Two Souls in One Body Hacking1991

Two Souls in One Body
Ian Hacking
Bernice R. broke down so badly, when she turned nineteen, and behaved
so much like a retarded child that she was committed to the Ohio State
Bureau ofJuvenile Research. Its director, Henry Herbert Goddard, a psy-
chologist of some distinction, recognized that she suffered from multiple
personality disorder. She underwent a course of treatment lasting nearly
five years, after which "the dissociation seems to be overcome and
replaced by a complete synthesis. [She] is working regularly a half day and
seems reasonably happy in her reactions to her environment."' Therapy
enabled her core personality and her main alter to make contact with each
other, and for her to understand her past and, to some extent, why she
had split.
Her story prompts questions about evidence, objectivity, historical
truth, psychological reality, self-knowledge, and the soul. It involves that
1. Henry Herbert Goddard, "A Case of Dual Personality," Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology21 (July 1926): 191; hereafter abbreviated "CDP." The "[She]" replaces
"Norma," Goddard's pseudonym for his patient in her "normal" state. The present paper
replaces Goddard's pseudonyms for family members with their actual first names. Miss R.'s
birth certificate and some records of the family are known to the author, but confidential-
ity should still be preserved. See also Goddard, TwoSouls in One Body?A Case of Dual Person-
ality. A Study of a RemarkableCase: Its Significancefor Education and for the Mental Hygiene of
Childhood (New York, 1927); hereafter abbreviated TS. Unpublished letters quoted in this
essay are from the H. H. Goddard collection, M 331, Archives of the History of Psychol-
ogy, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio; hereafter abbreviated HHG. I would like to thank
the librarians for their assistance.
Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991)

1991 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/91/1704-0006$01.00. All rights reserved.
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Critical Inquiry Summer 1991 839
powerful intersection of morality and metaphysics: why is it of value to

have a self-understanding founded on true beliefs about ourselves and our
past, or at any rate on memories that are not strictly false? To what extent
is such self-knowledge based on evidence? To what extent is it knowledge
at all?
What follows has three levels: versions of the events; evidence for
those versions; and reflections on the different kinds of evidence brought
into play. The more I know what really happened, the more I wonder if
there is a "what really happened." Everything about this puzzle genera-
lizes, but only in its dense detail and turnings in upon itself do we begin to
face up to the question of truth-and partly because so much of the evi-
dence is so plain in its style: clinical reports, letters and archives, and so
forth, the veritable carriers of truth. Here are four specific questions that
bear on the case of Bernice, each followed in parentheses by an all-too-
immediate generalization.
"Medical":Is multiple personality an objective state or condition of
some disturbed or unhappy people? (What is it for an abnormal mental
condition to be a "real"state of a person, especially when there is no plau-
sible physiological or organic abnormality?)
Diagnostic: If there is such a state as multiple personality, did Bernice
suffer from it? (What are grounds for diagnosis, especially when some
respected experts deny there is any such ailment?)
An "outsider's"question:We rely, or begin by relying, on Goddard's two
reports of his case. Was he trustworthy?Not, as it happens, entirely so. (Ther-
apies, especially abreactive therapies, involve a relation between patient and
therapist; what are we to make of the case reports when we know that the
reporter is not a passive witness but an active agent in the case?)
An "insider's"question: Bernice's conception of who she was, of her
nature, her soul, was in part a product of memories achieved by synthesis
and cure. Yet she could have emerged well-cured, by a strikingly similar
method of therapy, but with an importantly different set of memories-or
so I shall argue. Probably her actual memories were false. If she was well,
went on to live a decent life, and was at almost no risk of having her memo-
ries undone, so what? (It is undoubtedly important that our self-
conception should be founded on recollections of our own past that are
not strictly false. Why?)
Ian Hacking, a philosopher,teaches at the Institute for the History

and Philosophyof Science and Technology in the Universityof Toronto,
and he is the author of TamingChance(1990). His most recent contribu-
tion to CriticalInquiryis "The Makingand Moldingof ChildAbuse"(Win-
ter 1991).

840 Ian Hacking Two Souls in One Body
Does Multiple Personality Exist?

Multiple personality has had its ups and downs. The idea of a double
or split self arises simultaneously in the stories and novels and plays of the
romantic period and in occasional cases such as the now-celebrated Mary
Reynolds of Pennsylvania, briefly described in 1816, or a case reported at
greater length in Scotland in 1822.2 There continued to be scattered
reports in America and Europe, but "double personality" became a medi-
cal concept for the first time in France in 1875.3 It was picked up in the
United States by William James and Morton Prince, but multiples faded
away. Bernice was one of the last two cases of the first American wave of
multiples.
In 1968 the American Psychiatric Association published a taxonomy
of mental illness, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-II.4 It contained no
description of multiple personality, which was subsumed under hysterical
neurosis. There had been a number of multiples recorded as curiosities
from 1927 to 1973, of whom by far the most famous was "Eve."5But the
revival of multiples as a clear medical concept can be put at 1973, when
Cornelia Wilbur's case of "Sybil"was published, again as a popular book.6
Wilbur describes herself as a maverick psychoanalyst. She thought her
work important because it was the first psychoanalysis of a multiple per-
sonality. But its effect was different. Being a psychoanalyst, she elicited
repressed childhood trauma. During the decade of the analysis, child
abuse had, quite independently, become an almost obsessive concern of
the American public.7 A new doctrine emerged in the practice of a persua-
sive few: multiple personality was a reaction to childhood trauma, child
abuse, and particularly sexual abuse. From that point on a small group of
psychiatrists fostered what we may call a multiple personality movement,
2. For a remarkable account of Mary Reynolds, including the successive medical

reports and selections from her own letters, see Michael G. Kenny, The Passion of Ansel
Bourne: Multiple Personality in American Culture (Washington, D. C., 1986), chap. 1.
Goddard's "two souls" metaphor was used of an American lady who dissociated in 1802:
"She appeared as a person might be supposed to do, who had two souls, each occasionally
dormant, and occasionally active, and utterly ignorant of what the other is doing"
(Benjamin W. Dwight, "Facts Illustrative of the Powers and Operations of the Human
Mind," AmericanJournal of Science 1 [ 1818]: 433).
3. For an account of these successive waves and a theory about their occurrence, see
Ian Hacking, "Multiple Personality Disorder and Its Hosts," History of the Human Sciences4
(June 1992).
4. See The Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics of the American Psychiatric
Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders, 2d ed. (Washington, D. C.,
1968); widely referred to by the acronym DSM-II.
5. See Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, The ThreeFaces of Eve (New York,
1957).
6. See Flora R. Schreiber, Sybil (Chicago, 1973).
7. One account of this is in Hacking, "The Making and Molding of Child Abuse," Criti-
cal Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991): 253-88.

whose success was flagged in 1982 with an essay about the "epidemic" of
multiples.8 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III of 1980 placed multiple
personality disorder in its taxonomy and provided clear criteria.9 It said
that the disorder was rare; this qualification is modified in the revised
manual, DSM-III of 1989.
Students of the disorder began to recognize themselves as specialists
in the late 1970s, with teach-in seminars at the meetings of the American
Psychiatric Association. They established a newsletter, "Speaking for Our-
selves." They had their first International Conference in 1984.10 They
acquired a niche in the National Institute of Mental Health, with a
Dissociative Disorders Unit. They founded their technical journal Dissoci-
ation in 1988. The standard textbook was published in 1989.1 Hardly
anyone says "multiple personality disorder" any more. MPD suffices,
proof positive that there is such a thing.
There are, nevertheless, complete skeptics. They say there is no such
disorder, and that pulp publicity in the media conspires with psychiatrists
in the multiple personality movement to create the symptoms. In the
United States opposition is muted. The most vigorous American denial
comes, strikingly, from the two psychiatrists who treated "Eve." In 1984
they inveighed against the proliferation of multiples, which they held to
be real but very rare.'2 A distinguished Canadian psychiatrist has gone
through the entire "canon" of multiples, rediagnosing each one as suffer-
ing from a less florid complaint.'3 Ottawa psychologists have shown how
8. See Myron Boor, "The Multiple Personality Epidemic: Additional Cases and Infer-
ences Regarding Diagnosis, Etiology, Dynamics and Treatment," Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease 170 (May 1982): 302-4.
9. See American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, 3d ed. (Washington, D. C., 1980); hereafter abbreviated DSM-III
10. "International" is a sign of empire building. Multiple personality is strictly Ameri-
can with Canadian branch plants. For proceedings see the March 1984 issue of Psychiatric
Clinics of North America. The year saw this and three other major journals publishing entire
issues on multiple personality, featuring central members of the movement: Ralph B.
Allison, Eugene L. Bliss, Bennett G. Braun, Philip M. Coons, Richard P. Kluft, Frank W.
Putnam, Jr., and Cornelia B. Wilbur. See AmericanJournal of Clinical Hypnosis (Oct. 1983),
PsychiatricAnnals (Jan. 1984), and International Journal of Clinical and ExperimentalHypno-
sis (Apr. 1984).
11. See Frank W. Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatmentof Multiple PersonalityDisorder (New
York, 1989).
12. See Thigpen and Cleckley, "On the Incidence of Multiple Personality Disorder: A
Brief Communication," International Journal of Clinical and ExperimentalHypnosis 32 (Apr.
1984): 63-66. Their treatment differed from that of the post-1973 multiple-movement in
two ways. First, they elicited three personalities instead of many. Secondly, they do not link
multiple personality to child abuse. Chris Costner Sizemore, the original of Eve, broke long
ago with her doctors. She developed twenty-two subsequent personalities and took to the
lecture circuit. See Chris Costner Sizemore and Elen Sain Pittillo, I'm Eve! (Garden City,
N. Y., 1977).
13. See Harold M. Merskey, "The Manufacture of Personalities: The Production of
Multiple Personality Disorder," British Journal of Psychiatry (forthcoming).

students with minimum coaching "spontaneously" produce the symp-

toms.14 A British book is subtitled "An Exercise in Deception."'5 Physi-
cians and psychologists have to be cautious in suggesting that the existence
of the phenomena has more to do with their colleagues than with the psy-
che. In print, at any rate, it is left to Karl Miller, professor of literature,
editor of the London Review of Books, and author of a stunning survey of
manifestations of doubleness in the romantic period, to say of the first
modern multiple, Sybil, what many say less artfully in private:
As for the umpteen selves exposed in the Book of Sybil, it is safe to

conclude that they are a manner of speaking, and of conjuring-that
they are produced out of a hat in the manner of some strange fiction
of duality, and by a trio of conjurors. Every life is made up, put on,
imagined-including, hypocritelecteur,yours. Sybil's life was made up
by Sybil, by her doctor, when she became a case, and again, when she
became a book, by her author. Sixteen selves were imagined. But it is
not even entirely certain that there were as many as two.'6
Note how the "diagnostic" question runs into the "medical"question.

