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In Western culture, the concept of «personal identity» has a history that can be represented on a parabolic line, which has a starting point in 1694, the date of publication of the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by Locke (1690). Locke defines «personal identity» as a psychological mechanism that does not have its real foundation in a substantive entity, as for some time had been considered to be the case with the soul, but rather in the memory. Identity is made up of sensations that exist in a determined place and time, sensations which recall themselves in another time and another place. On the one hand, identity finds its necessary permanence in the invariability in time for the thinking being, capable of reflection and self-awareness inasmuch as he is an individual, distinct from others, and, on the other hand, identity changes according to variations in time and the multiple spaces to which it is applied.
Personal identity is founded on the memory of a «thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself […], which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself as far as that consciousness extends» (Locke, 1690, 302-7). In an interesting paper on personal destiny in Western culture, Bodei (2002) uses a wealth of examples to analyse «the configurations assumed by the self, consciousness, and personal identity» following the erosion of society's faith in the «immortal soul»,1 the fixed foundation, which for a very long time guaranteed a process of individuation.
The loss of the guarantee of the soul has generated a multiplicity of ways to conceptualize identity — a polytheism of identity following the collapse of monotheism. Interpretative and regulating constructions of identity follow each other in time, distinguish themselves one from another, overlap each other, and are mixed together.
Bodei uses an investigative strategy in the mult