This interdisciplinary study examines the still vivid phenomenon of the
most controversial psychiatric diagnosis in the United States: multiple
personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder. This
syndrome comprehends the occurrence of two or more distinct identities
that take control of a person's behavior paired with an inexplicable
memory loss. Synthesizing the fields of psychiatry and the dynamics of
the disorder with its influential representation in American fiction,
the study researches how psychiatry and fiction mutually shaped a
mysterious syndrome and how this reciprocal process created a genre
fiction of its own that persists until today in a very distinct
self-referential mode.