 We'll see. Okay, thank you for coming and sticking around till 5 p.m. to talk about one of my favorite philosophy books. Yay, Rewriting the Soul. So, first of all, this is written by Ian Hacking. He was born in 1936, and I happily do not have to give a death date. He's still alive, currently living in Toronto. He is a professor emeritus, so he's retired from the University of Toronto and also retired from the College de France, and he grew up here in Vancouver. So he is a BC native. He went to the University of British Columbia for his undergraduate degree before going on for post-secondary. So, yeah, little bit of a local connection. So, one thing you may have recognized while reading this is that Ian Hacking is heavily influenced by Foucault's theories, particularly of bio power and Foucault's use of history. So, you might have seen some similarities when reading these texts, but also some differences. So, when I start today, I actually wanna start with three really big interrelated ideas that kind of weave their way through this text. And I want you guys to know about these. I don't know how far you've gotten in the text. It's quite long, and there's reading break, and if you're at all like me, you might be putting things off, don't do that, but you might be putting things off till reading break. So, I don't know how far you've gotten, but unfortunately, at least one of these three ideas doesn't actually get overtly mentioned by Hacking until quite near the end of the book. So, I'm gonna tell you all three of them right at the front, because I think having these three ideas in the back of your mind really helps when you're reading this text. So, here they are. I'm gonna go through each one. The first is Memoral Politics. So, you can see Hacking's influence from Foucault in terms of biopolitics. Hacking's talking about Memoral Politics. He also has what he calls the looping effects of human kinds. At some times, he also calls this making up people. Sometimes, he calls this interactive kinds. In this text, he mostly calls it the looping effects of human kinds or making up people. So, think of those two as interchangeable. And the last big idea is action under a description. So, I'm gonna go through each of these. First, Memoral Politics. So, as I said, this is influenced from Foucault. So, here I have some, they didn't actually talk to each other, but it kinda looks like they're talking to each other, which I like, and talking intensely, because all philosophers, like, we're really intense people, right, Kristina? Totally. What is Memoral Politics? It's similar to Foucault's biopolitics, and it's similar to some stuff you guys have already encountered. So, memory hacking wants to argue in this text is political. And this should be somewhat familiar to you guys, because you've read Trio's Silencing the Past, and you've done some looking at history, and at literary canon, and at what gets remembered, and what gets preserved, and also what gets forgotten. So, we know that what gets remembered is political, and what gets forgotten is political. But hacking is arguing something in addition to that. He's arguing that the way things are remembered, the way memories are framed, the way we talk about our memories is also political, and it is a way of power, a way of control. So, what hacking is claiming in this text, in effect, is that Memoral Politics is a way of policing, not the body, but the soul. It's a politics of the soul. In fact, the soul gets talked about a lot in the first few chapters, in the first chapter, in particular, and the introduction, and again, in the last three or four chapters, hacking talks a lot about the soul. And you might wonder what he's talking about there. So, what are we talking about with the soul? Is this a secular idea? Is it kind of a Christian idea, or what's going on? And in particular, hacking says that his referencing of the soul is a Western idea. So, he is centering this in a Western European context. He's talking about the soul in a Western European way, and he's talking about memory, and particularly the science of memory, as a way of secularizing the soul, of making the soul something that we can study. So, why do we have this connection between memory and the soul? Why link memory to the soul? Actually, this connection has deep, deep roots in philosophy. So, I'm gonna tell you really, really quickly, a kind of just-so story about how philosophers think of memory and mind and the soul. And basically, this is kind of how it happened. Philosophers at first equated the soul to the self, so there's an identity relation here. Who you are is your soul. And this was particularly important for religious philosophers, because that meant that who you were survives after death. Your body doesn't, but your soul does. Your identity is found in your soul. Your self is found in your soul. Then we get this forging of a connection between the soul and the mind. So, we have this idea that the mind and the soul are somehow the same idea, or the same entity. Who you are then is mental. Your mind, not your body, but your mind. And finally, John Locke comes around 1632 to 1704, and he gives us a theory of self, a theory of who you are, of what kind of person you are, in terms of the mind, and in particular, in terms of what is commonly understood as memory. So, here's a quote from Locke's short essay called of identity and diversity. It's, this is how Locke writes, here we go. Four, since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and is that which makes everyone to be what he calls self. And this alone consists personal identity. That is, personal identity consists in consciousness. Who you are is your mind. This is just what I told you. So, personal identity consists in consciousness, the sameness of a rational being. And as far back as this consciousness can be extended, backwards to a past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person. This is usually, though not exclusively, but usually taken to mean that you are what you can remember. So, identity consists in memory. If you remember yourself doing a past action or having a past thought, yeah, that was you. If you don't remember, then it wasn't you. In fact, Locke entertains the idea that, and this is true, this is in of identity and diversity, that if you got really, really drunk and went out and did something and didn't remember doing it at all, it wasn't you that did it. It was some drunk person that took over your body. However, you are still responsible for getting drunk in the first place according to Locke, while you might not be responsible for the actions that happen afterwards. Locke also tells us this plausible story. He doesn't necessarily say this is reality, but he says it's possible to conceive of a body that has two different persons in it. He calls them day man and night man. And so, day man during the day goes out and does his stuff and then he goes to sleep. And while he's asleep, night man takes over the body and goes out and does things that day man has no memory of. And Locke says, wouldn't our intuition be that there are really two people here in one body? What do you guys think? Is that your intuition of the story of day man and night man? Two people, one body. Maybe us, maybe no. This is what Locke thinks. And he thinks at the time that he writes this that most of the people who read him are going to agree. So if you don't agree, you might think about what's changed from Locke's context to ours that makes us question this. In what ways maybe has the body taken on a different role or a different importance? But Locke thought that the story of day man and night man was totally intelligible, that we could have two different persons, two different identities founded exclusively in what they could remember that occupied the same body. He actually has some other theories about this too. He doesn't just stop with day man and night man, he has a bunch of other weird ones. Check it out if you're interested. But that's about all we need to know about Locke to get going. So hacking tells us that the doctrine that memory should be thought of as a narrative is an aspect of memory politics. That is we constitute our souls by making up our lives, by weaving stories about our past by what we call memories. So it isn't enough to just remember but we create stories out of these memories. And those stories, that narrative, comes to stand in for who we think we are, comes to stand in for our souls or ourselves or our identity. And you've also already been introduced to this. That's a picture of Freud. Because Freud, if you remember from Christina's lecture, was trying to fill in the gaps of Dora's memories such that he could create a unified identity for Dora. So there's this idea that identity has to be unified, has to be intelligible, and has to be related through memories in terms of narrative. And all of that plays into the concept of memory politics. So who you are comes to look a little bit like a story or like a book. The next big concept that I wanna talk about is the looping effect of human kinds or making up people. This is what hacking says. And we'll go over this one a lot and it will be, this Prezi will be posted so don't worry if you don't get this whole quote down. It's on page 239. I have from time to time spoken of the looping effect of human kinds. That is the interactions between people on the one hand and ways of classifying people and their behavior on the other. Being seen to be a certain kind of person to do a certain kind of act might affect someone. A new or modified mode of classification may systematically affect the people who are so classified or the people themselves may rebel against the knowers, the classified, the science that classifies them. Such interactions may lead to changes in the people who are classified and hence what is known about them. This is what I call a feedback loop. Okay, that's long. That's about the second or third time he talks about the looping effect of human kinds. He also talks about it in the introduction which you can look at. So it doesn't come up that often. Here's my visual of kind of what it looks like. So you get a description or a label that is placed on a person. The person reacts to the description because people care about the way in which they are described. But the person may not completely fit the description and so the description has to be altered is applied to another person. Again, the person doesn't quite fit the description. Again, the description is altered. So we get kind of a spiral and that's what hacking is talking about with the looping effect of human kinds. That is the way we are described or the way we are taught to describe ourselves affects who we are and we in turn affect the nature of the descriptions available. This is also actually one that we've already come in contact with. So Foucault talked about this a little bit at the time, or Foucault talked about it. Christina talked about it on behalf of Foucault. So at the time that Foucault was living in France in Paris, his same sex relationships would have been seen as deviant and I