Philosophical Works and Broader Implications

Louise Armstrong, Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.)

I don't agree with a lot of it, but this is a fascinating book and written in a style that is a pleasure to read. However, be careful. She has a lot of ideas that will feel invalidating to most survivors.

Armstrong is the author of one of the first memoirs about incest, Kiss Daddy Goodnight (1978). In Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics she tells the story of how she came to speak out and of how public concerns about incest developed in very different directions from what she had hoped.

Armstrong is first, and foremost, a feminist, and she believes that the most important thing that needs to be done about incest is to change the cultural assumption that men have the right to control and sexually abuse their children (and wives). Her material on how the courts have ruled in favor of abusers and against women who tried to protect their children is truly frightening.

Armstrong believes that political action is the key and that any other response is a distraction that protects patriarchal privilege. In particular, she dismisses therapy, complaining that incest survivors are being taught to live with the system instead of changing it and that therapists focused on incest because it looked like a good way to gain money and professional prestige. She also suspects that MPD/DID is overdiagnosed and believes that it's popularity is a way of infantilizing women.

Stephen E. Braude, First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind (Lanham, MD and London: Rowman Littlefield, 1995, first edition 1991).

This is a serious philosophical inquiry into what multiple personality might tell philosophers about the nature of the self. Braude seems to be working from the published literature, not from his own experience with multiples, but he takes the experience of multiples very seriously. He makes some wonderful philosophical distinctions, if you like that kind of thing. For example, he argues that experiencing an action as something that I did and believing that I did it are two different categories that may, at times, be in disagreement.

Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul : Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton Univ Press, 1995).

This, oddly enough, was the first book I read when I diagnosed myself, and I found it quite reassuring. Hacking is a philosopher interested in using DID to examine issues about whether our memories are "real." He is generally sympathetic to people with DID, though he has trouble believing accounts of Satanic Ritual Abuse. If you like philosophy (this is a book written for scholars), I think this is a useful book because he does clarify that there are not true memories and false memories, but a whole range of different kinds of memories, none of which would exactly match what was captured by a video camera in the sky.

James M. Glass, Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993).

Prof. Glass teaches political theory at the University of Maryland. This book is one of three he has written based on research in a mental hospital. He uses the experience of people with mental disorders to try to understand issues of political philosophy, such as the nature of the self, and the relationship between the individual and society.

In this particular book, his goal is to disprove the ideas of certain postmodernists who say that just as there is no one truth, people have no one self (this is definitely a book written for scholars--he is responding to a school of thought that starts from Foucault's Madness and Civilization). Prof. Glass says that when he met people who have no one self, he discovered that it was not at all the creative life that the postmodernists claimed.

Unfortunately, he talked with multiples only in a hospital context, so he has gotten the idea that DID is terribly disabling. I found some of the theories he was playing with intriguing, but in order to prove his point that the postmodernists are wrong he paints multiplicity in a very negative light, and he talks about DID and schizophrenia together in his conclusion (though he is careful to define them as separate). Be warned that the book includes some brief, but rather specific descriptions of ritual abuse (which he believes).

Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988).

This book is based on a feminist study of the continuum of sexual violence; in other words, Kelly is interested in finding common themes in experiences of incest, rape, and domestic violence. Feminist prejudices show occasionally; for example, in a rather hasty dismissal of women abusers and of anger at the mother about incest. But it is interesting to see the larger picture, and particularly to see her discussion of pressured sex that women do not define as rape (which has parallels for me with my struggle to define experiences of sexual abuse). There is some discussion of not remembering, but no discussion of DID. The tone of the book sounds somewhat dated to me, but it is still a more thoughtful feminist analysis than I have seen anywhere else. The research was done in England.

religious issues | back to top

home | pam | pem | female-female abuse | book reviews |