What is multiplicity?
In some children, the mental fragments are organized or arranged into ‘personalities’ which seem to have a history and a life of their own. Often the personalities are so separated that they are not aware of each other’s existence. This is called an amnesiac barrier. Imagine a child with a mother who is loving one moment and cruel and sadistic the next. The child will obviously react differently, depending on the mother’s mood. The child will learn different ways of responding to the “good” mother and the “bad” mother. All children do this, to some extent, because no adult is perfectly consistent. Now imagine that the child is so stressed out that memories of interactions with the “bad” mother are dissociated. When the “good” mother is around, the child has no knowledge of the “bad” mother, or of the “bad” child. But as soon as the mother turns nasty, the child switches, and knows exactly how to react. That’s multiplicity.
