The Bactra Review Brainchildren
If there are several competing coalitions of contents with roughly equal
strength, we might expect possession of the commanding heights to pass back and
forth between them, as chance and circumstance give the advantage to one
faction or another. This is the account that Dennett (and Nicholas Humphrey)
advance for dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality
disorder, and a great many things before that, including demonic possession and
the Greek original of ``enthusiasm'') in ``Speaking for
Ourselves.'' They accompany it with a sensible story about how certain
kinds of emotional damage early in life might help those separate,
evenly-matched coalitions form. I'm intensely curious, however, about what
they'd make of Nicholas Spanos's quite compelling arguments, in Multiple
Identities and False Memories (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological
Association, 1996), that DID is really a learned, almost entirely iatrogenic,
form of social behavior, and not a trauma-induced state of consciousness.