How Freud Tricked You into Being Skeptical about Multiple Personality even if You are Not Interested in his Psychoanalytic Theories

Freud may be out of fashion—or perhaps never was in fashion with you—but some of his ideas may be thought of as conventional wisdom, even by you.

Part of conventional wisdom is that Freud discovered the unconscious, which Freud acknowledged was untrue: “Incidentally, even in the days before psychoanalysis, hypnotic experiments, especially post-hypnotic suggestion, provided concrete demonstrations of the existence and mode of operation of the psychic unconscious” (1, p. 52). However, many people still, routinely, give Freud credit for discovering the unconscious. It is one of the main reasons people think that he was a genius (even if they ridicule some of his other theories).

Freud also knew that his concept of a single consciousness and an unconscious was illogical, but he used sophistry to reject his own logic. Freud said, “This process of deduction—applied to our own person despite inner resistance—leads not to the discovery of an unconscious, but, strictly speaking, to the postulation of another, second consciousness within us…an unconscious consciousness…Second, analysis shows that the various latent psychic processes we infer enjoy a great degree of mutual independence, as if they stood in no relation to and knew nothing of each other. We would therefore need to be prepared to postulate not only a second consciousness within us, but also a third, fourth, perhaps an unlimited series of states of consciousness, all unknown both to ourselves and to each other…[However,] analytical research reveals that some of these latent processes have characteristics and peculiarities that appear alien, even incredible, to us, and stand in complete contrast to the known attributes of consciousness…[And besides,] the known cases of ‘double conscience’ (split consciousness) [dual or multiple personality] do not contradict our theory. They can most accurately be described as cases of a splitting of the psychic activity into two groups, with the same consciousness alternating between two sites” (p. 53-4).

In other words, Freud says that it is logical to infer, not an unconscious, but dual or multiple consciousness. But then he refuses to follow logic. Why? His reason is that these other conscious entities may have peculiar attitudes. (A silly reason.) And what of known cases of multiple personalty? He says that one consciousness can alternate its attention between different groups of psychic activity. (Is Freud really ignorant of the fact that, in multiple personality, it is common and routine for more than one personality to be conscious at the same time?)

In short: 1. Freud and his followers have known very well that he did not discover the unconscious, but if the public wants to believe that he did, which is one of the main reasons that people think of him as a genius, Freud and his followers might admit the truth in a technical paper, but would not go out of their way to correct the public’s mistaken impression. 2. Freud, himself, saw that multiple consciousness (and therefore, multiple personality) was the logical view. He had to reject logic and use sophistry to support the idea of a single consciousness and unconscious. 3. Freud was either clinically ignorant about multiple personality or he pretended to be so, or the personality who was writing his paper was not the personality who knew better.

In conclusion, Freud, erroneously, made “the unconscious” conventional wisdom, and if you accept that conventional wisdom, and believe that there is an unconscious—as opposed to multiple, segregated, consciousness—then you can’t understand how anyone could really have multiple personality. But Freud was wrong, and I think that he—at least one of his multiple personalities (November 7, 2013 post)—knew it.

1. Freud, Sigmund: The Unconscious. Translated by Graham Franklin with an Introduction by Mark Cousins. Penguin Books, 2005.