Narrative Construction in Treating Multiple Personality Disorder

AbstractMultiple personality disorder (MPD) challenges clinical psychology to forego the assumption of a unified and essential self. This is part of a larger historical process of giving up verities of the modern period as we move into an as-yet-unshaped postmodern age. Three arguments are made about this challenge: (a) Multiplicity becomes intelligible within a theoretical framework of narrative psychology; (b) This intelligibility makes inescapable what has been suspected by post-modern thought for some time-that the self (unitary or multiple) is a social construction and not an essence; and (c) the processes of both diagnosing and treating MPD also are best understood as social constructions. (Clini-cal Psychology)