Stewart 3

Ultimately, however, Norman Bates is given a legitimate claim to not knowing about the "self" who committed these murders. Norman, apparently, has no access to the experiential memory of killing Marion Crane and others. The move that says "Norman" does not have access to these "other" memories, and that therefore these other memories belong to someone other than Norman, is a move that still takes the criteria of personhood to be self-contained, first-person privileged access. This move still identifies agents as a set of first-person accessible thoughts and memories. As soon as Norman fails to be a collection of self-contained, first-person accessible thoughts, he fails to exist as anything we can make sense of as a proper agent. Suddenly, we insist on making sense of him as two agents, since (we want to say) there are, now, two sets of first-person accessible thoughts.

The personality who does remember killing those people is now, according to the psychiatrist, the only personality laying claim to the present experiences of this body. We ought to say, according to the psychiatrist, that "Norman Bates" no longer exists. Norman Bates no longer satisfies the necessary criteria of existing as an agent: The personality defined as and through the unification and edifice of Norman Bates's experiences is simply no longer responsive, no longer "there." Although we might still identify a body as somehow still "Norman's," since there is no longer the right kind of evidence of Norman's personality, Norman no longer exists. Here, personality itself is understood as that agency with privileged access to innermost thoughts, feelings, and memories. I take this to be thoroughly Cartesian in that Norman loses his status as a subject insofar as his definition as both the set of innermost mental states and the access to those states is suddenly jeopardized.4

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4 For crucial critiques of the Cartesian assumption of innermost feelings, thoughts, and memories as mental states assigned to individual subjects, and of the consequences of Cartesian individualism in the philosophy of psychology, see Naomi Scheman's Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority and Privilege (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially "Anger and the Politics of Naming," "Individualism and the Objects of Psychology," and "Though This Be Method, Yet There is Madness in It: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology." It is unfortunate that I do not have room to discuss Scheman's argument.

 


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