Miller is doubting that the first paradigm modern multiple, Sybil, had
even two personalities: by implication, there is no such "disease." But we
can usefully separate the two doubts, and can also sort out several ques-
tions portmanteau'd into "does multiple personality exist?" Some have
clear answers. Different kinds of evidence bear on each. In general, there
is less a question about evidence than about questions, although of course
the positivist equation is right: the meaning of a sentence is its method of
verification. You can't grasp one without the other. Becoming clearer
about evidence and becoming clearer about meanings are one of a piece.
Here it suffices to distinguish three versions of "does multiple personality
exist?" They concern state, criteria, and therapy.
a) State: Is multiple personality a real, objective state of some people,
perhaps connected with some, we hope, identifiable neurological, bio-
chemical, or physiological abnormality?
b) Criteria:Is there a set of core behavioral criteria, applicable at least
across a substantial part of Western culture, and such that these criteria
are satisfied in sufficiently many different times and places to suppose that
14. See Nicholas P. Spanos, John R. Weekes, and Lorne D. Bertrand, "Multiple Per-
sonality: A Social Psychological Perspective," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 94 (Aug.
1984): 362-76. See also Spanos et al., "Hypnotic Interview and Age Regression Procedures
in the Elicitation of Multiple Personality Symptoms: A Simulation Study," Psychiatry 49
(Nov. 1986): 298-311.
15. See Ray Aldridge-Morris, Multiple Personality: An Exercise in Deception (London,
1989).
16. Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford, 1985), p. 348.

they single out one possible kind of behavior?!7 A positive answer might be
noncommittal or even negative about the disorder being a "state" in any
clearly understood neurological sense. It might hold that multiple person-
ality is a response to the constraints of the militant forms of Protestantism
that emerged in the course of industrialization.'8
c) Therapy:However we answer the two preceding questions, is it the
case that there is a substantial number of troubled people who can be
helped by treating their multiplicity as a real part of their character, and
whose therapy actively involved working with their alter personalities?
I shall discuss these questions in reverse order. The third can be left to
eclectic therapy. There are good reasons for a cautious "yes"to (b). There
are none for answering (a) in the affirmative-except that if, according to
(b), some people behave as multiples, then it is a sensible research program
to try to identify some features of these people over and above their overt
behavior.
Therapy:Question (c) is a matter for the judgement of practitioners,
and I shall leave it to them. Note that an eclectic could hold that there is no
state; that the present rash of multiples is cultural aberration, an anomic
response to industrial Protestantism, or whatever; nevertheless, in the
present state of things it helps to treat some patients as multiples. Some
disturbed people have seen multiples on TV, read pulp magazines, heard
of sensational trials, have friends who say they are multiples. Even physi-
cians who hate the present fad for multiplicity (as they might call it) could
find it expedient to treat a patient along the lines laid down in a multiple
personality textbook-and find that it works just fine. They might even
attribute this to media conditioning of the patient.
Criteria: DSM-III has a set of well-defined criteria for multiple per-
17. I say "Western" rather than human because the idea of the integrated and unique
self is primarily Western, and a splitting of the self has a clear place only in "our" culture. In
addition to the three questions above, about the "existence" of multiple personality, one
can distinguish several others, for example, about the extent to which it is a purely "cul-
tural" phenomenon, as suggested in the final chapter of Kenny's Ansel Bourne, and
Aldridge-Morris's Multiple Personality. I extend this list of "kinds of existence" in "Multiple
Personality Disorder and Its Hosts."
18. In Ansel Bourne Kenny argues that American nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century multiplicity was a response to American Protestantism. But his eponymous born-
again (a triple pun) preacher Ansel Bourne, hero of William James, was not a multiple in
the sense of this paper. He had a "fugue." It may seem odd for me to add "industrial" to
Kenny's "Protestant" when, for example, the famous Mary Reynolds, the first American
multiple, grew up in "the wilds of Pennsylvania." But her parents had left England more for
political than for religious reasons, insofar as those can be separated, and in immediate
response to the industrial riots of Manchester in 1796. All well-documented multiples are
instance of the detritus of industrialization. The French paradigm, Felida X, was a piece-
work seamstress, the trade adopted by her mother when her father, first mate on a mer-
chant vessel, was drowned at sea. Our Bernice grew up in a small town south of booming
Youngstown, Ohio; the father of her tubercular, diphtheria-ridden family was a petty
accountant and the mother a telephone operator.

sonality disorder. A growing number of practitioners encounter more and

more patients who satisfy the criteria. That does not impress the skeptics,
who believe that "multipliers" train their patients. One might even note,
sardonically, that one of the symptoms of multiplicity is that the patient
has been diagnosed as suffering from a wide range of other ailments! Skep-
tics observe that industrial societies such as France, outside the sphere of
influence of the American Psychiatric Association, never see a multiple.
That puts anyone in a bind who critically asks whether DSM-III criteria
are "really" satisfied by anyone untouched by the media or by the move-
ment. What is one left with? History. For me the most powerful piece of
evidence has been the discovery of a whole tradition of multiples entirely
outside the "canon" published in the literature of the movement.19 The
reporters were not part of any movement, and had no interest in multiply-
ing multiples. The cases so well fit the criteria that I say, "Yes, this is a way
to be crazy, at least in an industrial/romantic, Protestant society." In that
modest sense, I assert, there is such a thing as multiple personality. In just
that sense I can go on to ask, "Was Bernice another individual suffering
from multiple personality disorder?" This is perfectly consistent with
admitting that every single case might be diagnosed as suffering from
some other complaint, and in particular admitting that she could also fit
under another set of criteria for some other malady. I shall give ample
evidence that she was a multiple, but such is the nature of this evidence
that its role is to characterize her in such a way, not to settle her nature
eternally.
State: If there is such a thing as multiple personality, there is good rea-
son to look for something over and above a set of behaviors. The one fixed
point in the modern movement is etiology: multiplicity is caused by child-
hood trauma, chiefly child sexual abuse. Hardly any abused children
become multiples, so that does not take us very far in defining a "state."
Every generation of multipliers has produced speculations about the phys-
ical condition of persons suffering from multiple personality disorder.
These are, uniformly, a pastiche on some current science. Goddard is
typical:
If we turn our attention to the neurological aspect once more, we

know that the brain neurons are storehouses of energy, that a minute
stimulus such as the finest particles of matter that impinge upon the
nerves in the mucous membrance of the nose may start an immense
amount of nerve action. We may even have what is called by Cajal,
avalanche conduction.... Now suppose that these cell bodies which
are the supposed storehouses of energy are, as a result of physical dis-
19. In "Multiple Personality Disorder and Its Hosts" I mention some hitherto unno-
ticed medical descriptions of the mid-nineteenth century, which with awesome accuracy
conform to the criteria set forth in DSM-III.

ease or weakness, possessed not of their full quota of energy, but

barely enough, let us say, to start the next neuron into activity. Not
enough to flood it but barely enough to set it going. Moreover, it in its
turn can barely stimulate the next one. And wherever the axon of one
nerve cell is in contact with two or three dendrites, instead of having
sufficient energy to arouse them all at once, it will arouse only one,
and that will be the one where the synaptic resistance is least. ["CDP,"
p. 189]20
Got it? After a bit more about the neurokyme and so on, we get two neuro-
logically disconnected bodies of memories. The same kind of writing
occurs today, but now we have quarks and gluons cropping up in the multi-
ple personality literature.21 The double cerebellum hypothesis has been
going the rounds since 1844-two souls, because of two disconnected
brains.22 Commisurotomy gave a recent boost to that old idea. There has
been rubbish about alpha-rhythms (one characteristic rhythm for each
personality).23 It has been said that myopic multiples change their requi-
site eyeglass correction as they switch from state to state. Most leading
advocates of multiple personality now stay clear of all that.
Bernice Was a Multiple Personality
There are three kinds of evidence for this, each taken from God-
dard's own description of the case. The three kinds of evidence are:
DSM-III criteria: Bernice exemplified almost everything DSM-III
says about multiple personality disorder.24
Additional current criteria: She confirmed many beliefs about multi-
ples that have been cherished by the multiple personality movement of the
1980s.
20. Phony science is usually a vehicle for moral interpretation as well. Bernice had "a
nervous system deficient in energy" ("CDP," p. 191). Protestant, or in Goddard's case
Quaker, values have been foisted upon neurology: Bernice does not have that cardinal vice,
lack of energy, but her nervous system does.
21. No kidding. See Bennett G. Braun, "Toward a Theory of Multiple Personality and
Other Dissociative Phenomena," PsychiatricClinics of North America 7 (Mar. 1984): 171-93,
with the message in a footnote, "The implication of this is that as we are constructed of sub-
atomic particles, we must follow the basic rules of physics" (p. 177).
22. See Arthur Ladbroke Wigan, A New Viewoflnsanity: The duality of the mind proved by
the structure,functions, and diseases of the brain, and by the phenomena of mental derangement,
and shown to be essential to moral responsibility(London, 1844).
23. If anything, nonmultiples vary more than multiples in their rhythms. See Philip M.
Coons, Victor Milstein, and Carma Marley, "EEG Studies of Two Multiple Personalities and
a Control," Archives of General Psychiatry 39 (July 1982): 823-25.
24. I use DSM-III rather than the revised version of 1989. The latter differs chiefly in
making it easier to satisfy the main criteria, in increasing the possible number of alters to
100, and in allowing that the disorder is less rare than suggested by DSM-III.

