Are Multiple Personalities Real?

[Minoosh]

I don't know about multiples but from years of observing my mother I do believe that some people can disassociate so completely that it can look like multiple personalities.

From the interviews:

I have always had a tendency to be hypnotised very quickly, even during some children’s movies as I was growing up.

My mother has severe short-term memory loss but retention varies sharply with circumstances. When she is in "small-talk" mode she has beautiful manners but remembers nothing. But if something affects her sense of security her memory is tenacious. Once the memory loss became obvious I started thinking back to when it started and concluded my mother usually wasn't paying attention, throughout my lifetime. That annoyed me inordinately, because it seemed willful. But now she's 90, and if she ever had control over her trance-like states she probably doesn't anymore.

She has a tendency to say everything is fine, beautiful, no problems, yet when she was recovering from a serious illness I heard her talking to her sister about being beaten after she came home late from a drive with a pedophile family member. Her parents knew he was a pedophile. While she insists "nothing happened," maybe it did, and even if it didn't, what came after constituted child abuse. As she talked to her sister she was crying, "I was just a little kid; I hadn't done anything wrong."

When I interviewed her for a biography for her 80th birthday, it was really difficult getting answers to the most basic questions - chronology, for example. I had to work with her impressions, filling in as I could with family records. It was a lesson on the unreliability of memory, including my own.

I think there are degrees of disassociation and in extreme cases this may present as different personalities. I believe extremely skillful therapists might be safe havens for people facing problems due to abrupt changes of mood. But it's very, very wrong for health-care professionals to implant beliefs in suggestible people. False ones in particular; but for a therapist to impose his/her own narrative on a patient's case - even when there is some truth to it - is wrong. That is for the patient to construct, IMO. If a person has erected formidable defenses around actual trauma, there's a reason for those defenses. I do think the very best therapists can simply listen alertly, ask brief/neutral questions and perhaps help people come to terms with real events. But it's a very sensitive process and it should not be rushed or imposed from the outside.

 

[Orphia Nay]

Thanks so much, everyone, for all your responses. Some of you (abbadon, to name one) have made my week. A fascinating discussion.

I think the articles, links, conclusion and the blog site itself sum up any quibbles anyone might have.

Sometimes there are MPD cases that don't have an explanation, but that doesn't mean there is something impossible going on.

 

[psionl0]

Well WE do!

Using the Royal "WE" in this forum is sheer madness!

 

[Octavo]

Very interesting article - thank you so much Orphia

 

[Orphia Nay]

If anyone who's read this thread is interested in learning more, here's an article well worth reading.

By reading the above interviews, you might have gathered that these disreputable therapists think multiple personalities are caused by childhood abuse and/or "satanic ritual abuse" and discovered by "recovered memories".

As I like to call it: An Ouroboros of Superstition.

Here is Ed Cara's thorough summation of this lingering superstition in today's mental health underbelly.

The Most Dangerous Idea in Mental Health

A snippet to get you started:

"The belief that hidden memories can be “recovered” in therapy should have been exorcised years ago, when a rash of false memories dominated the airwaves, tore families apart, and put people on the stand for crimes they didn’t commit. But the mental health establishment does not always learn from its mistakes—and families are still paying the price."

Thanks again for reading.

 

[Dancing David]

The main point I would make is that there are easier explanations that 'multiple personalities', and that Eve and Sybil were both found to be untrue.


In my own trauma, and working with people. I have found there is only one black spot in my memory, which my brother has clear memories of. The rest of tehm were just like rooms in my memory that I just never walked into.