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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33350 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Highly recommend reading Ian Hacking's Making Up People which was a decade ahead of The Geography of Madness in describing this phenomenon.

Around 1970, there arose a few paradigm cases of strange behaviour similar to phenomena discussed a century earlier and largely forgotten. A few psychiatrists began to diagnose multiple personality. It was rather sensational. More and more unhappy people started manifesting these symptoms. At first they had the symptoms they were expected to have, but then they became more and more bizarre. First, a person had two or three personalities. Within a decade the mean number was 17. This fed back into the diagnoses, and became part of the standard set of symptoms. It became part of the therapy to elicit more and more alters. Psychiatrists cast around for causes, and created a primitive, easily understood pseudo-Freudian aetiology of early sexual abuse, coupled with repressed memories. Knowing this was the cause, the patients obligingly retrieved the memories. More than that, this became a way to be a person. In 1986, I wrote that there could never be ‘split’ bars, analogous to gay bars. In 1991 I went to my first split bar.

This story can be placed in a five-part framework. We have (a) a classification, multiple personality, associated with what at the time was called a ‘disorder’. This kind of person is now a moving target. We have (b) the people, those I call ‘unhappy’, ‘unable to cope’, or whatever relatively non-judgmental term you might prefer. There are (c) institutions, which include clinics, annual meetings of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation, afternoon talkshows on television (Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera made a big thing of multiples, once upon a time), and weekend training programmes for therapists, some of which I attended. There is (d) the knowledge: not justified true belief, once the mantra of analytic philosophers, but knowledge in Popper’s sense of conjectural knowledge, and, more specifically, the presumptions that are taught, disseminated and refined within the context of the institutions. Especially the basic facts (not ‘so-called facts’, or ‘facts’ in scare-quotes): for example, that multiple personality is caused by early sexual abuse, that 5 per cent of the population suffer from it, and the like. There is expert knowledge, the knowledge of the professionals, and there is popular knowledge, shared by a significant part of the interested population. There was a time, partly thanks to those talkshows and other media, when ‘everyone’ believed that multiple personality was caused by early sexual abuse. Finally, there are (e) the experts or professionals who generate (d) the knowledge, judge its validity, and use it in their practice. They work within (c) institutions that guarantee their legitimacy, authenticity and status as experts. They study, try to help, or advise on the control of (b) the people who are (a) classified as of a given kind.

This banal framework can be used for many examples, but roles and weights will be different in every case. There is no reason to suppose that we shall ever tell two identical stories of two different instances of making up people. There is also an obvious complication: there are different schools of thought. In this first instance, there was the multiple movement, a loose alliance of patients, therapists and psychiatric theorists, on the one hand, who believed in this diagnosis and in a certain kind of person, the multiple. There was the larger psychiatric establishment that rejected the diagnosis altogether: a doctor in Ontario, for example, who, when a patient arrives announcing she has multiple personality, demands to be shown her Ontario Health Insurance card (which has a photograph and a name on it) and says: ‘This is the person I am treating, nobody else.’ Thus there are rival frameworks, and reactions and counter-actions between them further contribute to the working out of this kind of person, the multiple personality. If my sceptical colleague convinces his potential patient, she will very probably become a very different kind of person from the one she would have been had she been treated for multiple personality by a believer.

I would argue that the multiple personality of the 1980s was a kind of person previously unknown in the history of the human race. This is a simple idea familiar to novelists, but careful philosophical language is not prepared for it. Pedantry is in order. Distinguish two sentences:

A. There were no multiple personalities in 1955; there were many in 1985.

B. In 1955 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way, they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this way; but in 1985 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.

As I see it, both A and B are true. An enthusiast for what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder will say, however, that A is false, because people with several ‘alter personalities’ undoubtedly existed in 1955, but were not diagnosed. A sceptic will also say that A is false, but for exactly the opposite reason: namely, that multiple personality has always been a specious diagnosis, and there were no real multiples in 1985 either. Statement A leads to heated but pointless debates about the reality of multiple personality, but in my opinion both sceptics and enthusiasts can peacefully agree to B. When I speak of making up people, it is B that I have in mind, and it is through B that the looping effect occurs.

Multiple personality was renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder. But that was more than an act of diagnostic house-cleaning. Symptoms evolve, patients are no longer expected to come with a roster of altogether distinct personalities, and they don’t. This disorder is an example of what in my book Mad Travellers (1998) I called a ‘transient mental illness’. ‘Transient’ not in the sense of affecting a single person for a while and then going away, but in the sense of existing only at a certain time and place. Transient mental illnesses can best be looked at in terms of the ecological niches in which they can appear and thrive. They are easy cases for making up people, precisely because their very transience leads cynics to suspect they are not really real, and so could plausibly be said to be made up.

MPD makes sense to me. People already engage in various forms of "mask-wearing": if you're a performer, you're consciously putting on a very elaborate mask of the character you're portraying. But even outside the world of theatre, consciously or unconsciously, you're wearing one mask in front of your parents, the other in front of your partner, the third one in front of your friends, the fourth one in front of your coworkers, the fifth one in front of a cop, the sixth one on The Motte and so on. Some people narrate their internal monologue as a dialogue.

It's not a huge leap to get from putting a mask on unconsciously, to putting one on consciously, to deliberately crafting and enhancing such a mask, to treating an advanced mask as a person, especially when you have learned that treating masks as separate people is something people do.

That's not what MPD is though. Like, the way I talk on this site vs 4chan are wildly different, and it's sorta plausible to say they're different "masks" or "personalities", even though they both come from the same goals / values / etc. But that's just 'purposeful action that depends on context and conditions', not 'different people'. Your 'thinking' or 'ideas' aren't fixed into one mask or context, you can remember something that happened in a seriouspost and make a joke about it later. And sometimes you make a seriouspost on rdrama, sometimes you tell a joke here. (And I'd personally prefer a motte where bizzare enraging shitposts are mixed with the seriousposts, but am aware it wouldn't work, both because they don't want to see the shitposts and they'd bait them away from making interesting posts.)