Relative innocence:On present evidence the case of Bernice cannot be

successfully criticized along any of the lines used by skeptics about multi-
ple personality.
Relative Innocence
Skeptics worry about patients imitating and thereby faking symp-

toms, and about doctors training patients. Nothing in multiple personality
is proof against doubts, but the Goddard-Bernice case is as clean as any
1920s case of multiplicity could possibly be. Bernice was an avid reader of
newspapers and loved going to the movies. But Goddard was pretty care-
ful about faking, and has a serious discussion of the one incident that he
found suspect, quite late in his treatment (see TS, pp. 153-54). Bernice
was sent to Goddard's bureau because from 10 September she had gone
into a trance and repeatedly waked as a four-year-old named "Polly."She
had been visiting a family that had adopted her baby sister. The family
became so desperate that they had Bernice committed, and she was sent
by a court order to Goddard's bureau, which specialized in adolescents
with mental or criminal problems. Until she arrived, no one in the bureau
had the slightest interest in multiples. This is not a case of a clinic finding
patients that suit it.
Skeptics worry that the doctors who treat multiple personality are in
the grip of a theory. They make suggestions, often using hypnosis, to
encourage new personalities or to revive lost memories. Goddard had the
opposite vice, a certain grim positivism: "When a child is naturally timid or
has acquired an unreasonable fear, the method is not to argue with him
persistently but as far as possible to ignore it. In other words, to help him to
forget it, because, as we have already seen, what is forgotten has no effect
upon the personality" (TS, p. 208). Goddard was trained at Clark Univer-
sity by G. Stanley Hall, the man who made American psychology a science
of measurement. His own contribution was the measurement of intelli-
gence. He brought Alfred Binet's tests to America, sponsoring the transla-
tion of Binet's work.25 It was he who, with Lewis Terman, legitimated
intelligence testing by the tests designed for the American draft in World
War I. After the war, when Goddard took a job at the Ohio Bureau of
Juvenile Research, he was preoccupied by tests to administer to juvenile
delinquents.
25. Under Goddard's sponsorship his assistant at the Vineland Training School, New
Jersey, Elizabeth S. Kite translated all of the work of Binet and Theodore Simon on intelli-
gence and the feebleminded-a total of 664 pages: The Developmentof Intelligence in Chil-
dren (Baltimore, 1916), and The Intelligence of the Feeble-Minded(Baltimore, 1916). He had
cultivated, even hero-worshiped, Binet during a visit to France in 1908. Now Binet had
been much interested in multiple personality-see his Les Alterations de la personnalite
(Paris, 1892)-but there is no indication that Goddard's interests, in 1908, went beyond
intelligence.

Spiritism played a major role in American multiple personality, start-

ing with William James. It was guessed that alternate personalities might
be good mediums, excellent at extrasensory perception, or even reincar-
nations of the dead.26 Goddard was dead against ghosts, and repeatedly
emphasized in his book and newspaper interviews that "Polly"had nothing
to do with the supernatural.
There is only one ground for suspecting that Goddard was a closet
multiplier. He was an associate editor of Morton Prince's Journal of Ab-
normal Psychology. The editorial board was pretty eclectic-William
McDougall was also on it and Ernest Jones had only just quit in a huff.
Prince was indeed the prince of the old American multiple movement,
which had fallen on sad times for lack of multiples. Prince did strongly
encourage Goddard to write up the case for the Journal.27 He used the
tricks of Prince and his French predecessors-lots of hypnotism. But
there is no reason to think that he suggested personalities that had not
emerged spontaneously. Nor is there any reason to think he much adapted
his story to please Prince.
This is not to say he did not use Bernice when she arrived in Septem-
ber 1921. He was badly in need of good press to divert attention from
problems at the Bureau. It had gone through a bad patch earlier in the
year, with half the staff quitting, and "rumors and reports in daily papers
concerning the conditions existing at present in the Department of the
Juvenile Research." The legislature cut Goddard's salary from $7,500 to
$4,000.28 The publicity attaching to "Polly" was surely a godsend.
The chief message of Goddard's book was completely unconnected
with duality. He wanted more child welfare, and more care for parents to
ensure healthy children. He concludes quoting a celebrated tirade by Dr.
J. N. Hurty of Indiana on the indifference of that state to children and
mothers: a heavy-handed parable about how funds are always available for
sick hogs, but not for sick mothers and children. "'MORAL:Be a hog and
be worth saving"' (TS, p. 197). Goddard wanted state support for families,
and, immediately, for the Bureau of Juvenile Research.
In short: Goddard was a very ordinary professional person with a
26. Although this was primarily an American interest, it began in France where
Charles Richet "borrowed" a famous multiple of Paul Janet's and used her in the first ran-
domized experiments of parapsychology in 1885. See Hacking, "Telepathy: Origins of
Randomization in Experimental Design," Isis 79 (Sept. 1988): 427-51.
27. Goddard, letter to William H. Pritchard, 29 Jan. 1927, HHG: "Some four years
ago I reported the case at the meeting of the Psychological Association. Dr. Prince was
present and asked me for an article on the subject; which I promised him. I never got to the
point where I felt ready to write it. But the managing editor kept writing me until finally I
hastily prepared the article to get rid of him."
28. This was a highly unedifying fight, to some extent caused by Goddard, with subor-
dinates accusing each other, for example, of "postmenopausal insanity" (HHG). The quota-
tion is from the OhioState HouseJournal, 29 Apr. 1921, p. 817. The salary cut was after the
20 May appropriations sessions.

commonplace bundle of virtues, vices, abilities, and blind spots. I shall

later show that he lied in his article about Bernice, but that fact does not
show that the entire case is an artifact. The lies are humdrum ones, claims
to greater success and competence than were warranted. My story is
banal, the actors dull, Goddard bland, Bernice pathetic. But it is not a
story in which the patient has fabricated her disease or the doctor culti-
vated it; we are unlikely to find a much more innocent story in the annals
of multiple personality.
DSM-III Criteria
DSM-III defined multiple personality disorder as "the existence
within the individual of two or more distinct personalities, each of which is
dominant at a particular time" (DSM-III, p. 257). Moreover "the personal-
ity that is dominant at any particular time determines the individual's
behavior" (DSM-III, p. 259). Goddard said of Bernice and her four-year-
old alter Polly that each was "complex and integrated with its own unique
behavior patterns and social relationships" (DSM-III, p. 259). We can pair
off Goddard's report and the words of DSM-III as follows.
"The individual personalities are nearly always quite discrepant and
frequently seem to be opposites"-"a quiet, retiring spinster" and "flam-
boyant, promiscuous bar habitue" being given as instances (DSM-III, p.
257). "The contrast of the two personalities was most marked" ("CDP,"p.
173). In general Polly was "loud, coarse, wilful, emotional, changeable,
disobedient, selfish, egotistical, excitable and unreasonable" ("CDP," p.
174). Adjectives applied to Bernice include: attractive, modest, almost dif-
fident, very neat, of excellent intelligence, generous almost to a fault,
unselfish, absolutely truthful, good taste in clothing, polite, well man-
nered, quick and accurate at work.
"Transition from one personality to another is sudden" (DSM-III, p.
257). The transition was usually via an intervening and very troubled
sleep or trance. Polly's "going to sleep during the daytime generally was
literally a fall. If she was standing she would fall to the floor as though sud-
denly struck dead" ("CDP," pp. 175-76).
"Usually the original personality has no knowledge or awareness of
the existence of any of the other personalities" (DSM-III, p. 257). At the
beginning of treatment, Bernice "had absolutely no memory of anything
that had occurred while she was Polly" ("CDP," p. 170).
"The original personality and all of the subpersonalities are aware of
lost periods of time" (DSM-III, p. 257). Bernice "found it hard to under-
stand the lapse of time when she had been Polly for several days" ("CDP,"
p. 175). However Polly, who was four, did not have this problem,just pick-
ing up the thread of her life where she had left it, consistent, some would
say, with a four-year-old's sensibility to time.
When we turn to DSM-III's "associated features" we find that alters

