Skepticism about Multiple Personality is based on Fear related to Demon Possession and the Layman’s Definition of Crazy

Until I wrote my March 1 post about dictionaries of literary terms, it hadn’t really occurred to me that disbelief in multiple personality is based mostly on fear.

I had always thought that disbelief of multiple personality was based mostly on not having seen it, since I myself had found it hard to believe for the first twelve years I was a psychiatrist, which was before I had seen it with my own eyes. I had also blamed Freud for his mistaken conscious/unconscious model of the mind, which, by eclipsing the multiple consciousness model of the mind, had made multiple personality seem logically impossible. And I still think that these are important reasons.

But I was struck by the fact that the two UK dictionaries had no entry at all for the literary double, and that the closest they came was their entry on ghosts. It was like the dictionaries had a phobic avoidance, a fear of the double, which is the literary metaphor for multiple personality.

And while the USA dictionary did have an entry for the double, it had been afraid to make any explicit mention of multiple personality, per se. So it had shown fear of multiple personality, too, although less so.

Why the fear of multiple personality? There are two reasons. First, there is the ancient religious belief that multiple personality is an invasion and possession by demons, as illustrated in the Christian Bible, Mark 5:1-20.

Second, while I, as a psychiatrist, would view schizophrenia as a worse thing to have—since it is biological and incurable (though treatment may have good results), in contrast to multiple personality, which is psychological and curable (if you have the disorder and need to be cured, which most novelists don’t)—I have repeatedly been surprised to find that many patients think of multiple personality as a much worse, and less desirable, diagnosis. The reason is that multiple personality disorder fits their layman’s definition of crazy: you may not know who you are or what you have done, which would seem like the ultimate in being out of control and beside yourself.

Perhaps it would help people to get over their fear, if, when they thought of multiple personality, instead of being possessed by demons, they thought of Mark Twain or Charles Dickens.