Sexual Orientation in Multiple Personality: Since opposite-sex personalities are common, bisexuality and multiple personality may be clues to each other

In the novels I’ve discussed here in the past six years, there have been some bisexual characters. And some authors may have been bisexual in their personal lives and/or had opposite-sex writing personalities.

And the second time I ever made the diagnosis of multiple personality, clinically, was after a heterosexual woman, whom I had thought to have bipolar disorder, told me she was upset by finding literature for a lesbian dating service in her apartment, and she couldn’t account for it. I made the diagnosis after meeting her lesbian personality.

It is well known that opposite-sex alternate personalities are common:

“At least half of all MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients have cross-gender personalities…In both sexes, cross-gender alter personalities may be sexually active with either heterosexual or homosexual orientations…” (1, pp. 110-111). (Of course, those statistics mean that many multiples do not have opposite-sex, sexually-active personalities.)

Yet, somehow, I have not thought of bisexuality and multiple personality as possible clues to each other, possibly because the multiple personality textbooks I have do not happen to use the word “bisexual.”

But the novel I’m reading now—originally published under a pseudonym of an author whose pseudonyms I have previously discussed in terms of multiple personality—has a cast of characters who are almost all bisexual (although the issue of sexual orientation has not been mentioned). Indeed, bisexuality may turn out to be the main thing in this novel possibly reflective of multiple personality.

1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.