Shattered Selves : : Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World / / James M. Glass.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Glass, James M.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1995
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (208 p.)

In cultural arenas from academic debates to movies, postmodernist philosophy has "deconstructed" fundamental assumptions regarding history, causality, meaning, and identity. In their critique of modern ideology, such postmodernist thinkers as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Robert Stam go so far as to deny the self an integral being. There can be no single personality, they argue, only a radical multiplicity of selves, the person as rhetorical category.Yet what does it mean, really, to celebrate multiple- and fragmented-selves? In this wrenching book, James M. Glass exposes the limitations of postmodernist thought by examining the first-person narratives of women institutionalized with multiple personality disorder. Against the backdrop of postmodernist theory, he juxtaposes the actual suffering of women whose fragmentation of self originated in unendurable experiences of rape, incest, and physical abuse, in some cases inflicted by members of Satanic cults. Turning to the work of French psychoanalytic feminists including Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Catherine Clement, Glass addresses the problem of incest as a form of tyranny. In dismissing the concept of a cohesive self, he contends, postmodernist theory betrays an insensitivity both to the pain of individuals who must live without a firm identity and to the politics of the real world. Postmodernism's dismantling of the unified subject not only denies human psychological needs but also undermines its own political agenda.Shattered Selves will be essential reading for political psychologists and political theorists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, sociologists, feminist theorists, and literary critics, and for others concerned with the treatment of the mentally ill.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- 1. Postmodernism and the Multiplicity of Self -- 2. Multiple Realities: The Subject Disintegrating -- 3. Multiple Personalities: Terror in a Precivil Psychological Space -- 4. Phallocratic Culture and Reversion to the State of Nature -- 5. Molly's Absence of Self and the Postmodern Critique -- 6. Satan's Daughters: Power, Evil, and the Organization of the Multiple Self -- 7. Placelessness and Asylum -- Conclusion: The Paradoxical Plight of Fragmented and Multiple Selves -- References -- Index