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“The classic host personality, which usually (over 50% of the time) presents for treatment, nearly always bears the legal name and is depressed, anxious, somewhat neurasthenic, compulsively good, masochistic, conscience-stricken, constricted hedonically, and suffers both psychophysioiogical symptoms and time loss and/or time distortion. While no personality types are invariably present, many are encountered quite frequently: childlike personalities (fearful. recalling traumata, or love-seeking), protectors, helpers-advisors, inner self-helpers (serene, rational, and objective helpers and advisors first described by Allison in 1974), personalities with distinct affective states, guardians of memories and secrets (and of family boundaries), memory traces (holding continuity of memory), inner persecutors (often based on identification with the aggressor), anesthetic personalities (created to block out pain), expressers of forbidden impulses (pleasurable and otherwise, such as defiant, aggressive, or antisocial), avengers (which express anger over abuses endured and may wish to redress their grievances), defenders or apologists for the abusers, those based on lost love objects and other introjections and identifications, specialized encapsulators of traumatic experiences and powerful affects, very specialized personalities, and those (often youthful) that preserve the idealized potential for happiness, growth, and the healthy expression of feelings (distorted by traumata) in others (Kluft, 1984b).”

Dissociative Identity DisorderMultiple PersonalitiesAlter Personalities
Book:Handbook of Dissociation: Theoretical, Empirical, and Clinical Perspectives
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“It appears that the picture of DID as the ongoing clash of polarized personality types (e.g., good girl-bad girl, upright citizen-sociopath) is hard to sustain, although such clashes, when they occur, arrest attention and at times become a concern of the forensic psychiatrist. Most patients have personalities that are named, but there may be those who are nameless or whose appellations are not proper names (i.e.. “the slut,” “rage,” etc.). Child personalities, those who retain long periods of continuous awareness, those who claim to know about all of the others, and depressed personalities are the most frequent types enumerated (Putnam et al.. 1986).”

Dissociative Identity DisorderMultiple Personality DisorderMultiple PersonalitiesAlter Personalities
Book:Handbook of Dissociation: Theoretical, Empirical, and Clinical Perspectives
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“Most DID patients are rather muted compared to those cases incorrectly assumed to epitomize the condition (Kluft, 1985b). The personalities enact adaptational patterns and strategies that developed in the service of defense and survival. Once this pattern, which disposes of upsetting material and pressures rapidly and efficiently, is established, it may be repeated again and again to cope with both further overwhelming experiences and more mundane developmental and adaptational issues. Once the DID that developed in order to cope with intolerable childhood circumstances has achieved some degree of secondary autonomy, it becomes increasingly maladaptive.”

Dissociative Identity DisorderMultiple PersonalitiesAlter Personalities
Book:Handbook of Dissociation: Theoretical, Empirical, and Clinical Perspectives
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“The implication that the change in nomenclature from “Multiple Personality Disorder” to “Dissociative Identity Disorder” means the condition has been repudiated and “dropped” from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association is false and misleading. Many if not most diagnostic entities have been renamed or have had their names modified as psychiatry changes in its conceptualizations and classifications of mental illnesses. When the DSM decided to go with “Dissociative Identity Disorder” it put “(formerly multiple personality disorder)” right after the new name to signify that it was the same condition. It’s right there on page 526 of DSM-IV-R. There have been four different names for this condition in the DSMs over the course of my career. I was part of the group that developed and wrote successive descriptions and diagnostic criteria for this condition for DSM-III-R, DSM–IV, and DSM-IV-TR. While some patients have been hurt by the impact of material that proves to be inaccurate, there is no evidence that scientifically demonstrates the prevalence of such events. Most material alleged to be false has been disputed by someone, but has not been proven false. Finally, however intriguing the idea of encouraging forgetting troubling material may seem, there is no evidence that it is either effective or safe as a general approach to treatment. There is considerable belief that when such material is put out of mind, it creates symptoms indirectly, from “behind the scenes.” Ironically, such efforts purport to cure some dissociative phenomena by encouraging others, such as Dissociative Amnesia.”

EvidenceMental IllnessPsychiatryRumorDissociative Identity DisorderDiagnosisHysteriaMisinformationMultiple Personality DisorderFalseMultiple PersonalitiesMental DisorderDisinformationDissociative AmnesiaDsmMisleadingHysterican NeurosisPsychiatric Bible
Author:Richard P. Kluft
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