ABSTRACT
For almost 200 years, the often dramatic presentation of “alternating selves” (James, 1900/1950) in both clinical studies and popular accounts of multiple personality has etched a compelling and disconcerting trajectory across Western intellectual history. The fascination and uneasiness historically with multiple personality, the most disabling form of dissociation, have coalesced in recent years into an intensely focused, and often heated, controversy about the legitimacy of MPD/DID as a real mental disorder. But the terms in which the controversy has generally been waged tend themselves to conceal the critical issues for modern culture that I will argue are at the root of both our fascinations with and anxieties about MPD/DID.
