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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 psychologist 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 confidentiality should still be preserved. See also Goddard, TwoSouls in One Body?A Case of Dual Personality. 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 Unpublished letters quoted in this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 Psychology, 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.
838
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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 Ourselves." 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 Dissociation 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 suffering from a less florid complaint.'3 Ottawa psychologists have shown how
8. See Myron Boor, "The Multiple Personality Epidemic: Additional Cases and Inferences 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 American 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 ExperimentalHypnosis (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).
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students with minimum coaching "spontaneously" produce the symptoms.14 A British book is subtitled "An Exercise in Deception."'5 Physicians and psychologists have to be cautious in suggesting that the existence
of the phenomena has more to do with their colleagues than with the psyche. 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 questions 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, biochemical, 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 Personality: 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.
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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 personality 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 physicians 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 per17. 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 "cultural" 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 twentiethcentury multiplicity was a response to American Protestantism. But his eponymous bornagain (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 piecework seamstress, the trade adopted by her mother when her father, first mate on a merchant 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.
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Spiritism played a major role in American multiple personality, startWilliam James. It was guessed that alternate personalities might
with
ing
be good mediums, excellent at extrasensory perception, or even reincarnations 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 Abnormal 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 September 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 randomized 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 subordinates accusing each other, for example, of "postmenopausal insanity" (HHG). The quotation is from the OhioState HouseJournal, 29 Apr. 1921, p. 817. The salary cut was after the
20 May appropriations sessions.
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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 consistent" ("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 letter, 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. Likewise 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 hysteric. 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 interestingly 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 problems "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 consequent 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 disorder. 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.
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Today's multiple therapist might criticize Goddard for not developbut she does confirm the doctrine of "more-than-two." On the
Louise,
ing
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 theof
multiplicity: the disorder is caused by childhood trauma. There is
ory
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 medicine on Bernice by mistake. Or was this neglect, anger, or punishment, as
we might hear from many a child abuse investigator today? More charitably, we should think about a tubercular mother looking after a tubercular
father and a raft of sick children. The twins became deathly ill of diphtheria 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 housecleaner 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 manifestation 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 suspect 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.
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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).
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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 nothing 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 perfect 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 fouryear-old herself had changed her name. Today a standard strategy would
be quite different. One might guess that the Polly character was an "imaginary 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 contemporary, that is, of age about n. Imaginary playmates are usually
with them are happier than the less imaginative who
benign-children
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
through-was plainly not a major focus of
Abreaction-working
Goddard's work with Bernice, but it was there all the time as he kept on
106.
34. See Maya Pines, "Invisible Playmates," PsychologyToday 12 (Sept. 1978): 38-42,
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probing into the past. The attempt to restore memory by talk and by hypnosis is a standard feature of all the models available for Goddard to follow, 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 incidents 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. Generally, 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 suggestion 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 hypnotized, 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 mornings 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 emergence 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
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knew each other, and there is a general fuzzing over of their distinctiveness. 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.
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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, NewJersey; 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."
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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 explanations. Most of them were in fact victims of incest-or there is some powerful 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 relatively 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. Consummated 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 consciousness, 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," Psychiatric Clinics of North America 7 (Mar. 1984): 3.
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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 imperative, 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 procedure 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 remembers 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.
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fully developed human being. We inherit an Aristotelian tradition of teleology, 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 something 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 consciousness 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 Psychoanalysis (New York, 1982). For discussions of the realities of abreactive and analytic recollection, one can go back to Sigmund Freud, Screen Memories, The Standard Edition of the
CompletePsychologicalWorksof Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 3: 304-22. And on for example toJohn Forrester, TheSeductionsofPsychoanalysis: 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).
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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 selfamusement, 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 eightyseven 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 intelligence 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 idiots, 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 immigrants 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 recthe fact that this had increased by 350 percent in 1913
ognized as feebleminded-despite
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, Italians, 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.
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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 disturbed 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
R.: lunacy."50The newspathe laconic conclusion: "Case 45068-Benuice
pers were anything but laconic. A Columbus paper reported that "a Mr.
Hyde spirit won superiority over a Dr. Jekyll body yesterday when Miss
So real did the assumed personality
Bernice R., 22, was committed....
become to the young woman that she insisted she really was possessed of
two souls in 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.
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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 strangest 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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