Dissociation and psychosis: The need for integration of theory and practice

The most chronic and complex of the dissociative disorders, multiple personality disorder, was renamed ‘dissociative identity disorder’ in 1994 in DSMIV (American Psychiatric Association). The rationale for the name change was, among other things, to clarify that there are not literally separate personalities in a person with dissociative identity disorder; ‘personalities’ was a historical term for the fragmented identity states that characterize the condition.