Multiple Personality

Type of psychology: Psychopathology
Fields of study: Coping; models of abnormality; personality disorders
Multiple personality is the name of abnormal behavior in which a person behaves as if
under the control of distinct and separate parts of the personality at different times. It
is caused by severe childhood abuse and responds to long-term psychotherapy that addresses
the past abuse and the resulting symptoms of dissociation.
Key concepts
• alternate personality
• dissociation
• dissociative identity disorder
• integration
• repression
Multiple personality has had considerable research and clinical attention focused
on it since the early 1980’s, and this interest has increased significantly
from that point forward. However, multiple personality was known and studied
even prior to the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Austrian psychiatrist
and founder of psychoanalysis. Well-known French psychologists
Pierre Janet (1859-1947) and Alfred Binet (1857-1911), among others, had
written about it in the late nineteenth century, prior to Freud’s writings.
With the rise of psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century, the study of
multiple personality and dissociation waned dramatically for many years.
Two famous multiple personality cases in the United States were popularized
by books and then films: The Three Faces of Eve in 1957 and Sybil in 1973.
In 1980, multiple personality disorder (MPD) was officially sanctioned as
a legitimate psychiatric disorder by its inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (3d ed., 1980, DSM-III) published by the
American Psychiatric Association. The official diagnostic label was changed
in the fourth edition, DSM-IV (1994), to dissociative identity disorder
(DID), though it is still commonly known as multiple personality.