Suppose the notion of an authentic core self is an illusion or little more than what Edith Wharton called a “fugitive flash of consciousness”; at least she thinks it is there even if gone in a flash. Much respectable opinion doesn't think the self is really there so much as it is a fiction that keeps us roughly the same person from one day to the next, or a convenience adopted because it is useful for us to think that way. Thus, for instance, Hume. Very respectable philosophers still argue for some form of his position. The debate continues apace, and I merely intend to gesture in the direction of it after my own fashion to get at various social and psychological anxieties that suffuse certain aspects of identity, self, and role.

There is also a long tradition that we do not have one self, but many. This view was offered in various forms, from something as simple as the idea of good angel/bad angel, a kind of Jekyll-and-Hydism, to a view of multiple selves recently resurrected in rational choice theory to help account for the myriad human behaviors that make us continually act as if models of economic egoistic rationality were silly inventions of bizarrely robotic minds. Even the words we use to describe aspects of the individual, if not the self itself, such as “person” or “character,” are evidence of a deep belief as to the fictional nature of our psychological, social, and moral selves.