Dissociative identity disorder in popular culture

Dissociative identity disorder (DID, also referred to as multiple personality disorder or MPD) has been popularized in many works of fiction throughout the world, most often in murder mysteries as a red herring plot device. This article provides a partial list of references to DID and MPD in fiction, omitting any which originate through supernatural or other pseudo-scientific causes.

Books and short stories

• Mary Higgins Clark's 1992 novel All Around the Town is about a young woman who is believed to have committed a murder. Psychiatric sessions reveal that she was kidnapped and molested as a girl, and as a result she has DID.
• Shirley Jackson's 1954 novel The Birds' Nest is about a young woman with multiple personalities. Jackson created the character by interviewing a local psychiatrist who had treated a client with DID.
• Lloyd Rose's 2002 Doctor Who novel Camera Obscura is built around the idea of multiple selves, both psychological and physical.
• In Stephen King's book series, The Dark Tower, one of the main characters, Susannah Dean, has stereotypical split personalities.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, begun in 1983, includes characters who manifest more than one personality; this is portrayed as a mere idiosycracy, not a serious psychiatric disorder. One of the most prominent characters is the beggar Altogether Andrews, who has multiple distinct personalities—none of which are named Andrews—each with their own memories and manner of speaking. Other characters with more than one personality include Agnes/Perdita in the "witch series" and Miss Pickles/Miss Pointer in Thud.
• Pat Barker's 1993 novel The Eye in the Door deals with numerous "splits" in the human life and psyche during wartime.
• Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel Fight Club revolves around the bizarre relationship between the mild-mannered protagonist and his radical, anti-consumerist, anarcho-primitivistic alternate personality. The book presents a very idiosyncratic version of MPD in which the identity manifests itself either conterminous to the multiple (as an audiovisual hallucination) or as a more realistic version that manifests while the protagonist believes he is sleeping.
• In Joe Abercrombie's fantasy series, The First Law Trilogy, a character named Logen Ninefingers occasionally succumbs to a darker alternate personality interested only in killing, which is called the Bloody-Nine.
• John R. Maxim's novel Mosaic is about a government experiment that uses people with DID in an attempt to create the perfect assassin.
• Robert Silverberg's 1983 short story "Multiples" describes a future where people with multiple personalities form a subculture similar to the modern gay community. In the story, a "singleton" (a person with one personality) fakes having DID to attract a DID partner and ultimately attempts to fragment her personality in order to become multiple herself.
• Matt Ruff's 2003 novel Set This House in Order concerns two people with classical MPD on a journey of self-discovery.
• In Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the scientist Dr. Henry Jekyll artificially separates his good and evil natures, causing him to switch between two separate personalities through the consumption of a potion of his own creation.
• Sidney Sheldon's 1998 novel Tell Me Your Dreams is about a woman named Ashley who has two other selves named Toni and Alette. A string of vicious murders seems to follow Ashley, and the police must work hard to find out who is behind them.
• In Ted Dekker's 2003 novel Thr3e, the main character has three different personalities: himself, a childhood friend, and the villain.
• Hervey Cleckley and Corbett Thigpen's 1957 book The Three Faces of Eve is loosely based on the true story of Chris Costner-Sizemore (who later told her own story in the non-fiction books I'm Eve and A Mind of My Own).
• Science fiction author Philip K. Dick's novels often include themes concerning alternate personalities sometimes intertwined with alternate realities and universes. Notable examples are his 1966 short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", on which the movie Total Recall is loosely based, and his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly which was also turned into a film.
• In Shana Mahaffey's Sound's Like Crazy, a voice actress, Holly Miller has developed a Multiple Personality Disorder because of a terrible past.
• In the Monster High toy line and book series, there is a character named Jackson Jekyll with an alternate personality named Holt Hyde (DJ Hyde in the books). The two personalities are unaware of one another's existence.
• In C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, at least two of the ghosts have good and evil personalities that have become physically distinct.
• In William Diehl's Novels Primal Fear and sequels Show of Evil and Reign in Hell one of the story's main characters Aaron Stampler appears to suffers from DID but is later revealed to be an act.
• In Max Brook's novel World War Z Paul Redeker developed an alternate personality named Xolelwa Azania.

