Stewart 4

The problem with this whole picture is that the kind of self-knowledge necessary for (agented) personhood seems to be a matter of first-person authority without any guarantee of access to the right set of complete memories relative to a body (usually, for all purposes, your body). In other words for Norman, some crucial memories otherwise linked with his body seem to be curiously missing from his repertoire. Since personality means, at least in part, having access to your memories, the effective omission of these memories from Norman's personality and their configuration elsewhere into a unified experiential memory are the basis for the claim that some other personality "owns" those memories. The instrument of Hitchcock's horror is thus not mere fiction, but the threatened reality of the terrifying possibilities of a self-contained psyche.

For the purposes of this paper, I have situated the theoretical model of memory and personhood at work in Hitchcock's film as faithful to a general Cartesian picture of mind. We should care about this problem since it challenges a general, if not doxastic, view of personality and self-knowledge as precisely linked to Cartesian-style accounts that ground self-knowledge, memory, and indeed agency in first-person privileged access. In other words, Psycho presents a good model of the underlying Cartesian assumptions embedded in particular psychological discourse and practice, as well as particular philosophical discourse and practice.5 

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5 This model is by no means universal, and to the extent that it is widespread, it may also be waning.

 


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