Tuong Lu Kim, an alternate personality of Dr. Janus.
Multiple Personality Disorder is a psychiatric diagnosis. It describes a mental health condition in which a person displays multiple distinct identities or personalities (known as alters), each with its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with the environment. Each alter has a set of memories, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions unique to them.
Background[]
The disorder was the focus of the episode "City Sushi", wherein Butters Stotch is erroneously treated for the disorder and discovers his therapist Dr. William Janus actually does suffer from the condition. After being blamed for the actions of one of Janus' alters, Butters exposes him to the town. Janus gets arrested, but the town lets him off, making him still believe he is the City Wok owner.
While Janus is the only confirmed instance, Herbert Garrison displayed extremely strong dissociative behavior with his puppet Mr. Hat (and briefly Mr. Twig), due to his repressed homosexuality. These patterns generally subsided once he came out as gay, leading to Mr. Hat being discarded, though in his only appearance since, Garrison seems to lose control of him and again treat him as a separate identity.
In "1%", Cartman projected aspects of his own personality onto his stuffed toys.
Although not specifically referred to as such, Eric Cartman also displays numerous worrying symptoms resembling multiple personality disorder: he has numerous alternate personalities, foremost amongst which is Mitch Conner (his left hand), which appears to act independently of Cartman on multiple occasions (examples include the episodes "Fat Butt and Pancake Head", "200", and "201").
Several more alters emerged during the episode "1%", in which Cartman projected certain aspects of his personality onto his stuffed toys (including Clyde Frog, Polly Prissypants, Muscleman Marc, Rumpertumskin, and Peter Panda). He genuinely appeared to view these toys as separate individuals, conversing with them and vocalizing their roles. His behavior ultimately extended to his acting without his own knowledge and against his own will.
It is likely that Cartman's conflicting interests of wishing to both "grow up" and hold on to his stuffed toys caused him to externalize the conflicting elements of his personality onto his toys, with Polly Prissypants in particular embodying his wish to grow up.
However, all of this evidence is quite similar to Butters (albeit, more nefarious) who, despite being diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, is just a kid playing pretend.
Although so rare in real-life, with only 1% of the population confirmed to have it, that many doubt its existence, multiple personality disorder is a common subject in popular culture. The real disorder is conventionally referred to as dissociative identity disorder, but South Park presents it under the more recognizable name.
Trivia[]
- The condition name of Multiple Personality Disorder is a reference to Dissociative identity disorder.