Incorporating hypnosis into the psychotherapy of patients with multiple personality disorder.

Psychotherapeutic treatment of persons with multiple personality disorder frequently includes judicious use of hypnosis. The author outlines widely accepted essential features of this form of treatment: developing self-soothing techniques, "mapping" the system of alternate personalities, facilitating communication between alters and with the therapist, managing abreaction, and--when possible and appropriate--aiding the process of fusion. The author shows how dissociative processes that originally were used for sheer psychic survival can be drawn on to improve psychological health.