believe Christina said his criminal behavior in Paris. Is that right? There was a law in Paris. Oh, okay. So possibly some same sex activities would be seen as criminal behavior. So it would have been described in a certain language. However, in many parts of the world that description has since changed such that the activity might still be the same being involved in the same sex relationship but the description of that activity has changed such that it is no longer in many parts of the world viewed as deviant that we know from what's happening with the Olympics right now that this is not true in all parts of the world. So that's one example that hacking actually references homosexuality of a looping effect of human kinds. An action that changes based on its description. Which brings us to the third category, actions under description. Wee. We have to go way far in for this one. Okay, here is an action. A man was moving a lever up and down. Actions under a description is the one that hacking doesn't get to till very late in the book but I think is really important for understanding what's going on. So here's the action. A man was moving a lever up and down. He was manually pumping water into the cistern of the house. He was pumping poisoned water into the country house where evil men where evil men met for planning sessions. He was poisoning the men who met in the house. How many actions do we have? Hacking references Elizabeth Anscombe, another philosopher, a philosopher of language and asks should we say that there was a number of distinct actions pumping water on the one hand, poisoning men on the other. Or actually say that there was just one action but various ways of describing that action. Anscombe argues that there was just one action under various descriptions, the action of moving the handle up and down. But depending on the context, depending on how far I zoom in, or zoom out, depending on the context I give, the description of the action changes. So we have one action with many descriptions. Why is this important for hacking? It's important because hacking is in particular looking at history and he's asking whether it is possible to retroactively apply descriptions to old actions, new descriptions of old actions. That is new ways of describing our memories. We know that our memories are connected to our identities. We know that descriptions are ways of human looping. So this idea of action under a description is really important to understanding both human looping and memo politics. So those are the three interrelated ideas. Now I wanna talk about the organization of this book. Here it is. And what you'll notice about this book is that a large, large part of it is about the history of multiple personality, like a huge part of it. But I wanna center in on what hacking says quite early on as his main point. He says my chief topic towards the end of this book will become the way in which a new science, a purported knowledge of memory, quite self-consciously was created in order to secularize the soul. So even though we spent a huge amount of time in this book talking about multiple personality, what hacking says he's doing is really trying to investigate the science of memory and the creation of the science of memory and the effect that the science of memory has on our thinking about the soul, particularly in the West. So I don't wanna lose sight of that main point even as we dive into a long and convoluted discussion about multiplicity. So what I suggest we do is we think of multiple personality as a case study that hacking is using. In the introduction he tells us that we are focusing on multiple personality because it is, quoting, a paradigmatic if tiny memory concept. That is through examining multiple personality we can get a clear picture of how memory and memory politics work on the soul and on the self. So a lot of this text is the story behind the creation of one very specific narrative, one very specific way of making up people or of human looping. That is the narrative of multiple personality. So we're asking how did this narrative come into being and how does it affect the people who are classified as multiples and what can that tell us about memory in general, about action under a description and about the looping effect of human kinds? So this is odd because I'm kind of saying even though the book is about multiple personality it's not really about multiple personality. Okay, so why is he doing this? Here what I think are hacking's goals and objectives from my several readings. In fact, I've actually kind of run out of places to put sticky notes in this book. Several readings of this book. Okay, so in pointing out how this story, how this narrative of multiplicity came into being I think hacking is doing two things that should remind us very similar, they're very similar to the kind of goals that Foucault had in writing the history of human sexuality. I think one, hacking is trying to illustrate that a lot of the facts that we take to be true or given about humanity are actually contingently true. So they have not always been true, they may not be true in the future, that there's a story to tell about how we ended up where we are. Where we are is not just kind of a natural given, a brute fact that we don't have to think about or investigate. Why is he doing that first point? Well I think he's doing it because he wants to get us to the second goal. That is encouraging us to ask ourselves to reflect on the ways in which we make up people or the ways in which we create human kinds, this human looping process. And on the ways in which we encourage people to think about their past and to narrate themselves, to tell their story of who they are. Are these ways helpful? Are they useful? Do they make people happier? And right near the end of the book, perhaps the question that I still find very puzzling, do they allow people autonomy and self-knowledge? Recognizing that the ways in which we talk about ourselves are contingent that they came into being and have a history can open up questions about maybe there are other ways we could talk. Maybe ways are more useful and ways are less useful and we can think about self-consciously making up people instead of just kind of unconsciously doing it. Okay, so I will return to these three little bubbles as well I will also return to those three big concepts that I gave you. But now I want to talk about the structure of the text as a whole. You can tell by the number of boxes I have here and the number of chapters that are in the book that I am not actually going over the entire book. So we do not have time for that. Instead, I'm going over some things that jumped out at me and some points of some chapters. And I've tried to color code it for us because this is what's really interesting about the structure of the book. We actually start in the present. By present I really mean 20 years ago because this book was written in 1995 but at the present. And then we move back into the deep past into the 1800s and we come back up to the present again. So I've tried to color code it that the blue arrows are we're in the present and then the green arrows are we're in the past and then we move back up to the present again. Which means that this book is actually structured kind of like a mystery TV show or a thriller TV show. You know those shows that open and you've got your main character in this perilous situation and you're like, whoa, how did they get there? And then it goes like 72 hours earlier and you kind of start figuring out how the person got where they got to. Am I the only person that watches these? Okay, people know what I'm talking about. There are movies structured like this. There are TV shows structured like this. About 10 years ago, Alias was always structured like this and I was a little bit hooked on, oh gosh, this is being filmed. I was not hooked on Alias. Anyway, so we got this kind of picture where we start where we are and then we back up to try and figure out how it came to be where we are. And I wondered why I was hacking doing that. So I have a little bit of a theory about the organization of this book. I think that what's going on here is that he begins with multiplicity as his readers were experiencing it 20 years ago. So when the book came out, the book came out a year after the DSM-4 came out. So the DSM-4, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you guys have been hearing a lot about this since Freud. The DSM-4 came out in 1994 and this book came out in 1995. It came out in the middle of a huge controversy surrounding multiplicity. The DSM-4 had just changed the definition from multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder. They had just changed the name of the disorder and some of the criteria. And there are reasons, some political reasons, why they changed the name and why they changed the criteria that we will talk about. So Hacking's book comes out in the midst of all of this and he starts right where people are with things that would have been very familiar to his readers, especially readers who were interested in multiplicity. So we begin where we are and then we jump back in time. And jumping back in time, I think, makes the familiar appear unfamiliar. So we begin with this, oh yeah, I know what's going on. This is the way things are right now. But then we jump back and we start this story about how it is that we came to be where we are in the opening chapters of this book. And through this story, I think that the current context shifts from being something familiar, something given, something obvious, to looking like something contingent and possibly strange. Because now we know how it came into being and we know that it's kind of a weird story how we ended up with this concept that we have and that things might have fallen out differently and could fall out differently in the future. So I think the whole book is actually designed to aim towards these goals and objectives. I think the actual layout of the book itself is trying to illustrate the fact that what we take to be true is contingently true and encourage us to reflect on these contingent truths, how we arrived at them and whether they're truths that we should think about changing. Okay. Let's begin with this question. Is multiple personality real? Why is this a question? I mean, it's in the DSM. It was in the DSM3. When did the DSM3 come out, 1980? So it's in the DSM3. It's in the DSM4 under a different name. It's been around since about the 1840s. So what's going on? Here's the story in Hacking's past. Yeah. No, let's hear it. Sorry. So many of the experts are so evenly divided on whether or not it's real, even though it's in the DSM and even today, they're still divided on whether or not it's a real condition. They are still divided. The DSM5 came out last year, and there was right before... This is going in and out and it's bugging me. Right before the DSM5 came out, there was a huge controversy about whether or not to pull the Associative Identity Disorder out of the DSM. So we have experts, therapists, who are split as to whether or not this is a real disorder. And they're fighting about it, and this continues. In fact, I have a link, which I'll get to in a minute, to an article published last week in the Huffington Post still talking about whether or not this is a real disorder. So even though this book is 20 years old, a lot of the things it's talking about are still with us. So why do we have this question? There's a bit of a story as to how this big controversy came into being. Because for a lot of the history of multiplicity, there wasn't as much of a controversy. So 1972, you could list every multiple recorded in the history of Western medicine, even if experts disagreed on how many of those cases were genuine. None, 84, more than 100. Whatever number you favored, the word for the disorder was rare. So in 1972, the disorder was incredibly rare. More than 100 is still not a lot of people when you think about the entire history of Western medicine. The chances of any therapist encountering a multiple were miniscule. 