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Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. By Ian Hacking. New York: Princeton University Press, 1995. ix, 336 pp. $24.95.
For several years now, the philosopher Ian Hacking has been studying and writing about "multiple personality" as a description of a certain kind of person, as a diagnostic category, and recently as a way of life. Hacking has a long-standing interest in how scientific notions of kinds of people affect the kinds of people we turn out to be. In other words, Hacking, like many in the humanities today, is interested in the social construction of things which we might take as natural or given. Whether it is the creation of a moral absolute, such as child abuse or the use of statistics to define what is "given," Hacking has done important historical-philosophical research on how what we make up (or what is made up for us) comes to determine who we are.
The major difference between Hacking's approach to showing the social construction of things and that of many others is that he does not think that a cultural entity is any less real for having been constructed in society (12,67). But this does not lead the philosopher in the direction of hyperbole: he has no interest in making the claim that everything is necessarily (or always already) socially constructed, or that there is nothing outside the text. Hacking's work is careful and thrives on fine-tuning distinctions rather than on annihilating them. In the end, this allows the reader to take his major claims very seriously. It is important to state what this book is not. It is not another salvo in the battles over false memory, child abuse, suggestion in therapy, or the impact of the media on the ways we describe and live our suffering. Although there is much in Rewriting the Soul that is relevant to these debates, Hacking is working through them in an attempt to elucidate the conceptual background that has made them possible. He finds that that background was formed in late nineteenth-century France, when memory was made to stand in for the soul in the scientific study of the personality. When memory became an object of scientific knowledge, it was used as the key...