Alternating Personality

Alternating Personality, a form of psychic splitting in which the usual personality of a given person is episodically excluded from consciousness and replaced by a new one, separate from the first. This phenomenon, otherwise called split personality or double (resp. multiple) consciousness, has been described in some deeply degenerate personalities and consists of 1) amnesia of the previous conscious experience (not always complete: the second personality may know of the existence of the first) and 2) the emergence and consolidation around a new center of a series of experiences that were previously below the threshold of consciousness (see Unconscious). This condition is related to changes in consciousness that occur during hypnosis, somnambulistic and mediumistic states, and represents the highest stage of manifestation and development of complexes that have been repressed from ordinary consciousness or created during its inactivity (e.g., in hypnosis) (see).