A case of multiple personality.

Abstract

THE psychiatric manifestation called multiple personality has been extensively discussed. So too have the unicorn and the centaur. Who has not read of these legendary quadrupeds? Their pictures are, perhaps tiresomely, familiar to any schoolboy. Can one doubt that during medieval times many twilight encounters with the unicorn were convincingly reported? Surely in the days of Homer there were men of Thessaly or Beotia who had seen, or even ridden, centaurs almost as wise as Chiron. The layman who at college took a course in psychology may feel that for him dual personality, or multiple personality, is a familiar subject. Some psychiatrists' reactions suggest they are inclined to dismiss this subject as old hat. Nevertheless, like the unicorn and the centaur in some respects, multiple personality, despite vivid appearances in popularized books on psychology (2), is not commonly encountered in the full reality of life (1, 16, 17). Nearly all those perplexing reports of two or more people in one body, so to speak, that arouse a unique interest in the classroom, are reports of observations made in a relatively distant past. The most significant manifestations of this sort discussed in the current literature occurred in patients studied half a century or more ago (13, 23). It is scarcely surprising that practical psychiatrists today, never having directly observed such things as Morton Prince found in Miss Beauchamp or as Azam reported of Felida, might hold a tacitly skeptical attitude toward such archaic marvels and miracles. In the fields of internal medicine and chemistry the last, or even the middle, decades of the nineteenth century are close to us. In the relatively new field of psychopathology they are almost primeval, a dim dawn era in which we find it easy to suspect that a glimpse of a rhinoceros might have led to descriptions of the unicorn, or the sound of thunder been misinterpreted as God's literal voice. A reserved judgment toward what cannot be regularly demonstrated is not necessarily deplorable. Some current tendencies suggest that our youthful branch of medicine may not yet have emerged from its primordial and prerational phase. The discovery of orgone by one of our erstwhile leaders in the development of psychodynamics should not be ignored (4, 25). Enthusiastically adduced proof from an adult's dream that he was as an embryo significantly traumatized by fear of his father's penis, which during intercourse threatened him from his mother's vagina, is, we believe, the sort of evidence toward which our resistance is not without value (21). Despite Morton Prince's exquisitely thorough study of the celebrated Miss Beauchamp (23, 24) it is not surprising that decades ago McDougall should have warned us: