Description
Book SynopsisClinicians, 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. This book scrutinizes today's moral and political climate, especially our power struggles about memory.
Trade ReviewWinner of the 1995 Pierre Janet Writing Award, International Society for the Study of Dissociation "In this brilliant and provocative new book, Ian Hacking fixes his searching gaze on the hot topic of multiple personality. The results are remarkable... In Hacking's hands, multiple personality emerges as a paradigmatic case study illuminating basic questions about truth, memory, fact and fiction, about knowledge, science, and identity... [This book] treats these impossibly difficult problems of knowability in the human sciences with grace and wisdom."--Ellen Herman, Contemporary Psychology "The details of Hacking's discussion are enthralling and illuminating. He manages to avoid altogether the sensationalism usually associated with treatments of multiple personality, providing an informative history and raising deep and important philosophical issues."--Marya Schechtman, Mind
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