20 years later, 1992, three years before this book was written or published, there were hundreds of multiples in treatment in every sizable town in North America. Even by 1986, it was thought that 6,000 patients had been diagnosed. So we jumped from a few hundred to 6,000. Also notice that it is isolated. Multiplicity is happening where in North America. And it is a localized phenomenon. We have way more patients in North America, and particularly in the US, more than in Canada, than we do anywhere else in the world. This is weird. What is going on? So this started leading people to wonder about whether or not this disorder was genuine or being created. There were varying levels of arguing about whether or not it was being created. Some therapists actually suggested that patients were faking it. Many, many more therapists suggested that what was happening was that therapists were causing this disorder to occur in their patients, rather than the disorder being a naturally occurring disorder. Which brings us to 2014, where we still have articles. Huffington Post. So this is Alan Francis, who's a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chair of the DSM4 task force. And in his article in the Huffington Post from last week, he said, NPD disappeared in the mid-90s because of its own failures and dangers. It was doomed when insurance companies stopped paying for NPD treatments and patients started suing NPD therapists for malpractice. So there's a suggestion here that the therapists were at fault and that NPD is somehow not genuine. So this is why Hacking starts with this question, a question that is still with us 20 years later. But Hacking's answer to this question is that it is real. He says, people really were suffering. People really were categorized as being multiples. People really did act in ways that were described in the language of multiplicity. People really did have amnesia. In fact, Hacking raises the question about the question of is it real? The question, is it real, makes a presupposition we should reject according to Hacking. It implies that there is an important contrast between a real disorder and being a product of social circumstance. The fact that a mental illness only appears in a specific historical or geographical context does not imply that it is manufactured artificial or in any other way not real. Yeah. That is one of the theories. So we have on the one side people saying it's not real who are blaming therapists or possibly blaming parent patients. On the other side, we have people saying it is real. It's just that many therapists are not skilled enough to identify and treat it and diagnose it. And we will return to this question about what happened once we get to the cause of multiplicity. Because there are a lot of people who argue that it was not able to be identified until we could recognize a cause. And there's a reason why it took a long time to recognize a cause. So I'm not done with that slide and you are absolutely right. So what's really important for hacking, and this ties right in with this theory of the looping effect of human kinds, is that hacking thinks that it's false to think that there's a difference between something that is real and something that is a product of social circumstance. Things can be real and be a product of social circumstance at the same time. In fact, I am living proof of that right now. I am a university instructor. Does that occur in the natural world or is it a product of social circumstance? It's not a trick question. It's a product of social circumstance. There are contexts in which I could not be a university instructor. There are places in history in which, had I lived, I could not be a university instructor. Sometimes because the category of university instructor didn't exist. Sometimes because that category did exist but women were not admitted to universities. So hacking thinks that it is totally false to ask the question, is it real if what we mean is, is it real or is it socially created? Because he thinks it is real and it is socially created. Because of the looping effect of human kind. Making up people is real. We do it all the time. We all have descriptions on us that are a product of our social circumstance but are nonetheless real and have real consequences. So that moves us to hacking's next question. What is multiplayer personality like? I've been talking now for a few minutes about multiple personality but we don't actually have a definition of it yet. So I'm gonna give you a couple of definitions. The first is our current one. This is one that hacking would not have had available to him. This is from the DSM-5, came out last year. So it's no longer called multiple personality disorder. It's called dissociative identity disorder. Any ideas why that would be? Why would we change from multiple personality to dissociative identity? Well, personality, so there was kind of like, like stigma's around it so I guess I could change it for that reason also because like there's a difference between when people look at someone who has multiple personalities that when you just dissociate yourself from your personality that just means you're like pushing yourself away from your personality to possible other streams while multiple personality implies that you have like multiple characteristics and traits within yourself. Yeah, so we get away from the language of personality. Now there could be stigma around multiple personality so putting it under the umbrella of dissociative identity there are many other dissociative disorders in the DSM as well. So it brings it kind of under an umbrella of other recognized categories which might help with the stigma. So we can see it might be a bit of a political move to do that although also a scientific move because they think that there's some relationship between dissociative identity and some of the other dissociative disorders. But in addition, if we're talking about an identity that is somehow dissociative, we're no longer talking about multiple identities or multiple persons. Remember how none of you were really that moved by Locke's day man, night man example? Well if we're in a culture in which we're not really moved by the idea of multiple persons in one body, maybe we shouldn't use the language of multiple personality anymore. So we might change the language to kind of fit our current understanding of personhood. Now the general thought is instead of thinking about different personalities, therapists talk about alter states and alters are considered to be kind of personality fragments. They aren't full-fledged personalities, let alone persons. And the idea is to unify the alters. Whereas in multiple personality, you could have what was considered to be roughly fully-fledged personalities and the idea was to find the original personality and give it back its agency over the body. So not only has the language changed but the conceptual ideas around treatment have changed as well. Okay, so what does the diagnostic and statistical manual tell us? Dissociative identity disorder is characterized by disruption of identity, characterized by two or more distinct personality states, not personalities but personality states. This involves marked discontinuity in a sense of self, not in the self but in the sense of self, interesting, and in the sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition and sensory motor functions. Amnesia is and had always been a requirement of multiple personality slash dissociative identity in the DSM. Amnesia has to be present according to the DSM, though not according to all therapists, which is interesting. So we have to have a recurring gap of recall that goes beyond ordinary forgetting. In particular, alters often cannot remember what other alters have done with the body and in the body. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in important areas of functioning. This is a standard class for any syndrome or disorder. It's disorder if it's causing impairment in your day-to-day life. If you are functioning, it may not be a disorder. And then D and E are things we're gonna come back to. Religious practice is emitted as is normal fantasy in play and physiological effects from substance are emitted. So if like lock story, you get really drunk and can't remember what you did last night. That doesn't mean you have dissociative identity disorder. It might highlight other problems, not dissociative identity disorder. Okay, but this is what hacking tells us a paradigmatic multiple was like, circa 1980. So this is a paradigm. It's a, it's said just so story about what a classic multiple would look like. A classic multiple would be female. 