 So thank you for inviting me back for my last arts one lecture. I'm very excited to be here And I'm really excited to talk to you guys about Ian hacking because he's probably one of my favorite philosophers So I'm really excited to be here and to talk about all of this and Get calm. Okay All right, so what can I tell you about hacking the guy? He's still alive So we're actually reading someone who's still alive. This has happened a couple of times already in arts one though But he was born in 1936 Here in BC In fact, he went to the University of British Columbia as an undergrad So there you go He is now mostly retired and a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto He's also apparently an avid hiker and gardener And he was heavily influenced by Foucault's theories So last year Christina gave a lecture on Foucault, which I believe is still up on the arts when open website If you want to check out one of hacking's main philosophical influences You can go check out that lecture or go ask Christina about Foucault Which I have done several times and trying to understand what's going on. All right So there are three main ideas that run through hacking's book and One of them and well, maybe not unfortunately, but one of them He doesn't introduce to you until quite near the end of the book I think it's like the second last chapter of Rewriting the soul so I want to just put the three main ideas up front first Before we talk about what's going on in the rest of the book and the three ideas are Memoral politics the looping effect of human kinds which he also calls making up people So he uses those two terms interchangeably Sometimes he says human looping sometimes he says looping effect and sometimes he says making up people and then the third which is action under a description So I'm going to look at each of these in turn so that we have them up front to think about as we talk through this So Memoral politics there he is telling us about Memoral politics okay So hacking argues that memory is actually political which is something you guys have already been introduced to if you can Remember way back before the Christmas break not back to September though I'm not asking you to go back that far not till April will they ask you to go back that far but way back before Christmas we read trios silencing the past and Trio argues that what gets remembered is always political Hacking actually argues something slightly more that the way We narrate our memories the stories we tell the way we construct and understand our memories are also political So it's not just what gets remembered, but how it gets remembered that is political What he ends up saying Both in the start and then much more towards the end of this book is That Memoral politics that is the way we tell our memories is a way of policing not the body Not the human physical person moving through space because you might be police that way You know like a traffic lights and stuff like that So it's not a way of policing the body says hacking it's a politics of the soul it is a way of constructing and Controlling the soul and the soul becomes kind of a weird concept for hacking through this Because he has a lot to say at the start and at the end of this text about the soul about regulating and secularizing the soul So this is something that you might want to consider and maybe talk about in their seminars because he's not entirely clear about what he means by the soul I mean it doesn't necessarily seem to be that he means anything particularly religious But at the same time he's speaking in a Western tradition where the soul has predominantly been viewed as a religious thing So depending on how far you've gotten through this text. I'm gonna assume you all made it, right? What do you think he means by the soul? And he talks about the soul or what do you think anyone means by the soul when they talk about the soul? This is great. I can see all of you any ideas I know we start with the easy questions, right? Yeah, yeah, I think where he's we'll talk about what he might be saying about it later It's complex complicated It does seem to be that it's not necessarily this unifying force or at least not an isolated autonomous unifying force but I think we often marshal the idea of the soul both in religious traditions and outside if and when we talk About the soul to talk about Something unifying something that kind of makes you who you are throughout your whole life something that doesn't change Because everything about else about you can change and can change quite a lot like if we bring in baby pictures of all of you I bet I may not be able to you know match you up with your baby picture. You probably don't look much like you did So the idea actually of connecting the soul to the two identity has a really long history in philosophy So first there was kind of a connection of the soul to the mind The idea well the soul is supposed to be intangible, right? It's not a physical thing and hey the mind is also kind of intangible So probably they're the same thing Say the soul and the mind are the same thing and then the connection of this soul mind entity to Identity to something that can make you who you are over time And this largely gets attributed to this guy John Locke there are his dates 1632 to 1704 and John Locke was really interested in having a very systematic account of what identity is Something practical and systematic that could tell him if you were the same person who did some action 10 years ago So for Locke this all came down to memory which is where we get the connection of the soul specifically to memories That is here's here's Locke now you get to be grateful. We didn't ask you to read Locke Here's a little bit For since consciousness always accompanies thinking and it is that which makes everyone be what he calls self and this alone Consists personal identity 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 Most people have interpreted this not everyone but most people have interpreted this to mean that identity Consists in memory that is how far can you stretch your consciousness back people think that means how far back can you remember something? So you are what you remember and Locke actually said the converse as well If you don't remember something it wasn't you that did it even if it was your physical body that did the action It wasn't you so Locke has this hypothetical story where you get really really drunk and then Commit some crime, but you don't remember it because you were blacked out drunk and Locke says well that wasn't you But don't get too excited This doesn't get you off the hook says Locke because Unfortunately, we can't tell when you really don't remember and when you're just lying about not remembering So the courts are gonna err on the side of caution and punish you anyway, but God will know So God will let you off the hook because you didn't remember Locke has a bunch of other scenarios like intuition pumps to try and Get you to test the idea that memory and identity are connected So for example, he comes up with the story of day man and night man That is he imagines one body wherein one consciousness is awake and active during the day and Then at night a different consciousness It animates the body and he calls these two consciousness day man and night man And he says when day man is asleep night man moves the body around and does all this stuff And when night man is asleep day man goes goes and does all these activities But neither of them remember the actions of the other one There are two separate minds if you like who can't interact and so Locke says well How many people are present and he thinks most of his readers will say well there are two people present one body two people He gives a bunch of other intuition pumps trying to get at this idea that really what it comes down to is What can you remember that solidifies who you are? Okay Hacking is picking up on a very long tradition in philosophy of connecting memory to identity and He says the doctrine that memory should be thought of as narrative is an aspect of memory politics We constitute ourselves by making up our lives That is by weaving stories about our past by what we call memories That is when you get to know somebody else You get to know them through telling them stories about you and through them reciprocating them having you tell us stories about them We tell each other stories about ourselves and that's how we construct our identity and how we put that identity out there into the world for other people to interact with And this is something again you guys have already kind of faced so last semester you read Apple fells until the dawn's light which had Blanca trying to narrate an identity Trying to continually narrate memories Being pulled if you like by two different forces in her life that wanted to narrow her narrate her life in two different ways And struggling to find a narrative that was her own and we talked a lot at least my seminar did hi, I'll be one We talked a lot about the issue of writing in this text and Blanca writing and rewriting and the movements back in the past and back to the present The idea that this is a way to try and construct an identity Okay, so that's the first one memo politics that these narratives are somehow political the narratives we tell ourselves That we are participating in a wider cultural influence that is pulling us to narrate ourselves in certain ways Okay, the looping effect of human kinds or making up people This is how hacking describes it I have from time to time spoken of the looping effect of human kinds That is the interaction 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 or to do a certain kind of act may affect someone a new or modified mode of classification may be systematically may systematically affect the people who are so classified or The people themselves may rebel against the knowers the classifiers 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 So one of the the most minimal point hacking is trying to make here is that humans care about the descriptions that others used to talk about us That it matters to us how other people describe us the kind of classifications that are put on us affect us So in that respect how hacking says that humans are what he calls interactive kinds We interact with the descriptions that other people use either by saying who that's not me or by embracing the description Yeah, that's the kind of person. I am By contrast hacking says that there are also indifferent kinds That is types of things in the world that are indifferent to the descriptions placed on them For example in another text. He says that a rock doesn't really care that we call it a rock It doesn't matter to the rock. Whatever we call it. We could call it stink bomb and they probably wouldn't care Whereas calling one of you stink bomb might not be so cool, right? You might care So