On an ordinary day, when I was clinical director of a psychiatric day hospital, I saw the door open and was stunned to see Angie walk in, her eyes blazing, her pale thin lips covered in bright red lipstick, her head held high and straight, her gait wide and strong. Angie had transformed overnight from the shy, shoulder-slumped, whispery-voiced, mousey young woman who seemed so much younger. Today she was a different person, loud, gregarious, assertive, very social, and unaware of the change.  We had warnings, vitriolic damning postcards that began arriving anonymously but signed in the same red lipstick. Angie, we quickly came to realize, was a multiple personality.

Don’t we all occasionally, sometime in the back reaches of our remotest daydreams, wish we could step out of our usual self and inhabit another version of ourselves, someone brighter, fearless, outspoken, accomplished, esteemed, fiercely happy? And, yes, there are some people who have other personalities, these alternate others often unknown to the core person, the host. Attractive as it might seem in daydreams that never materialize, these real others arise not out of a fulfilled wish but out of a deep, darker past. These others emerge out of traumas so disturbing, so terrifying that during the traumatizing acts a part of the self dissociates and psychologically steps out of the trauma and finds safety as some one else, someone unaware of the suffering of their other self, someone existing in a new experiential space, in a new identity, free of trauma.

Perhaps the most revealing of such a multiply lived experience is the memoir of Robert Oxnam, A Fractured Mind. A respected China scholar and president of the Asia Society, Oxnam learned through psychotherapy that he had eleven personalities, the fractured parts of his identity. One of them told of childhood abuse. He confided to me that he ended psychotherapy wanting to maintain two of his now recognized identities: Wanda who had a Buddhist-like presence and Bobby, an eighteen-year-old rollerblader balancing bottles on his head who had an affair with a young woman, a revelation that startled Dr. Oxnam and his wife.

Multiple personality disorder, now re-named dissociative identity disorder, affects about one percent of the population and typically emerges after severe trauma early in life. Given that this condition must channel through the brain’s memory systems, I wonder how this can be accomplished. Besides Angie, I have had another person with a dissociative identity, a thirty-eight year old man who was desperate to break free of the oppressive hold his split identity forced on him. It is difficult to convey the extreme, agonizing terror that lies behind that dissociative process, that fulminates in its secret background.

In studying the brains of persons with experiential trauma-related disorders, neuro-scientists have discovered alterations in functional connectivity of key brain regions, including connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala and its complexes, the insula, and the periaqueductal gray as well as differences among the kappa-opioid and endocannabinoid chemical-humoral systems. In other words, despite such searches, we as yet understand little about how the brain functions with dissociative identities.

Just as we understand little about dreams even daydreams. The strange nocturnal events that can wake us up startled and sometimes amused, sometimes horrified — are these the result of the unconscious reveling in its freedom to roam through our dream thoughts and present us with mysteriously disguised dramas, or are dreams merely memory traces randomly ticked off by neuronal activity mechanically cataloging and concatenating these traces without any mental or psychological governance.

Don’t we all wish sometimes to be an other? Wouldn’t it be nice to escape the self we are forever wedded to and run off as someone else. Think of the little ordinary, benign traumas that can kick this wish into consciousness. Well…

Maybe let it stay a harmless fancy. A true split comes at price best having evaded. We can luckily rejoice in the soft pillow of our fixed identity. Let it not have to split.