“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 8): Scarlett O’Hara does not have histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, or sociopathic personality disorders.

In various parts of the novel, Scarlett might seem histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, or sociopathic. But at the time of the novel discussed in the last post, she was none of these. And since a personality disorder, by definition, is always the same for a particular person and is always present, Scarlett does not have any of the above personality disorders.

Indeed, since Scarlett seems to have a different personality at different times in the novel, she might have multiple personality, which, as discussed below, is neither a psychosis nor a personality disorder.

Terminology: “multiple personality” is the most widely understood term for this condition. The name has remained popular, because the person may appear to have more than one personality, and, like Scarlett O’Hara, may behave rather differently at different times.

     However, the term “multiple personality” does have the disadvantage that the condition it refers to may be mistakenly thought of as a personality disorder. Multiple personality is not a personality disorder.

     A personality disorder, like those mentioned above, has its own, consistent, pattern of behavior. In contrast, a person with multiple personality has various, inconsistent, contradictory patterns of behavior, which correspond to the person’s alternate personalities.

     Since 1994, the official, American Psychiatric Association term for multiple personality has been “dissociative identity disorder”; it is classified as a dissociative disorder. The official name change from “multiple personality” to “dissociative identity” was for political and technical reasons. The condition itself was unchanged.

     By whatever name, multiple personality has never been a psychosis and has never had anything to do with schizophrenia, except by mistake. When psychoanalytic terms like “neurosis” had still been in use (prior to 1980), multiple personality had been classified as a neurosis.

     Unfortunately, multiple personality and schizophrenia are still often confused with each other and mistakenly lumped together in novels and literary criticism under the nonspecific, catch-all term, “madness.”