BUT THERE'S MORE to media apparitions of Bill Clinton as a man with split or multiple personalities than a president who can't keep his trailer-park id chained in the basement of his psyche (although he is that). There's more to them, too, than the Gothic dreams of a society that is, like all end-of-the-century societies, seeing double (although they are that). To be sure, John Brummett's characterization of Bill Clinton as a man with a conspicuous "lack of a solid center," a man who seems "to lack grounding or certainty about who or what" he is, is a reasonable likeness of a Faustian politician whose willingness to sacrifice seemingly any principle in the name of political expediency has gained him the world but cost him his soul. But when Brummett notes Clinton's observation that he sees "'character' not as a permanent condition, but as a struggle and a progression," we catch a glimpse of the deeper anxiety exorcised by images of Clinton as a Jekyll or a Sybil. It's the ontological vertigo we're experiencing, late in the 20th century, as the self as we know it -- a sharply demarcated, integrated, more or less stable psychological entity -- spins off its axis.

The static, individualistic self, unshakable cornerstone of the Western world-view, seems to be liquefying into a mutable, multidimensional thing, a polymorphous, postmodern perversity, barely recognizable to the modern "I." The political scientist Walter Truett Anderson thinks we're in the midst of a "global identity crisis." In The Future of the Self: Inventing the Postmodern Person, he writes, "Considering how central the idea of the self is to every aspect of our lives, it is obviously an event of enormous historical importance when a society's fundamental idea of self changes dramatically. And that is what is happening now. The ground is shifting beneath us all."

The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has felt the tremors as well. "We are becoming fluid and many-sided," he writes, in The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. "Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time." This new self, "the protean self," is the brainchild of "the widespread feeling that we are losing our psychological moorings."

So, while Bill Clinton the man is undeniably a Mighty Morphin' Machiavelli, as well as the son of an abusive alcoholic, raised to disguise or deny painful truths, Bill Clinton the mass-media mirage is a funhouse-mirror reflection of our anxieties. "The culture is developing multiphrenic and protean myths," writes Anderson. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, as Joan Didion observed, and one of the stories we're telling ourselves around the electronic campfire is the tale of the self's metamorphosis from the bounded, centered entity that solidified sometime around the Enlightenment to the shapeshifting postmodern self that began to emerge in the '60s. One version of this tale is multiple personality disorder, the signature psychosis (and extraordinary popular delusion, according to its critics) of the late 20th century.

In 1972, the disease was a freakish curiosity; by 1982, an article in a psychiatric journal was noting the "multiple personality epidemic." In 1990, one influential medical professional claimed that one percent of the population -- some two million Americans -- "fit the criteria for being a multiple personality." Not only that, but patients were exhibiting what Anderson calls "identity inflation": "Sybil," the prototypical multiple personality and subject of the eponymous 1973 best-seller, had a mere 16 "alters"; patients in the '80s and '90s have spawned a hundred, four hundred, a thousand separate selves. And whereas Sybil limited herself to human alter egos, her successors were more ambitious; one psychiatrist reported sessions with "sages, lobsters, chickens, tigers, a gorilla, a unicorn, and 'God.'"

MPD seems to be going out of fashion, discredited by its association with satanic ritual abuse and debunked by feminist critics like Elaine Showalter. Most psychiatric professionals have concluded that the disorder is real but far rarer than the recent hysteria suggests. Many cases of MPD may be examples of what the New Yorker writer Joan Acocella calls an "idiom of distress" -- a psychosomatic manifestation of a profound cultural crisis.

The crisis, in this case, is the crisis of the self, a crisis that began, in the modern era, with Freud's invention of the unconscious, the Hyde-like dark double that challenged the integrity of the conscious mind. Things really got going in the '70s, as reflected in the work of post-structuralist philosophers like Michel Foucault, who saw the self as a social fiction created by the state to straitjacket our minds. Fellow travelers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari championed a romanticized vision of the schizophrenic as a slipsliding, shapeshifting non-self that state power couldn't lock its radar onto. In the late '90s, cyberfeminists like Allucquere Rosanne Stone and Sadie Plant dream science-fiction dreams of transgendered, post-humanist cyborg selves. "High-resolution, high-definition minds," declares Plant, "are anathema to the parallel processors, intuitive programs, nonlinearities, interactivities, simulation systems, and virtualities of the late twentieth century." Artificial intelligence theorists and cognitive neuroscientists are promoting the disquieting notion that consciousness is a "user illusion," to borrow the title of a recent book on the subject. The MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks dismisses Descartes's thinking "I" as "just this thin layer of consciousness trying to make up a story about what happens down below" in the neurochemical workings of the brain. "Cognition," he asserts, "is nowhere." The self is a cloud of cultural marsh gas floating over the purely material processes of the brain.

There's a growing tendency to relax into the falling sensation we experience when wrapping our minds around such ideas. "Our prominent philosophers now speculate that 'the concept of a single person with a disunited consciousness will become less strange as science advances,'" notes Hillel Schwartz. "And we do now appear to accept a culturally and historically peculiar sort of self-commenting, self-combative, doubled but estranged consciousness."

As if on cue, Walter Truett Anderson has punningly dubbed The Future of the Self a "multiple-self-help book." A true son of New Age and pomo, he counsels us to find, in the revealed postmodern truth that the self is a social fiction, something like Zen liberation from the ego. He envisions a collective "movement beyond the modern self toward more multifaceted, changeable, or decentralized identities and personalities, or even toward the no-consciousness sometimes called enlightenment." Similarly, Robert Jay Lifton emphasizes the power of positive morphing. Unafraid of shapeshifting and flexible enough to contain multitudes, his protean self is uniquely adapted to the liquid topography of the late 20th century. "The protean self seeks to be both fluid and grounded," he writes, "however tenuous that combination."

Lifton and Anderson's go-with-the-flow proteanism -- call it T-1000 psychology, after the liquid-metal shapeshifter in Terminator 2 -- has the zeitgeist on its side. The overthrow of the autocratic Self, hilariously compared by Anderson to Captain Kirk "sitting in the command center like a well-dressed Cartesian pineal gland," parallels challenges to the old (white) boys' network by feminists, gays, and people of color. The notion of a polyvocal self dovetails neatly with the ever more multicultural, increasingly heterogeneous society we live in. Besides, wasn't the self always a "symbol of one's organism" (Lifton), a tale told by a signifying monkey to shape the chaos of embodied experience into a coherent narrative? "We are habits, nothing but habits," wrote Gilles Deleuze. "The habit of saying 'I.'"

There's a certain poetic justice to the wrecking-ball deconstruction of the monolithic "I," the selfsame subject that scoffed to death all the master narratives about God or Marx or progress that we've traditionally told ourselves in order to live. Still, we're left with a creeping anxiety that the Smiley-Face postmodernism of Lifton and Anderson can't quite assuage. It's borne of the unsettling revelation that as the millennial counter nears triple zeroes, the Yeatsian center that cannot hold is, it turns out, the image of our selves that we hold in our heads. The Jungian critic Paul Kugler has written our epitaph -- or, at least, an epitaph for our selves as we know them. Here, in the twilight of the 20th century, he says, "it is the speaking subject who declared God dead one hundred years ago whose very existence is now being called into question."

Mark Dery edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press, 1995) and wrote Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Grove Press, 1996). His collection of essays, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, was published by Grove Press in February, 1999. He is an occasional writer for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, Suck and Feed and a frequent lecturer in the U.S. and Europe on new media, fringe thought, and unpopular culture.

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