90% of multiples still that are diagnosed are female. She would be in her early to mid 30s, suffer from memory gaps, foggy memories of troubling events in her childhood that she can't quite remember. She's likely to have had a history of alcohol and or drug abuse. Likely to have a history of storming marriages and or love affairs. Has likely been in the Meltel Health system for seven or more years under various diagnoses and various methods of treatment. Is likely to have up to or more 16 alters that is alternate personality to states. One of which is male. One of which is probably a child. One of which is likely to be an animal, angel or other non-human. And one of which is likely to have a different sexual orientation from the host personality. So this is roughly the picture of what it is like to be a multiple circa 1980. Some of this has changed, but a lot of it hasn't. So that gives you a little bit of a picture of what it's like. Which brings us to a question we actually already addressed very briefly which is what is the cause of multiple personality disorder. So identifying the cause is really, really important in any kind of diagnosis of any kind of disorder or illness. Because if we identify the cause, it's thought we're much, much more likely to be able to find cures and or find preventative methods depending on the illness. So the current cause, the current theory about the cause of dissociative identity disorder is child abuse. This is gonna take us a little bit of discussion because hacking is introduced to us the idea of the looping effect of human kinds. Which means that child abuse is a multiple personality as a category. Child abuse is its own category with its own history. And you'll notice this as you read this text as hacking introduces other categories of persons. In his discussion of multiplicity he ends up discussing other categories as well. Categories such as child abuse. Categories such as hysteria. Categories such as double consciousness, trauma. So a lot of these things have their own history and hacking tells you a little bit about their history while telling you the history of multiple personality. So the history of child abuse as a category. Hacking says child abuse is actually a fairly recent category. This is true and we will talk about what this means. But first it's thought there's kind of a connection between cruelty to children and child abuse. Cruelty to children was a 19th century concept. Anyone who got here, do you remember what cruelty to children involved? So here we are in the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. Children are working 10, 12 longer hour days. They're working in very unsafe conditions. When they get home their homes may be quite unsafe where they're living at the factory which could have its own set of problems. And so cruelty to children included things like negligence, included things like malnutrition, included things like overworking, working in unsafe conditions. It was actually housed under the same umbrella as cruelty to animals. So we have this kind of concept in which cruelty to children is largely seen as a problem, not exclusively but largely a problem for the working class and in particular for the working poor. It's a class specific problem. It's a class specific identifier. Child abuse as you know is not. So the first difference between child abuse and cruelty to children that hacking notes is that child abuse especially in America is supposed to be classless. It's supposed to occur in constant proportion more or less in every social class across every demographic. Poverty was not an issue. Cruelty to children in contrast was presented primarily as a vice of the lower classes though there were prosperous examples they tended to be viewed as outliers. So child abuse is pervasive. It is throughout society. Cruelty to children was not seen that way. In addition, cruelty to children was primarily not defined in terms of sexual abuse. It was defined primarily in terms of the labor force in terms of exploiting child labor. So child abuse however is paradigmatically understood as childhood sexual abuse. Not that there aren't other kinds of child abuse but the paradigm is usually childhood sexual abuse. So in 1953, Kingsie conducted a bunch of experiments on human sexuality. This takes us back a little bit to Christina's talk with Michelle Foucault. So Kingsie found in his questionnaires, he conducted a bunch of questionnaires in experiments and he found that 24% of his female informants had experienced the sexual attention of adults while they were still girls. Sound a bit familiar? From a few weeks ago? Maybe? Sounds a bit like Dora to me. Although this is 1953 so we were 50 years past the publication of Dora roughly. Kingsie seemed to have thought that this might even be good for a girl because it was before the appearance of child abuse as a concept ranging from battery to incest. So Kingsie conducted these experiments and questionnaires and he actually thought that these attraction, these advances that were happening in terms of older adults and young girls was normal and he thought it might be good. This might help explain for any of you and I know there were some people in my seminar who were a bit frustrated reading Freud as to why Freud didn't have this category of like, isn't she being sexually harassed? Isn't that happening? Why doesn't he have that category? That category does not exist. It is not a way of talking about the action. It is not a descriptor of the action. It doesn't mean that the action was okay. It doesn't mean that child abuse didn't happen. It means that therapists and those who were studying human sexuality did not have the language in which to talk about this. Is that distinction okay? The action versus the language to talk about the action. So cruelty to children was not framed in terms of sexuality. We get the category of child abuse and hacking makes a fairly starling and a bit controversial claim. Hacking says that psychiatry did not discover that early and repeated child abuse causes multiple personality. It forged the connection in the way a blacksmith turns formless molten metal into tempered steel. So hacking argues that the cause of multiple personality as child abuse is not a cause that was discovered, it was a cause that was made. So how does this story go? The story goes that a child, a young child, is somehow abused and in order to deal with abuse, the child personality runs away and leaves somebody or something else in its place to deal with the abuse. This is dissociating. I dissociate from the act and leave somebody or something else. The first alter is born. Now that the child knows how to do this, they are more likely to do it more and more often in cases of repeated abuse, but also as they get older, they might dissociate from things that are not necessarily abused but just unpleasant because it's become a learned behavior. And that's how we get more and more alters as the child grows. That's the theory, a current theory about multiple personality dissociative identity. And hacking is claiming that that connection has been created, it hasn't been discovered. Why would he say that? Well, he's got a few reasons and I invite you to read them and think about them and maybe talk about them in seminar, but one thing I will say as to why he says this is that even when a patient has a memory of child abuse, it is difficult to know if this memory was the cause of multiple personality disorder since there are many people who are not multiples who are victims of child abuse and there are some multiples who are not victims of child abuse. So this connection seems to be a correlation, but it's hard to see if it's a causal connection. I wanna make really clear that hacking is not saying that prior to the concept of child abuse, child abuse did not exist, so I have this question. Is he saying that since we used to not have a concept of child abuse, child abuse used to not exist? No, he is absolutely not saying that. So he says on page 68, it is a real evil. It was so before the concept was constructed. It was nevertheless constructed. Neither reality nor the construction should be in question. So the fact that child abuse happened, the fact that child abuse was pervasive, the fact that child abuse is a real evil for the child and for the adult that the child will become, hacking is not questioning. Okay. But he is saying that there is still the construction of the concept of child abuse, such that it allows us to talk about it in a way that was not possible prior to its construction. So I come back to this slide. What happened between 1972 and 1992? We know as late as 1953, there was still no concept of child abuse. In fact, we know as late as the late 1960s, there was still no concept of child abuse. And people who came out with memories of being victims of child abuse were often dismissed. So what happened between 1972 and 1992? Hacking argues that only a society prepared to acknowledge that family violence is everywhere could find multiple personalities everywhere. If the cause of multiplicity is child abuse, we have to have a society that is prepared to acknowledge and recognize that child abuse cuts across all spectrums, that it cuts across all classes in society in order to find multiplicity everywhere. So that's one story about what might have happened. Now that the cause has been identified and been recognized to be pervasive, multiples are also pervasive. The idea of the child abuse as the cause also feeds into this controversy about whether or not multiple personality is real. So I want to show you an example of how this happens through not hacking but another quotation from Joan, I can't say her name, Akosala, I think, in her book, Creating Hysteria, which as I recall is not actually about hysteria, it's about multiple personality and child abuse, but that will be an interesting connection later. So she says, if you become distressed at the suggestion that you were molested, this is a further tip off that you were in fact molested to your therapist. If, on the other hand, you suspect that it might have actually happened, then that is proof. So how do you prove that you were not molested? This is a concern that comes from the side that is doubting the reality of multiple personality. They're fearing that people are being coerced by their therapist into accepting a history that includes molestation or child abuse when that history may not be genuine. That is one side. The other side says that this attitude that is being espoused right now on our screen is an attitude of victim blaming, which does nothing to help uncover the very harsh realities of child abuse in our society. So we've got quite a strong war happening around the issue of child abuse, just as we do around the issue of multiple personality. Finally, there we come to the issue of memory. You were wondering when it was gonna rear its head since I told you it was so important. Okay. It is true in most stories of multiple personality that the cause in terms of child abuse is a cause that has been repressed. Hence the memory is hidden and has to be uncovered. This language of hiding and uncovering should be familiar to you from your reading of Freud that what is hidden and is being uncovered is different. So hacking tells us that child abuse and repressed memories of child abuse are supposed to have powerful effects on the developing adult. Even as the memory stays repressed, it has a powerful effect. This will remind you this is a legacy of Freud's discussion of the unconscious. Things get pushed into the unconscious, but they keep trying to come up and they affect your conscious day-to-day life. Hacking says what interests me is less the truth or falsehood of that proposition. The idea that a repressed memory of child abuse has a powerful effect on the developing adult. What interests me is not that proposition, but the way in which assuming that that is true leads people to discover their own past and new. Individuals explain their behavior differently and feel differently about themselves. Each of us becomes a new person as we redescribe our past, which I hope sounds familiar because it's an action under description. So I want you guys to think about this really briefly. Think about a movie or a book or a piece of music that you really enjoyed as a child or a preteen that you're now a little bit embarrassed that you really enjoyed. Sort of like aliens. Although I wasn't a child, unfortunately. Everybody got one? Okay, how would you have described that as a child? Think about that and think about how you