Multiple Personality in Later Life- A Developmental Interpretation1

Is THERE such a phenomenon as multiple person-ality in later life? This possibility had never occurred to me until I recently came across some observations that were made with other clin-ical and research problems in mind. The prelimi-nary observations presented here might be more meaningful if considered within the context of what has previously been reported concerning mul-tiple personality in general. Multiple personality has been defined by English and English (1958) as a "condition in which the normal organization of mental life is disintegrated or split up into distinct parts or subpersonalities, each with a fairly complicated organization of its own comparable with that of a normal individual or personality. Even in extreme cases, however, there are not completely independent personalities united only by a common physique. There seems always to be an underlying personal unity " (p. 383). Multiple personality occurs in varying de-grees of salience, and the specific features of the syndrome vary from case to case. The first published description of a so-called "multiple personality " appeared in 1817 (Mitchill, cited by Taylor & Martin, 1944). A few more cases were reported during the next 7 decades, but what we might call "The Golden Age of Multiple Per-sonality " did not develop until the 1890's and earl