DID and the Brain

You may have read the story in “People” magazine about the woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder. According some sources, this phenomenon was referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder until 1994, when the name was changed to reflect a better understanding of the condition. (You may even recall the best-selling book “Three Faces of Eve,” an early description of someone with this condition.) It is now characterized as a condition arising from a fragmentation of a person’s identity rather than by a growth of separate identities. It may be diagnosed when an individual exhibits two or more “identities.” DID is believed to be the brain’s was of protecting the mind (or, as some put it, the mind’s way of protecting the psyche). Protecting it from what? More tomorrow.