ABSTRACT
As with any other social fact, we can interpret an illness as somehow characteristic of the particular society in which it is found. Such specificity has been a particular problem for comparative psychiatry: can we argue both local specification as well as membership of some more universal psychopathological category when a ‘behavioural syndrome appearing in widely differing cultures takes on local meaning so completely that it appears uniquely suited to articulate important dimensions of each local culture, as though it had sprung naturally from that environment’ (Good et al. 1992)? Alternatively we can start from the idea that where some general category of ‘illness’ or other loss of personal agency is locally recognized, this category is then shaped and deployed, through fluctuating popularity and social contingencies, and through the immediate interests of therapeutic networks, their experts and victims (Lloyd 1990). European anthropology has turned from interpreting the ‘total social fact’ to a recognition that institutions are constructed through instrumental actions, and that rather than take these actions just as reflections of mentalities or political processes of society at large, we should examine in closer detail the practical power which is available to individuals at particular historical moments.1 In this chapter I consider the reemergence of the phenomenon of multiple personality-double consciousness as it was described by the neuropsychiatrists of the late nineteenth century.
