“When I hear DID explained, I often hear people start with the DSM-V – the manual that mental health professionals use to diagnose mental illness. However, a diagnostic definition is going to focus on the abnormal, the alien, and the disordered, and apply that to the person who has the disorder. This can be a dangerous starting point for examining a media portrayal, particularly one like Moon Knight, where the interpretation of Spector’s pathology has changed over the history of the character.
"I’d like to try a thought experiment instead, beginning with the popular understanding of the disease. The classic metaphor of DID is that of a ‘shattered mind’, like Jekyll and Hyde, as if the identity of the person was a plate once, and something took a hammer and broke it into a series of unusable fragments, waiting to be reassembled to allow a person to live a healthy life. The mental health profession used this type of metaphor to explain DID for a long time – a child has something happen to them that’s so terrible that it just ‘breaks their mind,’ and they have to hobble along broken-minded until they find someone to help them glue it back together.
"This is problematic in two ways: first, it’s exceptionally disempowering to those of us who are supposed to just be wandering broken plates. Sometimes this interpretation manifests in visions of fragile, emotionally and mentally crippled people, waiting for someone to save them. Alarmingly more often in the media, it paints a bogeyman story of a perfectly reasonable person who could, at any moment, transform into a violent monster, a la the previously mentioned Jekyll and Hyde, or in Marvel, something like Typhoid Mary.
"But beyond this danger, the metaphor is simply not a very accurate representation of how DID begins. The truth is that newer research both into DID and child development generally suggests that DID occurs when the child is so young that (to stretch the metaphor) they don’t even have a ‘plate’ yet. They just have a big lump of clay, waiting to be sculpted into a plate.
"Children beneath a certain age have an amorphous, plastic identity, not yet formed into a single coherent self in the adult sense. In normal development, this means they can work with their parents, who will expose them to new experiences while helping them to learn to cope with these experiences. The end state of this process is that the child can foster a single identity, equipped with the tools to handle most of what life throws at it.
"Of course, some people don’t have that support – some, instead, are compelled to cope with truly terrible things before they’ve ever had the chance to form that cohesive identity. In this case, the child may have no choice but to make their own tools without the benefit of help from an adult. There are many forms this can take. Dissociative Identity Disorder is one such form.
"In DID, the child basically makes identities on the fly to fit different situations as they arise, allowing them the emotional distance to try to integrate a life experience so painful and contradictory that it can’t be resolved by the child into a single cohesive story.”
— Lucy Pinlyn, excerpt from “DID in Moon Knight, Part 1: An Overview” (2022, Comic Book Herald)
