19
Multiple Personality Disorder
Finally, it became popular to diagnose the "fragmented" memories
17
and unruly
behaviors of trauma survivors with multiple personality disorder (now dissociative
disorder)—which Ian Hacking refers to as “movement” with a "down-home" appeal and
"egalitarian look", whose well-known players who have entered public mythology.
(1995, p. 39)
18
Rescued from its demonized portrayal in the 1976 film Sybil, multiple
personality disorder replaced diagnoses of borderline in the late eighties, somaticizing the
emotions of abused, angry, depressed women. Its symptoms of dissociative, fear and
mistrust mimic those of borderline and post traumatic stress and are apparently common;
the rate of multiple personality disorder diagnosis has increased exponentially since 1980,
now allegedly representing five percent of Americans. (Ross 1989, p.45, and Ross et. al.,
1989) A causal logic assuming that abuse caused these symptoms, however is a
dangerous temptation. Hacking traces the development of a psychiatric logic assuming
causes or associations between traumas and disorders of multiple personality and
hysteria.
19
These causes were forged, claims Hacking: ”…a disturbed type of behavior
has been joined to events in early childhood that may surface in memory.” Once the idea
of causality is forged, "we have a very powerful tool for making up ourselves… we
17
Trauma survivors detail an inability to remember periods of abuse, which some refer to as black holes of
memory. (Herman, 1992)
18
The DSM-IV states that borderline characterizes two percent of the general population and ten percent of
those in mental health outpatient settings, twenty percent of psychiatric inpatients and thirty to sixty percent
of those with personality disorders. (APA, 1994, p. 652) It is notable that the DSM-IV has altered its
assertion in the 1992 manual that five to ten percent of the general population suffered borderline. These
numbers also suggest that individuals with symptoms associated with borderline tend to find themselves
seeking or obtaining mental health services. I am not suggesting that diagnosed individuals are suffering,
but rather questioning that these behaviors indicate this personality disorder.
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Hacking’s problem with this psychiatric process is the dual assumption that sexual abuse causes multiple
personality and then the search for discovery of the cause of the diagnosis; “We should not delude
Convention