Reading Room
Multiple Personality
Mirrors of a New Model of Mind?
From: Investigations; Institute of Noetic Sciences
"The mind is its own place,
and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven." John Milton
(1608-1674)
The waking rational self is usually quite sure that we are one
mind in one body. The self that dreams knows another world,
but assumes it belongs in the realm of imagination and fantasy. But can waking
minds be divided up in such a way that several streams of life that are quite
separate from one another can exist concurrently in one human being? if so,
then does the old saying: "The left hand doesn't know what the right hand
is doing" become a kind of reality? Is there more to tales like Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde than we ever thought? Well, in some senses, we experienced a
"first wave" resurgence of this idea in the 1970's when the studies
of splitbrain patients hit both the science journals and eventually the popular
press with all the force of a new myth in the culture. Yes, there were clearly
some important findings in the area, but they all too rapidly became used as
metaphors for all manner of unrelated claims. We may now be about to experience
a "second wave" of data on the subject with the recent resurgence of
interest and research into the phenomena of Multiple Personality.
One of the interesting aspects of controversies in contemporary science and
the study of the mind is the way in which ideas move from center-stage to the
periphery during one period, only later to be returned to the center of
attention. Sometimes this happens because a phenomenon is simply too complex to
be addressed until the methods of science have evolved to deal properly with
it. On other occasions it occurs because the strategies of its proponents are
not soundly formulated. Or it can occur because science-at-large finds an idea
simply too strange or preposterous to deal with. It seems that the scientific
fate of the concept of Multiple Personality has been a cross between the latter
two of these. As we shall see in the historical sections of this report,
Multiple Personality was topic of great fascination at the end of the last
century, and up into the early 1900's attempts were being made to explain it in
terms of the proposed capacity of the mind to dissociate. These ideas were
proposed by the First Dynamic School of Psychiatry, now an almost forgotten
school of thought from the turn of the century. But, one might ask; why was it
forgotten and why did the subject virtually fade from view? As Dr. John
Kihlstrom of the University of Wisconsin recently wrote:
The eventual dominance of psychoanalysis in clinical psychology
and scientific personality led investigators to be interested in different
syndromes and phenomena, a different model of the mind, and the eventual
replacement of dissociation by repression as the hypothetical mechanism for
rendering mental contents unconscious. At the same time, the behaviorist
revolution in academic psychology removed consciousness (not to mention the
unconscious) from the vocabulary of science. At fault were the dissociation
theorists themselves, who often made extravagant claims for the centrality of
the phenomenon (of dissociation) and whose investigations were often
methodologically flawed.
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