Plurality is Not (Necessarily) Dissociative

In my research on plurality, a certain truism has emerged, one that states that plurality is fundamentally a dissociative condition. This view is, it must be stated, in all likelihood over-represented by virtue of the fact that, until very recently, scholarly and academic literature on the subject was all but exclusively focused on disordered plurality, neatly defined and catalogued as it is by clinical appraisals of the so-called dissociative disorders:— dissociative identity disorder (DID), other specified dissociative disorder (OSDD), and the various lesser-spoken-of conditions outlined in the ICD-11.

Because these conditions are thus defined, as dissociative disorders, those whose knowledge of plurality has been gained primarily by means of such a clinical lens might find the title of this article a provocative statement. Yet even among literature produced by and for the plural community, an understanding that dissociation comes part and parcel with the plural experience seems particularly widespread. To the reader who accepts this truism without question, I beg of you only your patience and an open mind. Because while dissociation is undoubtedly particularly comorbid with plurality, I am not convinced it is, necessarily, a symptom of plurality itself.

Before I seek to make my case, let me first lay my cards on the table. I am not a doctor, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a therapist, or a counselor. I have no experience treating dissociation or dissociative disorders. What I do have experience with is plurality. I have been a member of a plural system for nearly two decades, and I have cultivated close personal relationships both with my own headmate and with members of other plural systems. Too, while I’m sure there are others who have studied plurality much more extensively than I myself have, it is nevertheless a topic to which I have of late dedicated a great deal of time and attention for both personal and professional purposes. With that in mind, I can draw on both my own lived experiences and those of others to whom I have extensively spoken, and on the collected writings of and research about those to whom I have not, to form some baseline understandings of plural identity and experience as it relates to a variety of topics, including dissociation.

Secondly, let us define some terms. By ‘plurality,’ I mean any condition—clinical or otherwise—whereby multiple conscious identities coexist within a single human body. This shall include disordered plurality, as it is defined by those dissociative disorders aforementioned, but also non-disordered, holistic plurality of any origin whatsoever. Much ink has been spilled, and many trees felled, in the pursuit of a still-elusive universalizing definition of dissociation, including in the incredibly-influential 2009 book, Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond. Sidestepping this lively academic debate, I shall here use the term as it is commonly employed in psychiatric literature, and refer thereby to a failure to integrate processes of consciousness such as thoughts, feelings, or experiences into one’s ordinary sense of self, resulting in a discontinuity of awareness or selfhood.

This association—no pun intended—between dissociation and sense of selfhood is important, because it forms the basis both for the assumption that plurality is inherently dissociative and for my argument that it is not.

To those of the former persuasion, the existence of multiple identities (howsoever conceived) within the brain of a single human being might itself seem, prima facie, to prove their position. Widely-propounded mechanisms supposedly underlying the development of plurality, such as the theory of structural dissociation, view the establishment of a single, cohesive, and continuing sense of self within a given human being as being its only natural, healthy, and desirable course of psychosocial development. Viewing this single-self model as the baseline for normalcy, those of this persuasion seek to identify within the plural collective a ‘core self’ from which all the system’s other identities diverge. For an identity to be dissociated, after all, there must be an ‘ordinary sense of self’ into which its thoughts, feelings, and experiences fail to integrate— a ‘real’ self from which its alternate selves are dissociated.

Viewing the plural collective thus as being essentially one person with a fractured mind—as do the DSM-5, the ICD-11, and the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation—results in plurality itself being seen as the obvious and necessary extreme of clinical dissociation. If the only acceptable number of selves within a single human body is one, any deviation therefrom must be a failure to integrate certain dissociated processes of consciousness into a coherent and totalizing gestalt.

While this is the view currently championed by the psychiatric community, it must be said that it results in a number of quite distasteful knock-on effects. Because it requires the existence of a ‘core self’ from which one’s ‘alters’ are dissociated, it dehumanizes the individual members of a plural system by denying them ontological status; at times, this has resulted in persons diagnosed with dissociative disorders being denied the recognition of legal competency necessary to consent to medical treatment or even to testify against their clinicians in court. Systems that do not have an identifiable ‘core’ (such as protogenic systems, those that formed in early childhood, and those whose original members are no longer present within the system) are often at the mercy of clinicians who attempt to fabricate, like Victor Frankenstein, a single, cohesive self from the stitched-together pieces of other, real system members. And because those system members are seen not as people but as parts of a non-existent whole, attempts to resist integration are disparagingly-labelled as ‘narcissistic investment’ in their own existence, while fears of their extinction are ridiculed, belittled, and demeaned. Indeed, the idea of ‘headmate death’ has been made so toxic by those within the clinical sphere that, despite many and continuing reports thereof by plural systems, its mere existence has been labelled a ‘harmful myth’ even in plural autoethnographies, and discussions thereof are hushed—at best—even in otherwise-broadly-accepting plural spaces.

All wherefore this is not a view wheretoward I have a particularly-rosy disposition. The alternative, of course, is to view the members of plural systems as individuals and persons in their own right. But in doing so, a question emerges: From what can they then be said to be dissociated?

The obvious answer, which I have recently seen put forward in response to a video likewise critiquing dissociative assumptions about plurality, is to say that they are dissociated from one another. This argument supposes that the various identities present within a system need not be dissociated from a single source or referent; rather, it is enough that they are dis-integrated from and with one another, and thus are dissociated by definition.

I find this a peculiar outlook, to say the least.

Allow me thus a demonstration: Would you consider two singlets who share a house to be dissociated from one another by virtue of the fact they do not consider themselves to be a single person?

You could certainly answer this in the positive, and I’m sure there are some metaphysical monists who might be inclined to do so, but it must be admitted that while this answer may be technically correct, you would also certainly be stretching the conventional use of ‘dissociation’ in pursuit of that response. The expected answer is, of course, ‘no’: one does not experience dissociation merely for the fact he maintains an identity and an existence independently of someone else.

Yet by what token should I then expect a different answer in respect of two persons each maintaining his own identity and existence within a plural system— assuming, of course, that I do in fact recognize them as persons?

To label only the latter as dissociative is to qualify the personhood of system members as being somehow lesser than that personhood we afford to singlets, and at that point we’re right back where we started.

None of this is to say that plural people do not experience dissociation. Blurriness is almost universal among systems that experience switching, depersonalization and derealization are common, and dissociative amnesia remains a diagnostic criterion for dissociative identity disorder (at least in the DSM-5). And, of course, like all people, plural people experience subclinical forms of dissociation such as ‘zoning out’ and daydreaming. But insofar as such experiences reflect a failure to integrate one’s processes of consciousness with one’s ‘ordinary sense of self,’ that sense of self is that of the individual system member experiencing dissociation, not some mythical, unified ‘self’ we should expect to attribute to the system as a whole.

As is always the case with plurality, the range of individual systems’ and people’s experiences is vast and varied, and I am sure there are people whose experiences of plurality are (or at least may be considered) dissociative in their own right. In particular, median systems whose facets are less elaborated or emancipated than the headmates of other systems may well be inclined to view their plurality in purely-dissociative terms, as may those systems whose members are comfortable viewing themselves as parts of a cohesive whole. But those experiences cannot and should not be taken as the baseline for experiences of plurality more generally, and multiple people having multiple identities should not be considered anomalous merely because of their cognitive living arrangement.

Plurality is not—necessarily—dissociative.