may be of different age, sex, or race. Goddard reports only age. "Each
subpersonality ... displays behaviors characteristic of its stated age, which
is usually younger than the actual age" (DSM-III, p. 257). That was true of
Polly: "asked her age, she said 'four years'. And her behavior was consis-
tent" ("CDP,"p. 170). The same was true of a less-developed alter, Louise,
aged fifteen or sixteen. "One or more of the personalities may ... report
having talked with or engaged in activities with one or more of the other
personalities" (DSM-III, p. 258). Polly said Bernice was "'a friend of mine
who is coming to see me"' (TS, p. 69). Five days after she entered the
Bureau, Goddard tried to use automatic writing. He had Polly write a let-
ter, which begins "Bernice is coming down to see me."29
"Psychosocial stress most often precipitates the transition from one
personality to another" (DSM-III, p. 258). That was true enough in
Bernice's story, as we shall see. "Hypnosis may also effect this change"
(DSM-III, p. 258). To get his patient out of the most annoying versions of
Polly, Goddard would hypnotize her and bring her back as Bernice. Like-
wise with the second alter, the fifteen-year-old Louise whom "we could
bring back by hypnotic suggestion" ("CDP," p. 181).
DSM-III also notes somatoform disorders are common in individuals
with multiple personality. In fact Polly behaved more like a traditional hys-
teric. She was usually almost completely anaesthetic. "Pinching, pricking
with needles, tickling, etc., produced not even reflex muscular twitching.
A needle thrust under the thumb nail to the root of the nail elicited no
response of any kind" ("CDP,"p. 175). She also experienced loss of various
types of motor control, and a brief inability to see or hear. Goddard inter-
estingly comments on the lack of those symptoms of hysteria that DSM-III
calls somatoform. Persistent indigestion "seems more likely to have been a
real disturbance." The peculiar thing is not Bernice's somatoform prob-
lems "but that there were not more of them during such a long period.
This may possibly be accounted for by the youth of the patient and conse-
quent poverty of ideas and perhaps also to the fact that we were also
extremely careful not to suggest things to her" ("CDP," p. 185).
In short Bernice was a classic multiple personality. This does not
mean that the diagnosis is uncontroversial. It is possible to rediagnose
every historical multiple personality, arguing that there is no such dis-
order. I am observing only that there are a set of criteria that Bernice
satisfies.
29. The letter, dated "New York, Sept. 10, 1921," is printed in TS, facing page 19. It is
the only time the name "Bernice" (as opposed to the pseudonym Norma) can be found in
Goddard's publications. The letter was written on 28 September. Goddard does not draw
attention to the fact that 10 September 1921, the date of the letter, is the day that Bernice
fell into a trance, after eating some candy, and awoke for the first time as a clearly defined
Polly. Polly was rather obsessed with candy. Goddard does not note that 10 September
1919 is the probable date that Bernice learned of her mother's death.

1980s Expectations about Multiples

There is a wide consensus among multiple personality practitioners
that DSM-III underemphasized or omitted important features. "An abso-
lute essential criterion for the diagnosis of multiple personality is the pres-
ence of amnesia. Usually the original personality is amnesic for the other
secondary personalities."30 When she entered treatment Bernice "had
absolutely no memory of anything that occurred while she was Polly"
("CDP," p. 170).
Virtually all recent multiples are highly hypnotizable, and it is conjec-
tured that all lie in the upper quartile for hypnotizability on the Stanford
Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale. Hypnotizability has been proposed as a nec-
essary condition of multiple personality. Bernice was eminently hypnotiza-
ble. Then there is the matter of sleep. "Sleep disturbance is a commonly
noted feature of MPD ... with recurrent nightmares and terrifying
hypnogenic and hypnopompic phenomena."31 Bernice's troubled sleep is
uncomfortable even to read about (see "CDP,"pp. 175-77). Previous to
evincing multiple personality she had severe sleep disorders, was hospital-
ized around age eighteen, and would sleep for two or three days at a time.
She recalled problematic sleepwalking from the age of six.
It is now held by many dedicated workers that it is a necessary condi-
tion of being a multiple that there should be more than two personalities
-that dual personality or double consciousness itself would be a freak.
DSM-III allows that there may be up to 100 multiples, although most
workers agree that there will be at most 10 or so readily on call at any time.
The mean number of alters in a recent study of adolescent multiples is
24.1.32 Old historical cases, it is argued, are merely "double conscious-
ness" because one was not on the lookout for further alters and certainly
they were not allowed to develop. Bernice had at least a third alter: "Much
to our surprise just before Christmas," 1921, an alter of about sixteen pre-
sented herself after sleep. That was Bernice's age just before she had to
quit school because of illness. Goddard thought she might "be the true
person rather than" Bernice ("CDP,"p. 181). But he decided that this was
simply amnesia, a part of her that had forgotten what had passed in the
last three years. Hence "we ceased to encourage it, and after a period of
perhaps a couple of weeks this personality never appeared again" ("CDP,"
p. 182). Louise is not named in the 1926 article, and only appears in a cou-
ple of paragraphs. In the 1927 book she obtains two chapters, or 48 pages
of a 215-page text.
30. Coons, "The Differential Diagnosis of Multiple Personality," PsychiatricClinics of

North America 7 (Mar. 1984): 53.
3 1. Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatmentof Multiple Personality Disorder, p. 59.
32. See Paul F. Dell andJames W. Eisenhower, "Adolescent Multiple Personality Disor-
der: A Preliminary Study of Eleven Cases,"Journal of theAmericanAcademyof Child and Ado-
lescent Psychiatry 29 (May 1990): 359-66.

Today's multiple therapist might criticize Goddard for not develop-

ing Louise, but she does confirm the doctrine of "more-than-two." On the
other hand Bernice was mercifully free of persecuting alters, which are
nowadays found in the majority of multiple personality patients. In the
recent survey of adolescents, "all patients had angry protector alters,
depressed alters, scared alters, and child alters."33They "appear to have
become alter at a mean age of about three years." I shall discuss this later
when contemplating a fictitious Bernice in 1990.
I have already stated the most firmly entrenched item of 1980s the-
ory of multiplicity: the disorder is caused by childhood trauma. There is
no strong evidence that Bernice was cruelly treated or viciously neglected
in early life, but she had a ghastly childhood for all that. Siblings dropped
dead like flies. She had an identical twin Beatrice. They were the oldest of
ten children. She had an identity problem from the start; the parents
could not tell the twins apart and her mother would force Beatrice's medi-
cine on Bernice by mistake. Or was this neglect, anger, or punishment, as
we might hear from many a child abuse investigator today? More charita-
bly, we should think about a tubercular mother looking after a tubercular
father and a raft of sick children. The twins became deathly ill of diph-
theria at age ten. Beatrice died. Bernice "seems to have had a fairly happy
early childhood, though always frail; her first grief came at ten when her
twin sister died" ("CDP," p. 182).
Bernice's menarche was at thirteen years, three months; she "was
greatly frightened at her first experience" ("CDP,"p. 182). Tuberculosis
was rampant in the family, killing two other siblings; the father went to a
sanitarium when she was fifteen and died in a year. Her mother too had
TB during that time, leaving Bernice with a lot of responsibility for sick
and dying children; Betty Jane, the youngest, would have been one year
old at the time. The family was broken up when mother also went to the
sanitarium; she died when Bernice was seventeen. She worked as a house-
cleaner in a rotting old home where she was scared of intruders; in an
attempt to conquer this fear her employer repeatedly mocked, tricked,
and terrified her. At eighteen the girl had a breakdown whose chief mani-
festation was sleep. After hospitalization the ever-decent if ailing Bernice
was sent to a charity home "which deals mainly with girls who have fallen
morally" ("CDP,"p. 186). There was no shortage of trauma, and we sus-
pect Goddard of insensitivity when he suggests all went well before she
was ten, just because she could not recall earlier unhappiness.
In addition to abuse or neglect, it is now standardly expected that a
multiple will have experienced severe caretaker sexual abuse, typically
from a trusted person. Goddard thought not, but most readers will infer
from his account that Bernice was sexually molested and quite probably
raped by her father when she was fourteen. If Goddard were to deliver his
33. Ibid., p. 359.

paper as a lecture today, he would be hooted off the podium by militants in

the audience.
Hallucinosis Incestus Patris

In addition to these [minor hysterical symptoms], there were
other manifestations, such as one expects to find in a psychogenic
case. For example, we had a marked case of transference, which
finally ended as abruptly as it began. The vita sexualis was manifested
through a hallucinosis incestus patris. This was somewhat unusual in
its persistence and in the fact that it was concurred in by all the per-
sonalities and in hypnosis. She had told this in the home where she
was staying before she came to us and it was reported to me by them
as one of her unfortunate experiences. She told it to me on the second
day [on the first day she had been four-year-old Polly] and was evi-
dently living through the imaginary experience in the restless sleep
which we have described. There were many things to make one
believe that it was a genuine experience and not an hallucination. But
the fact that we were dealing with a phase of hysteria where, as some-
one has put it, when we do not find this particular hallucination it is
the exception rather than the rule, this coupled with her statement
that this occurred when she was fourteen years old, but had never
been mentioned to anyone until she was nineteen and a half, com-
pelled me to hold fast to the hallucination possibility, even in the face
of the constant reiteration by all the personalities, as already stated.
["CDP," p. 185]
I am not aware of any more explicit case of professional "denial" of

