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J. W. T. Redfearn's position in his admirable book, Myself, My Many Selves ( Academic Press, London, 1985). is that there is not ‘much difficulty in the idea that there are many selves present in us all’, and that using a general term for these avoids taking ‘sides over matters about which there is no point in arguing all the time, although every point in arguing some of the time’ (p. ).
He does not object to the various ‘schools and disciplines’ developing their own vocabularies and definitions of the self, but would offer ‘a generic, not too controversial word’ which ‘might lessen the irritation and confusion which tends to occur’ when the schools try to communicate with each other (pp. xii-xiii).
The ‘feeling of I’, he would illustrate, ‘migrates … to various locations in the total personality, like the spotlight at a theatre picking out first one actor then another, or … like a pilgrim on his journey of life visiting one place, then another, in his universe … I call these various actors in ourselves “sub-personalities”….’ (xii)
As a language scholar having a layman's interest in the difficulties of dealing with concepts of the self, I shall offer a few comments on this effort to provide a general model for the self, and then propose another to see if it might be of interest to psychologists.
First, I would note that language is hardly ever neutral. Redfearn's terminology is relatively neutral and therefore might help achieve his goal of lessening confusion. But ‘theatre’, ‘pilgrim’ and ‘sub-personality’ remain loaded words—as those in my comparison will be. The point is that we really cannot expect language to be neutral when important matters are under consideration, but must always be aware that figures of speech and word connotations point our understanding in certain directions.
The theatre analogy for the self has a long and respectable history, as has the republic or commonwealth. The former connotes the focus, the immediacy, the varying intensities that we expe