Multiple Personality: Mirrors of a New Model of Mind?

Written by Institute of Noetic Sciences

From: Investigations; Institute of Noetic Sciences

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven." John Milton (1608-1674)

The waking rational self is usually quite sure that we are one mind in one body. The self that dreams knows another world, but assumes it belongs in the realm of imagination and fantasy. But can waking minds be divided up in such a way that several streams of life that are quite separate from one another can exist concurrently in one human being? if so, then does the old saying: "The left hand

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doesn't know what the right hand is doing" become a kind of reality? Is there more to tales like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than we ever thought? Well, in some senses, we experienced a "first wave" resurgence of this idea in the 1970's when the studies of splitbrain patients hit both the science journals and eventually the popular press with all the force of a new myth in the culture. Yes, there were clearly some important findings in the area, but they all too rapidly became used as metaphors for all manner of unrelated claims. We may now be about to experience a "second wave" of data on the subject with the recent resurgence of interest and research into the phenomena of Multiple Personality.

One of the interesting aspects of controversies in contemporary science and the study of the mind is the way in which ideas move from center-stage to the periphery during one period, only later to be returned to the center of attention. Sometimes this happens because a phenomenon is simply too complex to be addressed until the methods of science have evolved to deal properly with it. On other occasions it occurs because the strategies of its proponents are not soundly formulated. Or it can occur because science-at-large finds an idea simply too strange or preposterous to deal with. It seems that the scientific fate of the concept of Multiple Personality has been a cross between the latter two of these. As we shall see in the historical sections of this report, Multiple Personality was topic of great fascination at the end of the last century, and up into the early 1900's attempts were being made to explain it in terms of the proposed capacity of the mind to dissociate. These ideas were proposed by the First Dynamic School of Psychiatry, now an almost forgotten school of thought from the turn of the century. But, one might ask; why was it forgotten and why did the subject virtually fade from view? As Dr. John Kihlstrom of the University of Wisconsin recently wrote:

The eventual dominance of psychoanalysis in clinical psychology and scientific personality led investigators to be interested in different syndromes and phenomena, a different model of the mind, and the eventual replacement of dissociation by repression as the hypothetical mechanism for rendering mental contents unconscious. At the same time, the behaviorist revolution in academic psychology removed consciousness (not to mention the unconscious) from the vocabulary of science. At fault were the dissociation theorists themselves, who often made extravagant claims for the centrality of the phenomenon (of dissociation) and whose investigations were often methodologically flawed.

Today, we seem to be witnessing a return to center stage of a number of previously discarded concepts that all seem to connect with each other in curious ways. One might say that one part of the stage was set by the split-brain data, which once again opened up the concept of the divided mind. Then the rise of Cognitive Science in the 1970's also helped to place a concern with mental processes and consciousness back in the center of things. Also during the 1970's, the data on and respectability of hypnosis research grew and led to greater attention being placed on the concept of dissociation, which is at the core of hypnotic phenomena, once again.

In this issue of Investigations, we will present an overview of the contemporary scene regarding the topic of Multiple Personality. There are several events which have occurred of late to cause a growing number of professionals to re-evaluate their point of view on the topic. More frequent diagnosis of the phenomenon is but one aspect of this sudden increase in interest. Another aspect involves the growing body of research data showing that multiples display unusual degrees of variation in physiological, neurological and immune system variables when the switch. Further the amount of professional attention being devoted to the subject in recent years has grown enormously. In May of 1984, the American Psychiatric Association at its Annual Meeting in Los Angeles devoted an unusually large proportion of its program to the topic: 2 whole days of a pre-conference workshop and 2 major symposia at the convention itself. Then in September of 1984, the First International Conference on Multiple Personality Dissociative States was held in Chicago. The meeting was organized by Dr. Bennett Braun of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's hospital, which co-sponsored the event. The Institute of noetic Sciences provided partial financial backing for the event and for next year's proposed Second International Conference. Further, several established medical and psychiatric journals devoted entire issues to the recent research. To produce this issue, Investigations attended these meetings, researched all the recent journals and interviewed in person between 20 and 30 of the leading figures in the field. What follows, therefore, should provide the reader with a comprehensive update - including data from the early history of the field right up to the present.