Split Personality~

In this world of todays', there are a lot of implausible diseases; one of them is the disease of human's mind, which is called as split-personality disorder. Not many people around the world believe if this disease really exists or not, or they rather think that the person is acting.
I was on my way from Bangalore, India to Mumbai, India and during the journey I was just chatting with the person sitting next to me and during the process of our conversation we begin to discuss on "Split Personalities".
I distinctly remember that when I was in college, I had one very good friend of mine and his name was Mr. T. Kiran Kumar. The uniqueness of our relation was our compatibility and depth of understanding. Whether we were with kids, or classmates or elderly people or uneducated people or females or highly intellectuals, hardly mattered; how we might behave, was entirely based on the type of group that we were part of. Believe me or not but our attitude, approach, behavior, and our way to react to a given situation was based on the type of group we were into. Does that imply that we were having split personalities? If that is the case then every one of us are having split personalities. We behave differently with our family members, with our friends, our spouse, and unknown people, right?

Definition of Split Personality: "A relatively rare dissociative disorder in which the usual integrity of the personality breaks down and two or more independent personalities emerge".
Explanation: There is no category or phenomenon in psychiatry called split personality. The term is commonly used in popular language to indicate an ambiguous or radically and spectacularly alternating type of behavior of the "Jekyll and Hyde" type. It is often bewildered with the medical illness of schizophrenia because the etymology of the latter (from the Greek schizein, to split + phren, mind) suggests, misleadingly, that schizophrenia is a type of split personality. In schizophrenia, however, the splitting is within one single personality as the individual's thoughts, feelings and emotions are seriously and confusingly disconnected from each other in a chaotic and random fashion. Schizophrenic individuals, far from having split or multiple personalities, actually have a great struggle maintaining the coherence and integrity of even a single self.

HUMAN PERSONALITY
There are three distinct meanings for the term "personality," two of them general and popular and the third technical and philosophical. The first and most general meaning is that personality is the sum of the characteristics, which make up physical and mental being. These include appearance, manners, habits, tastes and moral character. The second meaning emphasizes the characteristics that distinguish one person from another. The two meanings overlap or merge into each other, as the first considers all characteristics pertaining to the individual, without comparing him with others, while the second sees the same facts in relation to the outside world and fixes attention mainly upon the features that distinguish the subject from his fellows. This second meaning is equivalent to individuality. It represents a widely prevalent conception of the term.

But the third meaning is the most important, and is the only conception of any value to the psychic researcher and the philosopher or psychologist. This conception of personality is concerned only with mental characteristics; it makes no distinction between common and specific marks. In fact it connotes mental processes rather than fixed qualities. The capacity for having mental states, or the fact of having them, constitutes personality for the psychologist and the philosopher. Personality is thus the stream of consciousness, regardless of the question whether any special state is constant or casual, essential or unessential. Physical marks will have no place in this conception, unless they may serve as symbols of mental states. It abstracts from them and denotes only the stream of mental phenomena.

This third meaning is so radically different from the other two that it gives rise to perpetual misunderstandings between the philosopher and the public. These misunderstandings arise particularly in the discussion of survival after death. The layman with his conception of personality looks for physical phenomena of some kind to illustrate or prove it. Consequently, if interested in psychic phenomena at all, he prefers materialization, which best satisfies his conception of personality. He cannot take the point of view of the psychologist or the philosopher, who neglects these purely sensory characteristics, and fixes his attention on mental states as the proper conception of the personality, which may survive. Materialization would supply the very characteristics, which the layman fixes upon to represent personality. But precisely the fact that mental states are not presented to sense, leads the philosopher to conceive of immortality as possible.

If the layman's conception were correct the philosopher and psychologist would deny the possibility of survival with entire confidence, as a necessary implication of bodily dissolution. The day could be saved only by the doctrine of a "spiritual body," an It astral body," or an "ethereal organism," supposedly a replica of the physical organism in its spatial and other characteristics. These represent personality after the manner or analogy of the physical body. The real spirit may indeed have a transcendental bodily form; but the stream of consciousness remains the same whether there is any "spiritual body" or "ethereal organism" or not. This is the fundamental element in all conceptions of spiritual reality. It is not necessary to decide the question of a "spiritual body" or "ethereal organism" as the condition of believing in the existence of spirits. That is another and perhaps a secondary problem. What we need to know is, whether the stream of consciousness survives, whether the personal memory continues, not how it continues. The fact of survival is to be considered first and the condition of it afterwards.

Some real Life Examples of Split Personalities


Case-1

The first patient is a man named William S. Milligan, he was caught by the charge of rape in Ohio at 1977. As police and the psychologists examined him, they found the unbelievable fact that he had several personalities. Here are the first ten personalities they found. In The Minds of Billy Milligan;

1. The first personality is the main personality, Billy, twenty-seven years old, blue eyes, brown hair.

2. The second personality is Arthur, twenty-two years old, British. This personality and the next one are the keeper of the "Spot", where they can have the control of the body, or become themselves open to the outer world through the body of Billy.

3. The third personality is Leigen, twenty-three years old, Yugoslav, who knows how to fight and can use gun and other dangerous stuff, controls the hate.

4. Fourth personality is Allen, eighteen years old, talkative, only one who smoke and right handed.

5. Fifth personality is Tommy, sixteen years old, knows how to unlock chains or handcuffs, and the specialist of the electricity.

6. Sixth personality is Danny, fourteen years old, always scared to something especially man, blond hair, blue eyes.

7. Seventh personality is David, eight years old, controls pain, red-brown hair blue eyes.

8. Eighth personality is Christine, three years old, cannot talk, blond hair, female.

9. Ninth personality is Christopher, thirteen years old, brother of Christine.

10. For the last tenth personality, Adarana, nineteen years old, quiet, lesbian, female.

Those were the main ten personalities of the William S. Milligan. As if you wonder how they know their outlooks, William Milligan, Billy has a hobby of painting, or some of the personalities do. Therefore, they draw each other on the painting and that is how they get to know their outlooks.

Stay in touch and yes, do take care of your good self because you are precious.