Beware of the Other Side(s)

Download or read book Beware of the Other Side(s) written by Heike Schwarz and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.