Wearing the wolf skin: psychiatry and the phenomenon of the berserker in medieval Scandinavia.

This paper examines the berserker, a frenzied warrior attested to in both the written and material sources of medieval Scandinavia, and elucidates the characteristics that define him. It critiques explanations for the phenomenon offered in the existing historiography and whether this can be explained as a psychiatric diagnosis. It concludes that the berserker cannot be simply defined as a culturally bound or other psychiatric syndrome, or accounted for by psychogenic drugs alone. Instead, it proposes that berserk frenzy constituted a transitory dissociative state shared among a small warband steeped in religious/spiritual ideology. In entering this state, the psyche of the berserker was reconstituted in an almost archetypal pattern. Further research is required into this phenomenon in other contexts, including modern conflicts.

Seeking double personality: Nakamura Kokyo's work in abnormal psychology in early 20th-century Japan.

This paper examines Nakamura Kokyo's study of a woman with a split personality who lived in his home as a maid from 1917 until her death in 1940. She was his indispensable muse and assistant in his efforts to promote abnormal psychology and psychotherapy. This paper first explores the central position of multiple personality in Nakamura's theory of the subconscious, which was largely based on the model of dissociation. It then examines how it became a central issue in Nakamura's disputes with religions including the element of spirit possession, which invoked Western psychical research to modernize their doctrines. While both were concerned with the subconscious and alterations in personality, Nakamura's psychological view was distinguished from those spiritual understandings by his emphasis on individual memories, particularly those that were traumatic, and hysteria. The remaining sections of the paper will examine Nakamura's views on memory and hysteria, which conflicted with both the academic mainstream and the established cultural beliefs. This conflict may partly explain the limited success of Nakamura's academic and social campaigns.

Sexual Trauma at the Salpetriere.

Jean-Martin Charcot who studied hysteria at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris late in the nineteenth century is often portrayed as a great neurologist. According to standard accounts, his female hysterical patients imitated the seizures of epileptic patients at the Salpetriere in order to get attention because of their dramatic, self-centered natures. They were also prone to making false allegations of childhood sexual abuse. In fact, the so-called hysterical seizures were often abreactions of rapes. The patients commonly had extensive childhood sexual abuse histories, and sexual misconduct by doctors was endemic at the Salpetriere. The pathological counter-transference towards "hysterical women" at the Salpetriere has been repeated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in attitudes expressed towards dissociative identity disorder.

The rise and fall of dissociative identity disorder.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID), once considered rare, was frequently diagnosed during the 1980s and 1990s, after which interest declined. This is the trajectory of a medical fad. DID was based on poorly conceived theories and used potentially damaging treatment methods. The problem continues, given that the DSM-5 includes DID and accords dissociative disorders a separate chapter in its manual.

Hypnosis: seventy years of amazement, and still don't know what it is!

This paper has reviewed the author's experience with hypnosis and related therapies from 1934 through World War II, psychological warfare, multiple personality, the origins and feuding of hypnosis societies, the development of hypnotic ego state therapy and the unique contributions of his colleague and wife, Helen Watkins.

A new view from the acropolis: dissociative identity disorder.

The author reviews psychoanalytic viewpoints on dissociation and dissociative identity disorder (DID), the controversial condition previously known as multiple personality. He expands his own contributions to the literature over the last fifteen years, incorporating the burgeoning data from research on disturbances of attachment as precursors to dissociation. Utilizing clinical material, he then contrasts DID with trauma and dissociation in adulthood as well as with schizophrenia. He contends that the complexity and myriad manifestations of this condition warrant deeper psychoanalytic exploration to help elucidate not only its true nature, but also to further our understanding of all psychopathology.

Elena: A case of dissociative identity disorder from the 1920s.

In 1930, Italian psychiatrist Giovanni Enrico Morselli described the history, diagnosis, and treatment of his patient Elena. The case of Elena has been considered in literature as one of the most remarkable cases of multiple personality ever published. In fact, before treatment, Elena showed alternating French- and Italian-speaking personalities, with the Italian personality knowing nothing of her French counterparts. After a difficult treatment involving recovered memories of incestuous attacks by her father, which were proven to be true, Elena fully recovered from her symptoms. In this article, the author presents details of the case that were not available in the international literature before. He also discusses Elena's psychological and somatoform symptoms according to a contemporary perspective on the relationally traumatic origins of dissociation and dissociative identity disorder.

Hypnotic Seminar.

In this transcription of a lecture given in 2000, Jay Haley begins by answering the question, "What is hypnosis?"  Haley reviews the circumstances of Gregory Bateson encouraging him to meet with Milton Erickson to discuss the history of hypnosis and the paradoxical nature of trance induction. Haley expresses many original thoughts about multiple personalities, regression to past lives, and how to handle memories that historically may be false. Sophisticated and subtle, this is Haley at his best.

