Christine Beauchamp
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Christine Beauchamp (1875 – ?) was the pseudonym given to Clara Norton Fowler, a subject of one of the first scientifically conducted case studies of dissociative identity disorder. She was studied by the American neurologist Morton Prince, and his 1906 monograph, Dissociation of a Personality, describing her case, was a landmark in the study of what he described as multiple personality disorders.
Beauchamp had suffered a number of traumas as a child, including abuse at the hands of her father and the death of her mother when she was 13. While she was a college student in New England in 1898, she sought treatment for symptoms of headaches, chronic fatigue, and aboulia. Her personality at this time (which Prince called "B1") was characterized by seriousness, sensitivity, scrupulousness, and personal reticence.
Prince began a course of treatment involving hypnotic suggestion and found that Beauchamp manifested three additional personalities (which he named B2, B3 and B4). Prince considered B2 to be a standard hypnotic personality, essentially an extension of B1 and only manifesting for a short time. B3 had a personality the opposite of B1's, being energetic, relatively insensitive and carefree.
As treatment proceeded, B3 adopted the name Sally and coalesced as an overt personality spontaneously alternating with B1. Although B1 and B2 did not know what Sally did, Sally was aware of them. Sally in fact despised B1, playing pranks on her, such as leaving nasty things in her bed. Finally, after a little more than a year in treatment, a fourth personality (B4) emerged. Nicknamed 'the Idiot' by Sally, this personality, characterized by greater composure and social skill than B1, but little real moral, intellectual, or aesthetic strength, had no knowledge of what had gone on during the previous six years or what went on when either Sally or B1 was in possession of the waking state.
Gradually Prince came to the conclusion that B4 had formed as a dissociation from the 'real' Miss Beauchamp in response to a severe psychological trauma suffered six years previously and that this dissociation had left B1, also in effect a dissociated part of the original personality, in sole possession of the field until B3 had appeared during the course of treatment.
[edit] References
- Joseph Jastrow (1906). "The Dissociation of a Personality by Morton Prince". The American Journal of Psychology 17 (2): 280–284. doi:.
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