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Anyone inclined to question the voluminous and controversial research in multiple personality (now Dissociative Identity) as well as the escalating population of patients so diagnosed since the 1980s will recognize the depth and brilliance of this comprehensive analysis of the modern multiple personality movement. No other book in the field so objectively locates dissociation in its historical and professional contexts. (It began late in the afternoon of 27 July 1885 when Jules Voisin, a student of Charcot's described his treatment of Louis Vivet whom he presented as a ‘case of grande hystérie chez l'homme avec dédoublement de la personnalité’ (p. 171). Hacking's Rewriting the Soul details the emergence of this disorder in a way that shows how institutionalized ways of knowing about certain kinds of people constellate a complex interactional field between systems of knowledge, society, and the people about whom clinicians claim to know certain things.
The nature of this relation illuminates the social, cultural, and political dimensions