Discussion: A Psychoanalyst's Perspective on Multiple Personality Disorder

It was in the writings of Harry Stack Sullivan that I gained my first empathic appreciation of schizophrenia. Sullivan (1953a, pp. 331-339) conjured up the early-morning awakening from a disturbing dream whose mood refused to loosen its grip upon one's sense. Half-responsive to the realistic demands of another morning, and half-beckoned by the siren mood of the dream, we move about, semifrozen, perplexed citizens of two disparate worlds. Extending this example of Sullivan's view that “we are [all] much more human than otherwise” (1953b, p. 16), I ask you to consider that each night, in dreams, we experience the world of multiple personality. And, in the morning, like the host personality of a “multiple,” we have partial or total amnesia for our complex noctural alter activities.

Trauma is common to the etiology of both dreams and multiple personality. Freud's dream theory relied on a model of traumatic dissociation. A daytime experience (Freud's “day residue”), stimulates impulses that threaten psychological safety and are put beyond the reach of waking consciousness. Later, during dreaming sleep, the ego is flooded with visual flashbacks, hallucinatory, dramatized attempts to gratify the forbidden impulses of the day. In