Multiple Personality Disorder: Witchcraft Survives in the Twentieth Century

From the home of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, the website of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

This is an extensive article with many excellent references

An epidemic of psychiatric illness is sweeping through North America. Before 1980, a total of no more than about two hundred cases had ever been found in the entire world, throughout the entire recorded history of psychiatry. Yet today, some proponents of the condition claim that it afflicts at least a tenth of all Americans, and perhaps 30 percent of poor people -- more than twenty-six million individuals. An industry involving significant sums of money, many specialty hospitals, and numerous self-described experts, has rapidly grown up around the disorder.

The illness is multiple personality disorder (MPD), a condition that has always attracted a few wisps of controversy. Lately, these wisps have coalesced into clouds that, in drenching rainbursts, pour criticism on the disorder. An examination of the flawed reasoning, unsound claims, and logical inconsistencies of the MPD literature shows that well-founded concerns drive this storm of criticism.

[...]

In the epigraph that begins this article, Upham speaks of the excesses of the seventeenth-century New England witchcraft craze. The story of Sarah Good exemplifies those excesses (Rosenthal 1993). In March of 1692, when thirty-eight years old and pregnant, she heard her husband denounce her to the witchcraft tribunal. He said that either she already was a witch, "or would be one very quickly" (Rosenthal 1993, 89). No one had produced evidence that she had engaged in witchcraft, no one had seen her do anything unusual, no one had come forward to say they had participated in satanic activities with her. But no matter.

On July 19, 1692, Sarah Good died on the gallows.

Three hundred years later, a woman in Chicago consulted a psychiatrist for depression (Frontline 1995). He concluded that she suffered from MPD, that she had abused her own children, and that she had gleefully participated in Satan-worshiping cult orgies where pregnant women were eviscerated and their babies eaten. Her failure to recall these events was attributed to alters that blocked her awareness. No one had produced any evidence for the truth of any of this, no one had seen her do anything unusual, no one had come forward to say they had participated in satanic activities with her. But no matter.

The doctor notified the state that the woman was a child molester. Then, after convincing her that she had killed several adults because she had been told to do so by satanists, he threatened to notify the police about these "criminal activities."

The woman's husband believed the doctor's claims. He divorced her. And, of course, because she was a "child molester," she lost custody of her children.

Charles Upham recognized the importance of erecting barricades against addlepated ideas blown by gales of illogic. The twentieth-century fad of multiple personality disorder indicates that even after a third of a millennium, such bulwarks have yet to be built.

And now Witchcraft Survives in the Twenty First Century