Divided minds, selves, egos and internal objects

Tamas Pataki (University of Melbourne)

Partitive conceptions of mind have a long history in philosophy. Various types have been advanced to resolve certain troublesome aspects of self-experience and irrationality in belief and action. Some of these conceptions propose, radically (and roughly), that the mind (self, ego) splits into parts (sub-systems, component selves, subsidiary egos), that have perspectives and aims which are not shared with other parts, and function as independent centres of agency. Plato’s tripartite division of mind is of this kind, as is (I believe) Freud’s structural theory. W. R. D. Fairbairn’s elegant account of the ‘basic endopsychic situation’ involving ‘a multiplicity of egos’ linked to specific internal objects is emphatically of this kind; indeed, Fairbairn allows that internal objects, though not ego structures, may also acquire a ‘dynamic independence’, which seems to mean, at least, that they too are independent centres of agency.

Many philosophers, and some psychoanalysts, reject these partitive conceptions, for a variety of reasons; amongst them: that they are incoherent; that they fail to provide identity conditions for subsidiary parts or internal objects; that they are in conflict with the conception of a substantial unified self inherent in common-sense psychology and therefore sever the fundamental links between such psychology and psychoanalytic understanding; that they are unnecessary to answer to the clinical material. I will examine some of these objections against the backdrop of Fairbairn’s conception of endopsychic structure and attempt to develop a partitive conception of the self which is in many ways faithful to Fairbairn’s picture while preserving sufficient elements of a notion of the mind as a unity to answer some of the salient objections.

Dr Pataki is honorary senior fellow at the University of Melbourne and honorary fellow of Deakin University. He studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne and psychoanalysis at University College, London University. He has been a lecturer in philosophy at RMIT, University of Tasmania and University of Melbourne. He co-edited, with Michael Levine, Racism in Mind (Cornell 2004) and is the author of Against Religion (Scribe, 2007) as well as of several articles and book chapters on the philosophy of mind, and numerous popular pieces and reviews.