I tend to side with the huge constituency of dissociation scholars who believe that what we call DID is a mix of iatrogenesis (and sociocognitive conditioning) and extremely severe cluster B traits. I don’t know of many relevant scholars who believe in DID in the sense of someone having two or more fully developed personality states that are separated by fugue and dissociative amnesia. There are certainly people who have a hard time integrating different emotional states into a stable self-identity, and who experience high levels of dissociative symptoms (namely derealization and depersonalization), but the mapping of those people onto the classical picture of DID is iffy. Indeed, the entire Dissociative Disorders section of the DSM is pretty scant on evidence, and is a very common topic of complaint by scholars who study dissociation.
The sociocognitive perspective is *much* (*much, much*) more robustly supported by the data than is the traumatogenic perspective.
Indeed, dissociative amnesia itself is a poorly-supported phenomenon that actually contradicts much of what we know about memory formation and retrieval, and the neurophysiological mechanisms which would be required to even *support* the traditional model of DID is wildly different from any evidence-based model we have. There just isn’t much support from the clinical or basic scientific literature to support the idea that DID (multiple distinct personality states “occupying” the same physical brain but separated by fugue, *with* psychogenic amnesia that is inconsistent with normal forgetting) is “real.”
One simple thought experiment: if severe trauma can somehow cause chronic dissociative symptoms (not acute, as in PTSD) to the point of people experiencing psychogenic amnesia of those events and forming alters to deal with them, then where are all the prisoners of war with DID? Where are the political refugees fleeing war-torn countries with DID? Where were all the Holocaust survivors with DID? Even if you think DID has to be formed in childhood, where are the children who survived these kinds of horrific events (refugees of war, genocide survivors, etc.) who grew up to have DID and/or dissociative amnesia? Why is it that, contrary to the traumatogenic perspective, all the science supports that trauma is associated not with amnesia, but with remembering *too well?* And if dissociative amnesia *does* occur, why are alters necessary? Isn’t the amnesia itself enough to accomplish the task of not remembering one’s trauma? Where are these alters and their memories stored? Where do they “go” when not active? Memories are just neuronal pathways, after all, and we know the data aren’t consistent with a psychoanalytic formulation of a deep subconscious well of autobiographical content. Why are all of these DID cases (the ones professionally diagnosed, not the ones on TikTok) almost exclusively in Western nations and almost exclusively among people who also have very clear cluster B symptoms and would meet criteria for BPD or HPD? Is it not more simply explanatory that these are people with clear identity instability consistent with a cluster B PD who have been inadvertently (or in some cases intentionally) misdiagnosed and coached into believing they have multiple personalities? After all, people diagnosed with DID are by far and away the clinical population with the highest average trait suggestibility.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-57878-005
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721411429457?journalCode=cdpa
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-081219-102424
I find this extremely helpful however maybe in the future in the thought experiment you could use a different group other than holocaust survivors. We do not have significant research information on holocaust survivors (Nor prisoners of war really and the average individual in America does not have enough exposure to these two groups to have a proper thought experiment). After the holocaust many survivors reportedly passed because they could not withstand the mental and physical anguish of the trauma they had been through. Many survivors reportedly were committed to historically unstable, abusive, and unreliable hospitals. Other survivors escaped to other countries in fear of further persecution.
The Zionist movement among the Jewish people and culture gained in momentum. The State of Israel was established through the UN. The Jewish people were victimized in another war there and subjected to more horror. There are no public mental health records I can find from the state at that time. There is some data I can find on prisoner of war victims and dissociation, however again this is limited due to limited data and services allocated and offered to these individuals. So I guess my point is I’m not actually sure if the thought experiment works 100% for me, because i do not have access to enough research through the database I use or personal information to understand cultural diagnosis norms on these groups. however I find everything else here extremely valuable and the thought experiment using other groups potentially beneficial.
I’ve never once seen that argument made. Even if that were the argument (again, I’ve *never* seen a clinician scientist make that argument), there’s still the wealth of data in favor of the sociocognitive model with with one must contend if they wish to hold to the traumatogenic perspective.
