Contemporary scholarship in medical anthropology reveals the hegemony of the biomedical model of illness in the United States (Baer, Singer, and Susser 2003; Martin 1987). Health and normalcy are defined by medical institutions in their characterizations of disorder in medical texts and therapeutic protocols, and are affected by non-medical, public and private institutions such as those related to the mass media, religious organizations, social movements, and therapy. There are ongoing controversies surrounding the medical legitimacy of some illnesses, including Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), a U.S. "culture bound syndrome" that includes therapies and theories of causation outside the biomedical model. In the late 19th century, one of the most unusual "abnormal types" shares a similar symptom set with what the American Psychiatric Association (APA) now defines as DID (Ofshe and Watters 1996:4). Through participant-observation, interviews, and archival research, I explore the discourses and events surrounding the identification of DID/MPD since the 1950s. Using two case studies, I compare how the individuals, institutions, and discourses involved in these cases respond to broader changes in health care, political economy, and sociocultural processes in the U.S.

This study is guided by three goals: First, to examine how the various key informants and institutions involved in the longstanding controversies surrounding the diagnosis of DID/MPD in the U.S. characterize this phenomenon, with regard to international standards of mental health; second, to analyze the role of social movements in the meaning and stigma attached to DID/MPD in the U.S., specifically, as a disorder that disproportionately effects women; and third, to study the significance of hypnotic, psychoanalytic, writing and "talk therapies" in the treatment of DID/MPD and in their relation to claims of scientific/medical legitimacy. This research contributes to scholarship in anthropology and the social history of medicine by demonstrating how medical diagnostic categories such as DID act as dynamic conceptual spaces for social movements. Deconstructing the cultural processes shaping the characterization of DID, I show how women's embodied and disembodied "voices" speak through the DSM to support ulterior social causes, lifestyles, and political systems that contribute to their stigmatization.