at bare minimum, it's that we care about these descriptions Why do we care about them? He says because being seen to be a certain kind of person or do a certain kind of Act affects us That is if other people see you in a certain kind of way This can affect a lot of things it can affect the kind of opportunities that you have in life It can affect the way people respond to you the kind of friendships that might be open to you It can affect you yourself and what you think is possible about yourself if everybody always tells you you're really stupid There's psychological studies that show this can affect your own assessment of your level of intelligence So the idea is these descriptions matter they matter both socially, but they also matter individually of what you might think about yourself And this is why we may strongly rebel against some of the descriptions that are placed on us While we might quite strongly embrace other descriptions that are placed on us Or we might try and suggest a new description and get people to adopt it So hacking theory of the looping effect works kind of like this Someone places a description on you as a person and you react to that description either Favorably by embracing it and changing it to fit your needs or unfavorably by trying to refute the description and suggest something in its place And through your reaction the description itself changes and then you react to the new change in the description We're going to go through a couple of examples of this and return to this So if it's not super clear yet, don't worry The main point right now is that the way we are described and taught to describe ourselves Affects who we are and how we think of ourselves and that we in turn can affect the nature of available descriptions Okay Third one actions under a description This is the one that hacking doesn't actually introduce until quite late into the text So some of you you'll all be there. I know but some of you may not quite be there. So let's do it now So here's the example hacking kids what matters says hacking says is the context So for example, a man was moving a lever up and down Hold a little more about the context. He was manually pumping water and water into the cistern of the house We're told a little more about the context He was pumping poisoned water into the country house. Well, we're evil men met for planning sessions And finally he was poisoning the men who met in the house Hacking's point is that at every point along this line? We are getting an accurate picture of the action the action of pumping the water But at every point as we draw out we're getting more context and so the description of the action changes Because the context changes because we know more about what's going on Or because we have a different focus on what's going on So the theory of action under description isn't actually hacking zone he credits Philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe who lived from 1919 to 2001 She's a philosopher of language and she came up with the idea of action under description And what Anscombe said was that anytime you tells you report an action You do so under a description that is you place the action in a context Whether it be a minimal context or a very wide context you immediately contextualize the action We cannot speak about an action without providing some kind of description of it But says Elizabeth Anscombe the description can change right as we just saw as we shift the context we shift the description So Anscombe's puzzle. This was a big puzzle in philosophy of language was is it one action? With many descriptions or is it many different actions? Don't worry if that doesn't make too much sense and Hacking says it's one action. It's the same action throughout the man is pumping the lever no matter how you describe it That's the action, but that there are different ways of describing the same action So he says it's one action that can fall under multiple descriptions And here's where hacking takes Elizabeth Anscombe's idea and he takes it a little bit further So he began takes what she had He takes what he she had and he extends it And he says Can we have new descriptions of old actions? that is as The context shifts as we move forward in time our perspective on things that happened in the past changes So let's think of it in a very personal way Maybe some of you will be able to do this cast your mind backwards and think of an ex Next boyfriend ex-girlfriend ex-partner that maybe you know, you're not too happy with at this point in your life How would you think about how you would have described the relationship when you were in the relationship versus how you might describe the relationship now? That it has ended and you have a full context of the relationship arc You might use very different words Then you would have especially like after the first couple weeks of knowing the person versus now or think about Music or movies that you really loved when you were 13 How do you feel about this movies or music now? Would you describe them differently? Would you describe listening to them in different words or watching? The point being says hacking that we can come up with new descriptions for things in the past This makes the past a little bit open. We normally think of the past as fixed There's nothing you can do about it. It's done. You did that action. You can't change it. No, you can't change it But you can redescribe it and this means that the past is not quite as fixed according to hacking as we might think And this is another thing that trio was trying to point out for us as well That when you cast your mind back into the past we can look at these narratives and tell them in new ways Hacking is really here gonna talk about not just new descriptions of old actions But new descriptions involving new categories new words that just didn't exist in the past Okay, so those are the three main points that you want to watch for running through this text and They interact with each other So the looping effect of humankind's the categories that are placed on us change our narratives Our narratives are coming from our memories and as we change our narratives We are giving new descriptions of actions that happened in the past So the three ideas are getting at the same point This idea that the past can be rewritten and that somehow that means the soul can too You can see with all the looping why you guys are reading this given your theme Okay, so let's look at the organization of this book We're gonna look at the main point and then the case study that hacking uses and then the goals and objectives Because one thing that you might think when reading this book is that the main point is to talk about multiple personality Which is now called dissociative identity But actually that's not the main point Okay, so hacking tells us that we're not gonna get the main point till quite near the end So on page 4 he tells us what the main point is Gives us a sort of thesis statement if you like but the main point isn't gonna come up until quite near the end of the book He says my chief topic towards the end of the 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 the main point is to investigate how a new science was created with the express purpose of secularizing measuring quantifying controlling the soul and what that might mean This means that even though the majority of the book is about multiple personality disorder Do you need me to go back for a minute? I'll go back for a minute No worries. I will also send a link out to your profs so that they can distribute it on to you guys So that you have access to this Prezi. I should have said that at the start apparently I'm rusty with art arts one lectures. Okay, actually, I haven't seen you guys sin that in this format since Plato so Yeah, cuz I did all my lectures at the start of last semester, okay So this means that even though the majority of the book is about multiple personality Multiple personality is actually being marshaled as a case study and hacking says quite clearly He's not going to call it multiple personality disorder because the word disorder is part of that scientific language that he wants to investigate So he chooses to use the description multiple personality instead of the description multiple personality disorder And you can think about how the actions of the patients change depending on whether or not they we describe their actions as disorder or not So he's already kind of using action under a description while also talking about it So multiple personality we are focusing on multiple personality says hacking because it is a paradigmatic if tiny memory concept What does it mean to say it's paradigmatic? Does anybody know I will take silence is probably not or else You're all just frantically typing down the last thing I Maybe I'll give you another minute. It's a paradigmatic If tiny example of memory a memory concept. Oh, yeah See multiple personality is an actual thing that is true There is that whole controversy, but he's saying something slightly different here And you were getting at it with the first part of what you said Which is that a paradigm is a way of seeing the world so to call something paradigmatic is to say it exemplifies this way of seeing the world And in this case the exemplification is it exemplifies what memoro politics is The multiple personality is a perfect case study for understanding memoro politics Not every example of memoro politics will be this accurate is what hacking saying. Yeah Yeah It's like prototypes of anything actually a prototype is supposed to be kind of the This is the the goal right make the prototype car or whatever And this is the goal and we'll try and mass produce it and blah blah blah So multiple personality is the perfect way of understanding memoro politics and then we can take this understanding and apply memoro politics to cases That aren't multiple personality So what he's doing is examining one case study one example With the understanding that you could take the concepts and apply them in many other areas of human life Not just a multiple personality Okay multiple personality is being used as a case study Through examining multiple personality He says we can get a picture of how memory and memoro politics works on the self or on the soul So much of the story the text is the story behind the creation of one very specific type of narrative One very specific way of applying a category to people one specific way of changing Memoro politics of encouraging people to narrate themselves in a certain way So how did the story of multiple of multiplicity come into being that's what hacking is going to examine for us So why is he doing this if it isn't just about Examining as we know the controversies that surround multiple personality if it's something bigger than that What is the goal and he says he has two main goals? These goals should