Rewriting the Soul Review of External Book Review and Works Cited

 

            Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory by Ian Hacking 

                                               Book Review: Review of External Book Review

           Review of Book Review by The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis by Stephen E Braude.

The evidence is not in favor of child abuse being the foremost cause of Multiple Personality Disorder. The fact that child abuse is not the foremost cause of Mutliple Personality Disorder is made evident throught the book’s logical rebuttal of claims connecting the child abuse to the development of multiple personality disorder. Ian Hacking also suggests that our way of looking at the past is colored and even restructured by concpets such as child abuse.  Ian Hacking worries that calling oneself a multiple, with all the baggage that comes with it, can lead to a false self-knowledge that is created through therapy. He does not think that the consequences of therapy are against utilitarian mores, but he does morally object to them on the grounds of the fact that no one should have a false self-knowledge or a “false consciousness” (258). In response to this claim, Stephen E Braude asserts that it seems implausible that language, specifically the language used in the therapeutic process, should serve as a barrier to knowledge, particularly self-knowledge. I believe that false memories are a serious topic, according to Elizabeth Loftus, because false memories created by therapy and by reading various psychological self help books can lead to confirmation bias which leads therapists to only see evidence which corroborates their ideas of patients having trauma in their past. Interestingly, Braude does not seem to understand that therapy can be bad for patients in this respect. 

 

 Works Cited

 

Braude, Stephen E. “Hacking, Ian (1995). Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory.Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Pp. 336, $24.95.” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, vol. 38, no. 4, 1996, pp. 303–306., doi:10.1080/00029157.1996.10403357.

Loftus, Elizabeth F. “The Reality of Repressed Memories.” American Psychologist, vol. 48, no. 5, 1993, pp. 518–537., doi:10.1037//0003-066x.48.5.518.