An A–Zfurther observation, that the person may not be a single thing
but multiple and fragmented. This is the theory of William
James and Friedrich Nietzsche: for them, we are a constellation
of selves, and the sense of consciousness, or being an ‘I’, is the
product of that struggle. Hence the sense of crisis when we ask
ourselves who we might be.
Michel Foucault developed the discussion again, refl ecting on
the impact of the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud taught modern
people to think of themselves as ‘subjects of inwardness’: with
the invention of psychoanalysis, we learned ways of becoming
introspective in order to search out the truth about ourselves.
Our most authentic parts are soul-like and the word ‘soul’
becomes a synonym for ‘authentic’, as in soul music.
For Foucault, though, this belief was something of a delu-
sion. Our sense of self is forged through the way that power –
manifest in social entities like medical science or political
institutions – operates on the body. So the truth about ourselves
is not found by turning inward but by considering how our
bodies exist in the world. In a striking phrase, Foucault inverted
Plato’s thought that ‘the body is the prison of the soul’ and
declared instead that ‘the soul is the prison of the body’.
This latest strand in humanity’s discussion of itself, character-
ised by an uncertainty about personhood, and the feeling that
we are subject to all kinds of external forces that construct us in
some way, is a central preoccupation of what is sometimes called
postmodernism, and raises the nature of personal identity.
One of the big questions here is how we may understand the
sense that our identity is continuous. After all, although much
changes in the life of an individual as they traverse their ‘seven
ages’ – from infancy, to schoolchild, to teenager, to employee,
to employer, to grandparent, to senility – few would doubt that
in some sense they remain the same person. The question is in
what sense?
Two main groups of theories try to account for the continuity
of personal identity that we experience. The fi rst is the notion
that personal identity is intimately connected to the individual’s