actually be a little bit familiar because I would argue that they are also goals that trio had in his text So in pointing out how the story of multiple personality came into being hacking set is I think hacking is doing two things On the one hand he is illustrating that there are a lot of facts that we take to be Obviously true about humanity that are only contingently true. They didn't have to be this way There's a story we can tell that tells us how we got to the place We're at and we can see that things could have been different So they have not always been true. They may not always be true in the future. We can change things going forward Secondly hacking is asking us to Encouraging us to ask ourselves to reflect on the ways in which we are making up people and the ways in which we Participate in making up each other by putting categories on each other by encouraging each other to describe themselves in certain ways And asks us to think about the ways we are encouraging people to think of their pasts and to narrate themselves And he wants us to not ask questions like is this true is what I'm saying true That's not a question that hackings interested in when it comes to how you narrate yourself instead He's interested in us asking questions are the ways I'm narrating myself and encouraging others to narrate themselves helpful Useful do they make people happier and perhaps the most puzzling which he gets to towards the end of the text Do they allow people autonomy and self-knowledge? So we've been talking about the issue of autonomy at least since Kierkegaard. This has been with us for a while It's come up in a lot of different texts I don't know if you talked about it with Freud, but it kind of comes up there as well So there is kind of this issue and hacking is participating in this issue as well Okay, so those are That's the main point the reason why multiple personality is being used and what hackings ultimate goals are Let's look at the organization of the book Now I am not going to go over every single chapter. There are a lot of them Instead what I'm going to do is look at some of the chapters in order to get us kind of a narrative arc of What hackings trying to do so I've selected some that are my favorite some that I think are really important and Others you can talk about in seminar. They're all really cool. I'm a little biased all right But what I've started out with is I want us to look at the organization of the book if you look at it The book actually starts in the present I mean it doesn't start in the present because it starts in the 1990s which was present when the book was published So it starts in the present in hacking's present when he was writing this So this might be kind of odd He tells us he's going to tell us the story of how multiple multiple personality came to be But he doesn't start with the origins. He starts with what's happening right now in the 1990s So he starts in the present and then he takes us back into the past and then he brings us forward into the present So I think maybe I have I do know it's not really working on there Oh, there we go So I've used the blue lines the blue arrows to represent when we're in the present And then the green arrows to represent when we go back in the past and then we come back up to the present again So we've got present blue past green cool All right, so if you look at the structure of this book, it's structured kind of like I don't know this cliffhanger TV shows that you see on like well, they used to be on Friday nights I don't know if that's still the case. I haven't had TV in a while But what you know you start with like your main character is almost Dead hanging on the edge of a building or a plane or some crap and then it goes like 72 hours earlier And it tells you how that came to be right? Everybody's familiar with these cool Okay So why do you think he structures the book this way? Like here's what's happening in the 90s controversy about multiplicity hundred years earlier 150 years earlier actually Why does he do that? Why don't we actually just start with the origins? Because we start where the reader is or was right 24 years ago Okay. Yeah, so everything that's being told in the first few chapters would have been very very common knowledge to A current audience when the book was published, especially an audience interested in multiplicity already Yeah, that's right And I will also say that I think the structure of the overall book is this where I go next to my slide I can't remember what it is. I think the structure of the overall book and this is my theory I think the structure actually helps support the idea of making us look at the facts as contingently true Because he gives you the fact people in the 1990s who were interested in multiplicity would have known a lot of the stuff He tells us in the first few chapters that would have been very common knowledge to anybody who was interested in this stuff And then he goes back and shows you why those facts are only contingently true So I think the structure of the overall book actually supports one of his two main goals So I think it was done deliberately to support that goal Cool, so let's try we begin with this question Is multiple personality real? Why was this a question? So 1972 he says in 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 So there might be some quibbling about exactly how many None 84 more than a hundred whatever number you favored the word for the disorder was rare Nobody thought this was common in 1972 It was rare rare rare 1992 this is two years before the book was 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 prior to 1972 we had a few hundred on record for the entire record of medical history By 1992 there were 6,000 What had happened it gets it gets more interesting 2014 last year 2014 still saw a discussion in the media about whether or not multiplicity was real It was much higher this discussion was much much more in the early 90s But this discussion is still happening and I've given you a link to an article from the Huffington Post published last year on multiplicity in which The Alan Francis the professor emeritus at Duke University and the chair of the DSM 5 task force DSM 4 task force And we're going to talk about the DSM more in a moment Anyway, you just need to know he's a pretty prestigious guy in the psychiatric community He wrote MPD disappeared. That's multiple personality disorder. He's using an acronym MPD disappeared in the mid 90s Because of its own failures and dangers It was doomed when insurance companies stopped paying for MPD treatments and patients started suing MPD therapists for malpractice So he argues and he isn't alone That MPD was a creation of psychologists that they created this disease in their patients that the disease somehow wasn't real It was being created by psychologists who were malpracticing And this was one point of view that had been put out there that the reason for the explosion in 1996 was due to psychologists errors Psychologists wanting to find the disease were creating the disease That was one of the things that was argued on the other side people who argued that this was a genuine and real illness Said that the reason for the explosion was better testing better knowledge But a lot of things that had been misdiagnosed not caught were now successfully being diagnosed as multiple personality So there were arguments on both sides as to why this was happening more often But it was a heated debate and the debate continues though much less heated Hacking's take is that people were really suffering the patients really were suffering they went to therapists because they were really suffering People were really suffering People really were categorized the category that was placed on them people really were categorized as being multiples their therapists told them This is what you have and they responded to that category People really did act in ways that were described in the language of multiplicity They really did act in ways that if you read what it says a multiple is They conform to that description and people really did have amnesia, which is another characteristic of multiplicity So hacking argued he wasn't quite that it's a weird question to ask is it real That what's really happening is people really are suffering and people really are conforming to the categories that are placed on them So he says there's a problem with this initial question The question that was being thrown around in the 90s and is continuing to be discussed even 24 years later He says the question makes a presupposition that we should reject It implies that there is an important contrast between being a real disorder and being a product of social circumstance The fact that a mental illness appears only in a specific historical or geographical context does not imply that it is Manufactured artificial or in any other way not real Remember that the whole point of action under a description is that the context matters So hacking's point is if you are living in a context in which multiple personality is a label or a category that can be put on you Then even if that is a factor of social circumstance, that's still a real factor that you are dealing with So what he's saying is there's really no distinction between real and human created Human created things are real. That's what he's saying Something can be real and be a product of social circumstance Because what happens is we create a description we apply it to somebody That person responds to the description and new description is created And it continues What a hacking is trying to say is that making up people is real We have specific narratives for all sorts of different kinds of people and multiplicity is just one example So you can probably think of specific narratives that would apply to an arts one prof What would we be like? You can probably think of narratives that apply to arts students in general or arts one students in particular That there's a sort of narrative that's supposed to go along with an art student That's a very different narrative from a narrative that applies to an engineering student say So the idea is that these are real. I mean the category of university professor is completely human made up We created this category entirely Okay So we created the category entirely, but I hope it's real because otherwise I'm out of a job, right? Okay, so let's look at what multiple personality is like I've given you the DSM five definition for multiple personality now the DSM five Was published. I think in 2010 don't quote me on that. Oh, I'm being taped. Well, whatever But hacking didn't have the DSM five to work from he's working from the DSM three So he's working to diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders back so the DSM if you don't know is kind of this big collection of Mental illnesses and it lists all these symptoms So it's