Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory by Ian Hacking (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Remember, Plato believed there were three parts to the soul. Thomist Catholics, the book argues, advocate for a unitary model of the soul. The soul is one, not many. These debates are some of what’s at stake when we talk about multiple personality disorder and claim that our conversations are consistent with timeless definitions of how the mind works.

⭐I was a student of Professor Hacking at University of Toronto in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He is brilliant and a Canadian all Canadians should be proud of. The fact I got to enjoy his thinking firsthand while he was formulating his ideas that became this book while I was an undergrad and then a graduate student in one of his departments will always be my good intellectual fortune. “Rewriting” is a landmark work on the reformation of ideas about memory in the nineteenth century and the consequences of this reformation on science and indeed on western culture in general. This book as well as his earlier The Taming of Chance are two of the best works in the history of science written in the late twentieth century. Both are highly recommended.

⭐I normally like to read books like this. Some parts are interesting, but I lost interest. It’s ok. 3 stars maybe I will pick it up again…by the way, this book is about multiple personality disorder. Syble, is far more interesting and based on a true story.

⭐As a person diagnosed as DID, I was left with a lot of questions. My psychiatrist gave me a lot of reading to do but I found this one on my own. I haven’t finished this book yet but so far it has been an immense help. I highly recommend it.

⭐Truly an amazing piece of writing, scholarship, thought, etc. — Hacking attempts to understand the modern fascination with memory and the unified, integral self through a careful study of the evolution of psychiatric thought on multiple-personality disorder. What he uncovers is important in cascading fashion for: multiple personality, psychiatry, history of science, discourse on memory, conceptions of historical time, even ontology. Hacking’s underlying interest is twofold: one, what he calls ‘looping’ in the production of human types–here, a shorthand for the recursive reproduction of clinical disorders in patients. Essentially, this means that you go to see a doctor who assesses your symptoms and provides you with a diagnosis, a new description of your symptoms and an account of their cause. This re-description shapes the way you behave in the future, and both you and the doctor become more convinced that the cause is real (and accurately described) and that it can happen to others. As a result, ‘types’ are produced and therapists proliferate who specialize in treating these types.The second of his major interests, already suggested above, is the question of the temporality of scientific facts. This has been a concern for Bruno Latour as well, as in his famous essay on Ramses II. Hacking is interested here in the effects of belated re-descriptions of the past (hence the reference in the title to re-writing). The gist is that there is a strange kind of time that occurs when a present offers new descriptions of the past–we do not see these as present interventions that actively re-write a past, but rather as the revealing (or unveiling) of the truth that was always-already there. Here’s Hacking from p. 94: “The events as described, which the multiple in therapy comes to feel as the cause of her illness, did not produce her present state. Instead, redescriptions of the past are caused by the present. Nevertheless, the patient feels that evens as newly described DO produce her present state. She feels that way because of the kinds of knowledge about memory that are current.”

⭐Strengths: A powerful treatment of the socio-philosophico-psychological development of an emergent psychiatric phenomenon (“category”), that of multiple personality disorder. Hacking navigates between “social construction” pure-and-simple, false memory syndrome, the analogy between remembering and story telling, and the invariant features of the conceptual framework needed for science. He is deeply empathic (the word “empathy” does not occur) towards the suffering of those who have experienced multiple personality disassociation. He is less so towards those who have tried to profit from it on talk shows and in the popular press. To read this text is to enjoy the dynamic give-and-take of a master at work. If there is a fan club, sign me up – I am unabashedly enthusiastic about this work.Weaknesses: I cannot find any real weaknesses, certainly none that can be explained concisely and without elaborate give-and-take. A call for amplification might include saying more about Forgiveness; but would perhaps require another book. At the risk of sounding flip, the German word for memory/recollection is misspelled on the bottom of page 202 and should be “Erinnerung.” At another level, this may be a difficult book for many less sophisticated readers. That does not mean that they should not buy it and read it. They should. Just be prepared. I actually assigned it to a class in the psychology of cognitive and affective bases of behavior; and after some initial hesitation – and some guidance – they thought it was pretty cool. Doesn’t get any better than that. Hacking brings an awesome learning and intellect to the task at hand, the difficulties of which are not to be underestimated. Newton is supposed to have said, If I have seen further than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants who came before me. Not to lay it on too thick – but if not now when? – in this case, Newton’s saying actually applies. Well done.

⭐The typing is just a bit difficult to read, some portions of the letters are kind of thin , it doesn’t seem like a defect , but just an uninspired choice of font by the publisher. It is highly readable, though.However and this is a great However – The book itself, the content, the writing, the approach is incredible. It is simply an amazing perspective, especially due to and considering the fact that there is philosophy there ..too …blended seamlessly. Enjoy !

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