But someone with MPD claims to have 'fully separate' personalities that they 'can't control' - you'll switch semi-uncontrollably between one and another, you can't remember things on one personality that another can. They'll have different 'traits' in the same contexts, depending on what "person" they claim is fronting at the moment. This isn't just - sometimes you act silly and other times serious - which is entirely normal and unremarkable. It's saying that "Serious You" is "Joe" and joe is extraverted and likes doing math and watching cartoons, but "Silly You" is "Sally" and sally is introverted and likes moodboards and Harry Potter. This is just weird. Why not be ""extraverted"" about harry potter or ""introverted"" about math, depending on the circumstance? (and it really is that dumb - 'Having DID is wild [...] or a certain song will come on and suddenly I'm wearing different clothes and it's two hours later and I'm like "oh right"'). There's no use for that - each of those things can be engaged in independently. And the 'can't remember stuff from one personality in another one' isn't at all biologically plausible. They're just larping.

There’s a bit of motte and bailey going on. Or maybe sanewashing, I don’t know.

The defensible example is what you’re saying—everyone does social adaptation, some probably do it via dialogue, the long tails of that distribution could look like multiple personalities. There’s long-standing rationalist blogposts about having such dialogue, fiction with characters who use it, along with a general credulousness when talking about weird mental states. It’s also what Scott defends in his post:

For example, the person might be kind of a pushover, and then one time after they watched Star Wars ten times in a row, someone bossed them around particularly badly, and they imagined Darth Vader telling them to give into their anger and fight back…They emphasize that it really feels like Vader is in their head giving them advice, or that they sometimes “become” Vader - and in particular they emphasize that this is different from just asking themselves “what would Darth Vader do in this situation?”. They understand that most people learning about their situation would expect that they’re exaggerating a much more boring “just ask yourself what Vader would do” situation, and they’re fine with people believing that if they want, but insist that it’s actually something different and more interesting than that.

Something weird but comprehensible, plausibly an exaggeration, plausibly as “real” as anything else going on in one’s head. More importantly, it’s easy to empathize if one can relate it to the very normal dynamics of acting, role playing, whatever.

Now start adding accommodations.

This is the spicier claim: that the other personalities are, on their own, valid persons. That they may (or should) be addressed separately. That memories may not be shared, and any inconsistencies are framed as personality differences rather than a mercurial disposition. Perhaps that different pronouns are appropriate, since communities which buy into this dynamic are much, much more likely to be deeply and passionately aware of gender.

I don’t mean this as an attack. I’m really conflicted about the phenomenon, in part because it has such a reasonable motte. Also in part because one of my best friends has been diving headfirst into this community, and I’m worried about her. There is clearly a complex of social obligations which entangles the community with trans issues and transhumanist issues alike.

I could say the same thing about other possible incidences of fake science.

A. There were no flying saucers in the 1900s. There were many in the 1950's.

B. In the 1900s, people did not interpret mysterious things in the sky to be flying saucers and in the 1950s they did.

A is only true if by "flying saucers" you mean an observational phenomenon. And that's a motte and bailey, because when people say that flying saucers, or multiple personalities exist, they are not trying to communicate "this phenomenon exists", they are trying to communicate a particular claim about the underlying reality behind that phenomenon. If all you mean by A is is that the phenomenon exists, A and B are true, but not very interesting, because nobody cares about that.

I think this distinguishing between, say, the brute facts (or underlying reality) of some phenomena X and a socio-cultural narrative about X is exactly what Hacking is trying to get at with his distinction. Further in the paper he writes of autism:

Now let’s try out A and B for high-functioning autism:

A. There were no high-functioning autists in 1950; there were many in 2000.

B. In 1950 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way, they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this way; but in 2000 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.

As I said, A in my view is true for multiple personality. But it is absolutely false for high-functioning autism. It is almost as absurd as saying that autism did not exist before 1943, when Kanner introduced the name. But B, I believe, is true. Before 1950, maybe even before 1975, high-functioning autism was not a way to be a person. There probably were a few individuals who were regarded as retarded and worse, who recovered, retaining the kinds of foible that high-functioning autistic people have today. But people didn’t experience themselves in this way, they didn’t interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in the way they do now.

I think if Hacking were applying his model to your A and B he'd come to the same conclusion as with autism, that your (A) is false but (B) is true. Whatever phenomena we see with the naked eye that we interpret as being "flying saucers" almost certainly existed before we had the socio-cultural narrative of "flying saucers." I take Hackings point to be that having certain kinds of socio-culutural or medical narratives can both change the way we interpret some observed phenomena (as in the case of autism, or flying saucers) but also can give rise to entirely new phenomena (as in multiple personality disorders).

You can say all you want that you're talking about the sociocultural narrative, but everyone else isn't. You know, or should know, that the other people who claim that multiple personalities exist (or don't exist) aren't talking about a narrative. Saying "sure they exist" in reference to a narrative is a way to be the motte to their bailey by pretending to agree with them, but really agreeing with a much easier to defend version that misses the point.

Fascinating write-up - thanks for sharing. I wonder how many critiques of psychology (and other fields) like this are lost because of the fact that the current narrative doesn't support them.

I wish someone would write a counterfactual history where the mythopoetic Jungian psychologists stayed in power and kept developing their narratives into the mainstream. I feel like we might be in a better spot regarding mental health. Psychology has a lot to answer for....

This sounds like a plausible Orson Scott Card novel.

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