a reply to:
WhiteAlice
Interesting. A differing opinion and a link stating that dissociation is not as you defined it is met with accusations of arrogance and a plea to
authority of taking pictures of all the psychology books that you own as if owning psychology books makes one an authority. Additionally, you attack
my understanding of consciousness despite the roles of consciousness being something of so much fundamental importance to someone like myself. Could
you be anymore fallacious?
Fine. Want to talk logic? What have you on your side in this debate? I mentioned my books because I, unlike you, am a psychologist. Because I, unlike
you, am already quite aquainted with the orthodox viewpoint. Because I, unlike you, am cogitating this subject at the philosophical and
phenomnological level: and this is precisely where you get lost. By referencing wikipedia you unwittingly take whats wrote there as the "de-facto"
truth, and not, as I understood it, as a faulty view based on an objectivist "3rd person" analysis.
I also tried to clarify for you this issue, but you overlooked and chose to deny me my obvious superiority on this subject: a superiority implied -
and really shouldn't be stated by me - by the fact that I am a psychologist and you are a laymen (in this particular area) who merely knows that
he's been diagnosed as "dissociative".
Like I said, there can be a clinical and more general understanding of dissociation. But understanding this really means understanding the phenomena
in question: clinical dissociation is pathological; which is to say, a rigid mental structure has formed that keeps its place because of an implicit
unrecognized relational trauma that has left the dissociative in a state of rigid self-environment subjective awareness.
Could you be anymore fallacious?
You know whats really fallacious? Your attacking my entire thread based on an issue you have of my use of the term "dissociation"; that, I think,
was insulting and very poor reasoning. Think, if you replace just one term - dissociation - for another, "zoning out", the psychology I try to
describe still stands. It's still psychology: and by saying that my entire thread amounted to gibberish,because of that one problem - does not mean
its "not psychology" as you averred.
Yes, that annoyed me. And yes, my subsequent post was essentially about you. I apologize for that; it was in bad taste and it was personal. But I was
still reeling from you wrote earlier. It didn't seem fair, what you wrote.
Schizoid personality disorder is not on the dissociative spectrum and is not one of its disorders
Clearly were operating from a different understanding. Mine is phenomenonological, whereas yours is strictly referential: "this is what wikipedia
says!" How do you think these definitions come into being? Do you not think, perhaps, that todays regimented objectivism is ultimately at root for
present definitions? Tell me, please how a state of general cognition can morph into "dissociation" - if, logically, there wasn't some continuum
between ordinary consciousness and pathological consciousness?
And yes. Schizoid is a "splitting" of cognition from bodily experience; to use winnicotian idea, a break of cognition from the "psyche-soma". I
have plenty of books on my shelf on this VERY disorder. It may not be the one that makes personal sense to you, but then again, you have demonstrated
that you don't even understand how definitions are established in the first place.
You go on to describe what life must be like for a dissociative video game player and again, you have no real comprehension of the subjects that
you're discussing.
Maybe you should check out some of my other threads. I have been dealing with 'developmental trauma'; also known as "relational trauma" or
"complex trauma"; a de-facto dissociative disorder. What, again, is meant by this? Post traumatic stress in any form triggers some separation within
the mind i.e. a dis-association.
Generally, cognition (or perception) should be coupled with bodily experience. With post-traumatic stress, they become split; the body "enacts" the
dissociated affect; while the mind or perception is following another discourse. Thus, there's no connectedness as there should be; as there
ordinarily is in a normally functioning mind.
Schizoid personality disorder is another prime example of dissociaton. In this case, the personality becomes blunted and "decathected" from bodily -
and thus - environmental experience.
Because response is ultimately rooted in a prerflective awareness of meaningful self-environmental interaction, a normally functioning mind - one
experiencing within the "psyche-soma" - does not need to "generate" its affectivity. It happens unconsciously; the self is related to the
environment and affects are generated without any conscious activity.
Schizoids, like other traumatized people, have so succesfully dissociated their catalyzing trauma - probably because it originated in preverbal times
- that they operate cognitively, but without much input from the body. Thus, they tend to be loners; computer geeks. Basically anything where their
"autonomy" can be preserved and their mind can be free from dysregulating affects - hence, unconsciously and implicitly, they are very uncomfortable
with high-energy emotion.
That does not mean that the person is in those states around the clock
Did I say that? Again, if you were paying attention to what I've been writing (and perhaps I have just been doing a bad job of explaining it) because
every conscious state is a dissociated state - that is, a "unique profile", every state we experience is simultaneously a sef-state: everything we
experience is implicitly a part of a "self-network". We have MANY selves; therefore, even the dissociative person - and I dissociate from time to
time myself - will have self-states that arise that are affectively "alive" and not dissociative in the clinical and "hypoaroused" i.e.
depersonalized, state.
The reason states shift to begin with is because the mind is organized by MEANINGFUL self-environment couplings. Meditate on that. And you'll see
that what I'm writing is essentially true. Not because "I invented" - as you may be inclined to thin, but because very intelligent psychoanlysts,
influenced by phenomenoloigists like Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-ponty etc, have given us a "science of the subjective" in contemporary
psychoanalysis.
The rest of the time, an individual with dissociative disorder will be just like anybody else--capable of loving, laughing, and etc
Dissociative disorders come in many different flavors; you can be pathologically "stuck" in a low-affect state, but stable enough to create a sense
of self i.e. schizoid; you can also be in a state of dissociated anxiety i.e post-traumatic stress; you can be in states where the self is literally
fractured - one part "knowing and having meaning' that is consciously and semantically separated from other self-states i.e dissociative identity
disorder; you can be narcissistic and yet exquisitely sensitive to environmental cues that resurrect dissociated relational traumas i.e. borderline
personality disorder.
Suffice to say that dissociation is an area of academic interest for me. I have written a lot about it. Both professionally and casually.