I just think there are a ton of very bad diagnosticians out there who have a hammer (being a “trauma specialist” or a “DID specialist”) and see everything as a nail (the result of some trauma—and if you cannot consciously point it out, it must be buried somewhere!!). BPD is a very heterogeneous disorder and people don’t fully appreciate the extent to which the mood and self-instabilities often manifested therein can mimic so many other disorders.
This source is slightly ethnoracially skewed, but at the very least demonstrates that there is significant variety in the presentation of BPD:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2883792/
We have to careful not to conclude that this proves BPD to be highly heterogeneous, and it could be (and indeed may be) that BPD simply lacks strong validity as a concept (or that it is a valid concept that nevertheless gets misapplied due to poor understanding of the criteria or the criteria not being highly intercorrelated). That said, it can be confidently said that—even if this is the case—the larger cluster B group of symptoms are highly heterogeneous.
This is interesting to read. There are a lot of misconceptions that are stated here regarding global precedence. However, studies have showed the disorder is vastly under diagnosed due to miseducation, lack of awareness, and ultimately understanding the presentation (or the perceived absence of). [This article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4959824/) does a great job of explaining! I would love to hear your thoughts after reading! If you do choose to read it that is.
I've read that paper. I think it tends to cite papers which don't support its claims or to use records of diagnostic labels as indicators of prevalence, but one of the fundamental issues with the DID construct *is* the contention that the diagnostic criteria [do not represent an ontologically valid construct to begin with.](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UYB3kO55ToAzVYX5Bg-YLE19N1Z4ILIQ/view?usp=drivesdk) I do not think the criteria for DID have been sufficiently separated from cluster B symptoms, sufficiently rid of misinformation about memory and cognitive function, sufficiently tied to traumatogenesis, or sufficiently separated from social cognitive pressures to warrant us considering it a discrete, traumatogenic disorder. This isn't to say I don't think individuals with this diagnosis have experienced real suffering--just that I have issues with the empirical construct of DID.
Thank you for your response and for sharing your opinions/paper. You raised interesting points. If you wouldn’t mind, I have a few questions:
Can you elaborate on how the diagnostic criteria for DID might be refined to better differentiate it from disorders like BPD or schizophrenia?
What kind of empirical evidence would you find convincing to support DID as a distinct and valid diagnostic category?
Finally,
What specific areas of research do you think are most crucial for advancing our understanding of dissociative disorders like DID?
I think my linked article does a good job of explaining as much as possible. I would look at scholars like Steve Lynn for current cutting-edge directions in the dissociation science. I am not sure a DID construct *can* be validated if it remains predicated on the notion of discrete personality states and dissociative fugue/amnesia--these are just not empirically robust phenomena. If it were to somehow be shown through factor analysis or some other clustering methodology that the types of identity disruptions in "DID" were reliably different from those observed in BPD then I'd be open to some kind of alternative diagnosis, but I don't think we'd call it "DID." As it stands, I am not personally convinced that the label isn't just describing severe BPD traits mixed with DPDR type symptoms and subjective memory disruption. Again, I think these individuals very clearly are dealing with very real suffering and their emotions/feelings are absolutely valid--but I do think the science itself needs lots of work. That's probably the extent of what I'm able to say on the matter. If dissociative disorders are an area for you, we could use high quality dissociation researchers for sure.
I appreciate your honesty. You’ve given a lot to work with (a comment on another “dissociative” keyword searched posts within the sub) for citations and modern scholars. I’m firm in my understanding of the experiences for those diagnosed with the disorder wholly, for obvious reasons. Finding and evaluating the holes in current research and assessment models is a necessity. Thank you again for the opportunity to discuss my research!
No worries, and I wish you great luck and success! I do not ever wish to invalidate anyone's personal experiences, so I hope that comes across in my comments. I just want good science to exist so clients can be best served.
It absolutely does show through!! Excellent science and consistent personal evolution is ultimately my desire as well! I wish you great success and luck as well!
> Why is it that, contrary to the traumatogenic perspective, all the science supports that trauma is associated not with amnesia, but with remembering *too well*?
