Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities & the Sciences of Memory (1995) by Ian Hacking

 Book Review

Rewriting the Soul: 

Multiple Personalities & the Sciences of Memory (1995)

by Ian Hacking

  I actually source a decent number of books from the New York Times weekend obituary section.  One example is this book, by recently deceased Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking.   Here's the obit from last month.  Hacking takes what you might call a Foucauldian approach, excavating historical sources and showing the contingent nature of mental health diagnoses through time. 

  I found it revelatory, twenty five plus years later- the way he uses the Foucauldian method of demonstrating the social construction of allegedly "objective" ideologies- here he traces the development of "multiple personality disorder" from the 19th century through it's post-WWII rise in the USA as a companion of the child molestation hysteria of the 70's and 80's.  It was a pretty curageous position to take, and Hacking bends over backwards not to be unnecessarily cruel, up to and including a conclusion that argues that for the people suffering from "Multiple Personality Disorder" the truth of an allegation of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a family member may be beside the point so long as the client derives relief from its "discovery." 

  That is a diplomatic way to put it. Another way to put it is that the conjunction of the popularity of multiple personality disorder and flamboyant stories about recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse destroyed at least hundreds, if not easily thousands of lives as families were forced to take sides as shocking allegations were made decades after the events in question.

   My personal connection to this world is through my work as a criminal defense attorney.  Much earlier in my career I handled a case of sex abuse by a father of his children and at the time I struggled with how a child could make something like that up- not that it was the case for my client- just the idea of it, like, how could someone ever make something like that up?  This book provides that answer.