Dissociative identity disorder is a complex, mysterious, but very interesting phenomenon. Scientists are still trying to understand its essence, conducting massive research, studying “accessible” personalities. In cinema, the disorder has become a platform for the scripts of a large number of films that intrigue the viewer almost until the end of the film. And indeed, each subpersonality of a “crowded” personality is like a separate character in one scenario.
Features of the disease
DRL has the following properties:
- a combination of several Alter personalities in one personality;
- each ego state is endowed with its own psychological qualities, different from the characteristics of the patient;
- new personal formations often do not know about each other;
- switching of ego states occurs unexpectedly or sequentially.
With this disorder, it is common for each “character” to appear in certain circumstances reserved for him. For example, the well-known Billy Milligan developed DID at the age of about three years. Then in the “arsenal” of the child’s subpersonalities there was Sean, a deaf four-year-old boy with mental retardation. He took control of his consciousness when little Billy was subjected to punishment: shouting, insults. The deafness forced Sean to hum to feel the vibration of the sound.
As Billy matured, other ego states relegated Sean to the rank of undesirable for lack of necessity.
While serving time in a Lebanese prison, Milligan's other subpersonality, Steve, was called upon to make people laugh. Steve is a 20-year-old guy, a parodist. One day, while imitating the warden, he was “caught” by employees. For this, Billy was sent to the isolation ward.
Dissociative identity disorder is triggered by a traumatic event. As a result, the process of the emergence of a subpersonality begins, and the main identity is freed from traumatic experiences - they go beyond the boundaries of its consciousness.
Negative experience is transferred to the incipient, traumatic subpersonality. This is how amnestic barriers are formed, closing the identity’s access to the horrific event. Formed ego states become guardians of the negative past. Their task is to prevent terrifying memories from breaking into the consciousness of the main personality.
DRL becomes a powerful protection for a person, creating a new biography for him. There is a certain pattern among dissociative patients: the disorder more often manifests itself in people deprived of support and protection during exposure to a negative factor. This is the work of the unconscious. And, as you know, it is devoid of gender, time, and age differentiation. Therefore, born Ego states can be anyone, any age, gender, with different passions, abilities, etc.
The behavior of people with dissociative identity disorder is aimed at avoiding actions that can lead to memories of the trauma. They intensively unconsciously suppress all thoughts associated with it. Because of this, psychogenic memory loss develops.
People with DID are emotionally reserved and seem a little detached from the outside world, living with a sense of an uncertain future.
It is difficult to predict the life scenario of “crowded” individuals. Some adapt well to life and become professionals in various industries. Others come to an antisocial lifestyle.
Usually the patient combines several life paths. There is a well-known story from the life of a girl named Jane, an authoritative university teacher. In the dissociative reality, she was Mil, a petty thief, Janet, a programmer, Annette, a drug dealer, and Inia, the owner of a sadomasochistic brothel. They all lived in separate dwellings and adhered to their own style of clothing and behavior.
William Stanley Milligan
You will find his name in any psychiatry textbook. In Milligan, as in a St. Petersburg communal apartment, not two, not three, or even ten, but as many as 24 different people got along. These people had different names, different ages, genders and nationalities. They had different temperaments and pursued incompatible goals. The suicidal and psychopath Billy, the intellectual Arthur, the force majeure Ragen, the charming Allen, the three-year-old smart Christine, the crazy lesbian Adalana... When Milligan was charged with theft and rape, it turned out that Billy himself was not to blame. The thefts were committed by Ragen, and the rapes by Adalana.
Time frame
In the world of ordinary people, time is linear and sequential. We experience the past, present and future, smoothly flowing from one period of time to another. They are inextricably linked, forming a unity called “eternity.” The famous phrase says: “I am he who was, is and will be.”
For the dissociative personality, time becomes chaos. Time periods are mixed together, and in the present there is a collision of the past and the future. This disrupts the patient’s perception of the world around him and himself.
A psychiatrist tells the story of a 35-year-old patient. She called herself Nastya. She stated that she was 12 years old. According to the woman, she has not lived at home for several days and hangs around the streets with the homeless. Having learned from strangers that her parents had died, Nastya turned to law enforcement agencies for help with a request to place her in an orphanage.
