A
case of mistaken identity crisis
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People afflicted with multiple personalities reveal that the idea of the self is a fiction. The most sinister form of abuse is that meted out to a child by a parent. The young have a biological predisposition to belong a duckling, for example, will instinctively snuggle up to a human leg if that is the first thing it sees so it is particularly traumatic when this need for tenderness is met with systematic physical or sexual violence. Pamela, the subject of a haunting documentary, developed a mechanism to cope with her sadistic upbringing: she created new selves. When the pain, squalor and ignominy became too much to endure, Pamela, as it were, left it all behind: while she was abused, she dissociated and departed to another place leaving a new person in her place. Rémy Aquarone, an analytical psychotherapist, has dealt with these disturbing cases of what is known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Dissociation is a primitive defence mechanism, he said. When something is unbearable to consciousness and cannot be cognitively processed, it is split off: quite literally dissociated. In many cases the various alters have their own memories and personality traits. When a switch is about to occur the patient often undergoes a temporary look of vacancy before the background alter emerges. DID
strikes at the heart of the most basic myth in our intellectual vocabulary:
the self. This cherished conception is, however, a cruel fiction. It has taken extreme cases, such as DID, to ram the truth home. Take brain dissection. In these operations, the corpus callosum a large strand of neurons which facilitates communications between the hemispheres is cut to stop the spread of epileptic seizures from one half of the brain to the other. Under certain laboratory conditions, two centres of consciousness seem to appear in patients who have had this operation. For example, suppose that we flash the word CANNOT on a screen in front of a brain-bisected patient in such a way that the letters CAN hit one side of the retina, the letters NOT the other and we ensure that the information hitting each retina stays in one lobe and is not fed to the other. If such a patient is asked what word is being shown, the mouth will say CAN while the hand controlled by the hemisphere that does not control the mouth will write NOT. So much for the unity of consciousness. What about the notion of the self as instigator of action? We naively suppose that we consciously decide to move, and then move. When Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment on voluntary action in 1985 he found that the brain activity began about half a second before the person was aware of deciding to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the cause of the action, as though consciousness is a mere afterthought. Many reacted to this with astonishment. A more plausible theory is that which is emerging from both biology and artificial intelligence. As Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, puts it: Complex systems can in fact function in what seems to be a thoroughly purposeful and integrated way simply by having lots of subsystems doing their own thing without any central supervision. The self, then, is not what it seems to be. There is no soul, no spirit, no supervisor. There is just a brain, a dull grey collection of neurons and neural pathways going about its business. The illusion of self is merely a by-product of the brains organisational sophistication. Seen
in this light, DID is neither a philosophical absurdity nor a medical
fantasy but a vivid demonstration of the infinite adaptability of the
human mind in the quest for survival. Accepting the death of self
is both strange and traumatic, bringing with it a profound a sense of
bereavement. Except that there is nothing there to bereave. Excerpt from www.timesonline.co.uk, 6/8/05
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