Multiple personality disorder

The Personality disorder multiple is a term qualifying a psychiatric disorder appeared in North America in the years 1980. The patients reached present alternations of personality (or states of personality) different, and can pass from the one to the other without being able to control it (for example an adult woman can suddenly speak with the voice about a 5 year old young girl and speak like such, then “to become” a 50 year old man, etc)… Such disorders, though rare, had been described since of old times, and then more particularly with the hinge between XIXe and the 20th centuries in France starting from work in particular of Pierre Janet. These cases remained rare, but in the years 1980 one attended a true explosion of these disorders, so that some spoke about “epidemic”. That was accompanied by many drifts, whereas a broad part of the scientific community remained skeptic. It is striking to see that after an apogee, this diagnosis again almost disappeared. It was famous besides in DSM-IV in dissociative Trouble of the identity.

Definition

The person victim of the Personality disorder multiple , on the level Conscient, is persuaded to be such person in turn. One can produce in experiments and transitorily a multiple phenomenon of personality has minimum by the use of the Hypnose: one suggests with the person, under hypnotic state of Transe, which it has such or such characteristic and one can note that it yields with this suggestion and the role suggested is given. It was shown that if the suggestion is contrary with major choices of the subject, he refuses to enter the character and - possibly, leaves even its state of consciousness modified. It is not a question of Simulation, the changes of states not being placed under the control of the will. As opposed to what one thinks sometimes, this disorder has nothing to do with the Schizophrénie, disease during which the subject presents a dissociation, a disintegration of its personality, and not several successive identities definite.

History of the concept

Prehistory

Lycanthropie
collective Possessions

XIXème at the XXème century: a first epidemic

Eugene Azam and his patient Felida
Pierre Janet and his White patient
Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer and their patient Anna O evoked in Studies on the hysteria .
Morton Prince and his patient Sally Beauchamp (1906)

End of the XXème century: an explosive North-American epidemic

Evolution of the situation

Since the spectacular case of Sally Beauchamp presented by Morton Prince in 1906, the question of the multiple personalities had sunk in a relative lapse of memory. It is especially after the publication of the work Sybil, in 1973, which was an immense success in term of diffusion, that cases were described again. In parallel, the figure of the multiple started to appear in films of fiction, in the talk-shows; a set of themes of which we have a beautiful exploitation in the novel of Mary Higgins Clark " We will not go any more to the bois" (1992). This renewed interest led the originators of the Manuel diagnosis and statistics of the mental disorders, classification American of the mental diseases of reference, to introduce this disorder into the third version of their handbook: the DSM-III.

New diagnostic criteria

Advanced causes

Excesses

the use of the diagnosis by criminals in the legal system to try to clear itself: " It was not me Mister Juge, but another of my personalities! "
Epidemic of " discovered Sexual abuse s" whose memory had been found during therapies by the patients. These abuses were described like horrible, sadistic, and of the legal battles engaged between parents and children, for abuses made at the age of 2 or 3 years, and of which it had never been question, but which “had been retouvés in therapy”. The parents attacked in justice, without means of proving their innocence, generally ended up fulfilling the financial requirements favorably their children who accepted this payment by amicable agreement and the withdrawal of their complaint. The term of False-memory was proposed by the psychologist Elizabeth Lotfus to give an account of the “memories” without real bases found (one should say rebuilt) during therapies carried out by not very scrupulous therapeutists… An association of the victims of the false memories even was born”, and the American Association of medicine, just as the Royal College of the Psychiatrists in the United Kingdom warning statements emitted.

Criticisms

Certain authors, Elaine Showalter, consider that it is about a contemporary form of Hystérie (among others such as for example the chronic Syndrome of tiredness, the Syndrome of the war of the gulf or the Enlèvements by extraterrestrial the).

Current location

See too

External bonds and documents

Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber (1973)

Billy Milligan, the man with the 24 personalities per Daniel Keyes (1982)

Joan by Joan Frances Casey and Lynn Wilson (1992)

Mary Higgins Clark "We will not go any more to the bois" - novel - translated from English by Anne Damour - Albin Michel (1992)

" Identity" , of James Magold _ film, 2002.

References

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