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Spanos rejects the traditional view by arguing that MPD is in large part a sociohistorical product. To reinforce his case, he marshalls an extensive body of research that supports a sociocognitive alternative to the disease model. The book critically examines commonly held views about hypnotic amnesia as an altered state, which some investigators link with the amnesia purportedly experienced by MPD patients. It investigates the nature of memory and the complex issues surrounding the reported recovery during psychotherapy of memories of childhood abuse. It also explores the parallels between MPD and posits their relation to such historical and sociocultural phenomena as spirit possession, witchcraft, glossolalia and hysteria. And it evaluates the role of social learning and validation in the development of MPD.

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This well-researched and heavily documented posthumous study examines a number of related phenomenon including hypnosis, hypnotic amnesia, recovered memory, brainwashing, UFO abduction, spirit and demonic possession, multiple personality, etc. All, Spanos argues, are social problems or problems in living that have become medicalized. This reconceptualization has made problem behavior internal to the individual. Unlike physical illness, however, the triggering events are conceived as occurring in the mind, not in the body. Inevitably, the result of this new "insight" has been a huge increase in the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers who propose easy causal answers to major social problems or behaviors. He compares many of the professionals in the field to the judges in the Salem witch trials, who did not solve the problems but added to the frenzy. At the same time, clients and patients involved consciously or unconsciously respond by fitting their problems into the new fashionable diagnoses. He urges the abandonment of the disease theory of such phenomenon and, instead, viewing them from a sociocognitive and historical perspective. General readers; undergraduates through professionals. V. L. Bullough; University of Southern California