Exploring Plural Identity Through Creative–Critical Autoethnography
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- ISBN 9781041127277
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 17 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book rethinks the relationship between creative practice and critical inquiry in mental health writing. Combining scholarly analysis with lived experience, it develops a distinctive account of dissociative identity disorder, positioning plural subjectivity not only as its subject, but also as its method. The work blends evocative and analytical approaches to explore how writing can embody unknowing, rupture, and difference: What becomes of life writing and identity processing when memory is discontinuous? Focusing on the often- overlooked early stages of the therapeutic journey— help- seeking, psychoeducation, and meaning- making before “living well” narratives take hold— it engages critically with life writing, memoir, autobiography, and autoethnography, while interrogating the social, clinical, and media frameworks that shape understandings of DID, one of the most marginalised forms of neurodiversity. The text theorises as it feels and critiques as it creates, ultimately asking what it means to write— and to be written by— plurality. It will appeal to scholars in the Health Humanities, Literary Studies, and Narrative Theory, as well as psychologists and sociologists interested in neurodiversity, dissociation, and writing therapy.
Elayne Smith is Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia. She has published widely on questions of time, identity, and place in premodern literature. As an interdisciplinary scholar, both practice-led and critical researcher, her work and teaching span Literature, Heritage, Health Humanities, Applied Arts, and Creative and Cultural Adaptation Studies.