At the age of 11, as Nastya said, she was raped by her drunken father. The patient seemed confused, frightened, and depressed. The voice trembled, tears escaped. She said that she wanted to go to an orphanage in order to have the opportunity to study, although in fact she showed high intellectual abilities and had knowledge in many fields and foreign languages. The woman's behavior and speech corresponded to adolescence.
During individual psychotherapy, the patient often asked the specialist about his family. And her phrase “Never abandon your children” became an indicator of a woman’s emergence from the image of a teenage girl.
The woman told what her real name was. She indicated her real age and told her life story. She had a husband and two children. Her alcoholic husband systematically subjected her to physical abuse, and she had to leave him.
After the divorce, the patient several times experienced situations similar to the one in which she found herself at the moment: “My consciousness was in a fog. I practically didn’t remember anything.” Such behavior alarmed her relatives, and her own mother kicked her out into the street and tried to pick up the children.
Having lost her job due to layoffs, the woman found herself on the street without a livelihood. She was forced to turn for help to her aunt, a tough and capricious lady by nature, who insulted and humiliated her. The patient lived with her for seven years.
On the eve of the “switching,” a woman was walking down the street with her aunt. She once again poured a portion of insults and comments on her. And at that moment, as the patient herself says, she passed out.
Psychotherapy had a therapeutic effect and helped the woman return to real life. In addition, the patient’s aunt was also involved in psychotherapeutic work. A month later, the patient was discharged from the hospital with maintenance therapy continued.
Diagnostics
To confirm the diagnosis, use the following points.
- Conviction of persistent dissociation.
- The manifestation of at least two different entities of one person, which have their own characters, behavior and worldview.
- Exclusion of organic brain damage by:
- electroencephalography;
- Ultrasound;
- X-ray examination;
- CT scan;
- MRI.
To confirm the diagnosis, special tests may also be performed to determine:
- memory problems;
- change in self-awareness;
- deterioration of relationships with close circles;
- disturbance of emotionality;
- mood swings;
- experiences of violence;
- excessive responsibility, personal or professional.
Examples from cinema
They say that dissociative identity disorder cannot be faked. A professional quickly recognizes a malingerer by the exaggerated, primitive features of the disorder: false patients do not sufficiently differentiate between subpersonalities and leave many inconsistencies.
Even the most brilliant actor in real life is unable, according to experts, to reliably play a split personality. But in the cinema everything turns out to be quite truthful, interesting and exciting. This is why there are so many films on the topic of dissociative disorder. Most of them are awarded prestigious awards, including the Oscar.
One of them, quite famous, is “Black Swan”. This is the story of a young, fanatical ballerina Nina Sayers (actress Natalie Portman), who dreams of playing the main role in the ballet Swan Lake. She lives with her mother, a failed ballerina who devotes all her time to her daughter and her career.
Nina gets the main role. The white swan part comes quite easily to her. But the black swan requires passion and emancipation, which Nina does not have enough of. Choreographer Toma, seeing potential in the young ballerina, tries to free her, bring her to emotions, and achieve looseness. He tries to seduce, constantly criticizes in a harsh manner, calls her frigid. In this way, Toma tries to stir up Nina’s dark side. He wants to kiss the girl, but she bites him and runs away.
Suddenly the girl begins to experience hallucinations. Frightening reflections appear in the mirror, and photographs of the mother come to life. The back becomes covered with rashes and scratches. The girl's mother thinks that her daughter has returned to the harmful habit of scratching her skin from childhood.
Nina’s colleague, Lily, is becoming her friend. He plots, trying to take the role away from her, drugs her with alcohol and ecstasy and seduces her. As a result, Nina slept through the rehearsal. Having come running to her, she sees that her place is taken by a friend-colleague. Lily denies everything, claiming that Nina spent the night with a stranger she met at the club.
Nina's condition is worsening. She visits a former theater prima who was asked to leave due to her “advanced” age. Depressed, she threw herself under a car and is now in the hospital. Prima, in front of Nina, disfigures her face with a nail file. Nina runs out of the hospital, but for some reason the nail file ends up in her hands.
