PERSONALITYand claimed that “one minute I’d be one person and the next minute I’d
be somebody else.” She believed that her first husband had married Eve
White, not her, and that her first daughter was Eve White’s daughter, not
her own. Sizemore today claims to have lived as one personality for the
last thirty years, with all her alter egos combining to form her newfound
singular identity.
What is happening in a case like this? Can it really be possible for
a single brain to give rise to multiple personalities? A diagnosis of
dissociative identity disorder is highly controversial, and it’s rather
suspicious that the number of reported cases has waxed and waned
according to the publicity given to the condition. In particular, there
was an “epidemic” in the 1980s and 90s when awareness of the diagnosis
was at its zenith.
Today, dissociative identity disorder is considered one of a family of
conditions alongside depersonalization disorder (feeling that nothing
is real), fugue state (forgetting who you are) and dissociative amnesia
(forgetting key episodes of your life). These diagnoses are only made
in the absence of a possible organic cause of the symptoms. Psychia-
trists and psychologists have tried to shift the focus away from the
sensational notion of multiple personalities, to concentrate instead on
the memory loss and breakdown in continuity of consciousness that’s
common to all these conditions. As with the case of Chris Sizemore,
the most popular theory is that dissociative identity disorder emerges
as a coping mechanism after trauma. In line with this theory, people
exhibiting a purported case of split personality will often claim that
one or more of their identities has no recollection of a particularly
traumatic memory.
One of the leading authorities on dissociative disorders is John
Kihlstrom of the University of California. His authoritative overview,
published in 2005, called on people to keep an open mind. “As complex
as [dissociative disorders] are,” he said, ‘they deserve to be studied in
a spirit of open inquiry that avoids both the excessive credulity of the
enthusiast and the dismissal of the determined skeptic.” Today, most
of what we know about dissociative identity disorder remains anec-
dotal and based on single case-reports. There’s been little systematic
study to find out how a single person’s multiple identities score on a
personality test.