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Multiple personality disorder (MPD) is a complex and chronic dissociative disorder involving difficulties in the integration of memory and identity (Nemiah, 1980; Kluft, 1987a). It is currently understood to be a sequel of overwhelming childhood experiences (Kluft, 1987a; Putnam, 1989). Few if any mental disorders are surrounded with such controversy and evoke such highly polarized and tenaciously maintained opinions in otherwise circumspect and scrupulous clinicians and scientific investigators (Goodwin, 1985; Kluft, 1985). Few mental disorders, apart from the organic mental syndromes, have remained as remote from the mainstream of contemporary psychoanalytic inquiry as has MPD (Kluft, 1989).
There is a certain historical irony to this, because Anna O., the index patient of the seminal “Studies on Hysteria” (Breuer & Freud, 1893-1895), suffered this disorder. Jones (1953), Freud's preeminent biographer, noted that Anna O. had “two distinct states of consciousness … rather like that in Morton Prince's famous case of Sally Beauchamp. It was a case of double personality. The transition from one to the other was marked by a phase of autohypnosis” (p. 223). However, Freud rapidly repudiated the early models of mental function explicit and