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Rewriting the Soul : Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory / Ian Hacking.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [1998]Copyright date: ©1995Edition: Course BookDescription: 1 online resource (352 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691059082
  • 9781400821686
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 153.12
LOC classification:
  • RC569.5.M8
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 1. Is It Real? -- CHAPTER 2. What Is It Like? -- CHAPTER 3. The Movement -- CHAPTER 4. Child Abuse -- CHAPTER 5. Gender -- CHAPTER 6. Cause -- CHAPTER 7. Measure -- CHAPTER 8. Truth in Memory -- CHAPTER 9. Schizophrenia -- CHAPTER 10. Before Memory -- CHAPTER 11. Doubling of the Personality -- CHAPTER 12. The Very First Multiple Personality -- CHAPTER 13. Trauma -- CHAPTER 14. The Sciences of Memory -- CHAPTER 15. Memoro-Politics -- CHAPTER 16. Mind and Body -- CHAPTER 17. An Indeterminacy in the Past -- CHAPTER 18. False Consciousness -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary: 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.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 1. Is It Real? -- CHAPTER 2. What Is It Like? -- CHAPTER 3. The Movement -- CHAPTER 4. Child Abuse -- CHAPTER 5. Gender -- CHAPTER 6. Cause -- CHAPTER 7. Measure -- CHAPTER 8. Truth in Memory -- CHAPTER 9. Schizophrenia -- CHAPTER 10. Before Memory -- CHAPTER 11. Doubling of the Personality -- CHAPTER 12. The Very First Multiple Personality -- CHAPTER 13. Trauma -- CHAPTER 14. The Sciences of Memory -- CHAPTER 15. Memoro-Politics -- CHAPTER 16. Mind and Body -- CHAPTER 17. An Indeterminacy in the Past -- CHAPTER 18. False Consciousness -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

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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.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)