an aid for psychologists and psychiatrists in diagnosing people the DSM one was like a pamphlet It was really small the DSM one by the DSM three you're looking at something about this big And I think the DSM five is yeah, it's it's quite hefty Don't read them They so they list all mental disorders that are recognized and all the different symptoms that Are as a guide to helping people diagnose, but it's supposed to be just a guide only And the DSM is put together by kind of a panel of highly respected psychiatrists in the field So hacking was working from the DSM three because the DSM four was published in 1995 which is a year after this book came out The DSM four made a change It changed the disorder from multiple personality to dissociative identity So it's called dissociative identity disorder instead of multiple personality disorder That change was done for we think two reasons One it allows it to be nested under all the other dissociative disorders So there are a bunch of different dissociative disorders and now this disorder belongs in a category with a bunch of others So we've got categories inside categories The other reason is we've removed the word Personality which sounds suspiciously like person So the DSM four and DSM five which I'm going to show you in a minute continues this trend has eliminated any idea that We have multiple persons inside one body Prior to this it was quite normal to think about the different altars as being kind of different persons Kind of like John Locke's Day Man and Night Man two persons in one body Now they've consciously changed the terminology that is used So that it discourages you from thinking of it like that dissociative identity is supposed to conjure up an idea of a fractured personality as opposed to multiple personalities a Dissociative identity an identity that is somehow dissociated from itself. It is fractured. So we don't have multiples We have one that has become disunified There's a quite conscious decision made. So we're talking about Rewriting the soul different categories everybody who was multiple is now actually just dissociated That's a big change in how people would think about themselves if they were classified with this disorder So maybe you can talk about why that was done in seminar I can tell you one reason it was done. There was actually some debate among some fringe groups of psychologists that Unifying what what used to be done was you would find the personality that you thought was the original host personality And you would kind of get rid of the other personalities through therapy Find ways of eliminating the other personalities and letting the host personality take back over the body But if you think of those other personalities as persons The concern among various some people was that maybe you're murdering them in eliminating them And now the way it's talked about is it's a dissociated Identity and the job of the therapist is to unify all those personalities or identity bits together into one person Instead of eliminating them. So here's what the DSM 5 says about multiple personality dissociative identity Apologize it's a little bit different than what hacking was dealing with but not that much So the there's what you'd see is a disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states This involves marked discontinuity in the sense of self and sense of agency Accompanied by related alterations and effect behavior consciousness memory perception cognition and sensory motor functioning So we have two different personality states And how do we know there are two because there's a discontinuity and how do we know? There's a discontinuity because of changes in behavior Changes in cognition changes in motor function, but especially this became very important changes in memory that is There's amnesia and in fact, that's where we go the very next point Amnesia has to be present in order to have dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality It was also in the DSM 3 amnesia was there Amnesia is defined as recurring gaps in the recall of current everyday events that go beyond ordinary forgetting The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in important areas of functioning And then D is actually an addition that I'm going to come back and talk to you guys about Religious practice as is omitted as is normal fantasy play in children. That's added that didn't used to be there And then finally the physiological effects from a sub from any substance are omitted So if the reason you have gaps in your memory is because like John Locke said you got really drunk that doesn't count as having dissociative identity disorder Okay So you can see that memory plays a really big role here. It's actually listed twice It's listed in point a and again more specifically amnesia and point b but in order to have dissociative identity disorder You have to have amnesia Okay, so here's kind of a paradigmatic example of a multiple circa 1980 That is what would we expect the most classic the most perfect representative of a multiple to look like so This is somebody who conforms to everything that a psychologist might look for Because as we know the DSM back here gives us a range of symptoms We should look for but any one person we look at might not display all of them And that's the way the DSM works It gives you a range of symptoms and you look for what most fits what you're seeing in your patient So this is somebody who would fit everything Circa 1980 so it's multiple personality in 1980 things are a little bit different first of all the patient would most likely be female 90% of multiples are female She would be in her early to mid 30s probably so you guys are safe. I'm not so good She would suffer from memory gaps Foggy memory and troubling events in her early childhood He likely has a history of alcohol or drug abuse as a coping mechanism She likely has a history of storming marriages and love affairs and also possibly unstable friendships Has likely been in the mental health system for seven or more years with several prior diagnoses Multiple personality historically is notoriously difficult to diagnose So any patient that was finally diagnosed with multiple personality likely had several diagnosis before that That were subsequently overturned as not being correct She likely has about 16 different altars that is 16 other personality states One of which is probably male One of which is likely a child One of which is an animal angel or other non-human personality and One of which has a different sexual orientation from the host personality So that's kind of a paradigmatic example circa the 1980s But as we see as we go through the history of this That isn't always what a multiple looked like or even looks like today Actually, they have many more altars than 16 today Most of them have approaching a hundred Okay So staying in the present One thing that's really important when it comes to diagnosing anything is to try and find out what the cause is That is if you can find out the cause it's much easier to try and find a cure And the theory the present theory well, it is still the present theory But it was also the present in hacking's present, which is what I'm using the 1990s theory Was that the cause was child abuse and even more specifically child sexual abuse So there are a couple of things to talk about with regards to child abuse The first is that the category of child abuse if you've read this chapter is relatively new So in the last century the 19th century didn't have a category of child abuse There was a category called cruelty to children and this actually persisted through much of the first half of the 20th century as well Cruelty to children involved things like Overworking children. So if you had a family business working them too hard was cruelty to children malnourishment Also physical abuse, but not much sexual abuse was discussed under this heading and cruelty to children was also something that largely was thought to be a problem for Lower class because these were the people that were most likely to not be able to properly feed their children because of lack of income and that kind of thing And to need the children to work quite hard in order to keep businesses afloat So cruelty to children was seen as a very specific category not saying that upper-class people couldn't Be charged with cruelty to children because they could but it was much more a problem That was associated mentally in the people at the time as being a lower-class problem And as being a problem that had more to do with malnourishment and overworking children Child abuse of course was not thought of that way. So cruelty to children was not thought of as a pervasive social problem It was thought of as being very specific Child abuse as you may well know is thought of as being a pervasive social problem that can occur anywhere at any time So child abuse especially in America was supposed to be classless This is in sharp contrast to cruelty to children, which is what the category replaced We no longer talk about cruelty to children. We now talk about child abuse It was supposed to occur in constant proportion more or less in every social class poverty was not an issue Cruelty to children in contrast was presented primarily as a vice of the lower classes the preposterous or prosperous examples not withstanding Cruelty to children was also not thought of as sexual abuse So in 1953 Kinsey did the Kinsey experiments. We tracked human sexuality This was a huge undertaking. He interviewed and studied a whole bunch of men And then the next year he did it with a whole pile of women across the US They did mail-out interviews phone interviews brought people into the clinic and he published his findings And he was one of the first people to argue that sexuality falls on a spectrum Nobody is straight heterosexual straight homosexual for example. So 1953 Kinsey was doing this research And he found that 24% of his female informants had experienced sexual attentions of adults while they were still girls. That is children Kinsey seemed to have thought that this might even be good for a girl. So you can see he has no concept of a category of child sexual abuse But that was before the appearance of child abuse as a concept ranging from battery to incest So Kinsey didn't seem to think that this could be a problem He didn't have the language to talk about the harms that sexual abuse could have or the child abuse in general could have So child abuse the category and the reality Hacking is not arguing that child abuse was created at least not quite He's not saying that nobody ever experienced child abuse before the creation of the category What he's saying is that psychologists and medical practitioners didn't have a way to talk about child abuse before the creation of the category And so it was hard for them to recognize it as happening Because they didn't have a language