Twenty-five years ago one could list by name the tiny number of
multiple personalities recorded in the history of Western medicine,
but today hundreds of people receive treatment for dissociative
disorders in every sizable town in North America. Clinicians,
backed by a grassroots movement of patients and therapists, find
child sexual abuse to be the primary cause of the illness, while
critics accuse the "MPD" community of fostering false memories of
childhood trauma. Here the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking
uses the MPD epidemic and its links with the contemporary concept
of child abuse to scrutinize today's moral and political climate,
especially our power struggles about memory and our efforts to cope
with psychological injuries.
What is it like to suffer from multiple personality? Most
diagnosed patients are women: why does gender matter? How does
defining an illness affect the behavior of those who suffer from
it? And, more generally, how do systems of knowledge about kinds of
people interact with the people who are known about? Answering
these and similar questions, Hacking explores the development of
the modern multiple personality movement. He then turns to a
fascinating series of historical vignettes about an earlier wave of
multiples, people who were diagnosed as new ways of thinking about
memory emerged, particularly in France, toward the end of the
nineteenth century. Fervently occupied with the study of hypnotism,
hysteria, sleepwalking, and fugue, scientists of this period aimed
to take the soul away from the religious sphere. What better way to
do this than to make memory a surrogate for the soul and then
subject it to empirical investigation?
Made possible by these nineteenth-century developments, the
current outbreak of dissociative disorders is embedded in new
political settings. "Rewriting the Soul" concludes with a powerful
analysis linking historical and contemporary material in a fresh
contribution to the archaeology of knowledge. As Foucault once
identified a politics that centers on the body and another that
classifies and organizes the human population, Hacking has now
provided a masterful description of the politics of memory: the
scientizing of the soul and the wounds it can receive.
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