Board certified shrink here: I’ll stay out of this except to say that many, if not most, in the profession saw this whole phenomena for the hoax it was from the very beginning.
It’s an iatrogenic illness, fostered on susceptible people by therapists of dubious insight, training, character and motives.
When therapists send me these folks for medication management, I politely inform the patient that I will require them to be present, not their multiples, throughout each meeting with me, and that I will refer them on to someone else the very first time a multiple appears. Not once have I, under those rules, seen a multiple or any other regressive nonsense, and I have found out later in several cases that they’ve dropped the drama altogether and gotten on with their lives.
Are you really a Buddhist?
Awesome post. And I learned a new word too.
This is from some decades past so please make allowance.
A story from, IIRC, a psychiatrist. He said he was taught and had believed that a person should display but one personality. Then one day he sat down to write several overdue letters to people he knew. When he finished it struck him that the letters were all different. Each was written according to the relationship he had with the addressee. That experience changed his view on personality.
That was sketchy but I guess you’ll get the drift.