In an earlier message, I recommended Ian Hackings' book on fugue states. A few minutes later, I remembered that Hacking had also written a book on multiple personality, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, 1995). When I tracked Freud down by means of the index, I found this:
"Breuer and Freud famously asserted 'that the splitting of consciousness which
is so striking in the classical cases under the form of double conscience [i.e., double consciousness] is present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria, and that a tendency to such a dissociation, and with it the emergence of abnormal states of consciousness (which we shall bring together under the term of
'hypnoid') is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis.'" --Hacking, p. 150-151. The quotation is from Breuer and Freud (1893), in Freud, S.E. 2:12 (emphasis in original).
I pass this along on the off-chance that it may provide new information to SB. Judging from this very limited bit of evidence, it seems likely that, as Sergei suggests, Freudian theory, simply through the treatment of hysteria, was, in a clear sense, deeply involved with multiple personalty in the 1950s, though perhaps without using that particular term.
If this guess is off the mark and totally useless, please ignore it. Before I sign off, though, I can't help wondering whether SB or CK has had a look at Ellenberger's great work The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. It's been years since I read it, but as I recall it's full of fascinating details about a wide number of cases and schools of thought.
Jim Twiggs
-------- Original Message --------
Dear Jansy,
even if the subject of split personality has no Freudian overtones
in psychoanalysis as such, the question is, did it have in 50 and 60-es
in the USA when VN was writing Pale Fire? I think psychoanalysis was
then and there very powerful and tried to treat almost every subject.
This irritated not only VN who could be quite violent toward it,
but other prominent writers (Salinger and his writings come to
my mind). I speak of historical reconstruction, not about your
"objective" view as a psychoanalyst.
Sergei
EDNote: VN would have gotten his earliest major exposure to the "split
personality" concept from William James' retelling of the work of
Pierre Janet and of some famous cases from the 19th century (Patience
Worth, Ansel Bourne) in
Principles of Psychology; possibly also
from works by Theodule Ribot. Matt Roth and I have both previously
mentioned Donald James West's
Psychical Research Today (1954).
My own research on this subject has not revealed major connections
between Freudian theory and multiple personalities in the 1950s--either
independently, or in Nabokov's notes on the subject. ~SB
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