as i've often indicated, i like david brooks. he's a more thoughtful person than the average columnist (more thoughtful than me, for example); he reads and thinks more than most columnists; he writes better than most columnists. sometimes, however, like today, you'd have to say that he's a bit out of his element. few columnists would go anywhere near the question of different conceptions of the human self, so points for that. but when he sets this up as philosophers vs psychologists, he just has no idea what he's talking about.

perhaps aristotle had some kind of unitary or atomic conception of the self (though that's a hard and interesting question). but no major philosopher who i can think of in the twentieth century who considered the matter at all didn't see that there was a problem, and whole movements of philosophy have shattered that sucker more thoroughly than any psychologist could.

for example, hume totally ripped up the cartesian self in the mid-eighteenth century. hegel socialized, historicalized, and smacked the self in 1810. multiple complex selves were flying all around the philosophy of nietzsche. you know, dewey, gilbert ryle, wittgenstein, foucault, derrida, deleuze etc etc: not a single single self to be found anywhere. 

"philosophy says x" is never a good idea. but here it's just completely uninformed.