incest. Every detail makes it probable (to us in 1991) that Bernice was
telling the simple truth. The girl's silence is to be expected and is not evi-
dence for later hallucination. During hypnotic sleep she not only talked
about the incident but acted it out. There was no need for any elicited
abreaction to bring the event to consciousness; quite the contrary. She
had already told her "home," and it is practically the first thing that she
told the Bureau of Juvenile Research. She and her alters valiantly
resisted his overt skepticism.
One becomes increasingly uncomfortable in reading Goddard. The
"vita sexualis" is kept for the professional journal, and then the unspeaka-
ble sin is named only in Latin. The subsequent book omits this altogether.
There we find something unnerving, absent from the paper. Polly began
by giving female names to everyone in the Bureau, "Sarah"to Goddard.
But in due course she came to call Goddard "Daddy," and later Bernice
then did so, too (TS, p. 153). The one incident of possible fakery (men-
tioned above) discussed by Goddard involved Louise calling Goddard
"Daddy" and then apologizing, "O!I forgot, excuse me." Today a psychia-
trist with a patient who clearly and distinctly asserts she was raped by her

father at fourteen would not treat this transference so lightly. Nor would
he so unreflectively quote Bernice saying to him, "Daddy, I am going to do
as you want me to" (TS, p. 161). Here is a dream of 2-3 October 1921,
reported without comment in Appendix C to the book; she is in the Hotel
Statler in Cleveland planning to go to the theater. "Mr. B. was her
daddy"-mentioning the name of her baby sister's adoptive father. She is
shot in the back by "a man dressed like an old-fashioned guard" (TS,
p. 238).
Today a therapist would do a lot of work on the incest. Goddard
thought of Polly's fascination with candy as just part of child's play. But
maybe it is not so benign. Bernice did her first well-reported switch on 10
September 1921-eating candy. Rewards with candy occur so often in
reports of childhood fondling and early abuse that this theme in the life of
the patient would certainly be explored.
At any rate we can be rather confident that the remembered incest
would, today, be reinforced in Bernice's mind as a permanent part of her
life history. Goddard's procedure was exactly the opposite. Rather than
encourage the memory of the parental assault, he turned it into self-
conscious fantasy. "It was of course important to get at the truth in this
case because if this were not an hallucination, it could be taken as an
important element in causing the trouble, whereas if it were an hallucina-
tion, it was a result and not a cause. I was led to adopt the procedure
which, I think, finally elicited the facts" ("CDP," p. 186).
Why was Goddard so skeptical? He thought that her acting out dur-
ing her sleep was "incomplete," to the extent that although at first he "was
fearful that other observers would discover the truth" ("CDP,"p. 186), her
acting and talking were not specific enough unless one was first told that
this was all about incest. He next found that her vagueness and indefinite-
ness were "not due ... so much to the delicacy of the subject as to her own
defective picture."
He proceeded as follows. He avoided all "leading questions" and
the appearance of making much of the matter. I hit upon the plan of
asking her one question at a time, days apart, until I was finally satis-
fied that I had gotten from her the complete story as it existed in her
mind.
The story thus obtained was so clearly the imagining of one
totally ignorant even of the human anatomy that any idea that it
could have been a real experience was absurd. When I later explained
this to her, putting it on the basis of a dream, she admitted that it
might be. ["CDP," p. 186]
What was the origin of the "fantasy"?A year before coming to Goddard
she had a partial breakdown and was hospitalized. She would sometimes
sleep for two or three days at a time. When she recovered she went to a

semipublic charity "which deals mainly with girls who have fallen morally,
but who are being helped back to a normal life." She said she knew noth-
ing of "such things" and was ridiculed by the other girls.
Vague references were continually made both by the girls and by

their caretakers. No real information about the truth of such matters
was given [so Goddard inanely hypothesizes]. This seems to be a per-
fect way to develop fears and fancies, to arouse abnormal cravings
with no real knowledge or explanation to keep the balance. In her
weakened state physically, it is probably only natural that she should
dream that something had happened to her. ["CDP," p. 187]
Polly's Origin
Goddard thought he knew where Polly came from. When Bernice
was in the abominable charity home for wayward girls, she visited her
baby sister Betty Jane, then aged four, who had been placed in a happy
family, in contrast to Bernice. It was "an ideal home where she was cared
for and loved and favored, where she had everything that a child could
want" ("CDP,"p. 189). Bernice was visiting there at the time her duality
began. She "doubtless many times wished that she were in the place of her
little sister, dreamed by day and by night that she was in that position"
("CDP,"p. 189). She had another sister named Pauline who died at age
eleven, and "Polly" is some sort of wish amalgam of the two.
This is by no means implausible. Goddard could have added to his
report the observation that Betty Jane had been adopted, and so the four-
year-old herself had changed her name. Today a standard strategy would
be quite different. One might guess that the Polly character was an "imagi-
nary playmate," namely, a Peter Pannery person of age four who had
never grown up. Current lore has it that the childhood alters of age n are
either stages of the patient at age n-perhaps self-fantasies at age n. Or
else they are imaginary playmates or companions of the child, usually con-
temporary, that is, of age about n. Imaginary playmates are usually
benign-children with them are happier than the less imaginative who
don't have them.34 Nevertheless it is argued that given excessive trauma a
playmate can become more and more real until it becomes a fixed role for
the child to take on, and at least a latent alter.
Goddard's Therapy
Abreaction-working through-was plainly not a major focus of

Goddard's work with Bernice, but it was there all the time as he kept on
34. See Maya Pines, "Invisible Playmates," PsychologyToday 12 (Sept. 1978): 38-42,
106.

probing into the past. The attempt to restore memory by talk and by hyp-
nosis is a standard feature of all the models available for Goddard to fol-
low, including those of Prince, Binet, and Pierre Janet. He also had, like
them, a clear conception of what a cure would be: it would consist in
"bringing the two personalities together in a normal form" ("CDP," p.
180). His model was integration, not exorcism, despite his belief, quoted
above, that events forgotten had no effect on the personality.
He tried three types of cure. First of all he tried to "age" Polly, in the
expectation that when she became nineteen she would merge with the
normal Bernice. This was done by hypnotic suggestion when Polly was
asleep. Age regression in hypnosis is as old as hypnosis, and is also what
encouraged the idea of abreaction, bringing childhood or adolescent inci-
dents to light. Age progression didn't help much, and Polly usually
declined to get up to Bernice's real age. "At different times in her history
she has been eight and ten in fact almost any age for short periods. Gener-
ally, however, she was fifteen" ("CDP,"p. 174). Goddard took her session
by session up by half-year notches until Polly made a slip; while writing the
ages of her brothers and sisters she gave her twin as nineteen, and
accepted a deductive argument that therefore she too was nineteen.
Henceforth she glossed over this. (This may suggest to our skeptical side
that Polly was just playing along.) She now stayed fifteen-or-nineteen for
some weeks (scoring fifteen on the Binet scale, whereas when four years
old she was below four on the scale of "mental age"). This older Polly was
thoroughly not the docile Bernice, but just like the four-year-old, "loud,
coarse, wilful, emotional, changeable, disobedient, selfish, egotistical,
excitable and unreasonable." In short, a pain. Then she woke up as
Bernice, and mostly stayed that way for a while, but there was no sugges-
tion that the two figures had been synthesized.
The second method was to hypnotize Polly every time she did appear,
and telling her to wake up as Bernice. So she did, but Polly would keep on
coming back. Moreover Polly disliked the whole business, objecting to
going to sleep, for fear she would miss something.
Finally Goddard stopped trying to trick Polly and instead tried to get
her to collaborate. She was, he told her, "well"only when she was Bernice.
Polly demanded to know more about her older self, and so Goddard
agreed to introduce them when Polly was asleep. When she was hypno-
tized, he told her she would know all about Bernice and remember it on
waking. She did. Goddard then did the same in reverse. Bernice and Polly
were made, in today's jargon, "co-conscious."
Various things then happened. When the patient awoke in the morn-
ings she would be "herself," but she would assume more and more Polly
traits as the day went on and she became tired. There was also the emer-
gence of the new Louise mentioned above, who according to Goddard's
article was not allowed to develop, but seems to have had quite a life in his
book. Polly and Bernice collaborated almost spontaneously once they

knew each other, and there is a general fuzzing over of their distinctive-
ness. Polly gradually agreed to disappear, and at the time of the report in
1926, that was how it was, despite the tantalizing observation that "there
were, it is true, a number of interesting episodes which we cannot take
time to narrate here" ("CDP," p. 182). There are more incidents in
Goddard's book, especially involving Louise, but it is by no means clear
what Goddard meant.
Therapy in the 1980s

Multiple personality therapists come from a good many distinct psy-
chiatric backgrounds, but their practice is less different than their train-
ing. Integration, synthesis, and fusion are the watchwords of modern
therapy. Child abuse has increasingly dominated the diagnosis, etiology,
and treatment of multiples. Hence abreaction of the early traumatic inci-
dents has become more and more central regardless of the therapeutic
orientation of the physician.
No one today would try Goddard's first technique, of age progression
for Polly. A few practitioners might try a slightly more sophisticated ver-
sion of hypnotically "training" Polly not to appear. Goddard's third tech-
nique, in contrast, anticipates modern practice. Work with the alters. Try
to make them co-conscious. When this is impossible, "talk through" one to
the other, on the assumption that the other is "listening in." Make con-
tracts with one or another about what role it will play in the immediate
future life, and how it will not interfere with the life of another alter. Mod-
ern multiples usually come with one or more vicious alters. Suicide-
understood as internal homicide, one alter murdering the body to kill
another alter-is regarded as a real threat. Initial contracts are precise
agreements with each alter not to hurt anyone. Then encourage mutual
caring relationships among alters, so that in the end synthesis will be vol-
untary on the part of every alter, and no one will be eliminated, "killed."
Some workers think that eliminating an alter, rather than having it join in
the resultant soul, is a kind of murder.
The metaphors of killing and murder may seem too strong, but they
were very present in Goddard's day. He went public with the case, giving
the story to newspaper reporters on 1 December 1921. A front-page story
in the ColumbusCitizen has the subheadline, "Columbus Scientist Is 'Kill-
ing' Child Soul." It continues, "Science is slowly but surely killing Polly R.
at the State Bureau ofJuvenile Research here. But offsetting this, science
is surely saving the life of Bernice R., 19."35 The more sensational organ,
35. C. C. Lyons, "Young Woman Is in Turn a Girl of 19 and a Baby of 4," ColumbusCiti-
zen, 1 Dec. 1921. The paper gave regular reports from the front: "Girl, 4 Monday, Is
'Grown Up' Today," 6 Dec. 1921; "Polly Fights Game Battle," 14 Dec. 1921; "How Bernice
Feels When She's Polly," 16 Dec. 1921; "Double Personality Girl Is Well Again," 12 Jan.

the Ohio State Journal, reported complete success on 13 January 1922,

under the heading "Polly R. is Dead: Bernice Again Normal":
Died-At the Ohio bureau ofjuvenile research Polly R., aged 4.

