<br ><br >Foreword<br >As Kit Castle s psychiatrist， I would like to<br >with a confession. During the process of gathering the his-<br >tory on this most remarkable young woman， I knew her<br >story had to be t01d. Yet I procrastinated--her case never<br >was presented in the psychiatric literature.<br > In retrospect， I believe my lack of action may well be<br >typical of my professional colleagues response when it<br >comes to the complex phenomenon of multiple personality<br >disorder. Psychiatry is a fairly young discipline， currently<br >struggling with its own identity crisis. As a stepchild of<br >modem medicine， greater "legitimacy" is sought by an<br >editorial policy withih the mainstream journals that en-<br >courages "hard， scientific" data characteristic of the other<br >medical specialties. A dase such as that of Kit Castle cer-<br >tainly challenges the usual notion of what is "scientific."<br >My feeble attempts to render her case history into a format<br >suitable for a scientific presentation so distorted the reality<br >of her life as I had come to perceive it that I eventually<br >gave up trying. I now realize that the most appropriate way<br >to share this powerful story is to have Kit tell it.<br > It would be easy to label what transpired in our therapy<br >as a manifestation of psychopathology. The case could (and<br >almost certainly will) be made that Kit s behavior repre-<br >sented the histrionics of a gifted patient with multiple per-<br >sonality disorder; that she experienced fugue states; that<br >Michael， her "spirit guide，" is "just an Inner Self-Helper";<br >that she has a borderline personality disorder; and so on.<br >Such labeling of Kit would， I believe， minimize， distort，<br >and ultimately destroy understanding. Having stated this， I<br >would also like to point out that as a fairly traditional "main-<br >stream" psychiatrist， I fully believe that psychiatric nosol-<br >ix<br ><br >