Persons and selves

Abstract

The simple theory of selves maintains that selves are simply persons; 'self' is a role word, the role is being identical with, and one's self is simply the person that plays that role in one's life, that is, oneself. But we often use the term 'self' in a way that implies that there can be more than one self per person, or various selves that compete for control of one person, throughout a range of fairly normal cases to the kind of extreme cases once known as 'multiple personality'. I argue that this use of 'self' can be seen as a metaphorical extension of the word to motivating complexes, the nature of which I try to explain.