Multiple Personality Disorder/ Dissociative Identity Disorder

What is multiple personality disorder?

Multiple personality disorder is a little girl imagining that the abuse is happening to someone else. The imaging is so intense and subjectively compelling, and is reinforced so many times by the ongoing trauma, that the created identities seem to take on a life of their own, though they are all parts of one person.

Two basic psychological manoueuvres form the foundation of multiple personality disorder.

First, the little girl who is repeatedly sexually abused has an out-of-body experience: detached from her body and what is going on, she may float up to the ceiling and imagine that she is watching another little girl being abused. Since that unfortunate little girl on the bed below may have a different name and a different physical appearance, the abuse is not so terrifying and overwhelming because it is happening to someone else, and the child is buffered from the direct impact of the trauma.

Second, an amnesia barrier is erected between the original child and the newly created identity. Now not only is the abuse not happening to the original little girl, she doesn't even remember it: this process is reinforced over and over as the abuse continues. Various identities may be created to deal with different aspects of the trauma, resulting in an eventual total of ten, twenty, or more alter personalities. Once the mind is in the habit of creating new identities in this way, alter personalities may be generated to cope with many non-trauma events, tasks, or functions in life, including going to school and dealing with peers.

Adult patients with MPD experience a number of core symptoms These include voices in the head and ongoing blank spells or periods of missing time. The voices are the different personalities talking to each other, and to the main, presenting part of the person who first comes for treatment. The periods of missing time occur when different personalities take turns being in control of the body, and are attributable to the memory barriers between the personalities.

MPD patients also experience numerous other symptoms such as those associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, sleep disorders, sexual dysfunctions, and psychosomatic disorders, and symptoms that mimic those of schizophrenia. The assessment and treatment of multiple personality disorder must take this large array of trauma-related symptoms and problems into account. The complexity of the patients' symptoms often results in misdiagnosis and the institution of treatments that are not effective. In fact, in two different published research studies, MPD patients were found to spend an average of just under seven years in the mental health system before being correctly diagnosed (Putnam 1989; Ross 1989). During this time, they received many different diagnoses and treatments, none of which took the trauma into account.

Although MPD patients are, by definition, diagnosed as having more than one personality, they in fact don't. The different 'personalities' are fragmented components of a single personality that are abnormally personified, dissociated from each other, and amnesic for each other. We call these fragmented components 'personalities' by historical convention: much of the scepticism about MPD is based on the erroneous assumption that such patients have more than one personality, which is, in fact, impossible.

In order to correct misconceptions arising from use of the term 'personality' in this context, the official name of the disorder has been changed to Dissociative Identity Disorder in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association (1993), which is the official diagnostic manual of psychiatry in North America. The term 'Multiple Personality Disorder' will be retained, in brackets, in DSM-IV, and thus may still be used diagnostically.

This Information was taken from

The Osiris Complex
Case Studies in
Multiple Personality Disorder

By Colin A. Ross, M.D.