or the whole set of narratives that comes along with this language to talk about what was happening But he does go on to say and this is probably one of the most controversial things hacking says in this book Something that you guys can think about the first quote Psychiatry did not discover that early and repeated child abuse caused multiple personality It forged the connection in the way that a blacksmith terms formless molten metal into tempered steel That is he says right now Psychologists think that the predominant cause of multiple personality is some form of child abuse usually sex abuse Hacking is saying that that isn't something that science discovered. That's a connection that they created This is probably the most one of the most controversial things he says The reason he says that Is that while the overwhelming majority of people with multiple personality have reported incidents of child abuse in their past That they recall it is also possible to have multiple personality without having this And it was also quite the majority of people who have experienced child abuse do not go on to form multiple personality They may have other mental disorders, but not multiple personality So he's saying that the connection was created by psychologists that it isn't obvious that there is a strong connection between child abuse and multiple personality So He says even there's even when a patient has a memory of child abuse It is difficult to know if this memory was the cause of the disorder since many people who are not multiples are also victims of child abuse He's not saying That child abuse did not exist in the past before we had a concept of it Instead he's saying in his own words It is a real evil and it was so before the concept was constructed the concept nevertheless was constructed Neither the reality nor the construction should be in question There was a time before psychologists could talk about child abuse There was a time when they didn't have that concept There was a time when kinsi looked at the reports of girls and thought oh, isn't that interesting and didn't think oh my god so This just shows the effect language can have on a description of the past on what you see and what you overlook So we return to this slide back here. What happened between 1972 and 1992? Hacking offers this possible explanation If you think the the cause of multiple personality is child abuse Once you have a concept of child abuse in place Which came about in the 70s Hacking says only a society prepared to acknowledge Face this fact only a society prepared to acknowledge that family violence is everywhere That it cuts across all classes That it can happen anywhere Only a society prepared to acknowledge that could find multiple personalities everywhere So what's one reason why there were so fewer multiple personalities in the 70s than in the 90s We didn't have the language to talk about the cause We didn't have any way to talk about child abuse as something problematic We didn't have any way to look for it. We just didn't see it So that's one possibility hacking offers And on that I think maybe people need to go get some sugar stand up Shake their legs and arms or whatever talk about something light And then we will come back and move from the present into the past So I'll see you back in about 10 minutes. Welcome back. I need a gavel again Thank you order order. Thank you Back to child abuse But now you have some food and maybe some sugar. Here we go So while hacking Suggests one reason why multiplicity was on the rise in the 1990s And he isn't interested directly in exploring the controversy that was happening in the 90s between people who said multiplicity wasn't real And people who said it was He does acknowledge some of the controversy and a lot of the controversy actually happened around the issue of cruelty to children or not cruelty to children My apologies. A lot of it happened around the issue of child abuse And in particular repressed memories of child abuse That was a lot of the way people would come in to see a therapist who was Specialized in multiplicity if they were diagnosed as a multiple Often the hunt was now on to find out what had happened to them as children If the patient didn't know of anything that had happened if they couldn't remember anything Then it was thought that the memory was probably repressed And so they needed to search for a repressed memory and the science on repressed memory had a huge controversy As to when repressed memory whether or not repressed memory actually is a memory whether or not repressed memory is trustworthy So this is another controversy that attached itself to the issue of multiplicity That is if the cause of multiplicity is child abuse and the way to find child abuse is through repressed memories Now we have all this controversy on the status of repressed memories And while hacking isn't going to take Side on the controversy because he thinks the whole question of this controversy is the wrong way to go about it He does acknowledge that this was happening So one thing that I want to draw your attention to is some of the issues that were happening in the 90s around the issue of repressed memory And so I have um this quote from I think it's Joan Accella I may be saying her last name wrong In a book interestingly named creating hysteria. We'll come back to the issue of hysteria oddly enough And this book was about repressed memories and in specifically repressed memories of child abuse and she says This is how she characterizes the approach being done If you become distressed at the suggestion that you were molested This is a further tip off that you were in fact molested So when the doctor suggests that there might have been a problem if your childhood if you've become distressed about that That tips them off If on the other hand you suspect that it might have happened. Maybe you were molested that is proof If she's right and there's a huge debate there was a huge debate in the 90s about the status of this She is suggesting here that there was no way to not Confirm the theory that you had suffered child abuse if you were diagnosed with multiple personality So we get this issue of a connection between child abuse repressed memory and mental illness and in particular here multiplicity We see again the importance of memory in constructing identity. That is we have to find a memory of the abuse Child abuse and repressed memories. This is hacking speaking child abuse and repressed memories of child abuse Are supposed to have a powerful effect on the developing adult What interests me is less the truth or falsehood of that proposition Than the way in which assuming it leads people to discover their own past and new That is hacking doesn't care whether or not it's true That what happens in childhood has a profound effect on adulthood what he's interested in is if you believe That what happened in your childhood has a profound effect on your adult life How will that affect the stories you tell about yourself and the way you will think about yourself as an adult He says individuals explain their behavior differently and feel differently about themselves Each of us becomes a new person as we redescribe the past This is another way of emphasizing that if the past is open That is if we can describe the past in different ways we can change our present selves And that's what hacking is really interested in more so than in the debate about whether or not repressed memories are scientifically accurate So if we come back here What hacking is suggesting Is that if we change the description Of the memories if we change the description of how important they are what happened in your childhood really matters for your adulthood If that's what you believe that changes the description of what happened in your childhood What happened then is important right now. It's not just something you can leave in the distant past Furthermore doing that can change the way you think about who you are as a category of person And the idea that this is true Is a way of marshaling memoro politics A way of working on the soul rewriting the soul So we see again this repetition going back in the past retelling the stories in order to change who you are now Or as hacking puts it Each of us becomes a new person as we redescribe the past We're not only retelling our past. We are recreating our present so We really have to deal with the issue of memory, right? It's all coming back to memory Whether or not you are multiple comes down to a amnesia whether or not You have the initial cause of child abuse comes down to memory and repressed memory. It all comes back to memory So what does hacking have to say about memory? 97 percent of multiples are thought to have been abused as children But here's where things start getting a bit weird. That statistic seems consistent Increasingly though as therapists so so therapists were getting the reports of child abuse And of course the thing they did was support this. This is your patient They're coming out with a report of having been abused as a child So you support it and you encourage them to work through it But hacking said increasingly therapists started getting stories that they didn't know how to deal with Stories of being abused as children by aliens alien abduction and increasingly even more so ritual sexual satanic abuse So if satanic abuse around 25 percent of multiples report to have been abused in satanic or sadistic ritual abuses This is kind of witch covens that would capture a child and ritually abuse it and keep the child in a cage or something like that And these were the therapists wanted to support this coming out But they increasingly the stories got more bizarre more and more people were involved and the therapists started getting concerned Little to no evidence actually supports much of these claims The 25 percent of satanic ritual abuse When they go back and look at where the person says that this happened and how many people were involved They can't find any forensic or any kind of evidence linking that this happened But because most people are diagnosed as multiples in their mid 30s Most of the abuse that is being reported happened over 20 years ago in which case it would be very hard to find the evidence anyway So we end up in a very difficult situation where there's no evidence to support claims that are getting increasingly bizarre But you wouldn't expect to find evidence anyway Because the claims are of something that happened so long ago And this just continues to fuel the debate about whether or not the memory is genuine This leads to uh in the 90s the creation of the false memory syndrome foundation This is as people were reporting childhood abuse and in particular childhood abuse at the hands of family members and close family friends And the family members in front close family friends were saying that they didn't do this So we