Dr. Ralph Allison - History and Experience

During a 33 year professional practice as a Board Certified Psychiatrist, I became an expert on diagnosing and treating patients with “other selves,” commonly called “multiples.” The original label was Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) but that has officially been changed to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). I did not agree with that change and refuse to go along with it, preferring to use MPD for one group of patients who made their first alter-personality before age six. I use DID for those whose first “alter” was created from age six onward. I developed a treatment plan for multiples, which I wrote in my first book, “Minds In Many Pieces,” published in 1980. I added a chapter and published a second edition in1999. This covers my early career in treating multiples in Santa Cruz, California.

After 14 years there, I moved to Davis, CA in 1978, where I met more multiples while working for the Yolo County Mental Health Service. I wrote a long manuscript about the care of Marie, my most exotic multiple whom I treated to integration in my three years there. That story is called “Memories of an Essence.”

In 1981, I moved to Los Osos, CA, and worked in a state prison, California Men’s Colony, in San Luis Obispo, until my retirement in1995. During my retirement, I recently wrote my last manuscript, called “Michael, My Essence.”

I have had this website up for about a decade now and have responded by e-mail to many requests for information, including quite a few from multiples themselves. While those conversations should remain private, I am now adding this blog to allow others who want to discuss what I have learned on this subject to better interact with me and help educate those who read what is written here. I have been through plenty of controversy in this field, which is as controversial as any in psychology or psychiatry. There are some therapists who believe there are no such patients as multiples, while others consider them liars and prevaricators. Most such patients have a high degree of talent with imagination, it is true, so such critics may have good reason for their skepticism. This is due, in part at least, to the tendency of other therapists to believe that every “other self” is an alter, and therefore diagnostic of MPD/DID. That is not true, in my opinion, and I hope correspondents will bear with me while I try to explain how other “intelligent entities” can borrow such a patient’s body and talk to us “singletons.” Such realities make this a complicated field of study, but I think I have a fairly good handle on it, after this much time and experience. I also had some very good teachers, my patients and the “other selves” who borrowed their bodies to chat with me about their version of reality.