Movies and television

• In 1967's Indian Bollywood film Raat Aur Din, directed by Satyen Bose, the lead female role played by Nargis Dutt suffered from dual personality disorder. Nargis, for her role, was awarded with National Film Award for Best Actress.
• In the 1976 television film Sybil, based on the novel by Flora Rheta Schreiber, a young woman is found to have at least 16 separate personalities. The fictionalized case of "Sybil", loosely based on the life of Shirley Ardell Mason, has become the iconic image of MPD/DID for most of the American public.
• In the 1975 television film Trilogy of Terror, the second segment concerns the rivalry of two sisters who turn out to be sharing a body. A similar story is the subject of an episode of the television series Magnum, P.I.
• Latka Gravas, one of Andy Kaufman's characters from the sitcom Taxi, was characterised as having multiple personalities. The normally shy Latka sometimes presents as womanizing Vic Ferrari. In at least one episode, he assumes the personality of the main character of Taxi, Alex Reiger.
• Norman Bates in the 1960 film Psycho (adapted from Robert Bloch's 1959 novel) can be said to have dual personalities, since he has internalized his dead mother.
• Mort Rainey in the 2004 film Secret Window (adapted from Stephen King's novella) has dual personalities, coexisting with John Shooter.
• Multiple personalities are a catalyst for numerous storylines on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live since its premiere in 1968.
• The 1999 film Fight Club features an unnamed narrator with dual personalities.
• The 1992 film Raising Cain is about a child psychologist who turns out to be harboring several personalities in stereotyped fashion. The cause of his mental disease is said to be mind control experiments performed on him as a small child by his father.
• The 1994 film Color of Night, starring Bruce Willis, the 1996 films Primal Fear and Shattered Mind, 1995's Never Talk to Strangers and 2001's Session 9, and the 2003 thriller Identity feature multiple personalities and explore the idea of responsibility for another personality's actions. The multiples in these films are characterized stereotypically as meek, peaceful people housing violent, psychopathic alternate personalities.
• Me, Myself & Irene (2000) starring Jim Carrey as Charlie Baileygates and Hank Evans, is a slapstick farce about a man who becomes a "split personality" after suppressing angers and frustrations for years, his new personality 'Hank' actively seeking confrontation where Charlie avoided it, their relationship culminating in the two literally struggling for control over parts of their shared body.
• French Stewart played a multiple in an episode of Becker entitled "Papa Does Preach".^[1]
• The popular sitcom Barney Miller guest-starred Stefan Gierasch as a multiple in the episode "Power Failure", which initially aired December 9, 1976.^[2]
• In X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), mutant Jean Grey is described as having developed a split personality as a result of mental barriers placed in her mind by her mentor, Professor Xavier. This "creature" represented all her primal urges, and called itself "Phoenix". In X-Men: Evolution, two characters are subject to DID at some point in the series. Rogue, capable of absorbing the powers and personalities of others, suffers from a variation of DID after her accumulation of psyches overwhelms her and she loses her sanity. Legion, or David, Xavier's son has multiple personalities, each with a particular mutant ability.
• The NBC television series Heroes features a character, Niki Sanders with two other selves referred to as Jessica and Gina, implied to have been the result of her abusive childhood. Later in the series, the main villain, Sylar, develops multiple personalities as a side effect of the use of the shapeshifting ability when used in combination with his acquired psychometry; his mind has begun to fracture into the different personas of those whom he has shapeshifted into.
• In an episode of the USA Network series Psych, (2006) the main character confronts a murderer with typically theatrical split personalities.
• Various episodes of popular television series such as The X-Files, Psi Factor and Judging Amy, use the idea of multiples with a hidden "killer personality". The film Saimin plays on this idea with one personality being a demonic possession by a malevolent incarnation of the Monkey King; the Touched by an Angel episode "Loser" states that multiples are possessed by demons. The Babylon 5 episode "Divided Loyalties" (1993) postulates a hidden killer personality programmed into the mind of a telepathic woman and triggered by a telepathically sent password.
• The 2005 Indian psychological thriller film Anniyan, portrays Ambi, who has developed DID as a result of witnessing the devastating experience of his sister's death.
• The 1993 Indian horror film Manichitrathazhu, centers around Ganga, a woman who develops split personality disorder during a period of stay at her husband's family house.
• In the ER, episode "Jigsaw", and in the Nip/Tuck episode "Montana / Sassy / Justice", patients are portrayed with stereotypical dissociative disorders.
• Jacqueline Hyde, a villain in the game show Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?, is a teenager with (as usual) a sweet, innocent personality and an insane, evil personality.
• In the television series Criminal Minds, several episodes deal with criminals who have DID.
• The 2003 film Haute Tension (Switchblade Romance) ends with a "killer multiple" revelation.
• In the animated series Transformers Animated, the Decepticon Blitzwing has three separate personalities and faces to match.
• In the animated series Beavis and Butt-head, Beavis has a separate identity, the Great Cornholio, who usually surfaces when he consumes a large amount of sugar or caffeine, or occasionally in moments of extreme anger.
• In the animated series Garbage Pail Kids, the character Split Kit has one side that is good and the other that is bad.
• In an episode of The Mod Squad, Carolyn Jones played a woman with two personalities, one of which was the stereotypical passive "good girl", while the other was a psychotic who had put out a contract on the "good" one.
• Showtime's United States of Tara is about a mother of two who is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, and whose alters appear regularly when she is under stress.
• On India's NDTV Imagine's popular soap opera Jyoti, Sudha Sharma exhibits dual personality, morphing into the confident and brazen character "Devika" by night.
• In the 1990s soap opera, Melrose Place, Dr. Kimberly Shaw suffered from what was called multiple personality disorder. She was also variously characterized as psychotic and possessed by a demon.
• In the British television series Jam & Jerusalem, Rosie Bales (Dawn French) is a factory worker who has an alter named Margaret, a stern and demanding older woman. It is hinted that this alter was created during a sexual trauma earlier in her life.
• In the Canadian television series Murdoch Mysteries, the suspect in the season 3 episode Me, Myself, and Murdoch has two personalities.
• The 2010 film The Ward depicts a young institutionalized woman who, while trying to escape from the institution and a resident killer ghost, finds that all the other killed patients and the ghost are alternative personalities she created in order to deal with a violent abduction in her childhood.
• In the television series Lie to Me, Cal works on a case of a woman who claims to have had a vision of murder only for it be discovered she has multiple personalities and the Lightman group must work out if the personality who witnessed the crime is a witness or the murderer. The personalities include a college student, prostitute, the silent protector and the original personality that the team inadvertently awaken during hypnotherapy.
• In the television series Family Matters, Jaleel White plays a character suffering from DID with two main personalities: intelligent nerdy Steven Urkel and suave sophisticated Stefan Urquelle.

