QUOTE : When treating their first few DID cases, therapists typically focus too much attention on the alters. This focus tends to distract from what is fundamental–the patients’ pervasive dissociative/posttraumatic distress and maladaptation. Has something similar occurred in psychiatry’s view of DID? Have the compelling phenomena of alters distracted us from the matrix of dissociative and posttraumatic symptoms in which alters are embedded? <br />- Dell, P. F. (2001). Why the Diagnostic Criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder Should Be Changed, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 2 (1).