Author: Radden, Jennifer
Title: Divided Minds and Successive Selves : Ethical Issues in Disorders of Identity and Personality
Description: Cambridge [MA], MIT Press, (1996). orig.cloth. 24x15cm, x,311 pp.. Minor rubbing. An ink mark to top page-edge. VG. ¶ If people change radically as a result of mental disturbance or brain damage or disease, how should we acknowledge that change in the way in which we repsond to them? And how should society and the law acknowledge that change, particularly in cases of multiple - personality and manic - depressive disorders? This book addresses these and a cluster of other questions about changes in the self through time and about the moral attitudes we adopt in the face of these changes. The result is a broad- ranging interdisciplinary discussion at the boundaries of psychiatry, philosophy, law and social policy. Theories of personal identity are applied to, and clarified in light of, the appearance of multiple selves in a variety of personality and identity disturbances. Divided minds force us to clarify our thinking about human subjectivity, Radden points out, and when they result in a succession of "selves", they provoke interesting ethical and legal issues. Radden provides a clear and thorough discussion of basic issues faced by clincians and philosophers contending with the unity of consciousness and personal identity, particularly in the area of dissociative disorders, where issues of unity of consciousness have a direct impact on clinical and forensic decisions. Part 1 takes up the divisions and heterogeneities associated with the normal self and then with the pathological self and identifies a "language of successive selves..." - Publisher's description.

Keywords: Dissociative Disorders, Philosophical, Psychopathology, Personality Change, Psychology, Psychiatry, Responsibility, Identity Self,