Alter

A distinct functional personality within a dissociative-identity system, with its own name, age, voice, mannerisms, and sometimes physical sensitivities. Programmed alter systems — characteristic of MKULTRA-class survivors and SRA generational survivors — have internal organisational architecture (host, protectors, sexual alters, suicidal alters, memory holders) accessed by operators through specific named triggers. The clinical phenomenology is detailed in Frank Putnam’s Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (1989) and Colin Ross’s The CIA Doctors (2006). Distinct from ordinary post-traumatic dissociation, which is unstructured.