Manga, anime, comics, and video/computer games

Manga, anime, comics, and video and computer games are genres that frequently use the idea of dual or multiple personalities to emphasize the struggle between good and evil, but these depictions are not truly examples of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Often the characters who develop alternate selves have done so through supernatural, magical, or chemical means, while real DID is a serious psychiatric disorder which results from extreme trauma, usually in childhood. Two of the most prominent example of DID in a fictional character are Yu Yu Hakusho's Shinobu Sensui, who developed seven personalities after a traumatic event in his youth, and Shigofumi: Letters from the Departed's Fumika, who developed two personalities (Fumi & Mika) after shooting her dad.

In music

• Quadrophenia by British rock band The Who is about a mod named Jimmy who embodies the personalities of the band members.
• In the song "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence" by progressive metal band Dream Theater, one of the movements, titled "Losing Time", appears to describe a Sybil-like multiple.
• "Sweating Bullets" by American heavy metal band Megadeth is about a man in an insane asylum holding conversations with multiple versions of himself. The video features lead singer Dave Mustaine in a small and dirty room being harangued and antagonized by other versions of himself.
• "Multiple Myselves" by Violent J of the Insane Clown Posse is about Violent J's multiple personalities that are both describing themselves to the listener while at the same time arguing with themselves.

See also

• Dissociative identity disorder

References

1. ^ Pavilion Review: Becker, describes the episode in detail. Retrieved 2008-07-24.
2. ^ Pavilion review: Barney Miller, describes the episode in detail. Retrieved 2008-07-24.