The self as a coalition: is personality a substance, or a resultant of organic and psychic conditions that can divide and dissolve?

Théodule Ribot, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The self is not a simple, indivisible substance sitting behind experience and owning it. It is a coalition — a resultant, formed at every moment out of the mass of organic sensations that rise from the body (the coenesthesis), the perceptions, the memories, and the feelings, bound loosely together by the continuity of the living body and the thread of memory.¹²

Its unity is not given but made, and what is made can be unmade. In the diseases of personality we watch the coalition loosen and break: the coenesthetic base altered, and with it the sense of self; memory severed, and with it the person divided into successive or simultaneous selves who do not know one another. These are not mere curiosities; they are the proof that the normal self is a synthesis of conditions, not a metaphysical atom.

The ego is a grouping, a federation of states presided over by the body and by memory — real while it holds, dissoluble when its conditions fail.³⁴

Sources

1. Translated into physiological terms, this means that the modifications of the nervous system which represent materially the sensations and their resultant desires (the first elements of the high psychic life) associate themselves with previous modifications which are the material representatives of the vital and organic sensations; by which means relations are established between these nervous elements; so that…

   Diseases of Personality, p. 89

2. In brief, the Ego may be considered in two ways: either in its actual form, and then it is the sum of existing conscious states; or, in its continuity with the past, and then it is formed by the memory according to the process outlined above. It would seem, according to this view, that the identity of the Ego depended entirely upon the memory. But such a conception is only partial.

   Diseases of Memory, pp. 118–120

3. The unity of the ego is that of a complexus, and it is only by a metaphysical illusion that the ideal and fictitious unity of the mathematical point can be attributed to it. It does not consist in the act of a supposed simple ''essence," but in a co-ordination of the nerve-centres, which themselves represent a co-ordination of the functions of the organism.

   Diseases of Personality, p. 88

4. This bodily condition, which is without the sphere of consciousness because of its perpetuity, is the true basis of personality — ever-present, ever-acting, without repose or respite, it knows neither sleep nor exhaustion, lasting as long as Hfe itself, of wMch., indeed, it is only an expression.

   Diseases of Memory, pp. 120–122

Where the argument is made

• The Diseases of Personality (1895 — the self as coalition, the coenesthetic base, multiple personality and its dissolution)
• The Diseases of Memory (1882, memory as the ground of personal continuity)

How the argument was received

Ribot's coalition theory of the self is a strong statement of the anti-substantialist, empirical view of personality, in the lineage of Hume's bundle and parallel to James's account of the self as a stream and an empirical me; it fed directly into Janet's dissociation and the modern study of dissociative identity, and it anticipates the neuroscientific picture of the self as a constructed, distributed process rather than a unitary thing. The standing objection is the unity-of-consciousness problem: that a mere coalition or federation of states seems unable to explain the felt unity and ownership of experience, which some hold requires more than an aggregate. So the view is broadly vindicated as against the substantial soul, while the binding/unity problem it raises remains open.