This article examines the notion that multiple-personality disorder represents the end of a continuum of a defensive dissociation of the self. Three case illustrations are presented in support of this notion. In one case hidden ego states emerged and displayed some behavioral control in the course of hypnotherapy. In another, dissociated part selves were responsible for much of the presenting symptomology, but did not qualify for a diagnosis of multiple personality. The author argues for the recognition of a continuum of dissociation of the self that extends into multiple-personality disorder.Increasing attention has been paid to multiplepersonality disorder (MPD), which only recently appeared as a distinct diagnostic entity in DSM-III in 1980, despite a clinical history extending back as far as the early seventeenth century. MPD reemerged as a topic of marked interest to the mental health community in the early 1970s, following important review articles by Taylor & Martin (1944) and Sutcliffe & Jones (1962). These articles systematically presented the evidence in favor of the existence of MPD as a diagnostic entity. The evidence presented in these articles was in turn supported in case studies by such researchers as Thigpen &Cleckly (1957) andBowers et al. (1971). Articles such as these led to the emergence of MPD as a distinct diagnostic entity from the shadow of schizophrenia, for which it had often been misdiagnosed during the midtwentieth century (Rosenbaum, 1980).
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