Multiple personality
By Y. P. Dhawan

MAN’s psychological perception of himself, after the pioneering researches of Freud, Jung, Lacan and other outstanding psychologists, is beginning to change, and it is beginning to look like that what once was called "multiple personality disorder", which falls well within the parameters of the normal functioning of the mind. It is estimated that one out of every 20 Americans suffers from multiply personality disorder. The reason commonly advanced is sexual abuse in childhood. Freud had postulated the thesis of seduction at the hands of parents at one time in his psychoanalytic theory but had later abandoned it on the ground that these were fantasies in the mind of the young girl or boy for which there was no clinical corroboration, but it now appears that the earlier Freudian thesis is largely valid. Sherry Turkle in a review article published in "The Times Literary Supplement" of 19th March, 1998 has argued that in view of the wide prevalence of MPD Epidemic repression, which is the cornerstone of psychoanalysis, is in danger of crumbling. If repression goes, can the unconscious be saved? The unconscious has no value without repression. Sherry

Turkle’s argument is that the unconscious of sufferers from multiple personality disorder "holds secrets so terrible that simple repression, a massive and motivated forgetting, cannot contain them. Pieces of the self need to be created that can function autonomously, thereby fencing off forbidden memories from the self as a whole." According to her repression can break down to such an extent that "over time there can be many of these splits, creating a cast of inner characters, each of which originally served a protective function, each of which has partial knowledge of the world." And yet she reposes her faith in psychoanalysis to reintegrate the dissociated fragments of the patient’s self.

Now we shall consider the views of another expert Sidis. According to Sidis the mind is a synthesis of many systems, of many moments of consciousness. We are many in ourselves, and that many histories converge in us — histories which are at the root of our fixations and anxieties, injuries and traumas; histories we have to live with, histories we have to accept, histories we cannot change, histories that are full of guilt and sometimes beyond redemption.

The self has to break down in the process of coming to know itself, otherwise the self remains the same and nothing new can be added to it. Perhaps the self’s salvation, if one is ready to replace one danger with another, "is to be experienced in letting itself fall apart, in relinquishing itself, in becoming other to itself, in being freed from the will’s control, in being no one in who one is, neither one nor many." The disaster the self most fears is the fear of falling apart, but if the self can become free to the extent that it has nothing to preserve and solve and avoid, then the self is on the road to recovery.

It is true that the self is always self-concerned and is perpetually burdened by taking care of itself, but when this self-relation fails — as it does in therapy or any other profound experiences — the "self-assertiveness and obsessive self-concern are stilled and the self’s unburdening gives way to the unself of the individual’s life."

What is clear from Sidis’s argument is that we are all of us not unitary but multiple personalities. Sidis is right in saying that multiple consciousness is not the exception but the law. The complex of personalities that composes the human aggregate knows no unity and no final submission to a single will. Who lives our lives we don’t know; it is certainly not ourselves.