to acknowledge that our selves are bundles, but also wants to allow for a
persistent core of sameness, so his view is somewhere in the middle too.A more clear-cut bundle-theory interpretation of Miss Beauchamp’s experiences
comes from discursive psychology, a field built on the principle ‘that the mind of
any human being is constituted by the discourses that they are involved in’ (Harré
and Gillett, 1994, p. 104). Within this framework, the sense of self is a product of
the use of the first-person pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’. Philosopher and pioneer
of discursive psychology Rom Harré and philosopher and neurosurgeon Grant
Gillett use the case of Miss Beauchamp to illustrate ‘the difference between the
old idea of the self as something inside a person and the new idea of the self as a
continuous production’ (p. 110). Analysing conversations between Dr Prince and
his patient, they argue that Prince made sense of Miss Beauchamp’s utterances in
terms of three independent pronoun systems. While BI spoke of herself as ‘I’ and
Sally as ‘you’ or ‘she’, Sally referred to herself as ‘I’, and so on. This produces three
distinct selves in the sense that each ‘I’ indexes the same body, but a different con-
tinuous sequence of events and morally responsible agent. Taking the ‘discursive
turn’, there is no more to the selves than that. As Harré and Gillett put it, ‘There
are not three little egos inside Miss Beauchamp, each speaking up through her
mouth. The speaking parts are all there is to it. They are the phenomenon, and
these speaking parts are the selves’ (p. 110).This kind of theory has the advantage of not having to rely on mysterious entities
called selves, but runs the risk of failing to say anything about consciousness. If
the words are all there is, why do we have this compelling sense of a continuous
and unitary self who is the subject of experiences? Or maybe words are plenty
powerful enough to create this sense, and the problem is simply that we under-
estimate the power of language to effortlessly embed itself in every experience,
even to the point of creating an experiencer.‘The same brain
may subserve many
conscious selves’
(James, 1890, i, p. 401)
Miss BeauchampChris/SallyMiss X
IYouSheYouIYouSheIFIGURE 16.4 • The power of pronouns to create
selves. According to Harré and
Gillett (1994), three distinct
systems of pronouns were used
in Miss Beauchamp’s speech.
This means that one body housed
three distinct selves, not because
Miss Beauchamp had three
selves inside her, but because
three selves were discursively
produced.