Commentary on "The Social Relocation of Personal Identity"

I am in full agreement with Hinshelwood's affirmation and lucid account of the importance of Kleinian concepts for psychoanalysis and our understanding of human personality. Here I will restrict myself to Hinshelwood's philosophical interpretation of the phenomena uncovered by Kleinian psychoanalysis.

The picture of personal identity that Hinshel-wood arrives at has much in common with the views of the many contemporary philosophers—preeminently Derek Parfit (1984)—who challenge the ontological robustness of personal identity, much in the spirit of Hume's famous repudiation of the idea of self (1739-40, bk. 1, pt. 4, sect. 6). Furthermore, Hinshelwood is not alone in thinking that empirical findings are decisive for our view of personal identity: the strategy of argument that he employs has analogues in the contemporary arguments against the unity of the self that have been advanced on the basis of commissurotomy and multiple personality (Dennett and Humphrey 1989; Mackie 1985; Nagel 1979; Pucetti 1973; Wilkes 1988). Hinshelwood's Kleinian approach is however fully original: it has been argued before that psychoanalysis implies a broadly Humean metaphysic of personal identity, but earlier arguments have centered on classical Freudian theory and referred to quite different considerations from Hinshelwood's (see Sartre 1943, 50-54; and Rorty 1989, ch. 2; these are discussed in Gardner 1993, chs. 2-3 and sect. 7.6).

The comments that follow focus on the two key claims in Hinshelwood's philosophical interpretation of the Kleinian material: that projective identification involves a relocation of mental states, and that Kleinian theory encourages a reconception of persons as processes.

1

As Hinshelwood notes, the notion of mental relocation raises the question of—as philosophers put it—the criteria of identity for mental phenomena. An understanding of this concept is essential for an accurate understanding of the concept of mental relocation.

A criterion of identity tells us what it is for one thing to be the same as another. For example, the criterion of identity for physical objects is spatiotemporal continuity: it tells us that A is the same physical object as B if A is spatio-temporally continuous with B. The criterion of identity for novels, by contrast, cannot be spatio-temporal continuity since, when you and I both purchase the same novel, we do not come into possession of a spatially continuous object. The criterion of identity for novels and other literary works is typographic, which is why there can be many, spatio-temporally distinct copies of the same novel, as there cannot of the same physical object.

Now it is an important fact—which Wittgenstein (1976) drew attention to—that the criteria of identity for mental phenomena are extremely hard to make out. The problems start in the context of individual minds. When my toothache disappears for an hour and then returns, is it the same toothache, despite its temporal discontinuity? If it is the same, this cannot be because the toothache is indistinguishable as regards how it feels, since I might want to say that when my toothache returned it had got worse. Further puzzles arise in interpersonal contexts. When you and I both think "John is late," do we think the same thought? And when we both feel angry with John on account of his lateness, do we have the same feeling?

In all of these cases, one wants to say that in one sense it is the same mental phenomenon, but in another that it is not. A full account of the relevant senses of sameness would lead far into the philosophies of mind and language. All that is required for present purposes, however, is a broad understanding of what it is for two persons to be in the same mental state, to share a mental state.

As indicated above, there is a perfectly good sense in which two persons can think the same thought or have the same feeling. How one understands this conceptually depends on one's general philosophical understanding of the mental.

On one account, which may be called the Object Model of...