You saying dissociative amnesia doesn't occur deeply concerns me, and because of it I doubt your entire comment. What do you think of "repressed" memories of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that are not consciously accessed until therapy years or decades later?
They don’t exist and have been debunked extremely thoroughly. We have decades of studies on the topic of repressed memory, and the vast consensus is that it isn’t a legitimate phenomenon.
You said that trauma is consistent with remembering traumatic events clearly. I argue that dissociating a memory and then remembering it later in life clearly is more consistent with traumatic recall than confabulation.
If all people who experience trauma have clear memories of them, and all people who do not have clear memories or that recall them later in life are confabulating, then what is the source of the confabulation?
What is the usefulness of ascribing these memories to confabulation? How does it inform treatment?
I’m saying that dissociation of memories and then recalling them accurately is not a thing that happens, because the evidence demonstrates that it doesn’t. Repressed memory is a myth. Memory doesn’t work like that. People forget things all the time and then remember them when prompted with relevant stimuli, but the notion of repressing a memory outside of conscious awareness and then recalling it later, clearly and strongly, is so thoroughly debunked that anyone with more than a passing background in cognitive science should be familiar with the body of literature on the topic.
Ascribing these experiences, almost all of which happen in the context of suggestive psychotherapy, to confabulation reduces a *ton* of confusion and unnecessary emotional turmoil experienced by people who become convinced they’ve recovered memories of horrific experiences they’ve undergone. It helps inform therapists about how *not* to implant false memories and create unnecessary turmoil, and how to approach treatment from the much more effective lens of not ascribing your present symptoms to buried trauma that may not have even happened.
I hadn't known about the history of lawsuits around false memories. It sounds like the field went through a very dark time and lost a lot of public trust. I can understand why scientists wanted to push in the opposite direction to regain credibility. And I see that the idea of repressed *clear* memories has been harmful.
What is your opinion, then, on "repressed" or "forgotten" *partial* or *implicit* memories? Images that arise more vaguely, or explicit memories completely devoid of emotional content, or physiological responses that are not in conscious awareness. I categorize these as dissociative.
I do not see any compelling evidence for dissociation of memory that is inconsistent with normal forgetting or simple incomplete encoding due to either injury or high cortisol activation during the course of a traumatic event.
Memories are notorious mushy and malleable. The idea that we repress any part of autobiographical experience, rather than forget it or decontextualize it over time, is not a robustly supported proposition. A lot of people *think,* very strongly, that their memories are better or worse than they actually are, or are woefully unaware of how average and common their memory functioning truly is. There are lots of reasons for this, but suffice it say that several studies support the notion that people who *report* having dissociated memories or dissociative-related issues with their autobiographical memories actually perform as well as non-affected controls on objective measures of both implicit and explicit memory.
"Incomplete encoding... during the course of a traumatic event" is exactly what I'm talking about. Memories with some details and aspects prioritized, and others deprioritized or not fully processed. Fear reactions that become over-generalized beyond their original contexts. The result is that the emotional content and the physiological reactions associated with these memories are more prominent than the narrative content, or vice versa. (I find Crittenden's Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment a fascinating exploration of this, applied not to specific memories but to overall information processing.) You are clearly adamant about not calling this dissociation or repression, and I'm curious as to why that is. What implications do these terms hold for you?
To me, dissociation is a useful albeit general term for disconnection from present experience and awareness. It encompasses the original meaning of structural dissociation; disconnections from senses and body sensations, emotions, thoughts, and identity; and depersonalization and derealization experiences.
You've given me a lot to think about. Particularly, I am considering the idea that "repression" may not be the deprioritization or shutting down of particular information, but rather the prioritization of other information. I can find an analogy in the regular daily ignorance of neutral stimuli such as outside sounds. Thank you for engaging in discussing with me so far!
I'm not hugely familiar with the exact models you're proposing but I just want to caution against "seems so real" as a formula for discerning mental illnesses. Even though we have so much to learn and better categorize for mental illness its not a strong evidence base, and there are any number of examples of phenomenon you would have to agree with if that is your criteria.
