Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory

Ian Hacking is a subtle, thoughtful, and often frustrating writer. In Rewriting the Soul, he takes a genealogical approach to Multiple Personality Disorder, epidemic at the time of writing in the early 1990s, and links it to political movements, 19th century French psychiatry, and the philosophy of self and memory. All science, particularly the human sciences like psychiatry, is informed by politics, but Multiple Personality Disorder is more informed than most. The appearance of alters, personality fragments, is linked to recovered memories of abuse, either mundane child abuse at the hands of close relatives or esoteric (and entirely fictional) ritualized satanic abuse.

Hacking is an expert both in 19th century psychiatry and the intricacies of the modern multiple personality disorder movement, and ably shreds any commonplace notion of a singular self based on factual memory by showing all the ways in which this commonplace self breaks down at the fringes of medicine. To the question, “Is MPD real?” Hacking replies ‘Yes. But it is a grave moral wound inflicted upon people by psychological entrepreneurs.’ For a philosopher, a seeker after truth, the scanty evidentiary basis of MPD must be infuriating, especially given the way that it afflicts the lives and communities of people diagnosed with it. But I’m not sure that Hacking earns his normative critique, or an alternative formulation of the self not reliant on a fallible and fluid memory.