had this issue of people saying it did happen and people saying it didn't happen The false memory syndrome foundation was created In order to try and support people who they said were being falsely charged of satanic ritual abuse and other kinds of abuse We know from uh research into memory not repressed memory That's the harder to research but research into memory in general That it can be quite easy to have a memory that is not entirely accurate Because you misremember things Because things don't always match up if you have your memory and then you look at a video It might not be the same. Uh, so elizabeth luftis wrote A book on false memory And which she reports having had uh, she was nine years old when she went On a vacation with her mother and her aunt And her mother on that vacation drowned in the hotel pool Her mother died Her aunt once said to luftis when she was in her 40s Well, you must remember that because you were the person who found your mother And luftis said immediately she had a full blown memory Of seeing her mother drowned in the pool And she couldn't believe that she'd forgotten that she was the one who found her mother And then she went back and looked at the police report and looked at all the evidence that had been collected at the time And talked to other people who were present and it turns out she didn't find her mother Someone else found her mother and they quite sensibly kept the nine-year-old girl away from the pool So that she wouldn't have to see her mother But the mere suggestion from her aunt that she had been the one to find her mother Created in luftis an entire memory of this happening, even though it hadn't happened So we know that memories can be mistrusting that they can lead us astray Repressed memories are different and the science is still out as far as I know on how repressed memories work But we know regular memories are not entirely accurate So the false memory cindery foundation was created to try and dispel the idea that these memories that were Surfacing of in particular satanic ritual abuse were not accurate And hacking reports prodigy about stories provided by the altars was compared to a sort of reverse Transference the therapist was too emotionally committed to what an altar said and had lost all critical faculty Yeah faculties So the false memory cindery foundation and people on this side started saying that the fault was the therapists That they were encouraging the altars too much and believing that the altars stories were true This leaves us with a bunch of questions Is the false memory syndrome foundation and other foundations like that engaged in victim blaming? By denying the accuracy of the patient's stories Are the therapists themselves criminally criminally responsible for adding to their patients suffering by encouraging their patients to uncover false memories That is by strongly suggesting and encouraging that the patient must have been abused as a child Do they create a memory of child abuse and thus add to the patients and their families suffering? These are medical questions But it is also important to note. They are moral questions And this is hacking's point that medicine has been marshaled in the service of morality here That we're using the language of medicine to talk about these moral questions Hacking says the only science taylor made to swim on top of the sea of morality and personal values was the science of memory So this should return us to these kind of questions The idea that we have a science now taylor made To secularize the soul By allowing us to talk about memory and very scientific language to allow us to talk about Moral questions in the language of science as opposed to in the language of ethics or something like that Okay, we're going back into the past now ready See we're on to the green arrows. It's working. All right traveling back in time First I want to take a little segue in our trip back in time to talk about multiplicity and fiction This is something that hacking talks about at a few points in his In his book, but he doesn't highlight it really strongly But I think it's so interesting and being that you're in an arts one class You're reading philosophy history alongside literature. I thought talking about multiplicity and fiction was probably a good idea So hacking notes that there have been a lot of multiples in fiction or at least doubles So he gives us the example of dr. Jacqueline mr. Hyde, which you may or may not be familiar with I'm going to give you another example Incredible hulk Right another multiple multiple in fiction Here's another one Golem or what's his other name? Smeagol? Smeagol. Yeah So in each of these cases, it's only two personalities, but remember that's all we need for the dsm. We need at least two So this would count But there's something else interesting about all of these Anybody note any similarity between the three? They're all fictional Yeah, they're all men And yet 90 percent of multiples are women That's something I don't know. I'm leaving you guys to talk about that. Why is that happening? Why do we have men multiples in fiction and women multiples in reality? I don't know So One big debate is actually where are the male multiples some people have argued that The fact that multiplicity is 90 percent females suggest that we're missing the males that we're misdiagnosing them as something else That there really are just as many males as females, but we're not catching them However, others say that this is no It's just a more commonly female illness in the same way that Alcohol abuse and addiction tends to be a more commonly male illness and that that's just the way it is So there's a debate as to why there are so few men in reality who are multiples Okay, so we have multiplicity in fiction and one thing that's interesting about that Is if we think about the power of categories and of actions under a description fiction kind of primes us To accept certain things in reality So the best science fiction is like really hopeful Like when i'm having a really bad day, I watch star check Because everything's so rosy and egalitarian and well, it's not really but it tries to be And that makes me feel better um So multiplicity in fiction primes us for the idea for accepting the idea that there can be more than one person in one body Because we've seen it and it's totally intelligible. It's right there So it primes us for the idea of accepting this narrative Which makes it easier to accept it in fact Because it's intelligible. We've seen it before Hacking says we must not discount the interaction between fact and fiction here at first glance fact and fiction are completely mismatched The fictional multiples are all men And the diagnosed ones are women But He goes on to argue that the fact that we have these narratives these repeated narratives of one body with more than one person inside And i'm sure you can think of more The fact that we have these narratives makes multiplicity intelligible to us when it happens in fact, so it's easier to understand He goes on though. There's something else that's happening here the effect of technology So when hacking tells us the story of multiples at different points in history He talks about eve, which was a multiple in the 1930s So i'll talk about in a minute and when eve changed her alter states She went into this kind of like trance in between So she would be one in one state one personality And then she would kind of go into a trance and get very still in bow her head and then she would become a different personality However by 1972 civil Who had 16 personalities could switch between the personalities with no trance at all She just switched And actually the description of civil was that she switched Like a television remote switching channels I don't know how many of you watch tv. I know it's all youtube now, but that's a remote It switches channels Here's something you may not know about remotes Remotes became very popular and wide used in the 70s to the 80s because before that it only had three channels so Don't really need a remote and they didn't have the technology for it. The first remote in my house was wired to the television You could only get so far away There was a wire So it's interesting that civil's way she changed between alters is now like clicking between the channels of a tv Whereas eve in the 1930s lawn before the remote Did not switch she switched like a radio where you have to tune it in and it's static and then it kind of the sound comes through There's also the power of the camera to capture these multiples and this was supposed to make it scientific So the doctors would photograph these women in each state So that you would have a picture of how their facial expressions change of how they carry themselves changes One multiple might be hunched and the other one might be very bold and stick her chest out and be like screw you world And and they had all of these pictures to show this So they were documenting it. So there's an effect of technology happening on multiplicity too here We go from the fiction to the fact Back to the fiction. I don't know if you noticed that it's a loop Like human looping Back to the fiction And indeed there is eve Eve is one of our 20th century prominent multiple And eve's story was made into a movie Called the three faces of eve. There was like good eve and bad eve and neutral eve. You've had three alters It was made into a film And after the film came out More people started having multiplicity Then this movie came out cybil Darn sally field Who you may or may not know I think she won an award for it actually I can't remember for sure Anyway cybil had 16 personalities After the movie came out Guess how many personalities an average multiple had 16 Before the movie came out on my average multiple had three like eve After cybil came out the average multiple had 16 We have another show being on right now actually As far as I know the what is it the united states of terra is not based on a on a real person Both cybil and eve are based on real people. They're what we call docu dramas Based on one woman's real life story The united republic of terra or the united states of terra is not as far as I know based on a one person But it is giving a very paradigmatic case of a multiple one of her alters is male She doesn't quite have enough alters yet though every season they add a few more alters So she may get up to 16. I'm not sure But it's out right now I want to talk about one more thing with cybil There was a book not that old a book 2011 published by debbie nathan Who's a journalist called cybil exposed In which she argues that cybil's therapist cultivated multiplicity in cybil by encouraging cybil to read books on multiplicity And that other than having 16 alters cybil was a paradigmatic multiple. She had too many alters for her time period So we can see the way in which Hacking would say that