"I think that the mad voice inside is someone who is conceived at the same time as the patient and shares the same sex as the patient since they share the same body. Living all of his life out of sight and out of the mind of others the cohabiting other mind becomes attached to his isolation and hates to be seen. He never has his own name and will hate any name that anyone gives him. The profound isolation and abandonment which is intrinsic to his experience gives rise to autoerotic preoccupation with bodily sensations and an extreme negativism in relation to the human interpersonal environment. The mind of the cohabiting other is impaired by his preference for relating to body experiences rather than the interpersonal world. This leads to difficulties in language development and emotional processing so that this internal other being has a very different childhood from the patient."Now, assuming that the Concept of Internal Cohabitation is correct, then bear in mind that while you have been reading this, your co-habiting other mind may also have been reading it, and quite possibly misunderstanding large parts of it on your behalf. So if you are now feeling that this idea is 'crazy', or you are feeling angry or feel like dismissing the whole idea out of hand, it could be that you are experiencing interference from your cohabiting mind.
I refuse to be limited to only two identities, and I refuse the idea that all of my thoughts and actions can be sorted out into "relational" and "negative". Philosophy and ethics would be mastered in Kindergarten if it were this simple.DONNIE
One can see a version of clashing multiple selves in the mental illness known as dissociative-identity disorder, which used to be called multiple-personality disorder. This is familiar to everyone from the dramatic scenes in movies in which an actor is one person, and then he or she contorts or coughs or shakes the head, and—boom!—another person comes into existence. (My own favorite is Edward Norton in Primal Fear, although—spoiler alert—he turns out in the end to be faking.)posted by AceRock at 7:46 AM on September 22, 2009 [3 favorites]
...Considerable evidence, including recent brain-imaging studies, suggests that some people really do shift from one self to another, and that the selves have different memories and personalities. In one study, women who had been diagnosed with dissociative-identity disorder and claimed to be capable of shifting at will from one self to another listened to recordings while in a PET scanner. When the recordings told of a woman’s own traumatic experience, the parts of the brain corresponding to autobiographic memory became active—but only when she had shifted to the self who had endured that traumatic experience. If she was in another self, different parts of the brain became active and showed a pattern of neural activity corresponding to hearing about the experience of a stranger.
Many psychologists and philosophers have argued that the disorder should be understood as an extreme version of normal multiplicity. Take memory. One characteristic of dissociative-identity disorder is interpersonality amnesia—one self doesn’t have access to the memories of the other selves. But memory is notoriously situation-dependent even for normal people—remembering something is easiest while you are in the same state in which you originally experienced it. Students do better when they are tested in the room in which they learned the material; someone who learned something while he was angry is better at remembering that information when he is angry again; the experience of one’s drunken self is more accessible to the drunk self than to the sober self. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Personality also changes according to situation; even the most thuggish teenager is not the same around his buddies as he is when having tea with Grandma. Our normal situation dependence is most evident when it comes to bad behavior. In the 1920s, Yale psychologists tested more than 10,000 children, giving them a battery of aptitude tests and putting them in morally dicey situations, such as having an opportunity to cheat on a test. They found a striking lack of consistency. A child’s propensity to cheat at sports, for instance, had little to do with whether he or she would lie to a teacher.
More-recent experiments with adults find that subtle cues can have a surprising effect on our actions. Good smells, such as fresh bread, make people kinder and more likely to help a stranger; bad smells, like farts (the experimenters used fart spray from a novelty store), make people more judgmental. If you ask people to unscramble sentences, they tend to be more polite, minutes later, if the sentences contain positive words like honor rather than negative words like bluntly. These findings are in line with a set of classic experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s—too unethical to do now—showing that normal people could be induced to give electric shocks to a stranger if they were told to do so by someone they believed was an authoritative scientist. All of these studies support the view that each of us contains many selves—some violent, some submissive, some thoughtful—and that different selves can be brought to the fore by different situations.
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Based on the premise presented, the "you" and "your" in this sentence do not make sense.
posted by rokusan at 8:40 AM on September 21, 2009 [2 favorites]