Why Multiple Personality is Not Crazy

The first post yesterday said that normal multiple personality—the kind that many novelists (and others) have—is not crazy. But the second post gave you a link to an article about its clinical counterpart, multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder), and if you read it, you may be thinking that it all seemed pretty crazy to you. So you may be wondering why it is that psychiatry does NOT categorize multiple personality disorder as a psychosis.

First, an analogy to religious differences. If you were brought up in a religious family, have had religious friends, have gone to religious schools, have had your own religious experiences, and you think that it’s absurd to think that the world created itself, then you might think that atheists must be crazy. Similarly, the atheist might think that believers must be crazy. But if the average believer and the average atheist meet and have a conversation, they will find each other to be generally rational and in touch with reality.

And the same might be said about political differences, cultural differences, gender differences, etc. We often think that other people must be “crazy” for seeing things so differently than we do, but when we talk to these people, we have to admit that they are mostly pretty rational and in touch with reality.

Well, if you were to talk to each of the various personalities of a person with multiple personality disorder, you would find that they certainly have their own view of the world, based on their own life experiences and self-image, but that they are mostly pretty rational and in touch with reality. And if that is true of multiple personality disorder, it is even more true of normal multiple personality.