cybil took in The information the description the category of what a multiple is And she exemplified this category in many many ways, but she also changed the category such that now a multiple has 16 alters So she took the category. She exemplified the category and she changed the category. This is the looping effect The way we change categories and categories change us There it is looping Which raises an interesting question for those of us interested in writing and reading fiction This fiction having an effect on reality Is fiction allowing us to make different categories of people because if we find it intelligible in the fictional world Is it easier to find it intelligible in the factual world? Remember, of course That the fact that fiction might be making people up doesn't necessarily mean that the descriptions we're using are not real Because money is something we made up And unfortunately it is also very real It's just paper it is only worth something because we all agree that it's worth something But that doesn't mean it's not worth anything. It's worth something. It's important This is again to say that just because something is human created doesn't mean it's not real So this again should remind us That what hacking is aiming at here is exploring the way the language of medicine has been marshaled quite self-consciously In order to measure secularize discuss the soul In order to find ways of changing us of Redescribing us revisiting our past revisiting our categories and changing who we are Okay, so let's go further past hysteria So I told you that around the 1980s The cause of multiplicity was thought to be child abuse But that wasn't always the cause So in the 19th century the cause was thought to be hysteria I know you heard a tiny bit about hysteria two weeks ago last week. I've forgotten when that was last week Teeny tiny bit about hysteria, but does anyone know anything about hysteria as an illness It's actually not in the dsm anymore. They've taken it out, but it used to be Yeah, yes hysteria is predominantly a female illness And it was thought to have something to do with the uterus In an ancient Greek hysteria. I think the word actually means wandering uterus And the thought was that the uterus wandered out of place And messed with your head Okay, so they didn't think that in 19th century france But um, they did they they didn't necessarily have a really clear idea about what caused hysteria But any woman who was kind of not interested in following Feminine norms of the time was thought to be hysterical. So like I don't know if you wanted the right to vote You were probably hysterical Um, and there were varying solutions for hysteria The vibrate vibrator was created to combat hysteria Because maybe having though they weren't orgasms, of course the female orgasm doesn't exist So says 19th century france But the vibrator was thought to like soothe the uterus so that maybe you would be okay And your mental problems would go away Um I was also thought maybe you needed to have a baby That would solve things or or conversely, maybe you were having too much sex If you were too promiscuous, you probably had hysteria as well You can see quite strongly the way in which hysteria Tried to whether self-consciously or not have women conform to a feminine ideal Because if you didn't something was medically wrong with you Although then you got a vibrator. So I don't know how much of a deterrent that would be but Actually, the worst was you would get a hysterectomy They were just removing of the uterus and that would Was supposed to solve the hysteria Men could have hysteria But it was much less common and it was usually as a result of some trauma happening typically in war So what we now think of post traumatic stress disorder in in men at the time was hysteria But women our uteruses are so unstable hysteria just happened All right, so the past cause of multiplicity was thought to be hysteria Now we know there is a jump in multiplicity in the diagnosis of multiplicity in the 1990s in america and the us in particular There is also a jump in the diagnosis of multiplicity in france in the 1800s French multiple personality was born under the sign of hysteria That was if you were a multiple it was because of hysteria It was a Comorbid disease if you like hysteria could manifest as multiplicity The connection although it wasn't actually multiplicity. It was double consciousness So it was two alters. Well the host personality and one alter This is precursors to multiplicity The connection between hysteria and what they call double consciousness became so strong That someone who merely split who had a double consciousness two alters Had to be made to have hysterical symptoms That is if you had double consciousness You had to have hysteria What I want you to notice here is that the connection between multiplicity and hysteria is very similar To the connection between multiplicity and child abuse If you have multiplicity We have to go looking for child abuse if you have multiplicity in france in the 1800s We have to go looking for hysteria And and maybe cause it In the period from 1895 to 1910 hysteria ceased to be central to french psychiatry Those they no longer started diagnosing women as being hysterical anymore Um a simple syllogism follows. This is logic If all multiples have to have hysteria and we no longer diagnose people as having hysteria Do we diagnose any multiples anymore? No So hacking says that the reason multiplicity spiked in france and then disappeared is largely because Psychologists no longer look diagnosed for hysteria anymore They decided hysteria was not actually an accurate Description an accurate category of illness and with the loss of hysteria We also lost multiplicity because it had been attached to hysteria In the same way with the rise of child abuse. We might see the rise of multiplicity if we attach it to child abuse So let's go before multiplicity To the deep past Before multiplicity. We had double consciousness and we had this weird issue with trance states So in france, they had double consciousness Which was kind of like multiplicity except there was no need for amnesia There was no discussion of memory at all actually It was just a switching between two different kind of states of being two different personalities There was also an issue of trance states and colonial imperialism and I bring this up because I know um last semester and with Both Why am I blanking on this of the tempest and also with trio? You guys talked a little bit about colonialism and these kinds of issues Hacking says there's something kind of interesting that happened here He says instead of seeing western dissociative disorders as a local and specific form of trance Instead psychiatrists sought to suggest that trance is a sub type sub type of western illness dissociative disorders So trance states happen in a lot of different religions around the world A lot of different cultural practices involve trance states Sometimes with the use of drugs or other inebriating substances sometimes not Sometimes dance or meditation or those kind of things can bring about trance states sometimes different costumes are associated with trance states And hacking says that people who are proponents of multiplicity said look We know that there's a spike in the states and you're arguing that oh Well multiplicity is just happening in the states because american therapists are obsessed with it and they're causing it in their patients But no multiplicity happens everywhere trance states are actually also multiplicity Why does he call this imperialism? It's because we're taking our own categories the category of multiplicity and we are applying it in a completely different context So we're saying trance states are really part of dissociative identity Instead of saying, huh, maybe dissociative identity is like a really specific part of trance states, which would be a different way of doing it So this is a way in which the language is still supporting this kind of colonial mentality So hacking is not too happy about this He says 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 That is not only are we colonizing other cultures by taking our own Categories and placing it on them. We are equally colonizing our own past looking back at past european religious practices If you like in terms of western Yeah, so european largely in terms of north america looking back at our past european religious practices And characterizing them in a pathological scientific language Characterizing them as medicalized instead of as something that belongs to a different context So we're not only colonializing other cultures. We are colonializing our own past says hacking That is we read multiple personality into other uses of trance that appeared in earlier european societies And i would add in other non european societies And find it very hard to see them as they were seen not as precursors of multiple personality disorder In adequately diagnosed but as cultural uses of trance with their own integrity So this is another way in which Redescribing the past actions under a new description can change the way we think about these actions And thus we lose the old description and what might have been valuable about it If we look back at the dsm, I told you we were going to come back to d religious practices The dsm 5 specifically is trying to kind of change this So it says and this is something new that religious practices are omitted So it will outright say no, we can't call trance states a form of multiplicity But this didn't used to be the case So before multiplicity the paradigm case of double consciousness Was felida x we don't know her last name actually i think they do now, but we'll just call her this And she was a case of double consciousness A switching between two alter states So hacking says that it is perfectly possible to imagine that felida manifested at least three Fragmentary alters and you can look at what's said about her as you read through her chapter It's possible to imagine she had at least three alters in addition to her normal and second state That's how they used to talk about it So there'd be your normal state what your personality is by default and then your second state the doubling of the consciousness So what is he saying here? He's saying that it's possible The felida actually had five personalities the normal state second state and three other alters But azam who was her doctor His model was doubling the categories that he had in place was double consciousness There could be no third personality to see this should sound kind of similar It's sort of like how we couldn't see child abuse before we had that category Multiple personality did not yet exist. And so azam couldn't say that felida x had five personalities He had to say she had double consciousness um, and in fact, I think what he ended up saying was something