ABSTRACT
In West Africa each person is composed of multiple souls. In India selves migrate from one body to another. Widespread in the world is the idea that a human person can be transformed into an animal and back again. There is also the separate idea that every human person has an animal shape and that everyone doubles back and forth between the two bodies, human and animal. In the West all these theories about the self are rejected. For us it is a fact that a person inhabits one body between birth and death; normally the person in the body is a rational, responsible being, deviations from the norm have legal consequences. It is very simple and straightforward. Psychoanalysts, to be sure, have more complex ideas about the machinery inside the person: it is layered into areas of control, it may be an arena where different agencies contest, or segmented into independent cognitive and affective realms. Apart from psychologists’ writings where something like homunculi can be supposed to operate the parts, there are tomes on subjectivity in literature and art, and whole libraries of counselling on how to achieve self-awareness in counselling. But this counts as speculation or therapy; when it comes to law or philosophy the central discussion focuses on the unitary, rational, once and for all embodied person. In this essay I will take this learned consensus about a fact as an illustration of a ‘thought style’.
