There are a lot of development pathways.
But before we get into that, I would say that this is less about "fragmentation" and more about "compartmentalization." Dissociative barriers would probably be better conceived as walls rather than something being broken apart.
In the case of trauma, it's barriers built to protect people from damage. Generally painful memories.
But for other systems the question is what causes this compartmentalization. And to be clear, what we have now is just speculation. While the existence of other forms of plurality is real, the cause is hard to determine for certain and all we have is theories.
The Emergent Multiple: Natural Multiplicity
This theory would say that, as the human consciousness emerges, it simply naturally compartmentalizes into multiple headmates for some people.
When you think about it, it's kind of weird that so many have only a single personality. Remember, a brain isn't one thing. It's billions of neurons working together. And try as we might, we don't know how consciousness emerges from these cells. We don't know how we're able to think like we do.
The theory of structural dissociation does suggest that, in childhood, children naturally have a less integrated personality. So maybe, due to some anomaly, some brains just naturally compartmentalize into multiple headmates instead of one.
It's also possible that singlethood itself is sociogenic. Basically, most people form into singlets because they observe everyone else as singlets and perceive them as such in a singlet-normative society. In which case, something as simple as having a different perspective of people as a child could result in this compartmentalization.
Before we can understand the cause of natural multiplicity, we would need to understand the cause of singlethood and how a singlet consciousness emerges from the billions of neurons in their brain.
Created Systems From Self-Hypnosis
This is a theory I've seen from Dr. Samuel Veissiere in his study of tulpamancers, where he suggested these sorts of created systems involved self-hypnosis. Hypnosis has long been considered closely related to dissociation, and some have postulated the existence of a "hidden observer" in hypnosis as a dissociated part of the personality.
In a recent AMA on r/tulpas, Dr. Michael Lifshitz discussed findings in an fMRI study of tulpa systems that showed the brain activity of tulpamancers while a tulpa was possessing a limb was similar to that of people who have been hypnotized. So that's cool and does lend some weight to this hypothesis!
I'm not really convinced this is the cause for this sort of plurality, actually. But at least similar mechanisms seem involved in ceding control to the nonfronting headmate.
This is the most cop-out answer possible, but well, they are. You mention several examples of pseudo-plurality, but one that everyone overlooks that everybody experiences is dreaming. Because yeah, every night a singlet goes to sleep, they drift off into an inner world where their brain creates multiple autonomous people to populate that land. And even many lucid dreamers can't control the people in the dreams even when they can control other things in the dreams. Dream characters just do whatever they want. And we all just accept this weirdness. 🤷♀️
We personally have one headmate who we dragged directly into our system from a lucid dream. And according to a poll I did, more than half of mixed origin and traumagenic systems had at least one headmate who originated from dreams.
So is there a connection here? Could a singlet just dream of someone and then wake up with that as a headmate afterwards? I mean, this seems unlikely. But we have no idea how any of this works.
And that's the point I want to get across with this. Because I don't know if this is a real way systems can form. But there are a lot of unknowns and things we don't understand about dreaming.
If nothing else, this should be proof that the brain just sort of has an ability to make multiple people. Even if these dream characters aren't permanent, for the time they exist, they must have been compartmentalized somehow.
the pseudo plurality caused by psychosis, delusions, MADD, etc?
Is this only psuedo-plurality?
I actually don't think of most delusions as being related to plurality.
But I believe some hallucinations can be when those hallucinations seem autonomous and demonstrate self-awareness. And this paper on hearing hostile voices has suggested the same.
There are two kinds of dissociation. Compartmentalization and detachment.
Compartmentalization involves separating headmates. (It also involves separating non-headmate parts and memories, which is why dissociative amnesia exists even with non-systems.)
When we talk about plurality, the type involved is general compartmentalization. While detachment is what happens when you switch. (And also in DPDR.)
So, what if a daydream character or imaginary friends developed all the personality and autonomy and self-awareness of a full headmate... but they just couldn't switch because they didn't develop the skills to?
It's my belief that there are probably a lot of systems out there who are unaware, who have fully-developed self-aware headmates, but dismiss the people in their head as just their imagination or just hallucinations because they aren't able to switch.
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