Multiple Personality Euphemisms: alter ego, anima, inner child, literary double, double consciousness, doppelgänger, imaginary companion, multiplicity, muse, personae, voices (character, narrative, nonpsychotic), second self, shadow, subpersonalities, the unconscious.

When people who have little or no clinical experience with multiple personality come upon its much more common, normal version, they don’t recognize it as such, so they use all kinds of other terms. The above terms are not always used this way, but they often are.

The essence of an alternate personality, by whatever name, is that it has thoughts, feelings, memory, and sense of personhood which are subjectively experienced as being more or less independent of the thoughts, feelings, memory, and sense of personhood of the person’s regular self.

Although alternate personalities may be quite talkative and obvious once their cover is blown, so to speak, they may, ordinarily, remain behind the scenes, coming out, if they do, only in private. And when they do come out in public, they usually do so incognito (sometimes causing the person to seem puzzlingly inconsistent).