like she had double consciousness with the complicating factors that made the second personality kind of Unstable or something and that's how we accounted for the other three changes that happened Advocates of the diagnosis of multiple personality will want to say That felida had more than two alters They want to say this because it makes multiple personality look like it has a long history Which makes it look more like it's fact But hacking says we know there could be at least five Under a different type of treatment with a different psychologist in a different setting All of the alters might have flourished there might have been clues to felida's under underlying distress But if we ask about what was rather than what might have been That is what actually happened rather than what we think could have happened if the doctor had known something about multiplicity Felida had two alters That was how she was thought of described talked about treated by her family and regarded by her neighbors Everyone around her saw her as someone who had double consciousness That was how she was categorized and even more importantly that was how she felt about herself That was how she experienced herself So when she told her own narrative She told it as a patient of double consciousness not as someone who had multiplicity So hacking says we can't really go back and apply this category of multiplicity to felida x Because that's not how she thought of herself redescribing her that way is to lose Genuinely how she described herself. It's to erode this Which is risking losing the authentic authenticity of her own description, but don't worry Because we're now moving from double consciousness to multiplicity So it wasn't felida felida was double consciousness though. She was a weird case of double consciousness Where people couldn't quite figure out exactly How she was so odd, but it had to still be double consciousness. So fine so she was double consciousness, but Then we got this guy louis v vet And from louis v vet we get the birth of multiplicity so This is interesting This is part of what makes multiplicity such a paradigm example for hacking you can pinpoint its creation as a category When did multiple personality come into being late in the afternoon of the 27th of july 1885? That's when it happened Uh julie voisson who was v vet's psychiatrist presented the case of v vets at a meeting To his superiors so two older psychiatrists working in the industry to try and ask them like what the hell Um, and he presented it as an unusual case of double consciousness You can read about louis v vet. It's very interesting case He said this was unlike any other case he had ever encountered and he didn't quite know what to do about it Calling the double consciousness didn't seem quite right V vet had eight distinct personalities stated The meet the people at the meeting listened to voisson's case And they sat down and they hammered out the details And they decided, you know what v vet can't actually be classified as a double consciousness case He doesn't fit Oh my god, we need a new classification And so right there at the meeting they hammered out a new classification a new category of mental illness V vet had eight distinct personalities stated the meeting broke up at 6 30 p.m And the discourse of multiple personality had just been put in place at that meeting because of voisson's depiction of v vet So it's not just uh the 27th of july 1885. It's the 27th of july 1885 at 6 30 p.m And we have the birth of multiplicity This is the classic paradigm case of human looping V vet comes to the doctor seeking a sort of a solution seeking an explanation of what's going on seeking a narrative That he can tell to make sense of what's happening to him The doctor gives him a classification of double consciousness He and the doctor worked together with this classification, but it doesn't fit not quite right V vet tries to make it fit the doctor tries to make it fit We have a lot of stories that v vet really wanted to please so he was very motivated to try and conform But it didn't work So what happens the description changes through its interaction with the person So it's not just that we change to fit the description We also change descriptions to fit ourselves and that's what happened in the case of v vet He and the doctors changed the description Now is when memory becomes important memory wasn't important for double consciousness If you only have to keep track of two alternating consciousnesses It's not actually that hard. There's only two of them If you have eight personality states inside somebody's body, how do you keep track of eight? This is where memory became important. We're asking them. What do you remember? What don't you remember about the past week or the past 24 hours became really important for figuring out How many altars were there? This is where amnesia became very important for delineating the borders of different personalities When you only have two no one was worried about this, but when you have eight Memory becomes very crucial to identifying each one So not only is multiplicity born But multiplicity is now tied to memory and that means it's tied to all this memoro politics stuff The way you remember not just what you remember We come back to the question hacking began with he's taken us into the past and brought us back up to the present Is multiple personality real? reexamining the 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 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 in the most common case of mixed origin That is we have a language in place to talk about people to talk both about fictional characters like golem And to talk about ourselves. It's the same language essentially What makes a novel so gripping part of what makes a novel so gripping when it is gripping is that those characters seem real Why do they seem real because the language is being used correctly to make them seem real that we create our own reality Our own identity through the stories we tell through the language we use So when it comes to the language that will be used to describe ourselves each of us I love this line each of us is a half grade of imagination and reality Is multiple personality real? I don't know. Is any of us real? Is anybody's identity real if what you mean by real is has no Corruption or influenced by other people by the language we use by what you read by what other people told you No, all of us is a mixture between fact and fiction Another way I once heard this described the same idea of human leaping by another philosopher Naomi Sheeman Is that she said humans are kind of like constellations Like the stars are there right What happened to you and what you did your actions and what happened to you is there in your past The stars are there in the sky But the way we link them together to create pictures to create constellations like Orion and stuff that's up to us We don't have to link them that way And it's the same with your past the way you describe it is up to you Unfortunately as with the constellations, it's not entirely up to you There is a cultural tradition and there are people in positions of power Who will put categories on you and strongly encourage you to take on those categories and take the ownership yourself In the same way, you know, no matter how hard I might try and convince people that actually The big dipper is a shopping cart. Everyone keeps calling it the big dipper so We're both socially created and individually created its fact and its fiction Old actions under new descriptions may be reexamined in memory And if these are genuinely new descriptions descriptions not available or perhaps non-existent at the time of the episodes remembered Then something is experienced now. This is so cool Something is experienced now in memory that in a certain extent sense did not exist before The action took place But not the action under the new description So given that we can keep having new descriptions It is possible to have a description now that gives you a new experience of something that you did when you were 10 That is so cool Okay So I want to do one more thing The history of multiplicity demonstrates that using the new descriptions made available by the development of the science of the memory We are able to create new human kinds that did not exist before But hacking says this means that we are all in tension in a tense place. If you can stay, please stay for this We are torn between Freud who you led read last week. That's Freud and jane another psychologist Both Freud and jane had a very different attitude towards patients jane's patients would come in suffering and jane would find the cause of their suffering And then he would hypnotize them into forgetting the cause Right, if you don't remember the abuse problem solved well, you know except people kept Unreuncovering the buried memory and had to go back to jane to be hypnotized again And at one point he joked that he better outlive all of his patients So okay, that didn't work super well, but that was one strategy just avoid it So hacking says jane Cured his patients by telling them lies And getting them to believe it He lied to them so that they could get over their problems He found what the truth was and then he just pretended like it wasn't there So he created false consciousness in his patients. He got them to believe something that wasn't true Freud on the other hand Got to uncover the truth He wanted his patients patients patients to face the truth Unfortunately, he wanted them to face the truth as he saw it Maybe not as they saw it so he didn't allow them to have their own descriptions And if you've ever read well, I know you've read some Freud if you've ever read more Freud some of his descriptions are pretty weird Eatable complex. Anyway So we have no doubts that Freud very often deluded himself But he did try and get his patients to face the truth So hacking says in the matter of lost and recovered memories. We are the heirs of Freud and jane We are torn between false consciousness And trying to figure out the one description that will fix everything But he also says says hacking at the end that self-knowledge is a virtue in its own right And this is where I think things get weird Because if we are all a mixture of fact and fiction if we're all Co-creating each other through the way we describe each other through the categories we use Is genuine self-knowledge possible That is if we're all trying to be pulled between fiction of jane And Freud's choice of i'm gonna pick a category and place it on you and you better accept it How do we get to this place of having self-knowledge be a virtue in its own right? I don't know that's for you guys this seminar Maybe there's lots to talk about but that's my one of my puzzles coming out of this Thank you so much arts one is wonderful. I will miss you Have a great rest of the semester