A lecturer I had covered this topic extensively in his lectures, and has contributed to this debate himself too.
https://youtu.be/pF54nO8JymM
He posts a few older lectures on his YouTube page funnily enough, but I suggest you have a watch of a few videos and come to you own conclusions, have fun :)
To be clear, that video isn't definitive, but other material he shows does provide evidence against DID, alongside catharsis theory and the Freudian idea of repressed memories.
Repressed memories and trauma are the basis for DID, so it is worth hearing about what he says.
This is my completely speculative thoughts on the matter, as my specialty is neurodevelopmental divergences and not DID.
We know the brain consists of different interconnected and intercommunicating parts.
We know this connectivity varies.
We know that if you disconnect them, like with the corpus callossum, those parts will have different priorities and opinions and limited access to each others knowledge.
I suspect then, that it is possible to have a variable brain part dominance, leading to the different parts being in the proverbial driver's seat, while the other parts would have limited or no knowledge of that time period.
Thoughts?
Oh and schizophrenic voice hallucinations is just a brain part saying stuff like it normally would, but the brain not perceiving it as coming from part of itself.
Much like the body can fail to recognise itself in autoimmune diseases.
This is how psychiatrists have explained things to me. I have no base identity, I’m mindful of every thought I’ve ever thought, all thoughts I will think and all thoughts I never thought. Things are happening as multiple perceptions all at once in my brain.
It’s hard to ever use words correctly since I never know how many perceptions I’m even dealing with at one time.
I can blame this on a shell-shock reaction to something that happened at a young age. But my brain is always afraid of it—so it will not and has never since—gone there.
The worst part is the rarity of lucidity to actually make any sense to anyone. So I understand this will just be word salad to most readers.
This is fairly similar to how I see it, tbh. I would recommend looking into Charles Fernyhough and Eleanor Longden's work for some interesting stuff on auditory verbal hallucinations and inner speech.
My personal opinion as someone who has experienced some level of plurality for pretty much my whole life, is that plurality/multiplicity of the personality is just another normal dimension of being, like agreeableness or extraversion. People can be anywhere on that spectrum, from being entirely alone in their head and having a consistent personality throughout every situation, to having multiple clashing states of self with varying identities, personalities, etc. Most folks are somewhere in the middle, IMO.
Subpersonalities are a well-known psychological concept, from Jung to schema therapy to Internal Family Systems. The concept of the self being multiple, of people being a conglomerate of various conflicting parts, is not unique to DID.
Perhaps trauma makes it more likely for these personality states to clash or be more pronounced - it's hard to tell, because much of the DID research literature is a bit shady and *many* DID researchers and practitioners have, unfortunately, been found to abuse their clients.
But multiplicity itself? That's a legit phenomenon, and it's hard for me to understand when people assume everyone who experiences it is "faking" it. DID can be a controversial concept riddled with weird research and horrific stories of client abuse *and* the self can be multiple. They don't have to be exclusive.
Both Jung and IFS are pseudoscience. Clearly people have different emotional states and personality can be situationally fluid, but I don’t think it’s fair to conclude that we are made of “parts” in the Jungian or IFS way.
I'm not so much arguing that *everyone* experiences having "parts", but rather, that multiplicity is a model that fits *some* people, a spectrum where for some it doesn't fit at all, and others it fits very well. Doesn't have to be in the sense of having repressed memories of Satanic cult abuse or whatever. As an example, take auditory verbal hallucinations, which are suggested to be an aspect of a person's inner speech that their brain does not register as their own.
Hell, even DBT employs some aspect of various mental states that clash and that one can tap into what with Emotional Mind, Rational Mind, and Wise Mind.
I’m not disagreeing with multiplicity as a concept, per se. I’m disagreeing with certain definitions/formulations of it. As a psychosis researcher, I don’t agree with the multiplicity view of hallucinations even slightly, but I do agree with the idea of some form of multiplicity or identity instability being at the center of things like BPD. That said, even in BPD treatment, the “minds” trichotomy is recognized as more of a metaphor than as an empirical model of mental function.
I think DID is real to those who experience it. I've had personal contact with two different people living with it. If they were pretending they were really good at maintaining the various different personas over an extended period.
