Christine Beauchamp (pseudonym)

Christine "Sally" Beauchamp was the pseudonym of a woman, actually named Clara Norton Fowler, studied by American neurologist Morton Prince between 1898 and 1904. She was one of the first persons diagnosed as having multiple personalities (a disorder now termed dissociative identity disorder). Prince reported her case in his 1906 book-length description of her disorder.[1]

History

Beauchamp was a 23-year-old student who came to Prince, a Boston neurologist, because she was suffering from a "nervous disorder". Her alternate personalities first appeared under hypnotherapy but later appeared spontaneously. Prince was active in naming the personalities and in expressing a preference for one of them. Prince "cured" her by reconciling her other personalities with the original one. Beauchamp later married one of Prince's assistants.[2]

Prince described Beauchamp as having three distinct personalities, each of which had no knowledge of each other. He wrote: "although making use of the same body, each ... has a distinctly different character ... manifested by different trains of thought, ... views, beliefs, ideals, and temperament, and by different acquisitions, tastes, habits, experiences, and memories..."[1]

Importance

This case was widely cited as the "prototypical case" of multiple personality disorder, even into the 1970s.[3]

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References
  1. Prince, Morton (1906). The dissociation of a personality: a biographical study in abnormal psychology. M. M. Lld.
  2. Alderidge-Morri (1991). Multiple Personality: An Exercise in Deception. Psychology Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN 978-0-86377-234-4.
  3. Kluft, Richard (1993). Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder. American Psychiatric Pub. p. 358. ISBN 0880483652.
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