I’m reading Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintence right now, and I’ve got a question. I was thinking about how the author starts to lose time and how Phaderous comes back into the picture slowly. This got me thinking:
Do people with Multiple Personalities suffer from loss of sleep? Like Ed Norton in Fight Club, he’s not “conscious” when Brad Pitt takes over, so is he effectively napping?
When Pirsig is on the mountain with his son, he remembers going to sleep, yet his son says he was up talking until 3 am.
So, did Pirsig get a full night of sleep (and Phaderous suffers from the sleep deprevation), or did he deprive himself?
I’m asking this here instead of the Cafe because I’m curious about the real world applications. If someone with MPS changes personalities during the night, the body effectively getting no sleep, is the original personality, which thinks it’s been sleeping, effected? Is the original personality only physically fatigued, not mentally?
I think this is akin to asking if when you get mad is your “happy self” napping. A person’s brain with a multiple personality disorder is not partitioned like a hard drive.
Sleep is characterized by predictable changes in general brainwave patterns and chemical balances. I don’t think it would be possible to isolate it to one “personality”.
What exactly Dissociative Identity Disorder (as it is now apparently officially called) is is still under debate. Some, such as the late Spanos, argue against the post trauma model. From that link:
ps- Do you think your waking personality is in charge when you are asleep? Is it your 9:00 Monday morning personality or your weekend at the cottage personality?
Expanding a little on “under debate”: it’s actually a tad bit more scandalous because it came to light a few years back that the case of Sybil – who is considered the standard model for “post-child abuse multiple personality disorder” – was largely fabricated by the therapist, Cornelia Wilbur. They discovered copious notes about how she used hypnosis and sodium penothal to achieve the desired effect with her patient. It was well-publicized 1999 and you can find a fair number of news stories about it.
Multiple Personality Disorder was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and somewhat begrudgingly was replaced with Dissociative Identity Disorder in DSM Fourth Edition. However, I’ve noticed it is completely absent from some on-line versions these days.
WARNING: the following opinions are my own. I have gleaned my opinion from the writings of those more knowledgable than I, but I can’t cite them right now. Believe at your own risk.
Multiple Personality Disorder is a name guaranteed to cause the confusion you’re feeling; this is no surprise, because it resulted from the same kind of confusion.
There is no such thing as “multiple personality.” One person, one brain, one personality. The condition formerly called MPD is a psychosis, usually/probably related to schizophrenia. As far as I know, the perception of a second personality often comes from a therapist, rather than the patient. Their patients are likely to perceive themselves as “forgetting things” or “possessed”; if badly dissociated, they may be completely unaware of their internal states.
There may be periods of relative lucidity alternating with periods of serious delusion, intense repression of memories, interpretation of auditory hallucinations as internal dialogue (with a second personality or possessing spirit), etc. The MPD patient may create the “second personality” as a coping mechanism.
Getting back to the OP, of course this “second personality” can’t be awake while the “base personality” sleeps. Sleep is a physiological phenomenon, and there’s only one body doing it. It’s possible to “sleepwalk” through such an experience, but this is best described as “incomplete waking”; it’s been studied, and it’s known to be unrestful. Whether lucid dreaming during sleepwalking fulfills any of the functions of dreaming is a question that won’t be answered until we truly know what dreaming is. I’ve never seen “Fight Club” nor read “Zen and the Art…,” so I can’t say much more about that.
The news came out in the summer of 1998 with the discovery of some tapes of the two therapists involved with “Sybil” (real name Shirley Ardell Mason). When their book became a financial success (a movie etc.) they got stuck at the point of no return. IIRC the APA was informed of the tapes in 1998, but it didn’t get much news coverage until a couple months later when the psychiatric community started pondering what they were going to do.
Adding fuel to the flames were a series of lawsuits in the 90s from patients of “recovered memories” who were recanting. There was also the license suspension of Dr. Bennet Braun who founded the International Society for the Study of Disassociation. He was considered quite important in the study of MPD and its treatment. One of his patients had been convinced that she had 300 personalities, had killed hundreds of people in Satanic rituals, and had eaten babies. She won a $10 million dollar suit. (Check the Chicago Tribune for a cite – I can’t remember when it took place, but they interviewed the former patient).
Kinda hurts credibility. But…
Currently, I understand that they are re-evaluating the model with a helathy dose of skepticism. I don’t believe that anyone is claiming that it does not exist, I think it’s being recategorized (which is why the new term refers to a disassociative disorder). I think (IANAD, so I’m only remembering what I read), that it has something to do with someone who is disassociative learning to develop different personas as socializing agents.
What you would have seen in Fight Club for is entirely a dramatic construction.
If anyone who knows more can elaborate, I’d like some enlightenment too, please.
