Synonyms of Multiple Personality: Dissociative Identity, Split Personality, Multiple Identity, Dual or Double Personality, Dual or Double Consciousness

Multiple personality means that a person has more than one autonomous (a mind of its own), person-like (with a sense of its own personal identity) consciousness (it is aware of what is going on). The simplest case would be two personalities, each with its own consciousness and memory bank.

Each personality or identity is often referred to as an “alternate personality”—“alter,” for short—because only one of them is usually “out” at a time. The one who is out has the most control over current behavior. But one or more other alters are probably conscious and monitoring things from behind the scenes. So “alternate personality” is partially misleading: The identities may alternate in controlling behavior, but they may be simultaneous in their consciousness.

The only one of the above synonyms that might confuse the contemporary reader is “double consciousness,” because its most common current usage is for the African-American experience, as originally coined by W. E. B. du Bois. For the history of this term, see Dickson D. Bruce Jr’s “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness”: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug03/souls/brucepg.html

Charles Dickens used the concept of double consciousness to refer to multiple personality in Chapter 3 of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, when he described Miss Twinkleton as having “two states of consciousness which never clash…”

NOTE: The terms schizoid, schizophrenia, and bipolar have nothing to do with multiple personality.