Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World

James M. Glass

Published by Cornell University Press 1995

Shattered Selves

Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World

James M. Glass

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501735431

Overview
Contents

About this book

In cultural arenas from academic debates to movies, postmodernist philosophy has "deconstructed" fundamental assumptions regarding history, causality, meaning, and identity. In their critique of modern ideology, such postmodernist thinkers as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Robert Stam go so far as to deny the self an integral being. There can be no single personality, they argue, only a radical multiplicity of selves, the person as rhetorical category.

Yet what does it mean, really, to celebrate multiple- and fragmented-selves? In this wrenching book, James M. Glass exposes the limitations of postmodernist thought by examining the first-person narratives of women institutionalized with multiple personality disorder. Against the backdrop of postmodernist theory, he juxtaposes the actual suffering of women whose fragmentation of self originated in unendurable experiences of rape, incest, and physical abuse, in some cases inflicted by members of Satanic cults. Turning to the work of French psychoanalytic feminists including Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Catherine Clement, Glass addresses the problem of incest as a form of tyranny. In dismissing the concept of a cohesive self, he contends, postmodernist theory betrays an insensitivity both to the pain of individuals who must live without a firm identity and to the politics of the real world. Postmodernism's dismantling of the unified subject not only denies human psychological needs but also undermines its own political agenda.

Shattered Selves will be essential reading for political psychologists and political theorists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, sociologists, feminist theorists, and literary critics, and for others concerned with the treatment of the mentally ill.

Author / Editor information

Professor of Government at the University of Maryland, James M. Glass has researched mental disorders at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital for sixteen years. He is the author of Private Terror/Public Life: Psychosis and the Politics of Community (Cornell).

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
1. Postmodernism and the Multiplicity of Self Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Multiple Realities: The Subject Disintegrating Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	28
3. Multiple Personalities: Terror in a Precivil Psychological Space Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
4. Phallocratic Culture and Reversion to the State of Nature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
5. Molly's Absence of Self and the Postmodern Critique Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
6. Satan's Daughters: Power, Evil, and the Organization of the Multiple Self Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
7. Placelessness and Asylum Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
Conclusion: The Paradoxical Plight of Fragmented and Multiple Selves Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	163
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 208
Keywords: Philosophy

eBook

Published: May 15, 2019
ISBN: 9781501735431