Ian Hacking’s “Rewriting the Soul” is a brilliant work that speaks to the whole of the subject of psychogenic trauma and, more broadly, to the nature of identity in the context of the “cultural imperialism” of certain streams of psychiatry that attempt “colonization of the past” through the object of memory (pg. 143-6). This work is a must read for anyone interested in issues related to the mind in any sense of that word.
Hacking chooses the ‘genealogical’ approach of Michel Foucault to examine the roots and development of “multiple personality disorder.” He ends up uncovering many deeply held sociocultural assumptions (that go along with the institution of psychiatry) about personhood and identity. This “disorder” quickly comes into focus as a niche in our sociopolitical ecology. The work thus takes us far beyond the simple question of the ‘reality’ of this disorder (a concern he addresses in the first chapter).
Hacking views the categories, or classes, of conceptual types (in our case, psychological ‘disorders’) as organized around a prototype, or “what people understand by a concept, what they point to when they want to explain it” (pg. 34). A prototype is therefore a kind of averaging (and stereotyping, if you like) leading to a mental impression of what the best example of a member of a particular class designation is like. He tells us classes can be thought of as “radial,” or “related to different chains of family resemblances, the chains leading to a central prototype” (pg. 24)
For example, when we invoke autism, we are likely to imagine a stereotyped example of what a person with autism is like, and this is going to be imagined by most of us as someone that socially and emotionally deviates from a set of social norms. We also have a prototype of ‘bird’ (and it’s important to note that most people will not imagine a penguin or an ostrich as a prototype of this category). Unlike the category ‘bird,’ ‘autism’ contains within it implicit social norms about what makes for a complete, healthy, and ideal person. All psychiatric categories have this “normative,” or ‘value-laden’ quality. Prototype is thus a property of language and cognition that can gives rise to sociopolitical effects.
In my read, Hacking furthermore views psychiatric disorders on a continuum ranging from ‘dysfunctions’ quite rooted in some form of disruption in neurobiological function (e.g. autism and schizophrenia) to those quite rooted in value-laden notions of what makes a ‘normal’ person that are predominantly ethical in nature. At the extreme of the value-laden side, we have “transient” mental illnesses, which last only so long as the cultural environment sustains them. It’s clear that he places multiple personality disorder on this end of the continuum.
But, as was mentioned before, any form of identity label comes with moral claims and will be interacted with by each person so-labeled. So even if “autistic” is ‘caused’ more by neurodevelopmental ‘disruption’ than multiple personality disorder, the label “autism” is still sociopolitical in its implications. The label itself changes the person’s identity (i.e. it forces them to interact with a prototype in our collective awareness about what it means to be that ‘kind’ of person). It affects the kinds of institutions and approaches a given social environment takes to address said label. In the development of such a kind, the label itself takes on a life of its own. The person might be more prone to adapt to their designation in certain ways, and react or push back’ against it in other ways. Different local approaches to what a designation is or means will further place parameters on how one’s identity develops. To this point consider how location, time, and place have shaped the prototype and adaptive consequences of the label “gay” and a person whose behavior aligns with that label.
In his words, “people classified in a certain way tend to conform to or grow into the ways that they are described, but they also evolve in their own ways, so that the classifications and descriptions have to be constantly revised.” (pg. 21). Consider now how “neurodivergence” developed as a reaction by people called ‘autistic’ to reimagining what it means to be the kind of person so labeled, and to reclaim the power taken historically from those same individuals.
This is all gets at what Hacking has called the “looping effect of human kinds.” The entirety of the sociopolitical implications of a label interact with the person through the process of social identity development such that there becomes a dynamic interaction between the person and the label as understood by the broader social public. It is this phenomenon that he is primarily interested in getting at with multiple personality disorder. He is therefore not going to give us a clear road to an answer about this diagnosis. He is instead going to paint a whole picture that situates this diagnosis within our social ecology. It is this quality that gives this work its ‘mind blowing’ effect to many readers (myself included). He takes this further to show how this project further reveals what he calls “Memoropolitics.”
Memoropolitics gets at the idea that “we have learned to replace the soul with knowledge, with science. Hence spiritual battles are fought on the terrain of memory” (pg. 5). Multiple personality disorder is a now long-standing battle that provides a picture of the larger memory ‘war.’ I argue this is indeed one of the best philosophical texts covering the (still ongoing) memory wars. The idea that memory is a surrogate for the soul explains for Hacking why it is so common in the Euro-American political context to try to conceal ethical claims within the ostensibly objective cloak of the scientific lexicon. If you consider some of the conventional points of political tension in Euro-American politics (e.g. trans identity), it will become clear that this is an important insight (e.g. even fundamental Evangelical Christians are prone to invoking genes and biological sex to explain away queer identity politics).
Hacking considers all of the terrain: The history of psychiatry, social movements around notions and fears about “child abuse” in U.S., political tensions related to what abuses exist (e.g. “satanic ritual abuse”?) and how to address them, psychometrics for assessing states like “dissociation,” grass roots movements of multiples and their therapists, and therapeutic challenges to the facade of the whole thing.
We only need some of Hacking’s personal belief statements to know how he really feels about it all. On the back cover of “Trauma: A Genealogy” by Ruth Leys, one will find the comment that “Psychic trauma has been extracted, by a sort of caesarian excision, from the corpse of psychoanalysis and made to serve the maladies of our time. Ruth Leys describes, with clinical precision, how the operation was performed, and how the product, so essential for our culture of victimhood, is an incoherent amalgam of conflicting theories about imitation, imagining, and pain.” We may just as well say that he could have written this about his own work here on multiple personality disorder.
Hacking concludes by reflecting on how this disorder, and all that it invokes, inevitably brings us to questions about what it means to be a fully developed human being. From modern moral theory, we get demands by the great thinkers to develop “awareness of how to take responsibility for one’s own character, one’s own growth, one’s own morality” (pg. 264). Opponents to the very idea of multiple personality disorder, says Hacking, believe that the disorder and the therapies that have arisen to address it, are opposed to creating a kind of ‘false consciousness’ that deprives the individual of that autonomy. And while we are left with the impression that Hacking stands with this camp, wherever you stand, you won’t be the same after you read this book.
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