I made the comparison because both groups are/were classified as mentally ill by the medical community and as dangerous by the wider community. Some people have big problems coming to terms with their status, some people have none. Some people are stereotyped according to their status, some people “pass” (whether they try to or not). At some stage most people in this state have to come out to themselves, their friends & families and the world at large, often at no small cost to themselves. Both groups face ostracisation and worse because they live in a bigoted society, not because of anything over which they have any control. I don’t see these similarities as being insulting.
I find that the most important question (IMO) doesn’t get touched by either Cecil nor any contributor: What exactly is a personality?
What are you talking about, when you you say: I ?
I am a Zen Buddhist, and I can tell you from experience, that this I tends to fall apart when you look at it closely in meditation.
As so often in discussions that lead nowhere, I find that the basic terms have not been defined well, or not at all.
Buddhism would call our idea of a personality that we are or own delusion.
We are nothing but a temporal rope, made up of many strings. It seems to me that in some people the coherence between the threads is less than in others, for whatever reason.
And I also feel that this is only worth treating if the person afflicted or somebody close to them suffers from it.
Otherwise it is just a window on the weird truth of the human condition.
And all this is just a sideline to the even more important and weird question: What is consciousness?
By the way, astarte, I love your Mark Twain quote, long may he run.
The Definition of Personality
Use personality to help predict and explain people’s behavior
3 Features in Defining Personality
Uniqueness
Most definitions of personality include some statement about the uniqueness of an individual’s personality
No matter which theoretical viewpoint a personality psychologist holds, any definition must take into account each person’s uniqueness
Idiographic: describe how SO is unique, seek for a different things in person
Nomothetic: to find out the commonality of people
Consistency
Personality psychologist usually assume some kind of consistency within individual across time and space (situation)
Emphasizing behavioral consistency does not mean an individual’s personality never changes
Degree of behavior consistency is influenced by the extent to which situational factors, as well as, one’s personality, determines thoughts, feeling and behavior
“psychic continuity” sense of connection in times
Contents and Process
Gordon Allport defines personality, " is something that does something"
Is something = refers to the content of personality
Does something = refers to the process of personality
Attribution and Definition
Attribution
Attribute (v): to attribute
Attribute (n): attribute of your brother’s breaking law to irresponsibility
Definition: isolating
Source:
Marshall, Wilma. Ph.D.; Lectures of Introduction to Personality
Carducci, Bernard J. Ph.D.; the Psychology of Personality
This seems to be pretty typical of the working definitions of personality.
Note one key, unspoken assumption; personality is defined by behavior - externally.
Why? In order to reliably predict the behavior of others!
So, this aspect of our picture of mental health, along with so much else is predicated on predictable behavior that is socially acceptable.
Behavior that is not socially acceptable is labeled as “insane.”
Which puts battlefield psychologists in a rather weird twilight zone, I’m sure, as what is “sane” on a battlefield - lack of affect, lack of empathy, subordination of individual will, self-destructive behaviors (eg, compulsive risk-taking) will get you at least a 72 hour admission in The World.
Speaking as a multiple, I know full well that in some cases, we are unpredictable, and were indeed more so before we worked on our stuff. (Trying to hide ourselves of course made us more so, even to ourselves.)
Then of course there’s the internalization of social expectations; if the way your mind works and the way you behave naturally is too far at odds with the way everyone else behaves, we often start to wonder - human beings, that is - if something is wrong with us.
For personal examples, remember your adolescence. :>
In point of fact, my personal beliefs resemble the Zen view described above. Further, as Gordon Allport defines personality, cited in the above quote, a personality " is something that does something"
That would be true of us all; each of us is someone that does something; occasionally that’s quite specific. For the most part, we have other interests as well, but primarily we tend to do one or two things VERY well and then we have our little hobbies and shared interests.
But how that is distinguished from “a person” is beyond me, unless one has the essentially religious belief that there is only one personality per body, associated, perhaps, with a spirit or “soul.”
We have for ourselves a working definition, which amounts to this; there are “larger” and “smaller” persons. This has nothing to do with the apparent age; it has to do with the complexity and stability of the person.
Some fragments in multiple personality systems, including this one, appear to be little more than behavioral subroutines, often very complex, but with no existence outside of a specific context. (eg, the “Cleaning Person” described in “When Rabbit Howls” that could clean the house from top to bottom in under two hours.)
(God, I’m envious… )
Others are not even that, we call them “sprites” as they are simply bits of plastic potential that can be given a temporary task/appearance within our internal reality. I’m sure this applies externally too, and is likely the first step in creating a new person for a situation none of us is equipped to handle.
By nature and necessity, we are more open to non-ordinary perceptions than average. Our internal reality seems closest to a “shamanic” reality, operating by rules that would seem familiar to any shaman. More to the point, operating on that assumption and using those techniques lend us a practical, external appearance of sanity and (more importantly) sanity, as defined as not FEELING out of control and “nuts.” 
If it’s a delusion, it’s a tremendously useful one.
So our working view is that every one of us has an individual, unique “spirit” which is independent of the body. The body itself also has one, which is likely insufficient to maintain conscious awareness, and there is something else, that seems to be associated with all of us, that we see lurking out of the corner of our awareness that seems - very strange and different - and that is what we think may be a “soul”.
Of course the fact that it differs significantly from any religious idea of what a “soul” would be tends to lend some credence; I’ve never seen an hypothesis survive data-impact intact.
flycow asks in parting…
Well, as is apparently now mathematically established, at least within the realm of particle physics, it appears that the existence of the universe depends on it being perceived. Astonishingly enough.
I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong on this point, but I recall experiments done in the 80’s that established that there were some quark interactions, recorded in bubble chambers, that simply did NOT occur if there was someone present who did not believe they could. This was apparently replicated and the whole thing was popularized in a book called “The Dancing Wu-Li Masters,” which was all about how physics was starting to get very, very strange indeed.
But if the universe - God, universal presence, Primus Causus, what have you - depends on being perceived to exist, that would seem to make consciousness a fairly important thing.
Interestingly, it should also suggest the wide and even distribution of conscious life. Um, and one wonders what is conscious ENOUGH? Personally, I’m sure cats are.
Questions for our friendly neighborhood multiples…
Do y’all have to come to a more or less unanimous agreement on major issues? I mean, say alter1 wants to move to Miami, but alter2 wants to move to Toronto, and alter3 is perfectly content to stay right where they are. Do they get together and convene or does alter1 just move them all to Miami on the sly while in control of the body?
In many of the cases of MPD I’ve read about, some of the alters are of a different gender from the body and each other. Does this effect dating? Say if alter1 is male and likes girls, but alter2 is female and likes boys, and alter3 thinks both of them have horrible taste in lovers anyway?
Is there one particular alter that is the Doper here? I mean, is atara, for instance, always atara, or is she sometimes atara2 or atara3 when she’s in here?
We need an “Ask the MPDer” thread. Just an idea.