Strange Terrain in the Endless Frontier of the Mind

This is a Book review of Minds in Many Pieces: Revealing the Spiritual Side of Multiple Personality Disorder[Kindle Edition] by Ralph Allison, M.D., first edition in 1980; second edition in 1999 with a follow-up chapter.

My curiosity of the phenomenon of multiple personalities, “exorcism” and thought form release led me to this book. Ralph Allison, a psychiatrist starting practicing in 1972, a pioneer treating multiple personality disorder patients and a daring soul, wrote this most interesting case history book. Can you imagine a middle class, crew-cut, straight, Board-certified psychiatrist conducts exorcism? He had the courage to stand up to his professional peers when they threatened to throw him off of a hospital staff because he dared use unconventional therapy techniques such as hypnosis, now a major instrument of cure for many persons with MPD.

I discovered that many of the comfortable assumptions I had held about psychiatry were questionable. In my role as explorer, I witnessed parapsychological phenomena for which there is, as yet, no satisfactory explanation. I talked to and worked with more than 45 unique individuals, each of whom had several different ‘persons’ living one body. Although my comfortable routine had ended, I was soon to be faced with the greatest challenge of my career.

As a mental healthcare practitioner, I know fear is the biggest blockage for us to follow our own instincts treating a patient. We know it’s safer for ourselves to follow a textbook than whatever the instinct tells us, even though its writer has never faced a particular patient in the particular way. “Cover your own ass,” as my instructor in hypnotherapy school used to say.

Caring for our patients’ welfare as the only consideration can lead us to do things unconventional.

That doesn’t mean I totally “believe” everything written in this book. I further read Dr. Allison’s other book Minds in Many Pieces: Revealing the Spiritual Side of Multiple Personality Disorder Together with Michael, his ISH, or Inner Self Helper, they wrote this book, and formulated a unique perspective of how spiritual world is and how everything happens the way they happen. Any system needs a structure. Only within a structure can you have a system. So a system of interpreting things is not the truth, it is a truth. But they are both very interesting books to say the least. In this system, we not only have ISH, but CIE (Celestial Intelligent Energy), that would be equivalent to angel, though they think instead of being “messenger”, as angel means in Greek, they are more like heavenly postal clerks.

According to the system demonstrated in the book, the ISH might be called the second level of consciousness. The first is the personality we show when dealing with the outside world. Freudian psychiatrists refer to this first level as the ego. The ISH is that part of the individual’s consciousness that is free from emotion. It is not neurotic. It is pure thought and uses good judgment. It has a conscious awareness of God and a strong sense of right and wrong. It does not necessarily respond to cultural demands. Dr. Allison has discovered, or invented ISH. It is the spiritual aspect of human mind – an aspect feared thus ignored by others in the field. I found it the same idea as “Higher Self” that some of us may be more familiar with.

Guided by his multiple-personality patients’ ISH, Allison successfully “exorcized” thought-forms masquerading as evil demons.

Multiple Personality Disorder is the most intriguing area of human experience. Many of them were subjected to life-threatening trauma before the age of seven. Lack of memory is normally the first clue to the illness.

Hypnotherapy, no doubt is the most effective way to treat MPD. The subject’s imagination can be stimulated far more readily than in the normal waking state. There is a heightened awareness, and it is possible to break through to the subconscious mind. Thus, experiences that have been repressed and kept out of our conscious awareness can be remembered under hypnosis.

Dr. Allison also differentiated MPD from DID, MPD from schizophrenia and maniac-depression; and MPD from spirit attachment – An alter in MPD is created by the original personality. A spirit attachment is someone who have had its own body. Chapter 8, “Possession and the Spirit World” illustrates the differences. An alter is created by mind, to deal with traumas. It serves a purpose, and it knows its age. A spirit can come and go, normally, and it has its own agenda, unrelated to the host body.

This is probably the best illustration of “spirit attachment”:

In the case of fearful, hostile spirits, these most likely have been created by the patient alone in most cases. Since I believe fearful minds can create such thought-forms, these entities can then invade the consciousness of others who have feelings of a similar nature. In my opinion, there are no innocent victims of such experiences. Only those with fearful, hostile mental states are going to be attractive to fearful, hostile thought-forms. These thought-forms are then going to be considered to be foreign evil spirits to that person, since he or she has not consciously acknowledged his or her negative mental state. That negative mental state may be apparent to an insightful observing therapist. If the person who originated the thought-form was reared in the traditional Western Christian belief system of Angels and Devils, then he or she would likely create an evil thought-form that identified itself as an agent of Satan and the other arch demons listed in the Christian texts on demonology. In the cases I have reported, with the exception of the case of Carrie, I have always relied on the ISH to define which mental entities were part of the person, i.e. alter-personalities, and which were “foreign bodies.” Only the foreign bodies that were dangerous for the patient’s survival and that were characterized as made up of only hostile anger energy were subject to exorcism. Everything else was left in place.

The most fascinating story is that one of his patients recorded a dialogue – a fight – between two of her personalities herself. And in the book, we can read the whole transcription.