Tags / 8 quotes from 1 source
#dissociation
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
A castle with eleven inhabitants
Once upon a time, in a castle on a large hill, there lived eleven strange, fractious individuals.
Robert Oxnam's eleven alters
The castle and all its inhabitants were contained within the head of one man: Robert B. Oxnam. Oxnam was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), more commonly, but anachronistically, known as Multiple Personality Disorder. In his account of his life with DID, A…
Dissociation as a coping mechanism
According to Smith, and many other DID experts, the vast majority of cases begin with severe childhood abuse. Dissociation is essentially a coping mechanism for tolerating the intolerable. In a strange way it is entirely rational. If you have the thought ‘this can’t be…
Recovered memories or confabulation?
There are, however, many who doubt DID really exists. The most serious worry concerns the way in which therapists bring alters to the surface. The deep philosophical question here is most evident when you consider the memories of childhood trauma that therapists elicit: how…
Are alters created by therapy?
Confabulation is not only a potential problem when it comes to causes, however. Could it also be that the alters are themselves brought into being by the therapeutic process, rather than simply brought to light by them?
Multiple selves are possible in everyone
To put it in broader terms, the self is not a single thing, it is simply what the brain and body system does. If that’s so, then there is absolutely no reason in principle why the brain couldn’t do different things at different times. In that sense, as the philosopher Daniel…
A whole person has more than one side
To be a whole person is precisely to have depth and more than one side. This is why DID is a disorder rather than a fascinating, postmodern way to live: each alter does not actually…
Multiplicity is a spectrum
Could it not rather be the case that the extent to which we perceive ourselves as one or many is in fact highly variable? That’s what the science writer Rita Carter came to believe after researching her book Multiplicity. ‘Multiplicity is a spectrum,’ she told me when I caught…