There will be no funeral services, for Polly never had a body. She
was the strange second personality which tried for months to steal the
body of Bernice R., of Cleveland, and there is no one to mourn her
passing.36
The Resultant Soul

There are two predictable ways in which a cured 1980s Bernice
would be different from the 1920s Bernice. First she would have under-
gone a treatment in which a goodly number of multiples would have
been activated and developed. With many therapists one can be almost
sure that an internal helper and a persecutor would have been found. It
is true that after fusion some former multiples forget a lot of what went
on during therapy, so the remarkable alters fade away. It appears, how-
ever, that most products of fusions do remember at least five or ten per-
sistent, recurring alters. This is no great feat because the alters are
typically stock characters with bizarre but completely unimaginative
character traits, each one a stereotype or one might say TV-type who
readily contrasts with all the other characters. Persona-switching now
happens much more suddenly and instantaneously than in the past.
There is no need for a trance or sleep period between alters. The model
is "zapping," of switching channels on television. One has little doubt
that Bernice in the 1980s would be very much like this, and would,
indeed, be an avid TV-watcher-I've noted above her repeated requests
to go to the "show,"that is, the movies, and dreaming of going to the the-
ater in an evening gown. A cured 1980s Bernice would have memories of
1922. The story was also carried on the wires and appeared across the nation; at the end of
TS Goddard quotes letters he has received from newspaper readers in Bloomfield, NewJer-
sey; Pueblo, Colorado; Portland, Oregon; Chattanooga, Tennessee, as well as Phoenix, San
Francisco, Chicago, and Bernice's home state.
36. "Polly R. Is Dead; Bernice Again Normal," OhioStateJournal, 13 Jan. 1922, p. 13. I
owe the newspaper references to Ben Harshman, who conjectures on the basis of other
stories that Goddard wanted favorable publicity over Bernice to obtain more funds for the
Bureau of Juvenile Research, and, more widely, more funds for the care and education of
the feebleminded. Or, as the Citizen reported more graphically in its lead story of 9 Dec.
1921, "Imbecile Menace in Ohio Grows as Politicians Quarrel over Spending Taxpayers'
Relief Fund." Lyons, who was following the Polly story above, wrote on 12 Dec. 1921,
under "Imbecile Peril and the Cure," about how 1800 feebleminded prisoners in the Ohio
jails confirmed "the claim of Dr. H. H. Goddard ... that every feeble-minded person is a
potential criminal."

a bunch of stock characters, each associated with an original trauma,

usually from early life.
1980s Bernice would also have abreacted her paternal incest in detail,
and would almost certainly have recovered some earlier sexual molesta-
tion by her father or another relative or caretaker. We would not be sur-
prised to find her remembering that she had been bribed by candies when
being fondled at about age four. And there would be a good deal of atten-
tion to nonsexual trauma of which there was plenty in her family. In short,
1980s Bernice today, in 1991, would have a different soul from the one
that 1920s Bernice had in 1930. Memories of matters fundamental to
who she is would be substantially different, both in the variety of alters
that she would recall from her therapy, and in the memories of incidents
in her own past.
Historical Reality: Incest

Whose memories are true, those of the 1930 Bernice or the 1991
Bernice? "We will never know!"On the contrary, I think that we can know
that some memories are true, some false, and that a great many others are
neither true nor false.
Let's start with incest. 1991 Bernice knows that she was molested by
her father and has worked through the vivid and painful events in great
detail, grieving and making peace, as best she can, with her past. 1930
Bernice pretty well believes that the incest was a fantasy, and she under-
stands where it came from. But what actually happened? Jeffrey Masson
famously threw a monkey wrench into psychoanalytic complacency when
he argued that Freud just fooled himself, or worse, when he retracted his
claim that his patients had endured real childhood incest.37 I do not share
the loathing for Freud that has become fashionable of late. I am sure that
fin-de-siecle Vienna was full of family sex that was painful to children.38 We
know that in recent decades there has been a great deal of sexual molesta-
tion of infants and youngsters by older family members, starting with
siblings-possibly the most frequent perpetrators-and proceeding
through parents, grandparents, and various collaterals. And I am sure
that small-town Ohio in the early years of this century was no better than
Vienna or Ohio today. One telling sentence is Goddard's, quoted earlier:
"We were dealing with a phase of hysteria where, as someone put it, when
we do not find this particular hallucination it is the exception rather than
the rule." That is a stunning assertion. Goddard's fraternity of doctors
and psychologists were finding that aside from some exceptional cases
37. See Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson, TheAssault on Truth:Freud's Suppressionof the Seduc-
tion Theory (New York, 1984).
38. Some facts and many speculations are recounted by Larry Wolff, Postcardsfrom the
End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud's Vienna (New York, 1988).

every single hysteric patient (or only females?) during a certain phase was
claiming paternal incest. And it was an hallucination.
These women almost uniformly believed they had been incestuously
assaulted. That is not something they could have readily picked up from
magazines or the general vision of the age. Today it is commonplace, and
one must be on guard against imagined events, but that guard was less
needed in 1921. Spontaneously, it appears, and without collusion, all
these patients said they had been assaulted. There are only two explana-
tions. Most of them were in fact victims of incest-or there is some power-
ful psychic drive to fabricate such fantasies when one is in a certain state.
Freud had a theory in which such a drive has a plausible place. Goddard
had no theory. He faced two opposite poles: either the stories are true, or
there is a completely mysterious and inexplicable drive in the minds of sick
women to imagine they have been raped by their fathers. His fraternity
resolutely denied what the patients said. In my unpopular opinion it was
intelligible for Freudians to make the denial-but for the likes of Prince
and Goddard it was downright dishonest.
Thus I assert that with high probability Bernice's assertion of father's
incest was historically correct. But nothing is simple. The age-old rela-
tively innocent conception of father-daughter incest is of consummated
sexual intercourse. Since the mid-1970s incest has increasingly been used
to cover many kinds of sexual abuse perpetrated by parents. Consum-
mated intercourse is relatively rare compared to various types of "bad
touching." The psychoanalyst who founded the multiple movement,
Cornelia Wilbur, goes further: "chronic exposure to sexual displays and
sexual acts during infancy and early childhood is abusive. This occurs
when parents insist that a child sleep in the parents' bedroom until 8 or 9
years of age.""39Some of Bernice's siblings and perhaps Bernice herself
will have slept with the parents. Where else do enormous poor families
sleep? But of course that's not what Bernice was talking about, but what
she was talking about may not be clearly defined. Nevertheless, why
should we not believe her? Because her account of intercourse does not
tally with Goddard's idea of how one has sex? Under Goddard's tutelage,
Bernice came to believe that her memory of it was an hallucination. After
she had been cured, she had what I think were false beliefs about items of
fundamental importance in her own past. Her soul had false conscious-
ness, untrue memories-at least if Goddard's therapy worked as well as he
thought it did.
39. Cornelia B. Wilbur, "Multiple Personality and Child Abuse: An Overview," Psychi-
atric Clinics of North America 7 (Mar. 1984): 3.

