Lying: Is it more common in persons with multiple personality? And when is “lying” a core creative ability?

“The experience of being called a liar is common for multiple personality patients. Apparent pathological lying or disavowing of observed behavior is one of the best diagnostic predictors in child and adolescent multiples [persons with multiple personality]. Adult MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients will often recount that they acquired a reputation as liars in childhood. I will ask patients whether they have often had the experience of being accused of lying when they believed that they were telling the truth. This may happen to all of us at some time or other, but MPD patients will have this experience frequently in childhood and fairly often as adults” (1, p. 78).

The easiest explanation is memory gaps. The person’s regular personality doesn’t remember what the person had been observed doing when an alternate personality had been in control. But that doesn’t explain why multiples (persons with multiple personality) sometimes claim to remember things that just aren’t true, like when Herschel Walker claimed he had graduated in the top 1% of his college class, when the fact is that he hadn’t graduated (see past post).

Most persons with multiple personality are very truthful, indeed sticklers for the truth, but occasionally they may latch on to, and “remember,” something that is true only in an emotional sense, like the time some multiples “remembered” having undergone “satanic ritual abuse” in childhood, which was alleged to have been a widespread conspiracy, but was rarely, if ever, proved.

Indeed, it may be this ability to imagine something fictional as though it were a virtual reality that, for fiction writers, is a core creative ability.

Search “lying” for past discussions.

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