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Project Monarch

From .nytimes.com!

Probing the Enigma of Multiple Personality

If the mind can do this in tearing down body tissue, I think it suggests the same potential for healing, said Dr. Braun, who directs a 10-bed psychiatric unit that uses psychotherapy, hypnosis and drugs to treat people with multiple personalities. He said he believed that the drastic physical changes seen in patients going from personality to personality could be duplicated for emotionally normal people under hypnosis.

In people with multiple personalities, there is a strong psychological separation between each sub-personality; each will have his own name and age, and often some specific memories and abilities. Frequently, for example, personalities will differ in handwriting, artistic talent or even in knowledge of foreign languages.

Multiple personalities typically develop in people who were severely and repeatedly abused as children, apparently as a means to protect themselves against the pain of the abuse. Often only one or two of the sub-personalities will be conscious of the abuse, while others will have no memory or experience of the pain. It is unclear why some abused children develop the syndrome while others do not.

For more than a century clinicians have occasionally reported isolated cases of dramatic biological changes in people with multiple personalities as they switched from one to another. These include the abrupt appearance and disappearance of rashes, welts, scars and other tissue wounds; switches in handwriting and handedness; epilepsy, allergies and color blindness that strike only when a given personality is in control of the body.

Some of the recent findings on such changes will be reported at an international conference on multiple personalities that Dr. Braun will convene next October in Chicago. The reports will include other physical differences from personality to personality, such as seizures, eating disorders, and different neurological and sensory profiles. Optical Differences

One of those reports will be on a study by Scott Miller, a psychologist at the University of Utah, of optical differences in people with multiple personality. Dr. Miller had an opthalmologist give a battery of standard optical tests to 10 patients and a control group of nonpatients. After each battery, the opthalmologist would leave the room while the patient switched personalties, sometimes at will and sometimes with prompting, then return and repeat the test.

The study included a control group of another 10 people who feigned switching personalties, unknown to the examiner, to remove a potential source of bias.

The study, which will be published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, found that there were significant changes in visual acuity, in the shape and curvature of the eye and in refraction from personality to personality in the real patients, but hardly any among the others tested.

The opthalmic exam also found some clinical differences apart from the standard tests. One woman had three personalities, aged 5, 17 and 35. When the five-year-old was examined, she had a condition, common in childhood, known as lazy eye, in which one eye turns in toward the nose. The condition was not present in the 17-year-old or the 35-year-old.

Similar differences were found in other patients. One patient had had his left eye injured in a fight, so that it turned out, said Dr. Miller. But the condition only appeared in one of his personalities. It disappeared in the others, nor was there any evidence of muscle imbalance.

The study corroborates an observation of vision differences that had often been made by those treating multiple-personality cases. Many patients have told me they have a drawer full of eyeglasses at home, and they never are quite sure which to bring when they go out, Dr. Braun said. How Mind Regulates Biology

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/28/science/probing-the-enigma-of-multiple-personality.html