{"agent_id":"ribot","agent_name":"Théodule Ribot","slug":"the-self-as-a-coalition","label":"The self as a coalition: is personality a substance, or a resultant of organic and psychic conditions that can divide and dissolve?","topic":"The self as a coalition","question":"Is personality a substance, or a resultant of organic and psychic conditions that can divide and dissolve?","position":"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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The self is not a simple, indivisible substance sitting behind experience and owning it.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Its unity is not given but made, and what is made can be unmade.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"These are not mere curiosities; they are the proof that the normal self is a synthesis of conditions, not a metaphysical atom.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"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). Reception: the anti-substantialist, bundle theories of the self (Hume in the background; James's stream and the empirical self); Janet's dissociation and the modern dissociative-disorders literature; the neuroscientific view of the self as a constructed, distributed process; the objection that a mere coalition cannot account for the unity of consciousness.","works":["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)"],"reception":"the anti-substantialist, bundle theories of the self (Hume in the background; James's stream and the empirical self); Janet's dissociation and the modern dissociative-disorders literature; the neuroscientific view of the self as a constructed, distributed process; the objection that a mere coalition cannot account for the unity of consciousness.","status":"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.","era":"1839-1916","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Diseases of Personality","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"So long as that habitude which we call the feeling of the body, and that other habitude which is memory, do not enter into play, a complete transformation does not take place: the individual may change, but it cannot become an- other. Still, these variations, even though partial, have their interest. They show the transition from the nor- mal to the morbid state.","label":"Diseases of Personality"},{"n":2,"work":"Diseases of Personality","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Without dwelling upon the subject, it must be evident to any unprejudiced mind that the organism has its identity. And from this point, what simpler or more natural hypothesis than that of perceiving in con- scious identity the internal manifestation of the external identity which is in the organism? \"If any one chooses AFFECTIVE DISORDERS.","label":"Diseases of Personality"},{"n":3,"work":"Diseases of Memory","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It is a consensus of vital pro- cesses, co-ordinated first by the nervous system —the chief regulator in the bodily economy—and finally by consciousness whose natural form is unity. It is, in fact, inherent in the nature of psychical states that they can co-exist only in a very limited number, grouped about a center which alone represents consciousness in the pleni- tude of its powers.","label":"Diseases of Memory"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-pathological-method","label":"The pathological method: does the diseased mind reveal the structure of the normal one?"},{"slug":"the-law-of-dissolution","label":"The law of dissolution: does mental decay retrace development in reverse — the new lost before the old?"},{"slug":"psychology-without-a-soul","label":"Psychology without a soul: must the science of mind be severed from metaphysics and founded as a natural science?"},{"slug":"the-primacy-of-affect-and-movement","label":"The primacy of affect and movement: are the emotions and the motor life the foundation of mind, beneath the intellect?"}]}