"Multiple" (Split) and Dissociative Identity Disorder

Multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder (DID) It has been dealt with in fiction on a recurring basis. The novel "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson and the film "Psycho", by Alfred Hitchcock, influenced a large number of later works, especially in the cinema American.

Multiple (Split), the latest film by M. Night Shyamalan, writer and director of "The Sixth Sense" and "The Visit", is the most recent example of the use of multiple personalities in fiction. However, there is a great deal of controversy regarding films that use DID to tell stories about violence and madness, and about the very existence of the disorder.

• Related article: "20 films about Psychology and mental disorders"

dissociative identity disorder

According to the DSM-IV-TR, in dissociative identity disorder two or more identities coexist in a person. These personalities alternately control thought and movement and may have memories and different thoughts, so each alter ego does not necessarily have the same information as the rest.

Multiple personality is due to disturbances that would impede the normal development of identity, rather than the rupture of a formed personality. While the primary identity of people with DID is usually passive and depressed, the rest tend toward dominance and hostility.

Fine attributes dissociative identity disorder to a hypnosis-like suggestion process that causes selective amnesia. Nevertheless, personalities can be hierarchical so that some control the rest and can access their memories and thoughts. The change from one identity to another is normally attributed to varying degrees of stress.

Likewise, the different identities can interact with each other, enter into conflict and manifest to others as hallucinations visual or auditory; references to alter egos as voices are typical. This may suggest certain similarities between multiple personality and psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.

dissociative identity disorder diagnosed more frequently in women than in men. Women also tend to have more personalities. In general, people diagnosed with multiple personalities have between 2 and 10 different identities.

• Related article: “Multiple personality disorder”

The controversy surrounding the TID and the disassociation

Dissociative identity disorder is considered to be an extreme manifestation of post traumatic stress disorder. In these cases there has usually been a childhood trauma, usually parental abuse or neglect. The symptoms occur as a defense against emotions and sensations that the minor is not able to handle consciously. It is also frequent that it occurs together with depressive disorders, Borderline personality disorder and addictions.

In general, the symptoms of DID are attributed either to dissociation or to simulation. One piece of information that seems to reinforce the view that multiple personality is feigned is the fact that it is diagnosed much more frequently in the United States, where most of the films revolving around this have been produced freak.

Some claim that dissociative identity disorder is a chimeric diagnosis used only by the Psychoanalysis, which in many cases is condemned from other orientations arguing that it generates false beliefs in patients.

The term “dissociation” refers to the disintegration of mental life: consciousness, perception, memory, movement or identity. Dissociation, proposed at the end of the 19th century by Pierre Janet, was used by classical psychoanalytic theorists to explain hysteria.

Even today, dissociation is frequently used as an explanatory construct. Cognitivist-oriented authors such as Hilgard and Kihlstrom affirm that the human mind is perfectly capable of causing dissociative phenomena such as multiple personality through a similar brain process to the focused hypnosis on consciousness or memory.

Kevin's 23 personalities in "Multiple"

(Warning: this section contains moderate spoilers.)

Multiple is a psychological thriller in which a man named Kevin kidnaps three teenage girls, apparently with the intention of using them to feed an imaginary or real being known as "the Beast". In Kevin, 23 personalities coexist, but the ones we see during most of the film are the most hostile and dangerous, who have managed to take control of his body by substituting the most adapted.

The leading actor, James McAvoy, puts himself in the shoes of 9 different characters during the film. Those who interact the most with the kidnapped girls are Dennis, a man with obsessive-compulsive disorder that he enjoys watching naked girls dance, Patricia, an eerily friendly woman, and Hedwig, a nine-year-old boy with a lisp – and who is a huge fan of Kanye West's music. These three rejected identities are known to the rest as "the Horde."

Much of the film's tension, especially during the first few minutes, resides in the fact that, as the three girls, the viewer never knows which of the identities is going to take over next, or when.

Dissociative identity disorder on film

As described by Kevin's identities, all of them they wait sitting in a dark room until Barry, an extroverted and sensitive man who is the dominant personality, "gives them the light", that is, allows them to control the body they share. Patricia and Dennis, the "undesirable personalities", are forbidden light due to the danger they pose.

On the contrary, little Hedwig, who is also rejected by most identities, has the ability to be "in the light" whenever she wants. Hedwig represents a regression to childhood which comes at a time when Kevin can't face the reality of his actions; It is interesting that, in the protagonist's personality structure, these regressions take precedence not only over "healthy" personalities, but also over violent desires.

Among the personalities accepted by Kevin's consciousness, the ones we get to know during the film are Barry, already mentioned, Orwell, a man obsessed with history and big talk, and Jade, the only one of all the identities he has diabetes. These alter egos maintain a kind of alliance with those who do not appear; together they have managed to keep "the Horde" out of conscious experience, or at least Kevin's control, until shortly before Multiple's plot begins.

Barry and his allies regularly visit a psychiatrist, Dr. Fletcher. She maintains the hypothesis that people with multiple personalities can alter your body chemistry through autosuggestion, due to the beliefs that each of the identities maintains about their own nature. For the psychiatrist, people with DID can develop "human potential" to a much greater degree than those without the disorder.

Is the plot realistic?

Much of the features of Kevin's disorder are based on the diagnostic criteria and clinical course commonly described for dissociative identity disorder. Alternative identities begin to develop due to the physical abuse that the protagonist receives as a child on her mother's side, especially the most hostile ones, who hold a grudge against the others because they were the ones who endured the suffering during those moments.

In both post-traumatic stress disorder and DID it is common for reference to experiences of dissociation that took place at traumatic moments; This would establish the habit of using dissociative mechanisms to escape from reality in moments of intense stress. The well-known pianist James Rhodes, author of the autobiographical book "Instrumental", reports similar dissociative experiences but without the presence of multiple personalities.

Kevin's personality structure is quite consistent with those of cases diagnosed as multiple personalities. The different identities are hierarchical so that some of them (or at least Barry, the dominant personality) can access the memories from the rest, while, for example, the child Hedwig is completely unaware of the thoughts of the others. the rest. These differences in access to mental contents generate the memory gaps of each of the identities.

A priori, the possibility of altering neurobiology depending on the personality state is one of the least credible aspects of the film. However, on many occasions people with multiple personalities not only affirm that their different identities have mental disorders different, as is the case of Kevin's selective OCD, but also that some may be right-handed and others left-handed, some need glasses and others do not, etc

As we said at the beginning of the article, a large number of professionals question the testimonials and studies that support these possibilities. In any case, in Multiple Shyamalan uses the disorder as an excuse to play with the boundaries between reality and fiction, as he has done throughout his filmography.

Controversy around multiple personality cinema

The Multiple film has been criticized by groups that work for mental health, such as the Australian association SANE, and petitions for signatures have been registered online against it. These platforms warn that Múltiple and other similar fictional products, particularly from Hollywood, are harmful to people with mental disorders complexes. They argue that people who have no more information about the disorders than what they get through movies to think that the people who suffer from them are dangerous and naturally aggressive.

Although it is convenient to know how to separate reality from fiction and understand that cinema is still entertainment, it is true that the repeated use of multiple personality disorder in horror movies has conveyed a skewed image of it – in case such an entity really exists diagnostic.