Customer Reviews

Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality, Identity, and the Self

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Rita Carter is a fine writer with a sterling track record in charting the human mind, both in her well praised Mapping the Mind, and Consciousness (Mapping Science) and here she explores the issue of personality.

The twist here is that recent advances in neuro-science are enabling us to understand much better how the brain operates, and Carter vividly explains a model that I'd describe as a networked email system with messages shared, responded-to, forwarded just as they are in an organisation. And just as an organisation has different departments and cultures, so too our mind has different facets - and out of these arise different responses to the world around us. Rather than having a singular personality, we actually have a cluster of personalities - a work persona perhaps, a cycnical persona, one persona while dating, and another persona while driving - and of course not all these personalities get on. Again, like the internal workings of a large organisation. There are complex interrelationships, conflicts, dissenting voices and unresolved differences.

This is the heart of multiplicity: the concept that we have a competing though potentially harmonious set of personalities.

What I love about the book is how Carter very tidily dissembles the dominant "one personality" idea promulgated by such war-horse tests as Myers Briggs: which as she shows, have only a low likelihood of awarding you the same personality prognosis from one sitting to the enxt.

Carter then shows how hypnosis and brain imaging both reveal our potential to have several sometimes quite dissociated personalities. This is just normal. I was reminded of the Keb Mo blues song in which Keb's character, having been caught cheating by his wife says: "But honey, that wasn't me. That was the man I used to be."

In part two of the book Rita Carter delivers the rare treat of a practical guide, using a questionnaire and a very clear set of diagnostics to help us identify our own personalities. She keeps this section very much grounded in reality - and where books on Consciousness, for example by Dennett Consciousness Explained (Penguin Science) can be pretty heavy reading without direct applicabilty Carter's gift is in the way she makes big ideas so accessible. For example a quick sign that you have two major personality types (a double major!) is if you have two quite distinct sets of friends, or two very distinct sets of clothes. Who are you going to be today?

Identification is one thing the book does well, but Carter also shows how we can get more harmony between our multiplicitous selves.

This volume is well worth reading. I don't know too many books on the human mind that also take the care to show us what we can do with this information. Rita carter delivers a big idea, then explains how we can use it. Well done - from all of me!

Most of us tend to think of ourselves as one individual, a consistent self. In Multiplicity, Carter argues that we consist of a group of unique personalities - each with its own characteristics. She contends that we slide from one personality to another as the situation demands. These many personalities are held together by shared memories.

Part I of the book provides an overview of dissociation and multiple personality that supports the notion of multiple personalities. While some of Carter's examples would be of "normal" people, some seem to better fit for those suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder. Human beings are very adaptable, and hence these different personalities came about to help us cope with the situations we face. Hence, the "troublesome" personality was created to help us, and brings some benefit to our psyche.

One would imagine that coercing a personality to "behave" (as Carter recommends) would not have the desired outcome as it may retaliate, if it can, often surreptitiously (as do individuals). If we subconsciously switch on or off personalities (as Carter contends), then one may question how much control do we truly have to summon a particular personality. Carter says that there is no "true self"; we are a collection of our personalities. Some readers may feel that this goes too far and that perhaps in the "shared memories" there is a "self." I feel that more research is needed in this area to construct a more coherent theory of multiple personalities.

Part II is dedicated to finding each of these personalities within us through a series of exercises. Carter does add that it may require the help of a friend or changes in circumstances to discover all these personalities. There are so many questions that only the most motivated readers would muster the stamina to do them all. Second, Carter does not provide much (empirical) evidence if this process really works well.

The theory of multiple personalities is interesting and does explain some observations that a single personality theory does not. From this book, it seems that we need additional research to make this theory more coherent.

Armchair Interviews agrees.

That irritating co-worker you were stuck sitting beside (again!) sees a decidedly different side of you than your best friend does. That's because you have may people inside of you. That's what veteran science writer, Rita Carter discovered as she began reading about bi-polar personalities for Mapping the Brain. Emerging research shows that several, "personalities are made and kept separate in the human brain" ... of everyone. Want a glimpse of how many you have? Depending on the situation and who you're are around, different people pop out and speak for you. If it is of some comfort, you do play one main character, much of the time, in the unfolding movie that is your life.