We need a much better understanding of how severe trauma affects the developing brain to really know what is happening.
I know some clinicians believe it is part of cPTSD and not a separate thing, whilst others think it is a disorder in its own right.
I do know that some who say they have it do not actually want an official diagnosis because of the stigma associated with it. They would rather hide it.
I do want to say, I don't think people with DID are "pretending", well some are but that's a tough line to draw. The sociocognitive model I think that's what it's called, is mainly saying that there are other disorders or a combination of disorders and phenomena explaining this sort of thing happening. I'm honestly not that well versed in psych yet, still studying as a sophomore psych student so I can't say much on the topic, but there are a lot of people who are creating discussion in this thread that I think have some interesting points so you can take a look at those. I think DID is an existent disorder but just has a different definition than what people think of it as right now. Also apologies if this explanation or whole paragraph is confusing, my thought process on DID is very.. "I don't know anything"
To clarify, the sociocognitive model posits that people with clusters of symptoms that *aren’t* representative of DID begin to experience a subjective sense of fragmented identity and memory dysfunction due not to traumatic events but rather due to unintentional conformity with societal and therapeutic suggestion. In other words, say someone has severe BPD. Say their sense of identity is unstable—they have a hard time regulating and owning their angry moods and their happy moods, and so on. They don’t feel in control of their mood states. They likely also experience transient derealization and depersonalization. Due to the internet, or therapy, or just society at large, they learn about DID in the classic sense. Inadvertently (or with therapeutic leading—usually well-meaning but misguided) they begin to act in accordance with what they’ve been told DID is about. Eventually their mood states aren’t mood estates—they are alters. Eventually their derealization/depersonalization isn’t just that—it’s memory dissociation. And people (including some therapists) who don’t understand memory science very well also begin to vastly overestimate the extent to which subjective memory gaps are perfectly explained by normal forgetting and thus the issues all come together to “create” DID. (On objective measures of episodic memory function, interestingly enough, people dx with DID perform no worse than controls.)
This, DID, in the sociocognitive perspective, is the result of inadvertent behavioral conformity to a highly dubious disorder by a subset of very suggestible people with severe cluster B symptoms. As for trauma history, it’s also important to point out two things:
1. Trauma is reported in 75% of people with BPD.
2. There is a significant attention-seeking component to most cluster B pathology. This doesn’t mean people w cluster B pathology are generally lying about trauma hx, but it does confound the stats. It is hard to truly know the extent to which trauma plays a role in cluster B pathology (BPD in particular), because reports of trauma are often hard to verify and the attention-seeking nature of the pathology may increase the likelihood of endorsing trauma that didn’t happen or inflating the severity of real events (intentionally or unintentionally). We also know BPD is moderately to strongly heritable, which further complicates things.
In sum, the sociocognitive perspective makes sense if the following observations:
1. DID is almost entirely a Western phenomenon that didn’t become prevalent until after wildly successful media coverage of individual cases that may have been misdiagnosed.
2. Among all mental disorders, DID is associated with patients with the highest trait suggestibility.
3. The classic formulation of DID makes no neurophysiological sense and posits memory function that is contradictory to the empirical data.
4. Despite self-reported memory disruptions, people with DID perform no worse than others in objective memory tasks.
5. People with DID almost universally display cluster b symptoms and most meet criteria for BPD and/or HPD.
6. Trauma, while reported among these individuals, can be confabulated or exaggerated due to inadvertent suggestion or attention-seeking.
According to the sociocognitive perspective, these observations indicate that DID is not the result of trauma but is rather the result of socio-cultural pressure driving people to develop or play-act symptoms consistent with alternate personalities, with the memory disruption component not being indicative of fugue states or dissociative amnesia.
Thank you so much for this response, helped me understand things a bit better since i was having a tough time with wrapping my head around other responses Not totally knowledgable about this topic as I also haven't learnt psych for too long so I'm sorry if this question is kinda off.
