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There is a cluster of concepts at the point where psychoanalysis makes contact with our ordinary understanding of people: there is the self, character, identity, ego, and the will. Like a shell game, it is difficult to decide which concept covers the I. It may even be that such a search is futile—an outmoded quest left over from the 18th century's optimistic belief in man as a rational agent. Nevertheless, we persist in trying to find the center and the source of ourselves, and we look for ourselves in that familiar group of concepts—will, decision, fear, envy, reason, belief, and so on—which has been called “Folk Psychology” (Churchland, 1981).
The difficulty lies in deciding whether the concepts of psychoanalysis and folk psychology overlap each other and simply present different ways of speaking about much the same thing; or whether psychoanalysis refers to more basic phenomena and can replace folk psychological talk of will with descriptions of an agency which operates at a deeper level; or whether the