Historical Reality: Alters

We suppose that in 1930 Bernice had a memory of a Polly with whom
she had made peace. In 1990 she would typically have a memory of a large
number of alters, each connected with something experienced as dread-
ful, often early in life. In 1990 that would be part of her personality struc-
ture. Let us suppose that exactly such an array of alters could have been
elicited from Bernice in the 1920s. Does the historical Bernice have false
consciousness because she does not know of these alters, and knows only
of Polly?
I think not, but yet another distinction must be made. Skeptics have
always proposed that alters are a product of the interaction between
patient and therapist. It takes two to multiply. But three distinct proposi-
tions must be noticed:
a) Every alter is iatrogenic.
b) Many or most, but not all, of the panoply of alters, up to 100 in
number, are a product of the therapy.
c) The entire array of alters is a real part of the patient's structure of
personalities.
Skeptics maintain (a). Most members of the community of multiple-
doctors favor (c). You can see why. Members of the movement think (b) is
a threat. If some multiples are products of the doctor-patient duet, the
next thing you'll hear is (a). Skeptics are equally scared of (b). They fear
that if they grant (b), anything goes. Yet (b) I propose is eminently
plausible.
The multiple-movement readily grants that patients don't walk in the
door with a host of alters. They are painstakingly ferreted out. In no way
need we suppose that suggestion is the norm. We need only imagine that
after a while it becomes almost routine to invoke a new alter to deal with a
new problem that is in the course of being abreacted. It is curiously said
that the characters of the alters are so vivid that only a great actor could
sustain them. I do not suggest that the patient is acting. But the argument
is fallacious. Stock characters are easy to act. They are roles that a patient
can grow into rather than adopt. It is plain that the therapist moves in with
the suggestion that a lot of alters are a good thing. "How many of there are
you?"-that is a starting point. "I want you all to be listening now while I
talk to the Terminator, even those of you who have not declared your-
selves yet."
My remarks are not skeptical about initial alters like Polly. I have
made plain my position-Bernice entered the Bureau of Juvenile
Research a multiple. Nor are these remarks skeptical about the modern
practice of multiplying multiples. It may be a valuable device for quickly
abreacting a complex series of traumas. I am quite happy to agree with
one of the leaders of the movement, Richard P. Kluft, that most alters are
spontaneously produced by the patient in the course of therapy, and are in

that sense not iatrogenic.40 On the other hand, had the patient not gone
into this kind of therapy, she would never become conscious of so many
specific alters.
What's the difference? It requires a very philosophical statement. It is
not either true or false that when Bernice entered therapy in 1921 she
had a personality structure with more than one or two alters. It is true that
she had at least one alter in September 1921, namely, Polly. It is also true
that if she had undergone a 1980s course of treatment, she would have
evinced a number of alters. If you like, multiples like Bernice have a soul
that has the potentiality to evolve in that way, suitably reinforced. But
there is no "actuality"in Bernice except this potentiality, which she shares
with any other multiple. I believe that if Polly had met Jesus in the year 32
she would have jumped into the soul of a Gadarene pig and run to drown
in the Sea of Galilee, but this too is no "actuality"in Bernice. It is a certain
type of suggestibility. Hence, I say, in 1930 Bernice was not suffering from
false consciousness because she knew of only one developed alter in her
past, namely, Polly. There was no important actuality, in this respect, that
was hidden from her by false consciousness. There was no psychological
reality that was concealed from her. "Know thyself" may be a moral imper-
ative, but "Know thyselves" is not.
Of course there is a quite different point. It might be the case that for
a multiple, the easiest way to abreact repressed trauma is through the pro-
cedure of alters, eliciting one alter per significant trauma. So as a point of
expediency, the great panoply of alters may be wanted, but not because
they, as opposed to their potentiality, are an intrinsic part of Bernice. It is
because without them it is unlikely that she will bring to consciousness
things that are of deep importance to her.
In short: Some of Bernice's profoundly important memories in 1930
were false. Moreover she did not recall events in her past that a 1980s
treatment would strive for. But her ignorance of a personality structure
that would have been elicited in a 1980s-style treatment was not ignorance
of any significant matter of fact about herself.
False Consciousness
What's wrong with false consciousness? Suppose Bernice's father had
not died when she was seventeen and Betty Jane was an infant. Many
would bet their bottom dollar that father would be after Betty Jane in a
while. If so, Goddard would have achieved an evil consequence. Bernice,
who might have given the alarm, is now silenced. She no longer remem-
bers what once she knew. But the false consciousness is not what is wrong.
40. Richard P. Kluft, "Iatrogenic Creation of New Alter Personalities," Dissociation 2

(June 1989): 83-91.

It is the fact that Bernice was deprived of a crucial piece of information

that matters to young Betty Jane.
False beliefs about one's past can have less dramatic bad conse-
quences. Most of us find it embarrassing to be contradicted, even in mat-
ters of no significance. But in the story as told, there were no survivors to
contradict Bernice. Sister Pauline had died at age eleven. It would be dif-
ferent had the treatment occurred in the 1960s. Bernice would be about
fifty, and she would have a mid-life crisis indeed, for she could hardly
ignore or hide from herself the news that incest is rampant, and all her old
terror might be restored.
In the historical case, however, Betty Jane is safe (we hope) in her
adoptive home and almost everyone else is dead. It is 1991; given
Bernice's health record, I expect that she died before incest made the
front page news. There was no occasion for any cognitive dissonance.
One may feel there is the terrible danger that the whole incest thing
would have erupted in her mind all over again. I think we have no right
to think this more or less probable than that a 1991 cure will relapse. A
great many do.
There may be no utilitarian argument to show that Bernice's false
consciousness in 1991 is a bad thing. She violates the ancient injunction,
"Know thyself." So what? Bernice has a coherent soul. It works, or so we
are told. What better truth for her is needed? The therapist will say, per-
haps, none. He is glad to get Bernice back to an almost natural life.41 The
pragmatist will say there is no need for some "historical" truth: Bernice's
soul worked.
There are serious grounds for caution. Bernice and indeed Polly and
Louise had a deep-seated belief about their father that was removed by
another father figure whom they called "Daddy" for a while. Even if the
belief was a fantasy, the destruction of that horrible belief about the father
by a "father," leaving her no sense of self-trust, no confidence about her
own inner springs of self-knowledge, would, in the opinion of many thera-
pists today, have left all sorts of hidden scars on her soul.
That is a practical reason for doubting that Bernice's soul did in fact
"work." But something additional is nagging me. We do have another
vision of the soul and self-knowledge. What is its basis? It surely comes
from deeply rooted convictions and sensibilities about what it is to be a
41. There's a slight dissonance. Goddard's article ends by saying that Bernice is quite
happy working half-days, but in the book we learn "it will take time to bring her back to the
point where she will be strong enough to earn her own living" (p. 170). In the light of the
correspondence reported below, we see that is quite an understatement. Up to this point in
the essay, I have been discussing a hypothetical Bernice as if Goddard's report were in the
main factually accurate. Harshman has established that in May 1922 Bernice was working
as a clerk in Goddard's bureau for pay. Goddard moved to a chair at Ohio State University
in the fall of 1922, and Bernice soon followed him; from December 1922 she was for sev-
eral months working in the University Hospital for room and board.

fully developed human being. We inherit an Aristotelian tradition of tele-

ology, of the ends for which a person exists, to grow into that complete
person. We inherit a nominalist tradition, according to which personal
identity is constituted by memory. Any type of amnesia results in some-
thing being stolen from oneself; how much worse if it is replaced by false
memories, a nonself.
There is also a further consideration, connected with the kind of
material that is and is not in the false consciousness of Bernice. She has
been built into the male-dominated world of Professor Goddard, in which
fathers never molest their daughters. She is a tidy and polite half-day
clerk. Any possible autonomy of this already much-weakened woman has
been effectively annihilated. Things are not so great in 1991 either. But at
least with the consciousness that she would acquire now, and some serious
sisterly support, there would be some possibility that she would find a self
to which it would be worth her while to be true. But beware of cant: One
has no confidence that 1991 Bernice is going to lead a happier or even
better life in the rough and tumble of fuller knowledge. A truer con-
sciousness may be a bed of thistles compared to which her historical false
consciousness was thorny, but a rose garden.42
Waitingfor Goddard
When we examine psychological material, we tend not to scrutinize
the therapist, except in the rare case of a giant like Freud. Goddard is
ordinary. In photographs taken at the prime of life, Henry Herbert
Goddard (1866-1957) is severe, intense, fully bald. Later he was more
relaxed, with a full head of distinguished hair. Brought up as a Quaker at
home and at Haverford, he had a firm conviction of righteousness. He
42. I am well aware that I have scarcely touched on deep issues, of the sort addressed in
Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truthand Historical Truth:Meaning and Interpretationin Psycho-
analysis (New York, 1982). For discussions of the realities of abreactive and analytic recol-
lection, one can go back to Sigmund Freud, Screen Memories, The Standard Edition of the
CompletePsychologicalWorksof Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (Lon-
don, 1953-74), 3: 304-22. And on for example toJohn Forrester, TheSeductionsofPsychoa-
nalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida (Cambridge, 1990), starting at, say, pp. 205-6. We should
note, however, that recollections by multiple personalities are now in a state of crisis. From
1975 it was taken for granted that any recollection of almost any kind of child abuse by any
alter was an historical memory, the abusive event having caused the alter personality to
develop. But as the satanic or ritual abuse scare mounts, so do alters who remember some
very remarkable things. One frantic physician in Smyrna, Georgia, reports that half the
patients in his clinic, like most similar clinics in North America, "are reporting vividly
detailed memories of cannibalistic revels, and extensive experiences such as being used by
cults during adolescence as serial baby breeders for ritual sacrifices" (quoted in George K.
Ganaway, "Historical Versus Narrative Truth: Clarifying the Role of Exogenous Trauma in
the Etiology of Multiple Personality Disorder and Its Variants," Dissociation 2 [Dec. 1989]:
205-20).

