Commentary on "The Social Relocation of Personal Identity"

Hinshelwood's paper is clinically fascinating and offers a welcome introduction to Kleinian theory. The main purpose of his paper is to put the phenomena he describes so vividly as instances of splitting, projection, and introjection onto the philosophical agenda, and in this he succeeds admirably. Whatever we make of them, the phenomena are clearly important, and compared with other closely related phenomena (such as dissociation—see below), they have received relatively little attention from philosophers. However, I find some of Hinshelwood's cases more convincing than others. Although his clinical examples are all very interesting, I am less convinced than Hinshelwood of the explanatory power of his specifically Kleinian interpretation of them. I would argue, in fact, that cases of apparent splitting, projection, and introjection may be less significant for classic puzzles about identity than Hinshelwood suggests.

Hinshelwood's interesting speculations concern an alleged "spreading, even a relocation of identity," and he argues that they challenge the received view that persons are "stable 'atomic' entities." According to Hinshelwood, "we commonly assume that the boundary to the person—somatic, social and psychological—is well defined." But I wonder, first of all, how widespread that view is. Most people, of course, do not have clearly articulable views about personal identity. But in contexts where issues arise concerning moral responsibility for one's actions, people seem tacitly to assume that—in some respects, at least—identity is anything but stable. The interesting cases that illustrate this cover a wide range and extend well beyond the domain of psychopathology. They include chemically induced sanity in court cases (see Radden 1989), political and religious conversions, the progress from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, as well as increasingly common instances of gender changes. Moreover, there are many parts of the world (and significant subcultures in the West) where familiar bodily criteria of personal identity yield to a variety of religious or spiritualistic beliefs concerning the independence of the mind or self from the physical body.

A second point is the similarity between Hinshelwood's account of Kleinian splitting and the concept of dissociation. Because Hinshelwood describes splitting as a process in which mental parts are separated so that they "no longer influence each other," at first it seemed that the difference between the two is that in splitting separated mental parts are independent of one another, whereas in dissociation that independence varies and is sometimes only apparent (see Braude 1995, for comments on the only apparent independence of dissociated parts of the self). But toward the end of his paper Hinshelwood inaccurately describes dissociation and multiple personality as a kind of splitting into parts that are "completely disconnected. " I wondered, therefore, whether there was any difference at all between Kleinian splitting and dissociation and whether Hinshelwood had perhaps also exaggerated the degree of independence of mental parts throughout his descriptions of splitting. So one of the main questions I had concerning Hinshelwood's proposals was whether projection and introjection had any explanatory utility apart from appeals to dissociation (or splitting) alone.

In trying to resolve this, I found Hinshelwood's definitions of "projection" and "introjection" (particularly the latter) rather unclear and even misleading. One would have expected the definitions to have a similar form and to differ primarily with respect to the direction of the alleged causal arrow. In projection, something "goes out" (so to speak) from oneself, and in introjection something is "brought into" oneself. But Hinshelwood's use of the terms "one person's" and "someone else" in his definition of "introjection" allow instances of projection to satisfy the definition. Of course, these are difficult concepts, and one reason for seeking to engage philosophers in the debate about them is to improve the clarity (or at least the consistency) of the way such concepts are used. But one would have thought that all Hinshelwood needs to say (roughly) is that in projection, one's feelings, etc. get transferred somehow to another person, whereas in introjection, another person's feelings, etc. get transferred to oneself.

At any rate, what needs to be examined is...