would describe this movie or book or piece of music now. How would you have described listening to or watching or enjoying this piece of art when you were a child and how would you describe that now? Things change. Another way of putting this is think about, oh, a relationship that's a few years old. How much you have described being in the relationship when you were in it versus how you look back on the relationship now? So we always say hindsight is 2020, right? You can look back on things and have a very different picture of what was going on than you had at the time. Very different picture of what was of value than you had at the time. So the idea is old actions fall under new descriptions just because we live, just because we change, just because we live in a different context than we did when we were part of that action. Old memories can fall under new descriptions. But Hacking is giving us a really radical example here. So he talks at great length about people who were growing up in the 50s through to the 70s who were growing up with this rising category of child abuse who may have had experiences that they did not classify as child abuse at the time because the category did not exist, but that as they got older, got into therapy, learned about the category. They could reclassify these past experiences, re-describe them, oh, I wanna go back. Sorry, hang on. Become a new person as they re-describe their past. I find that really interesting. This makes the past indeterminate and it means that as we revisit our past from a new context, we actually become new people because our past changes, because the way we talk about it changes. That's freaky. I now understand why people do things like life casting. Have you ever heard of this? Where you like film every moment of your life and put it up on the web? There was an article a few years ago about people who did this and one reason they said they did this was because they wanted a permanent record of their past. Maybe to avoid stuff like this, although that doesn't actually avoid stuff like this, but it's uncomfortable for some people to think of their own past as indeterminate. If your past is shifting and who you are is, as Locke says, in terms of your memories, then who are you? Because it just keeps changing, which brings us, of course, to the root of this whole issue, truth in memory. If we're gonna talk about a shifting past and we're going to talk about re-describing memories in new ways and we're going to talk about the controversy around child abuse and around therapists and around repressed memories of child abuse, the issue of truth in memory rears its head. Why? 97% of multiples are thought to have been abused as children. 97%. However, around 25% of those 97% were abused in satanic or sadistic ritual abuse. There is little to no evidence to support most of the claims of satanic ritual abuse. And if you've read some of the text, you know that some of these claims are pretty frightening and pretty horrific. Ideas of young women, young, well, 14-ish women who are used as baby factories in ritual satanic abuse to have babies that are then sacrificed. The idea of horrific satanic abuse happening to young individuals. And there's no evidence to support these claims and some of them are horrific. Most of them are horrific. However, many of the claims of the events because the paradigm case of a multiple is a woman in her mid-30s. Many of these claims are claims of events that happened 20 plus years ago. So while there is little or no evidence supporting most of the claims of ritual satanic abuse, most of the claims are of claims of events that happened two decades ago, making the evidence hard to find anyway. So we have people in support of the truth of these claims that are coming out, saying, look, evidence can't be found. It's 20 plus years ago, how are you gonna find evidence? These are cold cases. We know how hard it is to find evidence of cold cases. CSI notwithstanding. So this is really hard stuff to find any evidence about. The fact that there's no evidence doesn't call into question the legitimacy of the patient's claims. People who are concerned that memories are being created in these patients argue that, look, there's no evidence, and 25% of multiples involved in satanic or sadistic ritual abuse, that's a lot of people and we have thousands of multiples. Shouldn't we have some evidence of these satanic cults in the US? So we get the birth of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Look at the language of this. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation. This is medical scientific language. False memory is now a syndrome. It is an illness. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation was created to combat claims of childhood sexual abuse and particular ritual satanic sexual abuse. The claims were that these memories were being created in patients by their therapists, usually inadvertently, because the therapist were looking for the cause of multiplicity and the cause was child abuse. So they would create memories in patients and that these memories were tearing apart families as members of a patient's family would be charged or would be under suspicion of being involved in some kind of satanic cult and some kind of ritual, normally sexual abuse. So the foundation was brought together to support these family members who were being charged. Lawyers would be marshaled and expert witnesses. Elizabeth Lufthus is one of the experts in this False Memory Syndrome Foundation. She wrote a book called The Myth of Repressed Memory in which she argued that repressed memories in general have no proof that there's no proof that there is such a thing as a repressed memory. And she gives quite a detailed story about having a memory be created. So we know from research that our memories are malleable, that we don't always remember things exactly as they happened. I have certainly had the experience of looking at a picture and being like, huh, that is not at all how I remembered that room or how I remembered what I was wearing that day or whatever it is. We know memories are malleable, we know memories are not 100% accurate. However, proponents of the truth in memory argue that repressed memories are a very different kind of thing because repressed memories are created in an environment of trauma, they are embedded in our minds in a way that our normal memory is not. So repressed memories, proponents say, are much more accurate than our everyday memories. So we have, again, this kind of divide between the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and people who are in support of the truth of repressed memories. So the False Memory Syndrome Foundation argued as hacking reports that credibility about the stories provided by Alters was compared to a sort of reverse transference. And Christine already talked to you about reverse transference. The therapist was too emotionally committed to what an alter said and had lost all critical faculties. That is, the therapist was too willing to believe the stories even as the stories became more and more graphic and to the mind of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation more and more implausible. So we end up, as hacking says, in the truth in memory discussion with a very, very fierce fight. Is the False Memory Syndrome Foundation engaged in victim-blaning by not believing these people who are coming forward with these stories of repressed memories? Are the therapists themselves criminally responsible for adding to their patient's suffering by encouraging false memories? Hacking notes that these are medical and moral questions. They are political questions, they are moral questions, and they are medical questions. And he argues that the only science Taylor made to swim on the top of the sea of morality and personal values was the science of memory. So I come back here to the discussion of memo politics and the way in which the science of memory was created in order to secularize the soul in order to examine who we are and what our past is and what that can tell us about the world in which we live and the people that we are. So hacking says that the science of memory allows these things to be quantifiable, allows us to ask questions like, is it real? Is memory true? These kind of questions that allow us to try and measure and quantify and delineate who we are. But if you think the looping effect of human kinds is right, it's very hard to measure and quantify and delineate a moving target. Okay, so we are about to jump back into the past. We're at the end of the blue arrows. This at this point is the history that people in 1995 were living with. And you know something now about the fierce fighting that was happening around child abuse, around truth and memory and around whether or not multiple personality was real. And I hope you're beginning to see the very fine line that hacking is walking between these two camps and claiming that multiple personality is real and is socially created. So I want you guys to take about 10 minutes, go get a coffee or maybe some sugar, wake yourselves up, and then we will move into the past. So I have to hear what I'm saying about piraheci- Hi. So that was 10 minutes. So I'm gonna start up again. Most of you are back, almost all of you are back. There wasn't that many. And I know a couple of people left because they had to leave. So I think we're just missing three people right now. Oh wait, four? I have to keep going or we'll be here way too late. Because I love you in hacking, but I don't wanna talk about it all night. I do wanna go home and go to sleep. Okay, so we are moving into the past. And I wanna highlight something that actually isn't a complete chapter but I think is super interesting. So this is something that hacking talks about in a few places and I think is really pertinent to our arts one course. So I wanted to create a slide about multiplicity and fiction. Why? Because hacking notices that there's a lot of ways in which fiction has primed us to recognize and accept multiplicity as a reality. So he tells us about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Anyone familiar with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Either movies or book, cool. What happens? Yeah, it creates two personalities by drinking a potion. It also actually changes its physical form a little bit, but so we have one body, two personalities. So that's an old one. Hacking mentions a few others that I wasn't as familiar with from Gothic literature and from 19th century literature. But here are a couple more that are maybe more recent. Incredible Hulk, it's kinda like a modern Dr. Jekyll. And then this is a picture of a wax figure of Gollum. It's another one. Okay, any others from fiction? Any others you guys can think of? See, yeah, my class came up with Gollum today. I told you, Gollum. Hannah Montana, yes. Okay, so hacking tells us that we have this kind of fictional story in which it makes sense to think of multiplicity. Yeah, yeah. I also threw out in my seminar a more classical example, Ancient Greece with the idea of God's kinda