864 Ian Hacking TwoSouls in One Body
invented the technical word moron for those who, on Binet's scale, had a
"mental age" of between eight and twelve. He was capable of self-
amusement, expressing delight when a porter on a Pullman car called
him-a moron. He was the man who brought football to California when
in 1887 he was an instructor at the newly founded and ambitiously named
University of Southern California. Now that's a claim to fame: the first
coach of the future Trojans. He avidly climbed the mountains of Europe,
Colorado, and British Columbia. He had more than a passing interest in
nudism and suffered from chronic constipation. He was fascinated by
Egypt, the Dionne quintuplets, and wanted to go to the North Pole. He
retired to Santa Barbara, after putting up a dogged fight against the
retirement policies of Ohio State University. At the age of eighty-two he
published a book about children of the atomic age. In 1953, when eighty-
seven years of age, he and his second wife made the grand tour of Alaska,
and he walked most of the way up Mount Rainier on the way back. He died
peacefully at ninety.43
A good life, but: He had a strong influence on a piece of American
history of which no one now is proud. His most famous book is the 1912
Kallikak Family, which developed from observations on a girl at the
Vineland Training School, NewJersey, whose mother was of normal intel-
ligence but whose father was stupid.44 "Kallikak"is an invented name for
the union of good and bad (Greek kalos and kakos).Goddard proved that
for six generations back the paternal family consisted of imbeciles and idi-
ots, and took this to establish that intelligence and the lack of it is strongly
inherited. Worse, feeblemindedness is dominant, for when an imbecile
breeds with a normal person, the resulting line is damned.
Goddard became an ardent eugenicist, possibly with more effect than
his Quaker predecessor Francis Galton, founder of the English eugenics
movement. He did favor sterilization of those of low measured IQ, but
selective training was his motto.45 He did research at Ellis Island on immi-
grants who travelled third class or steerage on the steamers. "One can
hardly escape the conviction that the intelligence of the average 'third
class' immigrant is low, perhaps of moron grade."46He did not think this
43. These personal matters are culled from the unsorted residual material in HHG
labelled "depot."
44. See Goddard, The Kallikak Family:A Study in the Heredityof Feeble-Mindedness(New
York, 1912).
45. See Goddard, Feeble-Mindedness:Its Causes and Consequences(New York, 1914).
46. Goddard, "Mental Tests and the Immigrant,"Journal of Delinquency2 (Sept. 1917):
243. His sample did not include those whom the inspectors at Ellis Island had already rec-
ognized as feebleminded-despite the fact that this had increased by 350 percent in 1913
and 570 percent in 1914 over the annual total five years earlier. Even so 40 percent tested
feebleminded, of "mental age" between four and eight. The statistics for Hungarians, Ital-
ians, Jews, and Russians were indistinguishable. His most "intelligent" subject was a tailor
who spoke four languages and ran a small business, with a mental age of twelve.

necessarily bad, so long as immigrants could be trained for work that

Americans did not want. He became the darling of those who sought to
control the racial stock of immigrants, and provided testimony to
Congress.
His "methodology" in the Kallikak story has long been criticized, but
not until someone took pains to find out who the Kallikaks were did it
transpire that Goddard's genealogy and description of family members
was as defective as he alleged the family itself to be. He presumed a lot of
facts that are refuted even as soon as one turns to census returns, let alone
family research.47 These snippets of biography don't bear directly on
Bernice. She was all right, scoring well on "the scale," one of us, not them.
The facts do, however, suggest we tread warily. Goddard seems willing to
have tempered his reports and investigations to what he expected to find.
The rather benign picture of cure-in terms of which I posed the
possibility of a 1990 Bernice having a soul different from the real 1930
Bernice-is based on Goddard's reports. Are they honest? In the 1920s
Dr. William H. Pritchard (1867-1936) was superintendent of the
Columbus State Hospital (for the insane). At year's end, 1926, he angrily
wrote Goddard about Bernice's time at the University Hospital before
being transferred to his institution on 30 August:
You will doubtless recall that during the latter part of the period, dur-
ing which she was a patient at the University Hospital, her behavior
had become very bad; that the "Polly" personality had been in the
ascendancy almost continually; that her conduct had been such that
she was regarded by the committing physicians, Dr. Wagenhals and
Dr. McCampbell, as one suffering from an attack of Acute Mania;
that she was brought to the State Hospital "bound hand and foot to a
stretcher, and was held down by a canvas restraining sheet; and that
she was boisterous and noisy with much loud childish talk and swear-
ing." The article referred to states (Page 182), referring presumably
to the period prior to her entering the State Hospital, that: "Gradu-
ally the Bernice personality became established and Polly rarely
appeared." This statement is hardly consistent with the condition in
which she was brought to the State hospital.
Pritchard continues by noting that "the hypnosis and other psychological

methods to which she had been subjected" do not seem to have helped
much; on the contrary, she got better in hospital after as little as twenty-
four hours. "It would seem that the friendly routine disciplinary measures
of the hospital, the absence of suggestions due to freedom from newspa-
47. See J. David Smith, Minds Made Feeble: The Myth and Legacy of the Kallikaks
(Rockville, Md., 1985).

per publicity, and the common sense medical attention given this girl by
Dr. Bradley should be given some of the credit for her improvement."48
We possess two replies by Goddard, a defensive one of three pages,
marked "Not sent," and a conciliatory one of a page promising to make
amends in the book. Neither rebuts Pritchard's version of the facts.
Amends in the book are meagre.49 We are told that during the summer of
1922 Bernice was in the country, stayed there until October, returned and
was hospitalized at the University Hospital. It was crowded, and moreover
she was used in teaching clinics where "hysterical symptoms were pointed
out" (in the relatively cured Bernice!). She "began to have Polly episodes
again," although she was fine much of the time.
Finally, it seemed best to transfer her to the Columbus State Hospital

where there was more opportunity for quiet and rest. The transfer
was made on the 30th of August, 1923. Although she had been a very
violent Polly for some days before the transfer, possibly induced by
the thought of a change, as soon as she was received at the hospital,
she woke up as [Bernice] and now for three years has been perfectly
normal with the exception of two short periods when something dis-
turbed her and the Polly personality appeared for a very brief period.
[TS, p. 169]
In fact Bernice's fate was decided the previous day in Probate Court, with
the laconic conclusion: "Case 45068-Benuice R.: lunacy."50The newspa-
pers were anything but laconic. A Columbus paper reported that "a Mr.
Hyde spirit won superiority over a Dr. Jekyll body yesterday when Miss
Bernice R., 22, was committed.... So real did the assumed personality
become to the young woman that she insisted she really was possessed of
in
two souls the same human body. The younger personality, she told the
doctors, was named 'Polly."'51
Goddard saved perhaps the choicest newspaper story for himself, the
48. William H. Pritchard, letter to Goddard, 30 Dec. 1926, HHG.

49. In the preface, after thanking various advisors and the doctor who took some
X-rays, and another who performed a tonsillectomy, Goddard writes, "I wish also to
express my appreciation of the excellent care and treatment [Bernice] has received at the
Columbus State Hospital through the interest and skill of Dr. Pritchard and Dr. Bradley of
that institution" (TS, p. ix).
50. Daily Reporter,Columbus, Ohio ("Daily Law Journal and Daily Legal News"), 30
Aug. 1923. The name "Bernice" was misspelled.
51. Ohio State Journal, 30 Aug. 1923, p. 1. The OSJ had been developing the theme
since 2 Dec. 1921, under the headline "Jekyll-Hyde Parallel Is Found in Cleveland Girl." At
that date Goddard had been optimistic: "Soon the two personalities which have fought for
mastery of the same body will be merged into one and what is perhaps the strangest case
which has ever confronted Ohio psychologists will be closed." Once again, thanks to Ben
Harshman for locating the newspaper stories.

only clipping that he kept together in his files with his correspondence
with Pritchard:
Science lost ground to psychic abnormality today in one of the strang-

est battles ever waged. The center of the long fight is Miss Bernice R.
For nearly three years master psychologists have been puzzled by two
distinct personalities struggling to rule her slender body.... At one
time about a year ago psychologists believed the girl's "baby self"
completely "killed out." Recently the personality changes have
become more frequent again. Today efforts of science to banish
"Polly"came to an end. Attendants of Ohio State University Hospital
where Miss R. has been a patient since December, prepared for her
removal to the State Hospital for the Insane.... According to Dr.
Paul Charlton, house physician at the University Hospital, Miss R.'s
health is declining rapidly. She will be given good care, but it is not
likely that the corrective work can be continued at the hospital.52
52. From an unidentified clipping loose in the HHG file, with the dateline "Columbus,
O., Aug. 30."


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Two Souls in One Body

Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991)

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powerful intersection of morality and metaphysics: why is it of value to

Ian Hacking, a philosopher,teaches at the Institute for the History

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Does Multiple Personality Exist?

2. For a remarkable account of Mary Reynolds, including the successive medical

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students with minimum coaching "spontaneously" produce the symp-

As for the umpteen selves exposed in the Book of Sybil, it is safe to

Note how the "diagnostic" question runs into the "medical"question.

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sonality disorder. A growing number of practitioners encounter more and

If we turn our attention to the neurological aspect once more, we

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ease or weakness, possessed not of their full quota of energy, but

Bernice Was a Multiple Personality

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Relative innocence:On present evidence the case of Bernice cannot be

Skeptics worry about patients imitating and thereby faking symp-

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Spiritism played a major role in American multiple personality, start-

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commonplace bundle of virtues, vices, abilities, and blind spots. I shall

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1980s Expectations about Multiples

30. Coons, "The Differential Diagnosis of Multiple Personality," PsychiatricClinics of

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Today's multiple therapist might criticize Goddard for not develop-

33. Ibid., p. 359.

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paper as a lecture today, he would be hooted off the podium by militants in

Hallucinosis Incestus Patris

I am not aware of any more explicit case of professional "denial" of

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Vague references were continually made both by the girls and by

Abreaction-working through-was plainly not a major focus of

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Therapy in the 1980s

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the Ohio State Journal, reported complete success on 13 January 1922,

Died-At the Ohio bureau ofjuvenile research Polly R., aged 4.

The Resultant Soul

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a bunch of stock characters, each associated with an original trauma,

Historical Reality: Incest

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Historical Reality: Alters

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40. Richard P. Kluft, "Iatrogenic Creation of New Alter Personalities," Dissociation 2

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