Psychological Conditions - Dissociative Identity Disorder

In the series Lie to Me, a psychologist and his team are tasked with finding out people who are lying and getting the truth from them. In one particular episode a person is brought to their attention whom has Dissociative Identity Disorder in which the person is manifested with two or more personalities as distinct from having one which would be par for the norm in a lot of cases . The sympthoms of the disorder are behaviours outside what other people are aware of and the absence of alcohol, drugs and the lack of financial motive (pretending to be someone else for financial gain). There is no known cause of the disorder but one theory claims that it is from therapists using memory regression in order to gain memories from a childhood where alot of this would occur. A malfunction in the brain causes the child to disassociate himself from his old self thereby creating two identities for himself and a facade of sort.

More info on it can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissoci...ntity_disorder

This would go a long way towards explaining things like demonic posession or other similar situations where the person claims that they are occupied by more than one personality. The following case study shows the trauma that was suffered by a particular victim called Paula. Having suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her parents, she formed a number of identites to protect her self.

http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/schmidt1.htm




It wasn’t until over a year later that Dr. Harpin was able to officially diagnose Paula with dissociative identity disorder. Dr. Harpin had just concluded a hypnosis session in an effort to help Paula regain her memory from one of her episodes of amnesia when Paula complained of an intense headache. Suddenly Paula seemed very disoriented. She did not know where she was, but she claimed that her name was Sherry and that she was thirty years old. It was later discovered in therapy that "Sherry" was created in order to protect Paula from suffering from the emotional trauma of her father’s sexual assaults