dissociative identity disorder

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Recommended: Research paper on dissociative identity disorder

History
Over the years, people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) have thought to be possessed with demons this diagnosis continued well into the nineteenth century and is still a common misdiagnosis in some parts of the world today. Starting in the eighteenth century the possession theory started to die down and the first case of DID was found by Eberhardt Gmelin in 1791 a German Doctor. In America in 1815, Mary Reynolds was discovered as having multiple personalities (Coons, 2011 p 3).
The first studied case of DID was by Pierre Janet in 1883. Janet patient was a 45-year-old woman who had three different personalities her name was Leonie. Leonie had one personality that knew of the other two this is known as the host. The personalities were able to control the body at different times and Leonie remembered nothing of these missing times. The one personality would take over, take Leonie to another place, and let her take back over and she would have a panic attack not know where she was. (Manning & Manning, 2011 p 7). Janet took the case of Leonie to other big names in Psychology such as Jean-Martin Charcot, Frederick Myers, and Charles Richet; these men reviewed the case and agreed with Janet findings. Janet described the splitting of personalities as the process of the splitting of consciousness as disaggregation. Disaggregation was later translated in English to dissociation. He described the personality splits as successive existences that he thought was capable of having an independent identity and be able to lead a different live. Janet believed that this split was caused by real trauma in Leonie life. He believed to treat the disorder that he needed to bring to consciousness the split of memories and emotions and r...

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...o be the cause of chronic posttraumatic psychopathology. There are several factories that contribute to this complex splitting of personalities. Over whelming stress coinciding with the ability to separate ones memories, identity, and perception from our conscious awareness, abnormal psychological development, and insufficient protection and love as a child ( Pais, 2009 p 1). It is still not clear how these lead to DID. Dissociative identity disorder tends to manifest in early childhood and arises during adolescences due to the protective reaction to server childhood trauma usually sexual abuse. There have been numerous studies on the early severe abuse and dissociative disorder. It is believed that these identities are invented due to a unified self-identity failed to form due to the trauma especially if the trauma occurred before the age of five ( Pais, 2009 p2).

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