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Behavior analytic accounts of Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, are rarely presented in detail. This lack of depth may be due to misunderstanding the relevance of the behavior analytic position on personality, abnormality, and related issues. An argument is made here that a behavioral analysis of Dissociative Identity Disorder demystifies these behaviors and that behavior analysts need to communicate to a wider audience by addressing more phenomena of a clinical and popular interest.
When behavior analytic accounts of abnormal behavior are presented in textbooks, the discussion is usually brief, with references to faulty learning, inadvertent conditioning experiences, or aberrant behavior models. The brevity is to be admired, as it shows the behavior analyst or therapist's hesitation to speculate in the absence of data as to how a particular behavior may have developed (Thompson & Williams, 1985). Further, behavioral theorists are reluctant to attribute explanatory or causal status to intrapyschic or other variables relating to the individual as a cause of their behavior (Skinner, 1974). Nevertheless, this hesitation to speculate has led many writers to conclude that because behavior analysts have little to say or they say the same things repeatedly about different behaviors, behavior analytic contributions are irrelevant. This paper offers a behavior analytic account of personality and relates this to Multiple Personality Disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1987), now called Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). The intent here is to point out the misunderstood relevance of behavioral theory to this disorder.
What is Personality in Behavioral Terms?
There are over fifty definitions of personality, most refer to internal variables that somehow cause a person's behavior but do not refer to personality as being behavior (Hayes, Follette, & Follette, 1995; Pronko, 1988). Relatively few behavior analytic or otherwise behavioral theorists have addressed or defined the behaviors of personality. For instance, Skinner (1953) argued that personalities represent "topographical subdivisions of behavior" and that a particular personality was "tied to a particular type of occasion . . . a given discriminative stimulus" (p. 285). Twenty years later, Skinner echoed his earlier argument with "a self or personality is at best a repertoire of behavior imparted by an organized set of contingencies" (Skinner, 1974, p. 149). In a similar vein...