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Is headspace something actually recorded by reputable (or any) psychologists?
As a mechanism for coping with this concept of multiple personalities, yes, but it doesn't involve these wacky adventures "DID" people ascribe to them: it's more often described as a kind of structured space where someone with DID can interact with their other personae consciously. Speaking of: the top thing that these people with DID lack is the characteristic compartmentalization of memories: generally, the "foundational" persona does not remember the actions of other personae, such as the "child" persona reverted to in order to process overwhelming negative emotions, or the "guardian" persona reverted to under stress to "defend" the foundational persona. However, things like this are made a bit more complex by...
Some people are claiming you don't need to have had trauma to be plural
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They're (kind of) right. There are a number of culture-bound equivalents to DID that have been observed. For example, in some African tribes, it is considered somewhat normal to hold conversations with a guardian spirit under ritual circumstances (that, I want to stress, do not involve the consumption of psychedelics). A large number report the guardian spirit physically manifesting before them and speaking audibly to them, despite no such thing occurring from an outside perspective. Western occultists have reported similar experiences in summoning their "holy guardian angel". In both cases, the spirit doesn't, generally, actually
say anything that would suggest it's a real, discrete entity separate from the person's own consciousness, but instead expresses intuitive conclusions or thoughts that wouldn't be consciously-acknowledged.
From a secular perspective, some authors who work on long novels report that, occasionally, they will develop the psychology of one of the primary characters so much that they will begin to hallucinate the character communicating with them, despite no history of hard drug use or prior mental disturbances. Once again, these experiences are very real to the person experiencing them and seem more to be an expression of subconscious thought than a real, independent entity. Many young children, likewise, have "imaginary friends" that they report, very insistently, as being real, visible, and audible to them. Children tend to naturally grow out of this phase of development, but it
is quite common (in fact,
not having one of these friends can be an auxiliary indicator of Asperger's Syndrome- whereas the persistence of these friends into the early teens or later is a sign of an eccentric personality cluster issue or a considerable developmental disorder such as more profound forms of autism).
Then, of course, there's the wave of MPD in the 90's, where films like
The Three Faces of Eve caused a massive spike in the public consciousness of MPD: and a spike of MPD cases that seemed to very much be real and not malingerers followed. Most of these people would be later diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder instead.
Some people categorize these things as separate and unrelated phenomena, but in my opinion, they aren't and instead point to a general norm:
- The required circumstances for the formation of auxiliary personae are the combination of a weaker-than-normal sense of self (the rituals to contact a guardian spirit often involve ecstatic practices that push oneself to mental exhaustion, talented writers often intentionally try to remove their own ego-bias when writing other characters, and children and BPD persons have weak senses of self normally) and a cultural context where an auxiliary persona is seen as normal.
This isn't to say that 99% of these "plurals" aren't making up their experiences for asspats: just that this issue is more complex than most people on any side want it to be.
