Subject:		Re: THOUGHTS on Susan's note to Sergei
From:		James Twiggs <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To:		Vladimir Nabokov Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Date:		Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:28:32 -0700
Content-Type:		multipart/alternativ

In an earlier message, I recommended Ian Hackings' book on fugue states. A few minutes later, I remembered that Hacking had also written a book on multiple personality, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, 1995). When I tracked Freud down by means of the index, I found this:

"Breuer and Freud famously asserted 'that 

the splitting of consciousness which is so striking in the classical cases under the form of double conscience

 [i.e., double consciousness] is present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria, and that a tendency to such a dissociation, and with it the emergence of abnormal states of consciousness (which we shall bring together under the term of 'hypnoid') is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis.'"  --Hacking, p. 150-151. The quotation is from Breuer and Freud (1893), in Freud, S.E. 2:12 (emphasis in original).       

I pass this along on the off-chance that it may provide new information to SB. Judging from this very limited bit of evidence, it seems likely that, as Sergei suggests, Freudian theory, simply through the treatment of hysteria, was, in a clear sense, deeply involved with multiple personalty in the 1950s, though perhaps without using that particular term. 

If this guess is off the mark and totally useless, please ignore it. Before I sign off, though, I can't help wondering whether SB or CK has had a look at Ellenberger's great work The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. It's been years since I read it, but as I recall it's full of fascinating details about a wide number of cases and schools of thought. 

Jim Twiggs