Posted by alexandra_k on October 12, 2004, at 18:03:07
In reply to The Association of Independent Psychoanalytic, posted by Pfinstegg on October 12, 2004, at 13:11:14
Thankyou for sharing that, I found it interesting. I have done some research on DID and the neurological basis of dissociation, and am interested in different theories.
>Times of painful neglect, for example, are visualized as oval groups of neurons containing the implicit memories of that painful experience.
I didn't think that memories were localised. I thought that that was one of the morals that could be drawn from Lashley's infamous 'search for the engram'. Memory isn't located in any particular region of the cortex, rather memories are patterns of neural activation that are distributed throughout the cortex which is why we get 'graceful degradation'.
>Roughly speaking, the right hemisphere= the unconscious.
People have tried to find whether the structure of mind as posited by analysts (id, ego, superego) corresponds to neural structures or not. The trouble is that we know that we can remove the whole of the right hemisphere and so long as language production and comprehension is localised in the left hemisphere there can be suprisingly few behavioural changes. If the right hemisphere is the unconscious (roughly) then it would seem that with the right hemisphere removed the person would (roughly) have no unconscious!
I know that there have been lots of studies done on the neurological basis of dissociation. It has been found, for example that there are differences in neural activation when a subject switches to an alter, but not when they do a 'fictional switch' to play-acting an imaginary character (see Adler, New Scientist). These findings are controversial, and the interpretation of the findings are extremely controversial. The notion seems to be that memories are localised and so different alters have access to different memories. But this doesn't work if memories are distributed.
Thankyou for giving me some things to think about...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:402170
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20041002/msgs/402301.html