My wife and I are having a disagreement on whether multiple personality disorder is real or not. She works in a substance abuse clinic and says she sees people with this disorder quite often. I on the other hand feel that multiple personality disorder is a crock of dung. I have looked this up on the Internet, and views seem to be split fifty-fifty. What do you think–does this disorder exist? –Mark, via the Internet
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Possible cases of split personality have been reported in the medical literature since the early 19th century, and the condition was formally defined in the first years of the 20th. But until recently it was considered extremely rare–fewer than 200 cases were described before 1980. The diagnosis became much more common in the 80s for several reasons. One was the phenomenal popularity of Flora Schreiber’s 1973 book Sybil, which told of a woman with 16 personalities. Stories of “multiples,” fictionalized or otherwise, were nothing new–The Three Faces of Eve dates from 1954, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” from way back in 1886–but Sybil made a crucial innovation, introducing the idea that multiple personalities stemmed from trauma during early childhood. Around the same time, child protection advocates and feminists began arguing that child abuse, especially sexual abuse, occurred far more often than previously supposed. And in the late 70s, in a phenomenon thought to be linked to the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism, reports of so-called satanic ritual abuse first captured the public’s imagination.
By the early 1990s it began to dawn on rational folk just how preposterous the whole business was. Having investigated more than 12,000 accusations over four years, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Illinois at Chicago determined that not a single case of satanic ritual abuse had been substantiated. A 1992 FBI study arrived at the same conclusion: overeager therapists had planted horror stories in the minds of their patients. In 1998 psychologist Robert Rieber made a convincing case, based on an analysis of audiotapes, that even the famous Sybil had confabulated her multiple personalities at the insistence of her therapist. The bubble burst, and diagnoses of multiple personalities subsided.