speaking in your head or God's taking on different forms or at one point Zeus actually swallows his wife and she's living in his head for a while. Actually, she stays in there pregnant and then his daughter is born and bursts out of his head, which is just so strange. Anyway, so we have this idea of minds that hold multiple selves and bodies that can hold multiple people in fiction and I'm sure you can think of more if I wasn't putting you on the spot. But those are a few. Hacking highlights these and then he talks about multiple personality and fact and he says, we must not discount the interaction between fact and fiction here. In fact, the interaction between fact and fiction is really important for a lot of what I think hacking is saying. At first glance, fact and fiction are completely mismatched. The fictional multiple couples are all men, diagnosed ones are all women. And he asks, why is that? And I don't know, so I'm leaving that for you. You can talk about it in seminars. But there's another thing that's really interesting. So we have the effect of fiction on multiplicity. Perhaps we have a fictional, oh, hi. Perhaps we have a fictional history that encourages us to think of multiplicity as intelligible because we have all these cases of these fictional characters who are kind of multiples or at least doubles. We don't have that many of multiples but we have several of doubles. But hacking also really briefly references the possibility that technology is having an effect on our multiplicity, on categories of multiplicity. And he just kind of says it in a few places very passingly but I really wanted to talk about it because I think it's really interesting. So he says that alters are described as switching between their personalities the way someone would switch between channels on a TV. This is 1995. Multiple personalities started spiking in the US in the mid-80s which is also when cable TV and TV remotes became pretty prevalent. It is also worth noting that multiples prior to that, so he talks about Eve, a multiple from the 50s, remember, or she was from the 30s, her movie was from the 50s. Eve actually went into this kind of trance-like state in between her alters. So when she switched, she didn't switch the way you would switch TV channels. She switched slowly. She would be in one altered state and then she would go into this kind of very still state and then she would come out as another alter. Multiple in the 80s and 90s weren't doing that. They were switching the way we switch TV channels. And hacking notes that the remote and cable TV were prevalent at this time and wonders if that is having an effect. He also early on talks about the camera. And this is actually something that Christina noted in her lecture with, no, it was with Freud where we had Charcot who took all the pictures, the objective pictures of women in hysterical states. Charcot also did this with multiples. In fact, it was a way in which he could study and objectify multiple personality that you could physically take a picture of a woman's face in different multiple states and you would have a record of what each state looked like, her expression, her characteristics. So there's a way in which you might wonder if technology is having any kind of effect when we're talking about the looping effects of human kinds. Not just descriptions, not just fictions, but what about the technological world around us? How is it changing the way in which multiplicity is felt? Especially now that we actually are encouraged to have different handles online. Okay, I'm just gonna leave that there. I don't know how to answer that. Okay, so this brings us fact to fiction and fiction to fact. Hacking talks about these two movies, The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil. The Three Faces of Eve came out in the 50s, can't remember the date, and Sybil in 1976. Each of them was kind of docudramas. They were based on a real multiple. Not Eve or Sybil, those are actually pseudonyms, but women who went by it now, the pseudonym of Eve and Sybil. So we had books and movies made about these and Sybil in particular, I think, was actually a TV mini series and then turned into an insanely long movie. It's really long, it's really disturbing. I have watched it. I've also watched The Three Faces of Eve. It's gentler, you might check out that one first. It's in black and white. They're both really interesting movies, but Sybil in particular had a huge effect on multiplicity. So at the time Sybil was made, there weren't that many multiples, and most multiples had three or four altered states. Sybil, as you know, if you've reached this point in the book, had 16 altered states. Her, the book was made and the movie came out, both of which were very popular, and the median, or the average, not the median, the average, no, the median, yeah, that's what I meant, that type of average. The median number of altered states jumped from three or four to 16 after this movie came out. So you might wonder what effect this movie is having on the way in which people think a common multiple is supposed to behave, on the description of what a multiple is. This is the most recent that I know of, the United States of Tara. As far as I know it is not actually based on a person, but it is to some degree a fairly paradigmatic example of a multiple, except she doesn't have enough altered states, and she doesn't have a stormy relationship with her husband in this TV series. So these are still being made, they're still popular, as I understand that the United States of Tara was pretty popular, that was 2009. And in a really curious move, we actually go, so this is fact to fiction, fiction being made on fact, Sybil was a factual case, Dr. Wilbur treated her, and then the book and the movie were created, this docudrama, and we can actually go fact to fiction to fact. Sybil exposed, written by Debbie Nathan, came out in 2011, and it's writing about all of the things that the movie Sybil didn't tell you about Sybil's experiences. And in fact, Debbie Nathan actually argues that Sybil's doctor, Dr. Wilbur, created multiplicity in Sybil. Because one of the reasons, there's a CBC link here where you can go read this interview, one of the reasons is that Sybil's doctor encouraged Sybil to read a lot of books about multiplicity, so Sybil knew a lot about what was expected of a multiple, how a multiple should behave, how a multiple should act. And there's a fear that this influenced Sybil's own behavior, not consciously, not that she was faking it, but that having been diagnosed as a multiple, she wanted to be like a multiple. Yeah. So Sybil was based off a real case, was the three faces of Eve? Yes. Both of those. Both of those, just not the United States of Terra. Terra is based on kind of a paradigmatic idealization, not a real person. Do they go very far off in original cases, do you know? I'm not sure. Some of that depends on who you believe. So it depends on whether you believe Debbie Nathan or Dr. Wilbur, for example, in the case of Sybil. So we come back to this issue of truth. Okay. So I've created another looping effect between fact and fiction. I know I really like this thing. Okay. So we have a fictional account of multiplicity in male characters and mostly sci-fi and fantasy, affecting possibly factual experiences of multiples, which is creating new fictions, which go on to influence new factual multiples. So we have this kind of question. Are our fictions making up people? Fictional accounts providing us with ways to describe ourselves, to describe our actions. But even if we state, as Debbie Nathan does, that Sybil was created by her doctor, Hacking would still say something can be real and be created at the same time. And another example I have of this is money, which is not a natural real thing out there in the world. But it is pretty real, even though it's a product of social circumstance. It has a pretty real effect on people, so. So this brings us back to this issue of memory, and memory as secularizing the soul. And in particular, I want us to notice that we are moving back into the past. We've talked about current multiplicity, and then Hacking starts talking about these fictions, and particularly these 19th century fictions, though I've brought up a couple of recent ones. And the ways in which they might have provided the language to facilitate discussions of multiplicity. But we go even further back, because if child abuse is a recent category, multiplicity actually is older than child abuse, even though child abuse is now seen as the cause of multiple personality. So what was the old cause of multiple personality? Remember, it's really important to identify the cause of a condition. Well, the old cause was hysteria, which you might find, and I find a little bit troubling, because hysteria has its own cause. So the cause of multiple personality is hysteria, and the cause of hysteria is something we talked about a few weeks ago. So saying the cause of multiple personality is hysteria is actually kind of creating a very convoluted causal chain that Hacking doesn't go into, but that we could definitely talk about, because we've talked about hysteria. So I think that's really interesting. So we move back, we move back from 1995 to multiple personality in France in the 1800s. And Hacking tells us that French multiple personality was born under the sign of hysteria. That is, all multiples in France were hysterics. So we know a little bit about hysteria. What do you guys remember about hysteria? There's my water. Yeah. It was predominantly attributed to females. Yes, it was predominantly women, as is multiplicity, interesting. Yeah. Linked to sexual abuse. Or sexual irregularity. Sexual irregularity, not necessarily sexual abuse. Yeah. So it's linked to something sexual, as is multiplicity, and usually, though not exclusively. Anything else you guys remember about hysteria? Do you remember some of the signs or symptoms of hysteria? Symptoms manifest themselves from psychological trauma. Yeah, definitely. As is true in multiplicity. Yeah. Also the idea of not supposed to be blackouts, but like repressing certain memories and not remembering certain things, so they're being played. Yeah, so Dora has kind of this gappy past, repressed memories, definitely. So we can see actually a lot of parallels between multiple personality and hysteria. So it might be quite natural to think that these two are linked in some way. The connection between hysteria and double consciousness or later multiple personality, and we will talk about these two categories in a moment, became so strong that someone who merely split had to be made to have hysterical symptoms, says Hacking. So the idea was a multiple or a double, the precursor to multiple personality being double consciousness, just two personalities. A multiple or a double was hysterical. This was a link. And I think the way in which this is stated sounds a lot like Hacking's claim that there's a link between child abuse and multiple personality that has been forged. The link between hysteria and multiple personality was forged, such that if somebody