multiple personality disorder

multiple personality disorder

Through my reading of Kohut and Bollas, some years ago, I came to realize that that knowledge is not sufficient to cure. It is not unimportant, but ultimately, it represents an epistemological solution to an ontological problem. All the insight in the world wont help you to change.

At the time I started working with a yoga teacher. I thought somehow, whatever the nature of my own psychic wound, it was pre-verbal, and healing it would involve more than reading/talking/thinking.

(The basic faultis the term Michael Balint uses multiple personality disorder describe a feeling of existential worthlessness. This is the nature, I think, of my own psychic wound.)

I am not sure I understand completely the difference, between vertical and horizontal splits in the psyche. What I understand, and I may be wrong, is that a horizontal split results from repression of material that can later be accessed through analysis. With a horizontal split you have a healthy ego.  The vertical split is described by multiple personality disorder in Analysis of the Self, a book I worked through in some detail a few years ago. With a vertical split, you have a cutting off of a part of the self, and the development of a false self. There can be a complete dissociation (as in multiple personality disorder) or the two parts of the self can remain in dialogue. The narcissistic personality disorder results from a vertical split, for example.

I think Jungs shadow material, for example, is sealed off horizontally, and the material is accessible through introspection. But throughout my life, except on rare occasions, I felt a to pretend (to be normal).

I think I have (finally) healed the vertical split in my own personality. At least, I feel I have overcome most of the duality (the false self / true self split).

I still pretend, from to time, but out of habit, or for the fun of it. I really do feel whatever false self there was, has died, and I am now just dealing with ordinary repressed material, as far as my own integration is concerned.

What has preocupied me, recently, perhaps as a result of Robert Thurmans discussion of the boundedlessness of life, why this healing took so long. I am thinking of Michael Eigens statement, why therapy has to begin when it is almost too late.

Its sad multiple personality disorder a way, but not something bringing tears to my eyes.

I realized last night that therapy never worked for me because it was always the disintegrating false self seeking therapy, the grandiose self, as it were, and not the healthy part of me (which probably still scared me).

I have tended to identify with the false self (a very carefully constructed self), and to reject (to fear) the emergence of the true self. In my case, I multiple personality disorder therapy was to always initiated at the brink of disintegration, and always in the interest of preserving an image, if not to others, to myself. I wanted to believe I was special.

Maybe if I had ever persisted, I would have broken through the mask, but I never persisted. I never wanted to persist, I just wanted to keep the act together. I wish I had been less successful, pretending; I wish I hadn’t fooled my therapists the degree I always did. I did have a good one, in New York City, who was always trying to break through (it is, usually, the true self that feels), but I did not work with multiple personality disorder long enough.

But, luckily, the healthy of me managed to grow stronger over the years. I developed my capacity to feel (quite a feat for an INTP!).

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Post je objavljen 19.01.2008. u 14:41 sati.