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.

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.

On the history of dissociative identity disorders in Germany: the doctor Justinus Kerner and the girl from Orlach, or possession as an "exchange of the self".

The history of hypnosis is closely linked to the theme of possession; one such link is that the forerunner of hypnosis, animal magnetism, replaced exorcism in 1775 when Franz Anton Mesmer testified against Father Johann Joseph Gassner's exorcism. Modern authors have noted remarkable similarities between states of possession and dissociation. The treatment of possession by animal magnetism and exorcism represents the special romantic-magnetic therapy of the German medical doctor Justinus Kerner in the early 19th century. This article describes the man, his methods, and his thinking and presents one of his most famous case studies, the girl from Orlach, which, by today's standards, was a true case of dissociative identity disorder (DID). This article describes how contemporary principles of treatment were used and controversial issues about the nature and causes of DID were discussed 175 years ago.

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.

Pierre Janet and Félida Artificielle: multiple personality in a nineteenth-century guise.

In the wake of the recent epidemic of multiple personality phenomena, it is important to get a clear idea of what similar phenomena looked like in previous centuries. Pierre Janet's detailed description of his discovery, made during the 1880s, that he could cure hysteria by creating a healthy second personality offers a close look at a form of multiple personalities very different from what has recently been described. His description of the factors that influenced his discovery allow one to see his work in a historical context and to appreciate his confrontation with the paradoxes that this discovery revealed.

Hypnosis, false memory and multiple personality: a trinity of affinity.

This paper presents a discussion of the relationship between hypnosis, false memory, and multiple personality. Since Morton Prince's classic case of multiple personality (Prince 1906), only two other cases rival Prince's original work (Thigpen and Cleckley 1957, Schreiber 1973) in popularity. This paper illustrates startling new material regarding the third most famous of multiple personality cases, that of Sybil. Tape recordings recently discovered document the fraudulent construction of multiple personality. The importance of the role of hypnosis is discussed in this presentation. The author of this paper knew the author of Sybil, Flora Schreiber, through many years before her death, and therefore is able to present first-hand information about the author and her work.

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.

Multiple personality and hypnosis: the first one hundred years.

The Enlightenment brought with it a greater scientific interest in and attention to a wider range of human behavior. In 1789, there emerged during the French Revolution a case of what would be today called multiple personality disorder which came under the care of a local physician, Dr. Eberhard Gmelin. Gmelin had only recently become interested in mesmerism and tried this procedure with this patient. So started an ongoing and gradually increasing exploration of the role of hypnosis in multiple personalities. This paper contributes to the historical background of such psychodynamic concepts as dissociation, splitting, repression, consciousness, subconscious, and unconscious.

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.