MEMORY is a powerful tool in quests for understanding, justice, and knowledge. It raises consciousness. It heals some wounds, restores dignity, and prompts uprisings. What better motto for automobile license plates in Québec than Je me souviens?—I remember. Memories of the holocaust and of slavery must be passed on to new generations. Severe and repeated child abuse is said to be a cause of multiple personality disorder; the illness is to be treated through a recovery of lost memories of pain. An aging population is scared of Alzheimer’s disease, which it regards as a disease of memory. In a most extraordinary venture into the mind by way of biochemistry, the central focus of research in brain science is memory. An astonishing variety of concerns are pulled in under that one heading: memory.
My curiosity is piqued exactly when something seems inevitable. Why are such diverse interests grouped under memory? One senior American philosopher, Nelson Goodman, as committed to the arts as to the sciences, has called himself skeptical, analytical, and constructionalist. I have those tendencies too. I wonder skeptically: why has it been essential to organize so many of our present projects in terms of memory? I wonder analytically: what are the dominating principles that lock us into memory as an approach to so many of the problems of life, from child rearing to patriotism, from aging to anxiety? And I wonder, what constructions underlie these principles? I am not looking for the trite wisdom that there are different kinds of memory. I wonder why there is one creature, “memory,” of which there are so many different kinds.
I do not want, now, a grand reflection on memory, or its associated horrors such as genocide and child abuse. Skeptics are unenthusiastic about systems, about theories of everything. I propose to examine an entirely specific case of memory-thinking. Multiple personality is perfect for the purpose. This illness, which seemed as nothing twenty-five years ago, is flourishing all over North America. Amnesia has been built in to the official diagnostic criteria for what has just been renamed dissociative identity disorder. Dissociation into personality fragments is caused (on current theorizing) by abuse in childhood that had long been forgotten. Multiple personality is a paradigmatic, if tiny, memory-concept.
We can get some perspective on the question of how memory came into play, because multiple personality, though florid now, is not new. One of its previous incarnations, beginning in 1876, took place when a whole new discourse of memory came into being. People have always been fascinated by memory. In classical Greece, and in the High Middle Ages, mastery of the art of memory was one of the most admired of skills. But the sciences of memory arose only in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of these sciences, especially developed in France, fixed on pathological memory, and multiple personality is a part of that new science. I argue that the way in which the sciences of memory evolved has much to do with the frontline memory confrontations of today.
As a research strategy I have always been much taken by what Michel Foucault named archaeology. I think that there are sometimes fairly sharp mutations in systems of thought and that these redistributions of ideas establish what later seems inevitable, unquestionable, necessary. I hold that whatever made possible the most up-to-the-moment events in the little saga of multiple personality is strongly connected to fundamental and long-term aspects of the great field of knowledge about memory that emerged in the last half of the nineteenth century. I can use multiple personality, then and now, as a microcosm of thinking-and-talking-about-memory, then and now. Hence in the middle of the book I open a narrow window looking out onto memory—and multiple personality—long ago. The venue is France 1874–1886. I choose it because that was the center of the span of time when the structure of the modern sciences of memory came into being.
It is by no means an accident that in precisely that period the word trauma acquired a new meaning. It had always meant a lesion or wound, but its meaning was limited to the physical, the physiological. Then suddenly the word got its most common and compelling meaning, a psychological hurt, a spiritual lesion, a wound to the soul. Some historical dictionaries direct us to Freud, in the early 1890s, for the first usage of the word in that sense. We must go back further than that, for Freud only deployed what had already become current. He did so in connection with memory, for it is memories of psychic trauma that transfix us. The idea of trauma was already intimately connected with multiple personality. So many striking changes in ideas occur in my chosen two decades that I become convinced that we are looking at a radically formative moment, even for the idea of memory itself. The very fact that we do not think about these changes—who wonders how trauma became a lesion of the soul?—shows that we have come to think of them as inevitable, invisible, a priori.