At home, the girl’s hallucinations worsen. She sees a disfigured former prima. Suddenly, the girl’s skin turns goose-bumped, covered with strange spikes that turn out to be feathers, and her legs twist like a bird’s. She loses consciousness.
The climax of the film is the ballet scene. Nina fails the first act, where she plays a white swan. During the break, she gets into a quarrel with Lily. Nina breaks the mirror and wounds Lily in the stomach with a fragment. The body is hidden in the bathroom.
In the second act, the girl performs the part of the black swan brilliantly, liberated and fiery. She feels like a treacherous bird, her gaze changes. Wings grow on the back. They are not visible from the hall, but Nina sees their shadow on the floor. The audience rejoices.
During intermission, Lily comes to her, alive and well. It turns out there is no body in the bathroom either. However, the mirror is broken. Nina sees a fragment of it in her stomach.
Nina brilliantly plays out the last act, overcoming the pain. At the end, when the swan falls off the cliff, Nina falls exhausted in her bloody dress. Her acting was magnificent. Toma runs to her in admiration, but, seeing the picture presented, shouts in horror: “What happened?” To which Nina answers him: “I have achieved perfection.”
The film shows the psychological infantilism of a young, attractive, fairly mature girl who cannot separate herself from her nervous mother. Nina's energy is aimed exclusively at professional success. The girl is not interested in the opposite sex or sex life. The role of the black swan and the encouragement of the choreographer liberate her libido in the form of hallucinations. As a result, Nina develops a split personality.
Based on DRL
Another Oscar-winning masterpiece directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock is Psycho. The plot tells the story of a young man, Norman Bates, the owner of a hotel, where a girl ends up after stealing 40 thousand dollars from her boss and running away because of it.
Norman says he lives with his tyrannical mother, whom he loves very much. The man is fascinated by Marion, but his parent does not like the guest, which is expressed in the “screaming” arguments heard from the hotel windows.
While Marion was taking a shower, a woman with a knife (her face is hidden on screen) burst in and killed her. Norman, seeing what happened, wrapped the girl in a shower curtain and drowned her in the swamp along with her car and things.
Worried about Marion, her sister and a detective go looking for her. They end up at the Bates Hotel. In a conversation with Norman, the detective senses something is wrong. The detective decides to visit the hotel secretly. Here he is attacked by a killer who resembles a woman from behind and kills him with a knife.
Then sister Marion and her fiancé Sam go on a search on their own. The local sheriff told them that Norman's mother died 10 years ago. In the Bates house, the couple finds a woman's room with a wardrobe and cosmetics. It seems that someone lives in it. Sister Marion goes down to the basement and sees her mother's mummy sitting, turned towards the wall. At this time, Norman, dressed in his mother's clothes and holding a knife, attacks her, but Sam saves her.
Bates was arrested, but the psychiatrist rendered his verdict: split personality. Norman, jealous of his mother and her husband, poisoned them both. Although before this it was believed that it was the mother who poisoned first her husband, and then herself. Unable to bear the separation, the son took the corpse out of the coffin, placed it in the basement and began to talk to his mother. His personality was split. And the mother, now in the form of an Alter personality, began to dominate Norman. She was especially irritated by the young beautiful girls whom she killed.
The guy was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he often talked to himself in a motherly voice. Her personality remained dominant.
These are just a few cinematic examples, there are actually many more, as this topic can make some pretty interesting narratives. In fact, the life of patients cannot be called exciting.
Shirley Mason
For a long time, the American Shirley Mason existed not on her own, but in as many as four forms. All of Shirley's personalities were independent and completely different from each other. They differed in intelligence, age and character. The most aggressive and harmful person was the one who called herself Sally. During hypnosis sessions, Sally was capricious, refused to obey, and acted out. Only flattery and persuasion managed to convince Sally to leave her mistress’s body and leave the others alone. Left without Sally, Shirley Mason's three personalities quickly calmed down and united into a single whole.
Twenty in One: The Kim Noble Story
Kim Noble is a London-based artist in whom 20 subpersonalities coexist. Among them there are men, women and children. Most often, Patricia occupies consciousness. She owns her own bank card, which receives funds from the sale of paintings. The pin code is known only to Patricia. The change of other subpersonalities occurs approximately four times a day. Kim has published an autobiographical book, All of Me, co-authored with her Alter Personalities.
