"To Give Yourself Great Advice, Get Outside Yourself"
September 22, 2015 3:42 AM   Subscribe

via Bigthink's writeup - "European researchers created a virtual reality simulation where participants could give advice to themselves — as Sigmund Freud. In the experiment, "volunteers wore very sophisticated VR (virtual reality) devices (headset and sensors) and were immersed in a virtual room where there was a duplicate representation of themselves and Sigmund Freud. The subject could alternately be in the avatar body representing themselves or in Freud's body. The movements of the avatars ... were perfectly synchronized with the subject's real movements, and this produced a powerful illusion of embodiment." The result was not only that people felt better, but also their advice was much more effective." But did the researchers pick the "best" psychoanalyst for this job?

From Philip Coppins:

"Freud and Jung are considered to be the instrumental characters of defining psychotherapy. Both originally worked together, but Jung broke with Freud in 1911. Jung felt that psychotherapy was too narrow in focus – and his ideas were based on personal experience.

Jung had “spirit guides”, one of whom was named “Philemon”. Jung observed that “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. […]

Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight.” To anyone else, Philemon might be a figment of Jung’s imagination, or evidence of his madness. But Jung felt that Philemon was real – yet somehow dead, and somehow “talking” to Jung – to Jung’s mind.

Jung thus felt he was not insane; he felt that Philemon was a source of information that was legitimate: somehow, Jung was able to receive information from a source of information outside of his head – not existing in this physical reality. It opened the way for his theory of the collective unconscious, a type of library containing everything ever known, and archetypes, “active principles” that interacted between that “dimension” and ours."


...

For those who side more with Jung and his decidedly mystical brand of psychotherapy, you can always read his Red Book (Previously on Mefi)
posted by Perko (6 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
Addressing the first link: this is fascinating. I routinely use 'self-talk' when working on a personal problem, so I know it works, but this sounds like a whole new level. In a broader context, these knock-on effects of VR that keep coming up in therapy are so far beyond what I thought would happen, back when I imagined the future uses of it. Amazing.
posted by Mogur at 4:55 AM on September 22, 2015


I wonder how this compares to keeping a diary. It seems to me it might be substantially different for some people and not so much for others, depending on their writing ability, preference for expressing theirself aloud or in writing, and maybe proclivity towards treating the diary like a journal to recount and analyze, or as a dumping ground for emotions and dreams.
posted by ardgedee at 5:53 AM on September 22, 2015


I keep giving advice to myself but the idiot won't take it!
posted by Monochrome at 7:36 AM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


You can get this same effect by spending a lot of time on Ask Metafilter.
posted by bleep at 7:55 AM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Philemon sounds a lot like a Tulpa, something that was previously discussed on Metafilter.

It's interesting that VR could be used to essentially create real-life tulpas - that is, real people who are pretending to be a made up character, like a famous person who died long ago.
posted by Kevin Street at 10:31 AM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


Philemon sounds a lot like a Tulpa,

Or for that matter a guru in the traditions of the Indian subcontinent, which are seen as living people in some lineages, animate and inanimate spirit guides/projections of the self in others.
posted by Perko at 6:25 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


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