At the end of the 19th century, French psychiatrist Janet (1924)coined the term dissociation, describing a state of mind in which parts of the personality are separated into inaccessible compart-ments. American psychologist Prince (1906) popularized the conceptby describing a clinical case associated with multiple personalities.Fifty years later, two American psychiatrists, Thigpen and Cleckley(1954), described a simil ar case, which later turned into a book and a Hollywood movie, The Three Faces of Eve. However, although the idea of multiple personality was dramatic, it did not initially triggeran epidemic of diagnosis. That only happened after the publication ofanother best-selling book (also made into a movie), Sibyl (Schreiber,1973), describing a patient with multiple personalities who also re-ported severe child abuse. Although the diagnosis of multiple personality was long con-sidered rare, some authors now claimed that cases are quite commonin clinical settings, albeit undiagnosed, and that community preva-lence could be as high as 1%, which is the same as that of schizo-phrenia (Ross, 1991). At around the same time,DSM-IV (AmericanPsychiatric Association, 1994) gave the condition a more descriptiveand less dramatic name, dissociative identity disorder (DID). Thenumber of articles on MEDLINE concerning multiple personality orDID increased during several decades: 39, between 1970 and 1979;two hundred twelve, between 1980 and 1989; three hundred ninety-one, between 1990 and 1999; but leveling off to 179, between 2000and 2009. Even so, critics state that they had never seen a case andthat DID is an artifact of suggestive therapy techniques (Piper andMerskey, 2004a). Thus, the symptoms of DID were shaped by whattherapists believed and what patients were willing to provide.Although no formal surveys of diagnostic practices werepublished, most observers in the 1980s and the 1990s were impressedby a high frequency of identification of a disorder that was onceuncommon (McHugh, 2008 ). However, most clinical and researchreports about this clinical picture have come from a small number ofcenters, mostly in the United States, that specialize in dissociativedisorders. Many of these settings offer extended and costly inpatienttreatment and claim to reintegrate the various ‘‘alters’’ into whichpersonality had fragmented (Putnam, 1989). However, none of theseresearchers have published randomized controlled trials of theirtreatment methods for DID.However, there was a more profound reason for the diagnos-tic epidemic. The increases in diagnosis in the 1980s and the 1990swere associated with a theory that the etiology of the condition wasrooted in child abuse (Kluft, 1985). Although this causal link hasbeen challenged, DID offered a drama of trauma, followed by re-demption through psychotherapy.Whatever controversies are attached to DID, dissociation, inthe form of memory lapses and depersonalization, is a commonphenomenon, and the categories included inDSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) also describe a number of less con-troversial syndromes. For example, most people have the experience,when driving long distances, of being unable to remember how theygot from one point to another. Some people experience transientfeelings of unreality under stress. Trance states are important fortranscultural psychiatry (Spiegel, 1994). However, dissociative symp-toms do not necessarily constitute a disorder. Moreover, as pointedout by researchers of dissociation (Kihlstrom, 2005; Lynn et al., 2012),the idea that personality can split into alters that take on an indepen-dent existence is unproven and is generally inconsistent with researchin cognitive psychology.