How can people have as many as 25 personalities and not know that he experiences them daily.
No one?
Are you referring to a specific case, or is the 25 an arbitrary number? I think 25 is rather high number to be typical… anyway…
To answer your question, I don’t think the person doesn’t know. They probably have experiences where they can’t account for long periods of time (this would occur when other personalities took over) and people talk about events that they don’t remember participating in. That might be enough to cue them to the fact something’s not right. Granted, I don’t have multiple personality disorder (oh shush, people!), and I’ve never studied dissociative identity disorder/MPD from that point of view, but I doubt that people who have it are totally clueless.
Try reading the classic on the subject “Sybil (Now a frightening movie starring Sally Field)”, I’m sorry I’ve forgotten the author. An absorbing read which explains the complexities of the still contentious multiple personality disorder patient rather well. The fact that the psychiatrist who diagnosed and treated Sybil went on to diagnose 15 other patients with an incredibly rare disorder is a bit of a concern for the validityt of the disorder I think.
It’s the reliability of the diagnosis, not the validity of the disorder you should be questioning. DID does exist; other disorders were just frequently misdiagnosed at the time.
Too bad the Sybil case was a fake. Turns out that two researchers in recent years (1998 and 1999) discovered the identity of the real “Sybil,” Shirley Mason, and her therapist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur. Tapes of sessions between the two apparently demonstrate the therapist urging Shirley, under the influence of hypnosis and sodium pentathol, to remember things that had never happened to her. Furthermore, the author of the book Sybil twisted, distorted and outright made things up to make the story far more dramatic.
And there is an enormous amount of disagreement in the psychiatric community as to whether MPD/DID exists at all, and if it does, whether it is naturally occurring, the result of trauma/abuse, or (and this is the best one) induced in the patient by the therapist! For an excellent illustration of this see http://www.religioustolerance.org/mpd_did3.htm .
This subject has come up a number of times in “General Questions” and “Great Debates.” You’ll find much food for thought there.
That’s part of the reason it’s been re-named “Dissociative Identity Disorder” (DID)
The person dissociates (separates from) the various personalities. Thus, they are unaware of the existence/activity of those other personalities, and often experience “lost time”.
This assumes, of course, that you actually believe the disorder exists. That is still open to question, although it’s still in the DSM-IV (the American standard for psychological/psychiatric diagnosis).
You might find some more info in this thread, from a few days ago.
Arjuna34