Via Andrew Sullivan, it appears the Multiple Personality Disorder or Disassociative Identity Disorder may not actually be a psychiatric ailment. It became popularized at a time when society wanted a way to repress women who were beginning to show independence.
Apt. 11d 
Umm, does the historian in the house–or the historians in the audience here–endorse that sort of cause and effect analysis? Because this particular student of history (i) denies that women were “beginning to show independence” in 1953, or the early 1970s (it’s sort of a perennial phenomenon), (ii) notes the uncertainty about which time period we are talking about, (iii) notes that between (say) the publication of La Deuxieme Sexe in 1949 and today, many things happened, and surely they can’t all be attributed to the modern women’s movement, and (iv) notes that many episodes of phony psychology and social science have occurred over the past two centuries (mesmerism, phrenology, eugenics), and surely they can’t all be attributed to changes in women’s social status, of which there have been many. What empirical evidence is there to suggest that belief in MPD isn’t attributable to the Cold War, or jet airplanes, or the creation of Israel, or the cutback of workers’ rights under Taft-Hartley, or what have you?
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This one’s dear to my heart.
I honestly think there is a different kind of backlash going on. There’s no question that there have been strange and fraudulent cases of DID/MPD and also that therapists have benefited quite a lot from telling The Bizarre Tale Of My Patient And Her 20 Personalities and some of those books display crushingly bad boundaries. It was all a part of that 80s incest/satanic ritual craziness. Most of the books were therapist-written and some were really…narcissistic and extreme.
But you also have had in the last ten years a different kind of narrative. Men with MPD have curiously dominated the publishing scene starting with Cameron West’s First Person Plural, Herschel Walker’s coming out multiple, and the (to me) best autobiography of a multiple ever, A Fractured Mind by Robert B. Oxnam who was a reasonably prominent guy.
I think people are deeply uncomfortable with MPD/DID mostly because of how it’s been used as a plot device (Fight Club) and also because while we continue to believe in abuse, I really do think there is pushback to the idea that _such incredibly horrific_ things happen to children that there are consequences that are difficult to imagine.
I also think there is some reductionist thinking going on in the latest versions of the DSM-series, like the work around removing NPD, because we’re in a phase where if you can’t medicate it easily whatever the disorder is becomes suspect (autism maybe being one of the exceptions).
For me I’m way beyond engaging in the debate: I might not be multiple but it remains the best explanation going for the way my mind works, and I think I (we) have some right to self-definition, as long as I’m not demanding special contractual loopholes or whatever. I’m certainly not neurotypical.
I’m open to taking on questions here or at my blog if people are interested. (And whatever you like Laura) I’ll go start an open thread.
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y81,
Before reading this post, I actually would have assumed the relationship ran in the opposite direction. Doesn’t the Sybil phenomenon seem very much like a typical product of the 1970s women’s movement? The Sybil hoax was very much a woman-driven thing, with a female patient, a female psychiatrist with major boundary issues and a female journalist who wrote it all up. It would be interesting to know what was the reception of Sybil in the 1970s feminist movement.
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Amy P.: Actually, your theory does seem more credible than our hostess’s. But, as a child of the 1970s academy–humanist Marxism, Gramsci, Derrida, all that stuff–I stand firmly by my belief in the “autonomy of the psychobabble superstructure.”
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