The Ego Takes the Chair

The edition of Pereira Maintains (trans. Patrick Creagh) I have is subtitled in small type: “A Testimony.” It had waited for years, shelved after a half-reasoned intention sparked, I think, by an exchange on Stephen Mitchelmore’s blog. When I opened it again, I expected atmosphere, politics, a sense of Lisbon, but what I found was a disruption. This passage on the self< unexpected, unhurried, unsettled something in me.

Tabucchi, via Pereira, borrows from Ribot and Janet to propose not a soul, but a confederation. The metaphor is clinical, almost administrative. Yet it stuck. I could not stop rereading it. We do not live in unity, the passage insists, but in tenuous accord. The ego governs, until it doesn’t. Another rises, stronger, and takes the chair. The text described not a theory of mind, but a sensation I knew: that our inward voice is not one, but many, and often contested.

“[T]o believe in a “self” as a distinct entity, quite distinct from the infinite variety of all the other “selves” that we have within us, is a fallacy, the naïve illusion of the single unique soul we inherit from Christian tradition, whereas Dr. Ribot and Dr. Janet see the personality as a confederation of numerous souls, because within us we each have numerous souls, don’t you think, a confederation which agrees to put itself under the government of one ruling ego… What we think of as ourselves, our inward being, is only an effect, not a cause, and what’s more it is subject to the control of a ruling ego which has imposed its will on the confederation of souls, so in the case of another alter ego arising, one stronger and more powerful, this ego overthrows the first ruling ego, takes its place and acquires the chieftainship of the cohort of souls…”

—Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Maintains (trans. Patrick Creagh)