Jay Haley's Supervision of a Case of Dissociative.

This is a transcript of a supervision session with a young therapist caught in the complex world of a woman with multiple personality. Occurring very early in the written literature about treating multiple personalities, the highlight of this paper is the supervision style and technique of Jay Haley. His approach to supervision will make the reader wish that he or she could be in the room during this session.

The history of multiple personality in the United States: I: The beginnings.

The origins of the history of multiple personality in the United States may be found in the lectures and writings of Benjamin Rush. Although the case of Mary Reynolds in 1811 has been thought to be the first known case of multiple personality. Rush described three earlier cases of dissociation and attempted to explain these strange phenomena.

Multiple personality and spirit possession.

"Multiple personality" remains surrounded with a halo of the occult, and, as a rare exotic, fits uneasily into the framework of modern psychotherapy. Yet, the spirit-possession phenomena which it so closely resembles are widely distributed and commonly reported; and therefore, from the comparative perspective of anthropology, the truly interesting question is not why it occurs at all but why it occurs so seldom. This essay is an anthropologically motivated intellectual history of the perceived relation between multiple personality, possession, and kindred states. On the theoretical side, it concerns the creative role of psychological curing, the influence of theory upon the existence of the things which it is held to explain, and the influence of social and cultural factors on self-perception and the topography of the ego. I will begin by outlining the relation between multiple personality and possession, and follow with an account of how certain Western psychological theorists once tentatively allowed for the real existence of possession. Next I will examine cases of multiple personality in which possession was considered to play a literal role. As such an interpretation became increasingly suspect, decline of belief in possession was paralleled by a decline of interest in multiple personality as such and in the frequency of reported cases.

Satanism, ritual abuse, and multiple personality disorder: a sociohistorical perspective.

During the past decade in North America, a growing number of mental health professionals have reported that between 25% and 50% of their patients in treatment for multiple personality disorder (MPD) have recovered early childhood traumatic memories of ritual torture, incestuous rape, sexual debauchery, sacrificial murder, infanticide, and cannibalism perpetrated by members of clandestine satanic cults. Although hundreds of local and federal police investigations have failed to corroborate patients' therapeutically constructed accounts, because the satanic etiology of MPD is logically coherent with the neodissociative, traumatic theory of psychopathology, conspiracy theory has emerged as the nucleus of a consistent pattern of contemporary clinical interpretation. Resolutely logical and thoroughly operational, ultrascientific psychodemonology remains paradoxically oblivious to its own irrational premises. When the hermetic logic of conspiracy theory is stripped away by historical and socio/psychological analysis, however, the hypothetical perpetrators of satanic ritual abuse simply disappear, leaving in their wake the very real human suffering of all those who have been caught up in the social delusion.

Learning from extremism in the history of mental health. The example of multiple personality disorder.

This article reviews some of the history of the cultural forces that shaped the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder/dissociative identity disorder and the subsequent abuses that occurred at the time of its popularization. Some of the implications that can be drawn from these kinds of historical excesses in the field of mental health will be discussed. The article concludes by underscoring the ethical obligation inherent in maintaining healthy professional skepticism toward ideas driven by ideology and fad, rather than scientific empiricism.

Sally Beauchamp's career: a psychoarchaeological key to Morton Prince's classic case of multiple personality.

By the methods of psychoarchaeology, the identity of Sally Beauchamp, Morton Prince's classic case of multiple personality, has been established. The reconstructed life history has for the first time revealed the roots of the dissociative process. This goal was actually obscured by the tangled web of Prince's rambling 1906 book and his other publications on the case. The determinative events included two instances of sudden infant death during the childhood period of the patient, the earlier of which was apparently never even known to Dr. Prince. Though not mentioned in the patient's autobiography, it probably induced the initial dissociation to defend the integration of the personality. The relevance of the new concept of SIDS (since 1969) is considered. Other disturbing influences were the constant rejection of the patient by her mother, who died at an early age, and probable severe abuse by the widowed father which led her to run away from home (permanently) at age 16. Nine years afterward, therapy with Dr. Prince began and lasted seven years. It is suggested that this case and the parallel one of Breuer and Freud (Anna O.) be comparatively reexamined from the standpoint of modern feminism. The role of the conventional 19th-century woman was not acceptable to either of them, and both probably had an unusually large innate, bisexual endowment. Endogenous conflict, intensified by social demands, produced dissociation as a pseudo-solution until, through opportune therapy and other environmental opportunities, each was able to achieve a productive modus vivendi. The relation of bisexuality to the etiology of personality dissociation in general is considered. An incidental but instructive discovery made in the course of the Prince research was an unknown letter from William James to Morton Prince about The Dissociation of a Personality. This find points up the fact that James's final metaphysic was a form of pluralistic panpsychism derived from both psychical research and the contemporary knowledge about dissociated personality. James postulated a cosmic multiple personality.