just had two personalities, but no hysterical symptoms, they had to be made to have hysterical symptoms, which I think sounds a little bit like this. So you can see actually even the connection between multiple personality and hysteria is in some ways quite similar to the connection between multiple personality and child abuse. So in the period of 1895 to 1910, hysteria ceased to be central to French psychiatry. Hacking doesn't necessarily go into why. Hysteria has its own story, its own narrative of how it came into being and how it came out of being. We talked a little bit about that with Freud and a little bit more with Foucault, but it isn't our main concern here. So 1895 to 1910, hysteria ceased to be central to French psychiatry, as simple syllogism follows, out went hysteria, all multiples were hysterical, hysterics, sorry, so out went multiples. So we have a spike of multiple personality in France in the mid to late 1800s. Localized to France, localized in this time period, connected to hysteria. We lose hysteria, we lose multiplicity. We have another much greater spike in multiple personality in the late 80s to mid 90s in the United States. Very localized, very focused in time and in context. This is one of the characteristics of the history of multiple personality, is that we get localized spikes at different time periods in different places. These are the two biggest ones, the one in France in the 1800s and the one much bigger in the US in the 90s. So this is another factor in questioning and debating the reality of this illness. Why does it spike and fall off like this? One reason to think so is because we keep trying to link it to different causes. And as long as those causes are prevalent, multiplicity is prevalent. So we move back now to the deep past before multiplicity. Hacking tells us about trans states and colonial imperialism. So there's this theory that was actually in some of the older DSMs, that trans states were a type of dissociation or a type of multiple personality. Instead of seeing Western dissociative disorders as local and specific forms of trance, they suggested that trance is a subtype of a Western illness, a dissociative disorder. Worse, they turned the central and meaningful parts of other civilizations into pathologies. So there are trans states in many civilizations, often they're part of religious traditions, though not always. There are also trans states in the history of Europe. Particularly in the 19th century, around seances and voodoo boards, or voodoo boards, Ouija boards and things like this. So we have trans states in the history of Western Europe and we have trans states in many other societies, particularly in religious ceremonies. And the explanation was floated that trans states were actually a subset of a dissociation disorder. So hacking has quite strong feelings about this that I wanted to highlight, particularly since we've spent so much time reading about the effects of colonialism. Our ignorance about trance and our wish to make it pathological probably means that we colonize our own past, destroying traces of the original inhabitants. Why would it mean that? If we describe trans states in the language of dissociative identity disorder, why would this result in colonizing our own past? What do you think he means by that? Yeah? Putting something into a modern context where that context was not really there when these states of trance were kind of originally being created? That's right. We put something into a modern context that it may not have applied at the time. And in doing so, we might obliterate things about what was going on at that time because we cover it over with a modern description and we treat the modern description as the right one, somehow. So we colonize our own past. That is, we read multiple personality into other uses of trance. Those that appeared in earlier European societies and in other non-European societies. And we find it very hard to see them as they were seen then, not as precursors of multiple personality disorder and adequately diagnosed, but as cultural uses of trance with their own integrity. And so Hacking actually says that this is kind of a huge Western conceit that we take our own medical terminology and use it to diagnose other cultures' trance states as just subsets of multiple personality. So this is the language of medicine being used in service of colonial imperialism. I wanna take us back to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, to highlight for you criteria D, which does say that religious practice is omitted. This is new. So I think there is an effort to not include trance states under the umbrella label of dissociation, but it wasn't always the case. But now we come to Felida X, who gets pretty much an entire chapter to herself. Felida X was diagnosed with double consciousness or de double mont in French, which I just don't have a good accent for, I apologize. So she was diagnosed with double consciousness, which meant that she switched between two alter states. She only had two, not multiple, just double. But there are a lot of ways in which, as you read Felida X's history, she doesn't quite perfectly fit the paradigm example of double consciousness. In fact, there seem to be more than two alter states. So Hacking says it's perfectly possible to imagine that Felida manifested at least three fragmentary alters in addition to her normal and second state. So double consciousness, they had a normal state, and then they had a second state they would go into. But Felida seemed to have at least three other possible states. But Azam, who was her doctor, his model was doubling, double consciousness, that was the criteria under which he diagnosed her. So he didn't know how to talk about a third personality. There could be no third personality to see, and so he didn't see it. Instead, he would describe things like a second state with a variation, or her normal state with a variation, but there were only two states. So people who advocate for the reality of multiple personality take Felida X as an example to demonstrate that multiple personality existed prior to its categorization, that it was not created but was a real thing. So advocates of the diagnosis of multiple personality will want to say that Felida had more than two alters. We have intimations of as many as five, and under a different type of treatment, Hacking says, all might have flourished. That is, the therapist might have encouraged all the alters to come out, possibly give themselves names, reveal what they knew, what they remembered. But if we ask about what was, rather than what might have been, Felida had exactly two alternating personalities. That was how she was thought of, described of, talked about, treated by her family, and regarded by her neighbors. And perhaps most importantly, that was how she felt about herself. That was how she experienced herself. So she had the label of double consciousness put on her, and that was how she described herself, that she was somebody who had double consciousness, not multiple personality. In fact, if we're looking for an example of multiple personality, Hacking says we look at Louis Vivette. So I love this line. When did multiple personality come into being? Late in the afternoon on the 27th of July, 1885. So, Jules Wazon presented Vivette at a meeting. He was, I believe, a student of another psychiatrist, and he was the therapist who was treating Vivette. He presented Vivette at this meeting with a bunch of other therapists. And he presented Vivette as an unusual case of double consciousness, unlike any other he had encountered. He didn't know how to talk about Vivette in the language of double consciousness. Throughout the course of this meeting, a new language was created to deal with Vivette. Vivette had eight distinct personality states. The meeting broke up at 6.30 p.m. The discourse of multiple personality had just been put in place. So they created a language and a category and a diagnosis to deal with Vivette because he didn't properly fit double consciousness. Vivette for hacking is a paradigmatic case of the looping effect of human kinds. And it is important to note that with the birth of Vivette, having eight personality states, memory becomes really crucial to multiplicity in a way it was not for doubling or for double consciousness. If you only have two states, it's not that hard to keep them separate. But Vivette had eight. Here is where memory and amnesia becomes really important in terms of identifying the differences between different states. So I take us back here. Vivette is a perfect example of the looping effect of human kinds. He was labeled as having double consciousness. He didn't fully fit that label. And so a new label was developed to deal with him. He is categorized in a certain way and his behavior changes the category. He also exemplifies action under a description that he didn't quite fit the description that had been previously given. But once we have a new description, we can re-describe the exact same actions that Vivette is portraying. And finally, we see the rise of memory as really important here. Because once you have several alters, memory is how we're gonna tell the difference between those alters. So memory becomes part of the story of multiplicity where it wasn't part of the story of double consciousness. Now with that, I bring us back up to the present day. Is multiple personality real? Re-examining this question. Hacking says, I make the strong point that the whole language of many selves has been hammered out by generations of poets and novelists. We already looked at this, the way in which multiple personality plays out in fiction. This is not a test of how we use language in order to describe real people. It is a consequence of how the literary imagination has formed the language in which we speak of people, be they real imagined or the most common case of mixed origin. And this is the part I find most interesting. When it comes to the language that will be used to describe ourselves, each of us is a half-breed of imagination and reality. Because each of us has genuine actions that fall under descriptions that were socially created. So if I take us back here, the action itself is there, it is a given, but the description of the action changes over time. It's an imagination. Old actions under new descriptions may be re-examined in memory. And if these are genuinely new descriptions, that is descriptions not available or perhaps nonexistent at the time of the episodes remembered, then something is experienced now, experienced now in memory that in a certain sense did not exist before the action took place, but not under the new description. This means that it's possible to have genuinely new, present experiences of past memories, which I think is really weird. Because how do you have a genuinely new experience of something that is past? But apparently you can, because if you describe it anew, you experience it differently. So, I hope at this point it's a little bit clearer how hacking is trying to get at these goals and objectives. How he's trying to show us that