You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This slim volume presents the papers given at a conference in 1984 sponsored by The Section on the History of Psychiatry, New York Hospital, Cornell Medical Center. It provides a wealth of historical material on the development of the concepts of dissociation and multiple personality. The origins of these concepts are traced to a chapter “Dissociation” by Benjamin Rush in his text of 1812. The earliest work in hypnosis by Bernheim, Liebeault, and Charcot is described. Hannah Decker delineates literary contributions to the idea of dissociation, such as the writings of Oscar Wilde , Robert Louis Stevenson , and Virginia Woolf, one of whose characters states, “I am not one person; I am many people” (The Waves, ). Decker describes the contributions of workers in psychical research, such as Podmore, Flournoy, and F. W. H. Myers. William James was a good friend of Myers, and, “When Myers lay dying, James sat outside his hospital room, hoping to catch ‘a message when Myers’ spiritual self departed from his earthly body’” (p. 40). Those readers coming to the book with hopes of finding a relationship between split minds and split brains will be disappointed. John Sidtis addresses the issue of a possible relationship between brains that have been surgically separated for treatment of epilepsy and the phenomenon of split or multiple personality. He demonstrates that in such cases experimental evidence points to a single personality that attempts to integrate disparate sensory and perceptual information received separately from each disconnected brain.
Adam Crabtree writes on “Explanations of Dissociation in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” and he provides a well-integrated view of the concepts of the unconscious of F. W. H. Myers, Janet, Prince, Sidis, and Freud. He compares Freud and Janet in their views of the unconscious versus dissociation, and this comparison may well be the crux on which theories of the unconscious still revolve today.
The major emphasis in this b