Is there one self or many competing selves within us? Some argue we contain multiple selves, warring for attention and even control of the organism. But philosopher Luke Roelofs argues that we must distinguish between two accounts of the self to make sense of this: a persona emerging from mental processes and the substrate that underpins them. We can have multiple personas in conflict with one another, but the substrate in which they are in conflict remains unified. We should allow our multiple selves to democratically coexist in order to live a richer, more harmonious, internal life.

The Ancient philosopher Plato famously argued that our soul has three parts (usually translated as “reason”, “spirit”, and “appetite”), which are often at war with one another. His argument? We routinely find ourselves wracked with inner conflict, where we seem to simultaneously want a particular thing and also reject it. In one dramatic example he cites, the character Leontius struggles with both abhorrence at a pile of corpses and a desire to look at them, eventually breaking down and looking while screaming angrily at his own eyes “look, you wretches”.

SUGGESTED READING Freud vs Jung: Trauma extends beyond the self By Andrew Samuels Plato is not alone in thinking this way. We often describe our struggles and turmoils in terms suggesting a multiplicity of agents (or even a pair of wolves). We say we are at war with ourselves, or that we are not in control of ourselves, that a part of us wants something or believes something, but another part disagrees.

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We can broadly distinguish approaches where the self is something that emerges out of mental processes, which we might call a “persona”, from approaches where it’s something that underlies and enables mental processes, which we might call a “substrate”.

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