Book Split Personalities Gita

Since graduating I have been going to Barnes and Nobles quite a bit reading, guess that what I did in school but it is interesting to do it with more freedom of choice. I have noticed that many bookstores have sections on China, which I have glanced at and even read through although many blogs are more stimulating.

One title which caught my eye in the “psychology” section was related to multiple personality disorder. I read a few motivational titles but the stuff while positive gets redundant. The multiple personality book described a few cases of ways in which people developed or maintained multiple personalities. The main gist seemed to be that people internalized there thoughts as a defensive mechanism at some point in life, but this act of internalization became damaging, sheltering them from the outside world etc. At this point a “sufferer” might develop an outside personality which was meant as a decoy for his own personality, relying on this to fulfill other needs of some sort. One example given was a boy who began acting like women at times in order to act out the personality of his dead mother. The book suggests that people develop a caricature of a person which they may begin to act out, and this is a way in which the alternate personality develops. In the process, the internal self remains hidden, and the “suffer” may begin to see outside people as simply inanimate objects, rather than human, a process of objectification which happens in normal life. At the same time, the sufferer also sees themselves as inanimate, and thus somehow motivated or feeding the other personality. It also seems that the more that they feed into the other personality, the more it protects and hides the true self which is being destroyed and mutilated in the process. The fact that there are alternate personalities implies that one of the personalities becomes dominate enough to reject the actual thoughts of the true self, instead totally relying on the caricature. 

My question of all of this, is that it is clearly that in any person there is only one mind, and different people have different degrees of imagination. People also changes rules for themselves to a great degree. The idea of alternate personalities seems to imply that they actually begin to believe that they are a different person. Eminem impersonators clearly aren’t developing split personalities according to common thought although they all wear similar clothes- it seems difficult to define the disease. The main interesting point I can take from the book is that they seem to develop the split based on a combination of defensive internalization, concealment of the self, and developing imitations or caricatures in order to fulfill emotional needs.

From my own view obviously many people develop imitating personalities and behave in different ways at times, but I guess it is important to know the relationship between defensive behavior and creating imitations. One further thing that the author mentioned was how split personality people begin to associate the physical self with the outside world. I need to read more on the topic.