14 out of 20 Kim subpersonalities paint pictures. She first took up artistic creativity after the birth of her daughter. Yes, Kim has a daughter. But not all of her ego states are aware of this fact. A certain part of them thinks that Aimee is the name of Kim’s daughter, this is the daughter of her friends.
Now the artist is about 60. The disorder has accompanied her since childhood. The woman assumes that the onset of changes occurred between 1 and 3 years of life. Her parents often quarreled and treated the girl cruelly. Sometimes she had to spend the night with family friends.
Kim recalls that school was especially difficult. She did not remember many of her actions and words. School material was not fully absorbed by the main personality, since different subjects were covered by different subpersonalities. The material learned during the lesson was immediately forgotten during the break, as the characters changed.
Adolescence is the most difficult period in Kim's life. Switching ego states caused bewilderment in everyone, and, as a result, stress and panic. Most of them tried to commit suicide, others suffered from anorexia and bulimia. Because of this, Kim ended up in a psychiatric hospital several times.
The woman had to endure a fire, arrest, and threats. She was even doused with acid.
One day, Kim, in the guise of Haley, got a job as a driver, where she stayed for five years, until her consciousness was taken over by another personality - Judy, who could not drive. This happened while Haley was driving the truck. In essence, Judy rammed a number of cars, for which she was arrested. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Kim was correctly diagnosed only at the age of 35. Now she lives with her daughter and continues to coexist with her twenty hypostases, with which she managed to come to a consensus.
List of sources
- Brushlinsky A.V. Psychology of the subject. M., 2003. 272
- Korolenko T.P., Dmitrieva N.V., Zagoruiko E.N. Identity in normal and pathological conditions. Novosibirsk, 2000. 255 p.
- Turbina E.G. Multiple personality syndrome // Kemerov V.E., Kerimov T.Kh. (ed.) Social philosophy. Ekaterinburg, 2006. P. 205
- Nikiforova P. The phenomenon of multiple personality in science and culture. St. Petersburg, 2014. 20 p.
- Putnam Frank W. Diagnosis and treatment of multiple personality disorder. Per. from English - M.: Cogito-Center, 2004. - P. 10, 138-150.
Some more real stories
Until the age of forty, Melanie Goodwin did not suspect that she was a carrier of a mental disorder - multiple personality disorder. She felt some memory lapses, for example, it was difficult for her to remember the period of her life before the age of 16. But I couldn’t even imagine the presence of nine “I”s at once.
All of them are Melanie, but of different ages, corresponding to a particularly difficult period of life. There is a subpersonality who suffers from anorexia, and another who has attempted suicide several times. Three-year-old Mel is instantly overcome by stupor when confronted with a trigger of past traumas. 16-year-old Mel is a carefree, sociable girl who loves to flirt.
Every morning it is unclear how she will get to work: by car, if she is mature Melanie, or by bicycle, if she is 16-year-old Mel. Or she might have to grab her favorite teddy bear if her three-year-old self is in charge this morning.
The woman felt the presence of several personalities, but could not give an explanation for this. Everything fell into place when she came across the book “The Flock” by Joan Francis Casey. Then Melanie suggested that she had dissociative identity disorder, like the author of the work.
Having shared such thoughts with her husband, he agreed with her. Often it was difficult for a man to understand his wife. For example, one day she enjoys drinking coffee. And in another, he claims that he can’t stand him. Every evening, returning home, Melanie’s husband did not know what kind of wife would appear before him that day.
Mel finds it difficult to trace the chronology of her life. She appears before her in fragments that do not fit well together.
Causes of dissociative identity disorder
Scientists have not yet found the genetic causes of dissociative identity disorder. The main theory about the origin of this disease is based on the fact that in childhood such people experienced a traumatic situation, usually bullying or violence. However, even this theory does not explain 100% of cases of dissociative states. There are patients who, without an obvious or identified traumatic situation in childhood, suffer from dissociative identity disorder. As for the physiological manifestations of this disorder, there is an assumption that in such patients certain areas of the brain stop working and others turn on. However, none of the theories suggesting physiological causes of dissociation currently explains all cases of the disease.
