Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, is a mental disorder that many people have heard of, but most don’t understand. To help me explain it, I am going to be using Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho as a case study. For those of you unfamiliar with the plotline of Psycho, be warned now that this post contains spoilers! Though this film was made before the modern classifications of DID, Hitchcock did a fantastic job creating a character that truly aligns with the diagnosis of it. At the end of the film, a psychiatrist gives a description of Bates’ mentality (a link to the monologue is provided in the citations).

DID is usually caused during childhood because of trauma that will prevent a central consciousness to form in order to help protect the child: they believe that the traumatic events happened to someone else. DID can be seen as a sort of coping mechanism. The psychiatrist pinpoints 2 times in Norman Bates’ life where he experienced extreme trauma: the death of his father and killing his mother. The psychiatrist speculates that Bates’ could not deal with having committed matricide, and therefore Bates keeps his mother alive by “giving her half his life.”

The psychiatrist also speculates that Bates could have conversations with himself. This is probably the most problematic aspect of classifying Bates as DID by modern standards. One of the symptoms from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V) states: “Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting,” which is why it would be unlikely for Bates to have conversations with his mother personality.

Bates does display another symptom of DID: social impairment. The psychiatrist attributes this to the jealousy of Bates’ relationships with other people, specifically women, that he projects onto the mother personality. Besides helping advance the plotline with murder, this particular aspect of Bates’ personality is what really classifies him as DID by modern standards. Disturbance in day- to- day life is often key in diagnosing any mental illness, and without any, Bates might not even show up on a radar to need help.

Though Dissociative Identity Disorder is one of the rarer mental illnesses, it is still important to talk about and understand it. I hope by using Psycho as a case study, it has helped your understanding of this disorder. It is important to remember that not everyone with DID is a killer, as people with DID are often portrayed in pop culture. With learning about a disorder comes insight, and with insight, we can eliminate stigmas such as these in society.

Citations:

Link to Monologue: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054215/quotes?item=qt...

http://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi....

http://traumadissociation.com/dissociativeidentity...