Introduction

In Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, philosopher of science - and recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize - Ian Hacking, makes the important point that fiction rather than medicine is often responsible for introducing new models of mind, consciousness, and altered states. As Hacking observes, E.T.W. Hoffmann's works, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dostoyevsky's The Double, and James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, to name only a few, disseminated and entrenched ideas about the non-unitary mind, doubles, trance-states, and possession. 'I make the strong point,' Hacking writes, 'that the whole language of many selves had been hammered out by generations of romantic poets and novelists great and small, and also in innumerable broadsheets and feuilletons too ephemeral for general knowledge today' (232). Our understandings of hysteria, possession, and multiple personality, Hacking concludes, are the direct 'consequence of how the literary imagination has formed the language in which we speak of people be they real or imagined' (233). Hacking's insights affirm what we the editors have recognized in our own work, namely, the profound role of novelists, poets, and dramatists, and of the humanities disciplines in general, in any period's signature theories of mind and consciousness. Our interest in the roles played by writers and by humanities scholars in helping to construct and disseminate models of consciousness - and especially extraordinary states associated with overwhelming emotions, trauma, and trance - led us to host three symposia on these themes at the University of Toronto over the past three years. This special issue of UTQ is in large measure a collection of selected papers from these symposia.

In offering the following brief summary of cultural and scientific approaches to hysteria and trauma, we are attempting not so much to map the field as to underscore the mutually dependent if not always acknowledged relationship between scientists and cultural theorists in their ongoing attempts to formulate and answer profound questions about the nature of consciousness. Our initial point of entry and the critical context for our research on the literary treatment of consciousness and its disturbed or unusual states were generated by scholarship from the late 1970s to the 1990s on hysteria and trauma by historians and cultural critics such as Ian Hacking, Carol Smith-Rosenberg, Elaine Showalter, Sander Gilman, and Mark Micale. Their research traces the hysteria diagnosis across a range of scientific and cultural discourses and offers a historical perspective on the disorder and on its later incarnations - including multiple personality disorder and dissociative identity disorder - along the triple axes of gender, race, and class. In Approaching Hysteria, Micale points out, for example, that during the nineteenth century, in an attempt to map the characteristics of the hysteric personality, Parisian physicians drew heavily from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. 'Parisian psychiatrists found the character of Emma Bovary all too believable, and they responded through pathologization: they elevated, or rather degraded, Emma into a psychiatric category, a "personality type"' (234). Similarly, in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, Showalter traces the 'inevitable interaction of fictional narratives' with the concepts of hysteria and multiple personality disorder 'circulating in our culture' (165). If science offers explanations of the causes and etiology of hysteria, then fictional and cultural discourses elaborate the so-called hysterical personality and the social dimensions of this alleged disorder.

But even more radically, the assumption that science originates and literature disseminates has itself been subject to critique. Although it is often assumed that scientists discover an illness and writers mirror and extend their discoveries, the relationship between scientific and cultural discourses is far more complicated - circular rather than linear, multidirectional rather than one-way. Since the early 1990s, critics have been arguing that medico-psychological discourse ought to be seen in relation to its ambient culture. As Janet Oppenheim put it in her history of the discourse of nerves, 'Scientists and medical doctors, belonging integrally to the public . . ., share many of its biases and expectations. Their pronouncements are not objective, or free of implicit moral judgment, for...