What does "less than one personality" mean?
Is it ableist, dehumanizing, or harmful?
Spiegel was the clinician who first put forth this idea in 1993, when MPD was being renamed to DID. It was said that those with DID did not have "multiple personalities", but rather "a dissociated identity," or "less than one personality".
I think Middleton explained the concept best.
Characteristically people with DID switch between different identity states, none of which has the full range of memory and the full range of affect that an integrated personality that's non-dissociative has.
One way of conceptualising it is, yes, people with this condition switch between different identity states, but it can be usefully conceptualised as not so much as having multiple personalities but having access to less than one personality in any context or in any time. So if they are confronted with a certain event, a person with DID in that particular state summons up what resources that they can lay their hands on in that state, but that may mean that that precludes them from the full access to other resources or memories that may help their decision-making, which sometimes represents a situation where they do things that appear very unusual or reactive in a way that is totally out of keeping with the circumstances.
Carolyn Spring also has a good description:
Dissociative disorders are characterised by ‘a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity or perception of the environment’. So for example memories and feelings may not go together – memories may be recalled with no accompanying affect or emotions, or there may be overwhelming feelings with no conscious memory of their cause. There is also often a lack of a coherent sense of autobiography, and this itself leads to problems with a sense of identity – ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What has happened in my life?’ This all results from dissociation acting as a creative survival mechanism in the face of overwhelming trauma, whereby the mind shields itself by segregating the experience, or splitting it off into its constituent parts rather than experiencing it as what would be an unendurable ‘whole’.
As a concept, this has nothing to do with personhood or ability to function as separate people-- though many alters do lack access to significant portions of memory and emotional growth that would inhibit and disrupt their ability to act completely independent of the system, and it ignores the internal communication and teamwork that makes sharing information across alters a key part of healing and treating DID.
It's really frustrating when people without DID/OSDD start making really broad, misleading statements about this topic, and pushing it as something negative or wrong based on made up arguments.
Frequently, topics that have nothing to do with the concept are dragged into it (like personhood) in order to make it look and sound worse than it really is.
You see people say things like, "The phrasing I more often hear is that alters are each part of the whole collective personality. This is based on a philosophy that a "person" is the biological human, and they therefore have a singular "personality.""
I have never heard anyone say that, and it's extremely misleading and flat out wrong.
It's rare that people specify what the parts make up, but typically, it's "person" or "individual".
It is important to bear in mind that the parts ‘are not actually separate identities or personalities in one body, but rather parts of a single individual that are not yet functioning together in a smooth, coordinated, and flexible way’. The ultimate work of therapy is to facilitate an increased coordination between these parts, so that they can indeed function together and perhaps even merge or ‘fuse’. By working on increased communication and cooperation between parts, often there is a corresponding increase in levels of co-consciousness, which can help the DID client to feel in much better control of their life.
Even the ISSTD says "person".
Although the DID patient has the subjective experience of having separate
identities, it is important for clinicians to keep in mind that the patient is
not a collection of separate people sharing the same body. The DID patient
should be seen as a whole person, with the identities sharing responsibility for daily life. Clinicians working with DID patients generally must
hold the whole person (i.e., system of alternate identities) responsible for
the behavior of any or all of the constituent identities, even in the presence
of amnesia or the sense of lack of control or agency over behavior.
Now while the philosophical view could be SAID to lead to one person = one personality, it doesn't mean that the connotation behind that is appropriate in this case.
And it's not even true. Even if I was one "person"-- as in, I had a full, continuous memory stream, I would still have different "personalities" for different situations.
Even we, as alters, can change and adjust our personalities based on situational needs.
Not only do we share this brain and body, but I am not the full person I would have been if I had integrated the trauma and full range of memories from my childhood and adolescence. I would probably be more scared of people, of commitment, I might be more or less scared of public speaking, of wearing more vibrant clothing, I might have different interests or pursued different avenues of education and work. How would my (MY, me, as an alter) advice to other survivors be different if I had access to all of the memories?
Who would we have become if we hadn't had to break apart the continuity of our memory and consciousness to survive?
We are now parts of one person, together holding one whole, continuous stream of memory (plus extra), living this life together as best as we can, with access to what we can offer each other in terms of advice and ideas from our own limited resources.
