The Misunderstandings of the Self-Understanding View

Marya Schechtman has argued that contemporary attempts to save Locke’s account of personal identity suffer the same faults that are to be found in Locke, among which is an inability to capture the role our unconscious states play. To avoid these problems, she advocates giving up the mainstream Psychological View and adopting a narrative account like her ‘Self-Understanding’ View that, she claims, has the further virtue of maintaining important insights from Locke. My paper argues that it is misleading to understand the Psychological View as sharing Locke’s commitments and that (partly as a result) Schechtman has not isolated a problem that needs fixing or any reason for going narrative. It further argues that the Self-Understanding View is a great deal more at odds with Locke’s view than Schechtman cares to acknowledge.