In preparing this work, feeling the tentacles of madness surround me, I was brought sharply to my senses in The Musical Offering, a café in Berkeley, California, which displayed a large and handsome poster of a rainy Paris street, “The World of the Impressionists, 1874–1886.” I had become so caught up in my strange tales that I had forgotten what all of us know about that time and place. We all have a vision of what that world looked like, at least to the chosen few. Let their world be my baseline. I ask you to imagine that I am talking about the world of the impressionists. Visually it was a new world, created not only by artists but also by the camera. The camera was truly objective because no human observer intervened between the object and the record. Alongside the impressions made with paint we must place the reproducible images captured by the lens. Toward the end of my chosen twelve years Jean-Martin Charcot, master neurologist, became fascinated by pictorial representations of hysteria, old and new. He and his students made this illness visual. Hysterics had to have some affliction that could be photographed. Multiple personality was thought to be a bizarre form of hysteria. The very first multiple personality—multiple meaning more than two—was photographed in each of ten personality states. Here they are in my hand, among the pages of a printed book, as faithful today as in 1885, when the poses were captured on the photographic plate.
Multiple personality became an object of knowledge in many ways. Photography was part of the initial rhetoric of multiplicity. Today quantitative tests of dissociation fill a similar role. My chief topic, toward 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. Science had hitherto been excluded from study of the soul itself. The new sciences of memory came into being in order to conquer that resilient core of Western thought and practice. That is the bond that connects, under the heading of memory, all those different kinds of knowledge and rhetoric I have mentioned. When the family falls apart, when parents abuse their children, when incest obsesses the media, when one people tries to destroy another, we are concerned with defects of the soul. But we have learned how to replace the soul with knowledge, with science. Hence spiritual battles are fought, not on the explicit ground of the soul, but on the terrain of memory, where we suppose that there is such a thing as knowledge to be had.
Talk of the soul sounds old-fashioned, but I take it seriously. The soul that was scientized was something transcendental, perhaps immortal. Philosophers of my stripe speak of the soul not to suggest something eternal, but to invoke character, reflective choice, self-understanding, values that include honesty to others and oneself, and several types of freedom and responsibility. Love, passion, envy, tedium, regret, and quiet contentment are the stuff of the soul. This may be a very old idea of the soul, pre-Socratic. I do not think of the soul as unitary, as an essence, as one single thing, or even as a thing at all. It does not denote an unchanging core of personal identity. One person, one soul, may have many facets and speak with many tongues. To think of the soul is not to imply that there is one essence, one spiritual point, from which all voices issue. In my way of thinking the soul is a more modest concept than that. It stands for the strange mix of aspects of a person that may be, at some time, imaged as inner—a thought not contradicted by Wittgenstein’s dictum, that the body is the best picture of the soul.
I am not writing about the soul in the way that you might expect in a book about multiple personality. I am preoccupied by attempts to scientize the soul through the study of memory. Some philosophers, and not a few clinicians, have wanted to make a quite different use of multiple personality. They argue that it shows something about what it is to be a person, or the limits of personal identity. Some have gone so far as to say that this disorder provides a window on the relation between brain and mind, or even contributes to solving the mind-body problem. I have no such illusions, no such intentions, no such problem.
I came to this topic when thinking about how kinds of people come into being. How do systems of knowledge about kinds of people interact with the people who are known about? The story of multiple personality is, in all too many different ways, a story about what I have called making up people.1 I am fascinated by the dynamics of the relation between people who are known about, the knowledge about them, and the knowers. That is a public dynamics. There is also a more private one. The theory and practice of multiple personality today is bound up with memories of childhood, memories that are to be not only recovered but also redescribed. New meanings change the past. It is reinterpreted, yes, but more than that, it is reorganized, repopulated. It becomes filled with new actions, new intentions, new events that caused us to be as we are. I have to discuss not only making up people but making up ourselves by reworking our memories.
I dwell on these difficult matters at the end of the book. In the middle I excavate the sciences of memory that provide the ground for so many present concerns. I begin by describing some recent dynamics. I tell how multiples, theories of multiple personality, and experts on the disorder have been interacting in the past few years. I tell only enough to set my stage. The whole field of multiple personality is ripe for participant observation and sociological analysis. But that is a task for others. I have scrupulously limited myself to matters of public record.