My Belated Interest in Multiple Personality

In 1972, after graduating from college in Boston and from medical school in Richmond, Virginia, I returned to Brooklyn, New York, where I had been born and raised. My father was a family physician, but I wanted to specialize in psychiatry, so I went to a psychiatric residency training program at a hospital in Brooklyn.

The Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry was an eminent Freudian psychoanalyst, but the Director of Psychiatric Residency Training was a psychopharmacologist, because diagnosis and treatment revolved mainly around medication. Neither of these psychiatrists had any interest in multiple personality, which was never diagnosed in any of the patients.

My idea of multiple personality was based on the 1957 movie, “The Three Faces of Eve” and the 1976 movie, “Sybil.” I thought that there must be rare cases like that, but I didn’t expect to ever see any.

As a psychiatrist in the 1970s and 1980s, I occasionally came across a psychiatric journal article about multiple personality, but I never saw a patient who looked like they had it, and didn’t expect that I ever would.

Toward the end of the 1980s, working in a psychiatric outpatient clinic, I found a new patient puzzling, and asked her if she ever had memory gaps, which was the only thing I recalled from the journal articles on multiple personality, and which I had never asked any patient previously. When she said that she did have memory gaps, I was shocked, and the patient evidently was, too, because she reacted like I had stumbled on a sensitive secret that frightened her, and she didn’t return to the clinic.

I continued to ask puzzling patients about memory gaps, and found that the percentage of my patients who had them varied from 0-5%. When I asked the patient what had gone on during the missing period of time, I would often see them switch to an alternate personality, who knew about that time. Then the patient would switch back to the regular personality, with a memory gap for the conversation I just had with the alternate. However, sometimes the alternate was antagonistic toward the regular, host personality and toward me, too, since it considered me the host’s ally.

In short, I discovered that multiple personality was surprisingly common, but was designed to keep itself hidden and avoid diagnosis.

Meanwhile, over the years, I had been reading interviews of fiction writers, since I thought I might one day write a novel. I had always thought the writers were joking when they spoke of communicating with their characters, who seemed to have minds of their own. But now that I had seen multiple personality, I realized they were not joking, although they said it in a joking manner, so they could deny it if anyone took them seriously and thought they were crazy.

Then I looked at fiction writers’ essays, biographies. and works. Some writers had actually acknowledged multiple personality. But mostly I found unlabeled, unintentional symptoms of multiple personality, which reflected how the author’s mind worked.

The difference between the patients and the writers was that the patients were having distress and dysfunction from the multiple personality, but the novelists weren’t. In fact, since alternate personalities are often imaginative and like to make up stories, this was a core asset for fiction writing. So I made the distinction between multiple personality disorder and multiple personality trait (surprisingly common, especially in fiction writers).