Alternate Personalities: Multiple Personality was renamed Dissociative Identity to make it clear that alternate personalities are not other people

In the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual (DSM-IV, 1994), multiple personality disorder was renamed dissociative identity disorder. The problem with the old name was that “multiple personality” had made it sound like there were multiple people, which had never been implied. The alternate personalities had never been conceived of as other people, but only as subdivisions of one person, who is dissociated or divided.

I am prompted to reiterate this history, because some readers of yesterday’s post may have thought it strange that I referred to Marius and Cosette of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables as having alternate personalities that were specialized in being in love. The fact is, all alternate personalities are specialized in one thing or another.

The least obviously specialized personality is the host personality, which is designed to appear like a regular, whole person and to deal with the public. In novelists, this is often the personality who does interviews, but who is not one of the more specialized personalities who actually wrote the novel. I think it was Margaret Atwood who said that in interviews you hardly ever meet the personality who actually wrote the book.

There are two reasons that I usually use the old name, “multiple personality.” First, it is still much more familiar to most people than “dissociative identity.” Second, “multiple personality” better captures the subjective experience of meeting alternate personalities. They seem like people in their own right, in part because they see themselves that way.