Discover Yourselves At Last
Yet even the argumentative or otherwise darker personalities are in your life for a reason. In Carter's newest book, Multiplicity, you can get to know your "people", the one who plays the most likeable role and the one who keeps getting you in trouble. In a conversational style, Carter describes the research on our multiple personality brains. In the second part of the book, find exercises to understand more about the multiple you. As a quiet child I'm still surprised at the many personalities that have appeared out of me in my multiple and overlapping careers, as a high tech exec, journalist and, perhaps most peculiar, a public speaker.

Imagine doing these exercises with a spouse, best friend of co-workers at a retreat. It would be a vulnerable time - and an opportunity to explore ways you can bring out the best side in each other more often. Combine this self-discovery and how you relate to others with the fascinating work by Steven Pinker, Helen Palmer, Dan Pink, Marty Seligman and Marcus Buckingham and you may find that you become happier, get along better with others and get more done with less stress. (I'm stumbling along in my own practice here.)

Possible Side Benefits

* You can design a more satisfying work and life.

* You won't let somebody else determine our behavior. With heightened self-awareness of your many roles, you'll be more aware of your hot buttons and the type of people and situations who set them off. You can protect yourself from being "primed" to react. Instead you'll have a better chance to choose how you want to act.

More years ago than I care to remember I undertook a Myers Briggs personality assessment. Whilst I've forgotten much else since then, I still recall the result and the warm feeling as the description of who I was matched who I felt I was. There's something undeniably comforting about the feeling of being understood, even if only by a matrix of questions.

However, even then I wondered which of me was being assessed. Was it the schoolboy, so quiet that my teacher on parents evening had to double-check for my mother that I was actually in his class? Was it the twenty-something software writer who played the part of the team clown? Was it the adult I became speaking at conferences.
Who did the results describe, and what if anything did they say about the future?

This book explores the multiplicity of personalities that almost all of us have.
The first half of the book describes the theory, building a spectrum which at one end has people with a single personality responding in the same way to all situations. At the other extreme is Multiple Personality Disorder, a Jekyll and Hyde like state where completely separate personalities inhabit the same person. Between these extremes we find most of us with multiple personalities connected by shared memories.

Rita suggests these other me's are tapped into by the stage hypnotist for comic effect, or felt more prosaically as we switch from our work to home persona on the drive home, or adopt our `telephone-voice'.

The book is profusely scattered with vivid examples used to illustrate the arguments.

To a large extent we are unaware of these alternate personalities, and have little conscious choice of who to be at any moment. The thrust of the book is that this community of people we are, offers immense potential, a pool of people we can draw upon to meet challenges and create opportunities.

Part 2 of the book provides a set of tools which will help you become more aware of the range of personalities you have, how to access them, change and create them. The result is a suite of you's better tailored for different situations.

In the hands of consultants these ideas would quickly be abused as answers to apply, but as questions with which to explore who you are and can become, this is a very powerful and intriguing book.

In "Multiplicity" Rita Carter makes a pathetic attempt to validate her bizarre idea that typical variations in human mood and behavior are evidence of unique and, crucially, separate "personalities" that inhabit our "selves." She misuses and misconstrues scientific data throughout this ridiculous fiction. Carter makes mention of such fantastical things as "the part of the brain that processes memories." (There is, in fact, no such "part" of the brain.) She claims that, via the magic of brain-imaging technology, "the generation of [a person's] inner life can be displayed on a screen for all to see." (No, actually, it is not possible to display anyone's "inner life" on a screen for all to see. Not even close.)
Such simplistic notions are so ludicrous as to make anyone familiar with the science of neuro-technology and fMRI studies toss this idiotic book into the trash before even finishing the second chapter.
Carter has conjured up an implausible theory of mind she thinks is likely to intrigue people who don't know any better- and she is not above perverting scientific research data to legitimize her wildly speculative notions. The wholesale fabrication of supposedly meaningful terms for these speculative personalities (major, minor, and micro) are offered to the reader as if they are empirical classifications as a matter of course. That breach of scientific protocol alone is enough to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the subject matter. The unexplained-- and inexplicable-- illustrations of "personalities" on page 24 are enough to cause any thinking person to laugh out loud. The only subject of scientific or psychological interest here is that Carter takes herself seriously. Somebody ought to help the poor woman before she further embarrasses herself.

This book is not about recovery from Multiple Identity Disorder or DID as it is now referred to. It is a bad self-help book that uses DID categories for it's marketing toward the need to always feel good about being a north american individual.

Do not be foooled by its title or Amazon.com's cataloging error in puttign it with multiple identity disorder.