A highly critical editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry in March 1995 suggests that the condition is largely generated within therapy. Certainly he intends to exclude malingering or mere therapist suggestion. Clark's philosophical remarks are also circumspect, but ambitious claims are there. He wants a re-appraised, strong theory of the self, though he doubts that the truth of such a theory could ever be established. Apart from its philosophical advantages, the notion of self he wishes to revive has therapeutic value.
Autonomy is the therapeutic target.
Understood in Cartesian terms, Multiple Personality Disorder presents paradoxes of autonomy. The difficulties are softened if our idea of self allows for plurality, opacity and divergence within the one person, so the prospect held out to the patient is the possibility of repossessing the fragmented parts of his or her life. Clark engages in a two-fold maneuver for making sense of Multiple Personality Disorder. He revives a looser philosophical concept of self, and he interprets the disorder as an extension of ordinary experience in which there is a divergence of coping strategies rather than a plurality of egos. One could argue that Clark is too optimistic in his belief that the disorder is part of a continuum of familiar dissipated, disorientated and dithering experience, a more exotic experience than most, but to be understood along similar lines.