Cinema and the Discourse of the Multiple

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, scientists began asking themselves whether the strange phenomenon of multiple personality was ‘primarily a pathological response to the physical doubleness of the brain or the result of disordered association.’ The debate revived an old question: ‘[I]s there a co-ordinating power within each individual, formed through memory and shaping individual will, that constitutes the core of the self? Or are we nothing but a series of bodily sensations, cerebral reflexes and fragmented memories that together constitute the fiction of individuality?’ In his essay ‘The Dream as a Revelation’ (1893), to which Freud refers in the 1909 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, the British doctor James Sully observed that ‘psychology has of late occupied itself much with the curious phenomena of double or alternating personality.’ Similarly, foremost among the questions that concerned Frederic Myers ‒ a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research established in 1882, known for making Janet's work on traumatic memory and Freud's Studies on Hysteria available in England, as well as for inventing the term ‘telepathy’ ‒ was ‘whether minds might exist outside the limits of the individual body.’ This question prompted him to study what he called ‘multiplex personalities’, including such well-known cases as those of Louis V. and Mme. B. Like James Sully, Myers saw the human mind as ‘a palimpsest with a structure and a history,’ but he also believed that ‘the fragmented selves revealed in cases of double consciousness are aspects of a subliminal consciousness’ that ‘at some future time, and under changed conditions may unite.’

As part of the evolving discourse of the multiple dominating the period between 1874 and1886, photography and film were instrumental in what Ian Hacking calls the ‘secularization of the soul’; that is, the transformation of the ‘soul’ ‒ under the new disguise of ‘memory’ ‒ into an object of scientific study.