Multiple personality disorder: witchcraft survives in the twentieth century

Since 1980, some psychotherapists have claimed that thousands of Americans are afflicted with multiple personality disorder. Believing such claims requires ignoring their many serious deficiencies.

Any people, given over to the power of contagious passion, may be swept by desolation, and plunged into ruin.

- Charles W. Upham, 1867

An epidemic of psychiatric illness is sweeping through North America. Before 1980, a total of no more than about two hundred cases had ever been found in the entire world, throughout the entire recorded history of psychiatry. Yet today, some proponents of the condition claim that it afflicts at least a tenth of all Americans, and perhaps 30 percent of poor people - more than twenty-six million individuals. An industry involving significant sums of money, many specialty hospitals, and numerous self-described experts, has rapidly grown up around the disorder.

The illness is multiple personality disorder (MPD), a condition that has always attracted a few wisps of controversy. Lately, these wisps have coalesced into clouds that, in drenching rainbursts, pour criticism on the disorder. An examination of the flawed reasoning, unsound claims, and logical inconsistencies of the MPD literature shows that well-founded concerns drive this storm of criticism.

What Is MPD?

MPD is classified as a dissociative disorder. The term dissociation refers to disruption in one or more mental operations that constitute the central idea of "consciousness": forming and holding memories, assimilating sensory impressions and making sense of them, and maintaining a sense of one's own identity (American Psychiatric Association 1994, 477). The essence of dissociation is that material not in awareness influences behavior, mood, and thought (Spiegel and Schleflin 1994). Thus, the behavioral disturbances prominently manifested in dissociative disorders are considered to be unconscious: that is, resulting from forces beyond the patient's awareness, beyond voluntary control.

The king of dissociative disorders is MPD,(1) also called dissociative identity disorder. Afflicted people episodically fail to recall vital data about themselves, but what distinguishes MPD from all other psychiatric conditions is the putative cause for these memory failures. The condition's proponents claim the memory failures occur because patients are periodically taken over by one or more "alter personalities" (variously referred to as "identities," "ego states," "alters," or "personality states"). These guest personalities, submerged since being formed during childhood - more on this later - rise to the surface and impose their own memories, thoughts, and behaviors on patients.

The essential feature of MPD, it is said, is that an individual's behavior is controlled by two or more alters (Putnam et al. 1990); the separate identities are assumed involuntarily (Sarbin 1995; Watkins and Watkins 1984). One personality may feel "carried along in a panicked helpless state" as another endangers it or engages in behavior repugnant to it (Kluft 1983, 75). Patients are said to experience a sense of being made to misbehave or hurt themselves (Putnam 1991). Some theorists even claim the existence of "omnipotent alters," which can simply compel patients to do their bidding (Lewis and Bard 1991). As an example, C. A. Ross writes of alters that "force [the patient] to jump in front of a truck. [The alters] then go back inside just before impact, leaving the [patient] to experience the pain" (Ross 1989, 115).

The image of all this is of an invading army usurping a government, an operator taking control of a machine, or a parasite attacking another organism. For example, contributors to the MPD literature frequently make statements such as, "If [the patient] drops her guard, the alters take over" (Bliss 1980, 1393). Proponents describe the original personality as the "host" - again recalling notions of a parasite - and describe the change from host to alter, or from one alter to another, as "switching." Thus, a librarian may one minute be her forty-two-year-old true shy self, but behave in the next like a nine-year-old child, a deep-voiced, foul-mouthed logger, or a promiscuous woman who picks up men in bars (Putnam 1989, 111,119-120).

These guest personalities, or "alters," are believed to have many truly remarkable capabilities and qualities. Some have the task of reproducing - of creating new alters. Others, it is claimed, determine which alter will take control of the body at any particular time (Kluft 1995, 364). There are alters of people of the opposite sex, of the treating therapist, of infants, television characters, and demons. Alters of Satan and God, of dogs, cats, lobsters, and stuffed animals - even of people thousands of years old or from another dimension - have been reported by MPD proponents (Fifth Estate 1993; Ganaway 1989; Hendrickson et al. 1990; Kluft 1991b, 166; Kluft 1995, 366; Ross 1989, 112; Ross et al. 1989).

MPD proponents assert that all manner of activities - creating a work of art, driving a car, fighting, doing schoolwork, engaging in prostitution, cleaning a bathtub, or even baking chocolate-chip cookies - are performed by alters (Braun 1988; Putnam 1989, 104; Ross 1989, 112).