Chapter 17 Mental Connectedness

Richard Wollheim was, most notably, among those philosophers who contributed to psychoanalysis as a philosopher, and conversely, who found psychoanalytic theories and findings relevant to their work in the philosophy of mind. My plan today is to illustrate this beneficial interdisciplinary connection by means of a discussion of Wollheim’s paper ‘On persons and their lives’ (Wollheim 1980), while keeping in mind, also, some questions about the nature of inter-disciplinary relations. Wollheim read his paper in 1977 in New York; the revised version which is the one I am quoting from appeared in 1980 in a collection of papers called Explaining Emotions, edited by Amélie Rorty.

Wollheim begins the paper with this sentence: ‘Every person has a life of his own, his one and only life, and that life he leads’ (Wollheim 1980: 299). His aim is the philosophical exploration of personal identity. He asks: what is it that tells us that ‘a boy who once stole apples from a particular orchard and some general who, years later, won renown on a famous battlefield would be one and the same person …’? (Wollheim 1980: 300). As well as this question about ‘being the same person’, identity in that sense, Wollheim asks another, about the personal identity that is constituted by the

varying degrees to which people, persons, manage to give to their lives a pattern, an overallness, or the different measure of success that they have in making their lives of a piece …. [We] recognize in such integration of a life, in the life of wholeness, something that, in many ages, for many cultures, has been in the nature of an ideal.

He is asking: how does the inner unity of persons, an ideal which is realised in varying degrees, relate to the continuity of persons over time? That is to say, how shall we understand personal identity?

Wollheim reminds us that historically philosophers seeking for a criterion of personal identity have been divided into two about where to look. Some have l