Multiple Personality Disorder

Phelps, B. (March 22, 2000). "Dissociative Identity Disorder: The Relevance of Behavioral Analysis." The Psychological Record.

Dissociative Identity Disorder: The Relevance of Behavioral Analysis by Brady J. Phelps fails to establish any relevance at all for behavioral analysis either as a diagnostic or a therapeutic tool when it comes to the controversial subject of Multiple Personality Disorder, now referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Belaboring the obvious or retreating into obscure behavioral jargon ("a self or personality is at best a repertoire of behavior imparted by an organized set of contingencies"), Phelps brings little insight to anything, let alone DID. First he ploughs through a variety of definitions of personality. But since behaviorism recognizes only behavior as relevant for psychological observation, all those wonderful intangibles of personality from imagination to taste are left out. The definitions are hopelessly inadequate. One of them states that Dissociative Identity Disorder is "the existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities, each of which is dominant at a particular time". Oh yeah? But what is personality?

The sterility of this branch of psychology is revealed clearly in this article when the author addresses how someone suffering from DID should be treated. "Therapy for persons displaying the behaviors in question must consist of extinguishing a reasonable share of the beha

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ity. Dissociation has also tentatively been attributed to self-hypnosis (Bliss, 1980, 1984; Hilgard, 1977) and neurological dysfunction or epileptic seizure-related activity (Gur, 1982; Schenk & Bear, 1981). How Does Behavioral Theory Account for These Behaviors? Although Skinner (1953) had suggested we all might display multiple personalities, Kohlenberg (1973) first proposed a learning theory account for a disorder of multiple personality. It can be argued that each of us has differing amounts of variance in our repertoires to the point that a common question may arise: "How many personalities do we actually have?" The question isn't how many personalities does each of us have, but, how many behavioral repertoires are each of us capable of performing or exhibiting? Viewing personality this way, it is obvious that we all perform many personalities, with differing degrees of behavioral excesses and deficits, beyond what is "normal." These variations are caused by differential stimulus control, reinforcement, and punishment contingencies. That is to say, we may behave very differently in a lecture hall than in a church or synagogue. Any individual no doubt behaves very differently when with one's mother than when w

Category: Psychology - M