DID in history: oldest accounts of multiple personality

Trauma and Dissociation

Before 1900

Most written accounts are fairly short, and many attribute behaviors or alter personalities to a form of religious possession, or link mental illness with belief in demons.
However some longer accounts were published by “physicians” and some historians found other accounts.

Many ordinary people couldn’t read and books were expensive rather than today’s mass-produced paperbacks and ebooks about DID.

An incomplete list of some of the historical cases of dissociative identity disorder…

• 1580s: Jeanne Fery: A sixteenth-century case of dissociative identity disorder – van der Hart, Lierens and Goodwin (1997)

1700-1799

• 1790 – 1952: Multiple personality before “Eve” – Adam Crabtree (1993), a short summary of the psychology of the times and recognition of DID
• 1790: a woman from Stuttgart described by Eberhard Gmelin speaks different languages depending on which personality is in control at the time

1800-1849

• 1802: Three cases described by Dwight who publishes them in…

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Waking After a Lifetime: Ingrid’s Voice

Beyond Meds: Alternatives to Psychiatry

“At this moment, a thousand valves have opened in my head, and I must let myself flow in a river of words, or I shall choke.” -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(Edit: And thank you, Monica Cassani, for graciously allowing me to ‘let it out’ here!)

By Ingrid Heiner

This bodymind named Ingrid has so much to say…and what seeks expression is not just for the sake of my own healing, but to serve as a beacon for anyone on a similar path, who needs to know they are not alone. Mine is a path of emerging from profound trauma, adversity, and lack, and of living in the world as highly sensitive, gifted, neurodiverse, and spiritually awakening. We are the people who so often find ourselves in the offices of professional helpers…and I will write for them, too, as it is imperative that those who would presume to walk with us, understand what…

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