Stewart 9

Even if we have added an essential dimension to understanding Norman's case, there seems to be little we can say to change his fate. Norman Bates was not reified to us; he was lost to us, but lost also, we are tempted to believe, to himself. The psychiatrist's explanation relies on the former (Norman being lost to us) in order to make its case for the latter (Norman qua private, transparent thought and memories being lost to himself). The claim that Norman Bates ceases to exist is given through our failure to interpretively access what was supposedly first-person privileged evidence for his existence. Thus to some significant extent, the psychiatrist's story of Norman Bates threatens to undermine the very model that affords it an explanation. This is an interesting point: If we accept multiple personality as a category of personhood, we destabilize our (already fragile) Cartesian-type criteria of person. In other words, Norman is an anomaly within the Cartesian picture of mind required to explain his exceptional case. Something Hacking never brings up is the obvious point that the very idea of multiple personality, even as a clinical diagnosis, still challenges some widespread notions of what it is to count as a person even as it relies on those widespread notions in order to make its case.

At this point, some might object that in order for me to disqualify MPD as a candidate for ways to live out and practise personhood, I need the very Cartesian picture of privileged, first-person accessible mental experience that I have brought into question. So aren't I just sneaking the Cartesian maxim for personality back into my picture of what counts as unified subjectivity? I would like to make it clear that I have questioned the work that Cartesian subjectivity as the whole story can do for us. The idea that our psyches are such that we can lose access to crucial sets of memories, feelings, and the general narrative or story of our life in such a way that others are forced to interpret our personality as degenerate, destroyed, or even on indeterminate hiatus, is an idea based on a particular model of mind and personality as practised in psychology and philosophy. It posits persons as those self-contained, transparent collections of ready-at-hand memories and thoughts. This self-containment—minds that 'house' personalities and are therefore occupant-accessible only—is the only resource, on this model, positioned as establishing particular agented subjects. We ought to wonder, then, whether this Cartesian model is capable of affording us the required tools of social hermeneutics that I have been suggesting are so crucial to understanding the criteria for personhood. On its own, the Cartesian model can't make sense of Hacking's claim of what it is about splits vs. queers that has led queers but not splits to be successful in challenging status quo social fabric such that their lived out identities are being inscribed into everyday life. For Hacking, multiple personality is distinguished by its lack of afforded possibilities for lived out subjective projects. Norman's failure was not, on my view, primarily the failure to maintain only transparent thoughts and memories in his psyche. Rather, and for reasons that are openly not a first-person perspective, Norman's failure was primarily the lack of finding himself capable of taking up a unified project of lived-out subjectivity. On my view, Norman is not so much an anomaly as he is a tragedy.


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