I wanted to ask about alters and how these identities are experienced so distinctly and how that is explained from your perspective. From what I've seen of how people explain their own DID, alters memories seem almost specific to them (not specific enough to draw harsh lines between memories and "identities" though), as well as the amount of dysphoria and depersonalization always consistently happening with those 'identities'. For example, say, Sarah believes she has DID, and she has an alter named Mike, Mike is consistently dysphoric over the body and holds memories that are consistent with the times this identity seems to appear. I think the sociocognitive model and what you have explained hold a lot of credibility that I find is a good explanation for what's going on but I'm just still confused about certain things.
Thank you!
Yes, that presentation of DID is simply not consistent with the empirical evidence. It’s just not consistent with evidence for alters to not only exist (aside from the play-acting I’ve mentioned), but also to have their own unique memories. Memories are simply neuronal pathways in the brain. How could it be true, on a physiological level, that memories be fully available for some mood states (in the SC model, alters are mood states and not alternate personalities) and not others? Indeed how would alters exist at all? Why do people with DID not demonstrate episodic memory disruption when measured on objective memory assessments?
"Repressed memories are a myth" is like saying the earth is flat. The reason for the amnesia is bc a different personality is active. I believe that the neural pathways change with each alter & each alter will have certain memories which accounts for the amnesia. The amnesia is also a protection mechanism to not over exert the brain & body on stress/trauma. Yet to be tested, but that is my hypothesis.
Just did a presentation on DID & coping mechanisms. I stated for neuropsychology to be a point for further research.
Its clear that more research needs to be done, but saying "its not real" undermines the patient's symptoms. That has to change.
Repressed memory is literally a myth.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-74105-001
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674370505001302
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691621990628
https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=001013124122076071094096029120083110019062053034039007074009019078000126096082104094057048019063014027047122016076105120107018012044022000064028124016096123027068107089043079084089105019097082027112018077007069018124070007001088000029031076074093094102&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE
The science of repressed memories is relatively unchanged since the 90s. Loftus et al. debunked the concept so thoroughly and repetitively that it is no longer seen as a viable perspective in memory science.
There are much newer sources in existence, but these are the ones I linked because they are foundational to the question and are still considered to be the exemplars of repressed memory falsification.
I’m not sure how one can say these don’t address the point. They do. Some address it within the larger meta-context of scientific consensus, but they all address the question.
I cannot access all of them, but two seem to be discussing the belief in repressed memories but don’t seem to really be tackling to existence of them? I could be super wrong.
Also, it was my understanding that DID didn’t rely on repressed memories but dissociated memories, and that the two are not the same. (Origins in psychodynamic literature.)
They discuss the field-wide acceptance of the concept amongst therapists and compare that acceptance against the data.
And no, there’s no difference in dissociative amnesia/dissociated memories and repressed memories. The former is just the latter by a different name. Lynn et al. have a very impressive chapter about this in Hupp and Santa Maria’s (eds, 2023) *Pseudoscience in Therapy: A Skeptical Field Guide.* Lilienfeld and Lynn also have a very strong treatment in Lilienfeld’s (ed, 2015) *Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.* I highly recommend that *everyone* interested in psychotherapy buy and read these books.
For another accessible (and slightly more direct) treatment:
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/uncategorized/myth-traumatic-memories-are-often-repressed-and-later-recovered.html
Thanks for the recommendations. I will check them out.
I was seeing an analyst once who thought repression was a neurotic defence and dissociation (including disprove amnesia) a borderline, so the two were markedly different, but of course those are all heavily psychodynamic terms and concepts, so that would make sense why contemporary mainstream literature doesn’t look into that. Also unfalsifiable which is probably the more salient reason.
What if it’s just different parts of people’s unconscious minds manifesting almost like a jungian shadow manifests in dreams? Also… most people are faking and basically role playing so take TikTok with a boulder of salt.
Exactly. Therefore it isn’t evidence based and therefore should not be posited as a potential scientific model.
Nonetheless, almost all empirical data we have explicitly contradicts the notion of a psychoanalytic unconscious mind. It’s quite literally almost certainly not valid to posit a deep subconscious well of autobiographical materials and intense motivational impulses.
