Ian Hacking’s Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory—Gives Opinions About Observable Matters That the Author Has Not Observed

A professor of literature recently suggested that if I wanted to understand her view of multiple personality, I should read the book by Professor of Philosophy, Ian Hacking. So I have.

In this case, you can tell a book by its cover, since the back flap reveals what motivated the author: Hacking is against “scientizing of the soul.” He is interested in multiple personality only to the extent that it is involved in science’s intrusion into the philosophical, moral, and spiritual soul.

“…[Is] there...such a thing as multiple personality [?]. The straightforward answer is plainly yes…the simple conclusion is that there is such a disorder…Is multiple personality a real disorder as opposed to a kind of behavior worked up by doctor and patient? If we have to answer yes-or-no, the answer is yes, it is real—that is, multiple personality is not usually ‘iatrogenic’” (1, pp. 10-12).

Yet, since he also gives the views of skeptics, he says, “You may be beginning to think I’m of two minds, just a little bit split myself, when it comes to multiple personality…What do I think? Is it real or not? I am not going to answer that question” (1, p. 16).

His real concern is how multiple personality and the sciences of memory (neurology, psychology, etc.) are tampering with the soul:

“Talk of the soul sounds old-fashioned, but I take it seriously. The soul that was scientized was something transcendental, perhaps immortal. Philosophers of my stripe speak of the soul not to suggest something eternal, but to invoke character, reflective choice, self-understanding, values…freedom and responsibility. Love, passion, envy, tedium, regret, and quiet contentment are the stuff of the soul…I do not think of the soul as unitary, as an essence, as one single thing, or even as a thing at all. It does not denote an unchanging core of personal identity. One person, one soul, may have many facets and speak with many tongues…” (1, p. 6).

“The soul was the last bastion of thought free of scientific scrutiny” (1, p. 208).

“…in the latter part of the nineteenth century…Memory…became a scientific key to the soul, so that by investigating memory (to find out the facts) one would conquer the spiritual domain of the soul and replace it by a surrogate, knowledge about memory…Subsequently, what would previously have been debates on the moral and spiritual plane took place at the level of factual knowledge…” (1, p. 198).

Regarding multiple personality, Hacking would include himself among “the less arrogant and more reflective doubters…They accept that the patient has produced this version of herself: a narrative that includes dramatic events, a causal story of the formation of alters [alternate personalities], and an account of the relationships between the alters. That is a self-consciousness; that is a soul. [Reasonable] doubters accept it as a reality…Nevertheless, they fear that multiple personality therapy leads to a false consciousness. Not in the blatant sense that the apparent memories of early abuse are necessarily wrong or distorted—they may be true enough. No, there is the sense that the end product is a thoroughly crafted person…That is a deeply moral judgment” (1, pp. 266-267).

Hacking says that, in most cases, the patient, not the therapist, has produced the multiple personality narrative. The condition really occurs. But he suspects that cultural beliefs and therapeutic practices have a major impact on the patient’s narrative.

The reason he thinks so is that he has never diagnosed, treated, or even interviewed people who have multiple personality. As he says, “The whole field of multiple personality is ripe for participant observation…But that is a task for others. I have scrupulously limited myself to matters of public record” (1, p. 7).

Even though Professor Hacking is honest, and acknowledges that he has never been a participant observer of multiple personality, I don’t think that that fact registers with most readers. For who could believe that a nonfiction book about an observable matter would be written by someone who had never observed it?

1. Ian Hacking. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton University Press, 1995.