multiple personality has a history and that it is contingent. We created it. That doesn't mean it's not real, but it is also a created description to cover our actions. So what does that tell us about the organization of this book? I think that the history of multiplicity demonstrates that using the new descriptions made available by the development of the science of memory, we're able to create new human kinds that did not exist before. So I've heard this in another account of the looping effect of human kinds described in terms of constellations. If you think of the stars as the actions and the constellations as the descriptions. So the stars are there. But the way in which we connect the stars together to make pictures like the Big Dipper or Orion or whatever is the description. And in order to make those connections we have to highlight certain stars and ignore other stars. So we know that if we actually look really closely there are stars in the constellation of the Big Dipper that aren't being actually used in the constellation. We're highlighting some stars and ignoring other stars. And we could probably make different shapes. We could connect stars differently to make different shapes, to make difference to descriptions. So we have the action in this metaphor, the stars and the description in this metaphor, the constellations. Meaning we can make new pictures or new stories out of the same actions, the same memories. Which means that even though we can't go back in time machines and rewrite the past we can kinda rewrite the past. Okay. Which gets me to what I think is the big thing that's going on here. In the last few chapters, I think it's the very last chapter, Hacking talks about Freud and Janet. And he says that all of us are caught when it comes to memory between Freud and Janet or between false consciousness and autonomy. Why? Both of these men were therapists, they were contemporaries, they worked at the same time. That's Freud obviously, and the other one is Pierre Janet. But they had very different theories about how to help their patients. So they both dealt with hysterical patients for example and they had a very different idea about how to do it. You know a little bit about what Freud thought that you had to do. Here's what Janet thought you had to do. Janet thought what we had to do was first of all identify the cause of the patient's condition. So find it, dig out that memory, fill in those gaps just like Freud. But once we found the cause, what we should do is hypnotize the patient and convince her the cause never happened. Because if the cause disappears all the effects will disappear as well. That's why we want to find the cause in the first place. So Janet thought what we should do is hypnotize the patient and then convince her that whatever had caused the initial trauma was not actually something that had happened. Now it isn't that Janet believed that none of these causes had happened. He believed they had. But he believed it was more important to tell his patients lies to make them feel better than to help them discover the truth if it meant that they might feel worse. So Hacking tells us that Janet cured his patients by telling her a lie and getting her to believe it. He did this over and over again with his patients, got them to believe what he himself knew was a lie. How do you feel about that? Not good? Why not? Do the patients really know about who they are? Not really. He's rewriting them. So it's a little bit creepy. Most people find this a little bit creepy. Janet actually apparently had slightly better success rates than Freud did in terms of happier patients. However, it is true that sometimes his patients would relapse and they'd come in and he'd have to hypnotize them and convince them that the trauma had not happened again. And he did occasionally joke that he'd better outlive all of his patients so that he could continually hypnotize them and convince them the trauma didn't happen. So if he wasn't there, that might not be good. So that's maybe a problem with Janet's theory. Here's what Hacking says Freud did. You know a little bit about Freud. Hacking says to some degree, Freud is a bit of the opposite of Janet because Freud attempted to eradicate false consciousness. Janet actively caused what we would call false consciousness. That is, he caused the patient to consciously believe things about themselves that he knew were false. Freud was the exact opposite of Janet. His patients had to face up to the truth as he saw it. We can have no doubts in retrospect that Freud very often diluted himself thanks to his resolute dedication to theory. And many of you have already talked about and considered this. So Freud thought that the patient had to come to realize what the traumatic event was and deal with the trauma. And that was the only way they were gonna get better. The problem Hacking says for Freud is he had very specific ideas about what the trauma was. And if the patient recognized things that were not the same as what Freud thought, clearly that was a problem. So that's why I say it's an attempted erasure of false consciousness. Because as we know, Freud was fairly committed to theory. Hacking tells us that in the matter of lost and recovered memories, we are the heirs of Freud and Janet. What does he mean by that, do you think? It seems like we're caught, we're caught between two extremes. The extreme of telling complete and outright lies and the extreme of being dogmatically or ideologically committed to some kind of stable truth. We're caught between these two. Between Freud and Janet. Between false consciousness on the one hand, where everything you believe about yourself is fabricated and autonomy on the other. Where what you believe about yourself is somehow a genuine truth about your past and about who you are. Hacking argues, much as Asia, and I've forgotten your name, but both suggested that Janet is a little bit creepy. And one reason Hacking thinks Janet is a little bit creepy is because, as he says, self-knowledge is a virtue in its own right. He also actually thinks that self-knowledge is necessary as a virtue for other things. So this is on page 265. He says, self-knowledge is a virtue in its own right. We value the way in which people can fulfill their own natures by gaining an unsentimental self-understanding. So being able to see yourself, really see yourself as who you are with all of your faults is something that we value. We think it is good to grow for all our vices into someone who is mature enough to face the past and the present. Someone who understands how character in its weakness as well as its strengths is made of interlocking tendencies and gifts that have grown in the course of a life. So Hacking thinks this is something that is intrinsically valuable, not valuable for anything, though he actually also does think it's valuable for other things, but just valuable because it is valuable to be the kind of person who can own up to your faults and to your mistakes, who can recognize your strengths and who can see yourself without having to cover over or put on rose-colored glasses as we say and look at yourself in a fictional way. Is he right about this? Is self-knowledge a virtue in its own right? What do you guys think? No? How come? Nope, and that's not what he's arguing. He just says it's positive to have it. Yeah? If you know something about yourself and you don't necessarily feel good about it and you still know what it can still help you with. So another thing he says with regards to self-knowledge, this is on the same, on the page opposite it, page 264, is that in the modern image it is we ourselves who must choose the ends. This is a stern creed. We can be fully moral beings only when we understand why we chose those ends. So this is another way in which hacking thinks self-knowledge is important that if we don't know about ourselves, we cannot know why we chose the kind of choices that we made. It's only through knowing something about your strengths, your weaknesses, your predilections, your desires, your faults that you can understand why you made the choices you did. And it's only through understanding why you made the choices that you did that you can grow as moral beings. This traces its way all the way back into Socratic and Presocratic philosophy. So the Delphic Oracle actually has inscribed on it, know thyself, that this is somehow a core idea of what it is to be a moral person. The first thing you have to do is be able to know yourself in a completely unsentimental and realistic way. So Jenna is not helping us out a whole lot here if that's true. On the other hand, it's not clear that Freud is helping out a whole lot either. Because how are we going to know ourselves if we are all a mixture of fact and fiction? That is, if we are all a mixture of fact and fiction, such that all of us have been created through a looping effect of human kinds, whereby new descriptions are created that connect our actions together in new ways, and that this is done socially, is any kind of genuine self-knowledge or autonomy possible? Or, to leave you with the final question, can we be autonomous when we make each other up? This, I think, is where we get left at the end of this discussion. Hacking is talking about secularizing the soul. If we've come to a place in which we can describe each other, classify each other, and give each other narratives, such that now you have this description, here is the narrative I expect you to have. You have multiple personality. I expect you to manifest 16 alters. I expect that there is some kind of story of abuse in your childhood. This is one very paradigmatic case, but you can think of other cases of descriptive labels that come with narratives. Some of them are medical, so another one that is medical is the description of the breast cancer survivor, which is one that a lot of people are writing about, in particular Judy Siegel, who's actually at UBC, is writing about it. The idea that you get diagnosed is that you're encouraged to take up this kind of survivor story. I'm going to survive for my family. I'm going to survive for my kids. You get this whole narrative that is put on you, whether you feel the narrative is appropriate or not. There are cases that are non-medical, in which you are identified as a specific type of person, and this comes with this whole narrative of who you were like, what your past was like, how you were encouraged to describe your memories. In our seminar, we even talked about cases like what is the narrative of an arts one student? How are you encouraged to describe your experiences? What is the narrative of a humanities major in general? What is the narrative of an engineering major, for example? All of these things come with these kind of arcs that encourage you to think of your memories and your past and your future under certain descriptions. But they came to you without you creating them yourselves. They were socially created. So can we be autonomous when we make each other up? And that, as I think we're hacking, leaves us with this science of memory. Thank you for staying. That's it.