dissociative

Josh Fischman: Welcome to Science, Quickly, a Scientific American podcast series. I'm Josh Fischman, Scientific American Senior Health editor. Is it possible for one person to have several completely different personalities? I've seen movies and read books that claim that this happens, but is it real? To answer that question today, I'm joined by psychotherapist and anthropologist Rebecca Lester from Washington University in Saint Louis. She'll tell us about a patient she worked with for many years, an amazing young woman…

In addition to being a magically empowered superhero, Steven Grant, the main character of Marvel’s Moon Knight series, is a man living with dissociative identity disorder, a condition in which someone’s personality and sense of self fragment in response to severe psychological trauma. Moon Knight’s only just begun to explain certain things about its hero, like why Steven — who’s clearly an American — loses significant chunks of time or why he’s putting on such an unconvincing accent while living in England. But all of…