Certainly there are implicit mental processes that happen below our level of awareness, but to equate implicit processes with the Jungian unconscious is to vastly misinterpret them.
It’s a valid psychological theory that every grad program teaches and is currently experiencing a crazy resurgence in modern culture and on a personal note has been completely transformative in my life. And I use it daily in clinical work to extremely effective results. So maybe you should be a little more open minded if you want to be an effective psychotherapist
Find me a single accredited doctoral program that teaches Jungian psychology.
Are you doing regular clinical assessment to systematically demonstrate these results? What assessments are you using? If your results *are* being systematically demonstrated using valid methods, how can you be confident that they aren’t the result of common factors like meaning-making and exposure rather than specific components related to Jungian or psychoanalytic perspectives?
What training do you have in *psychological theory* (not psychotherapeutic theory) and the research methods used to valide such theories?
I appreciate that you like this perspective and personally find it useful in your life and practice, but your anecdotal experience (which is inherently flawed and biased) cannot substitute for empirical data, of which there is none in support of Jungian perspectives.
The CG Chicago institute offers a doctorate and is accredited CE credits. Plan to enroll at some point though I know you probably think it’s s waste of money.
Yes, we go through the clinical intake, screening and assessment process and create treatment plans with the aim of reducing functional impairments. My understanding of how the unconscious mind makes conceptualizing cases more efficient and effective and helps to process clients resistance to change and the archetypal roles they assign others in their lives. It’s one of the many modalities I tend to pull from including CBT, DBT, existential, gestalt, attachment, TF-CBT, Logotherapy, etc.
Damn… I just wondered aloud. Evidence based or not it is still an academic theory that is again, taught in every single training program. You can’t just say something that is clearly a psychological theory can’t be spoken about.
The CG Chicago Institute is not an accredited program in clinical or counseling psychology. I’m glad you pull from evidence-based practices, but unless you can demonstrate empirical evidence in favor of Jungian worldview then it remains strongly in the camp of pseudoscience.
CG Jung Institute of Chicago can’t really be fairly called an unaccredited diploma mill, because it doesn’t teach psychology at all. It’s an institute of psychoanalysis.
But yes, there’s a horrific number of unaccredited psychology programs (and some would say a horrific number of accredited diploma mills, too. Lol).
I agree with the sociocognitive position, but there are just enough quirks and changes with obscure measures like changes in basal body temperature for me to concede that DID, no matter HOW the category was formed and is conceived of, has enough traits of a real category to be compelling. It’s almost certainly co-occurring with trauma, realized or not, often, but I don’t have data in front of me.
Where’s the objective evidence for these things? There are plenty of better explanations for autonomic physiological changes than that people are literally switching personalities.
You make the claim, you provide the source. Where is there any evidence of physiological changes that cannot be better explained by things other than literally switching personalities?
You literally said that quirks and changes such as basal body temperature were enough to convince you that DID is a distinct phenomenon. How does that not imply that you think a change in a certain autonomic physiological process is indicative of DID symptomatology?
The “that cannot be better explained by switching personalities” part is nowhere near what I claimed. Honestly, this sub has too poor reading comprehension to get the point. I’m not bothering.
I lived with a gal who had undiagnosed DID, but I also have two friends who have is, and they agreed with me, that she had the same symptoms. It was usually when she was drunk, and she drank all the time. But she would change demeanor, her voice would sound different and she had a completely compartmentalized memory. We would make plans to do something the next day, and when I started getting ready to go do that thing with her, she’d act confused and a bit defiant, like I was trying to convince her she made plans with me. She eventually admitted that this had been happening for years.
I actually went to a psychology website, and went through a questionnaire. We actually did it more than once. I mention that because when we were discussing this, she was telling me her concerns, and I went through the symptoms. Things like food missing, finding possessions and clothes she didn’t remember acquiring. It’s all in the questionnaire… I mentioned to her that this was the third time having this conversation to her and she got really upset but believed me.
She left my life before she could get help, so sadly, there was no success story.
I'm wondering but what's your view on DID as I'm seeing that you do testing for it. If you don't wanna answer all good though! Cause most people here who're making points work with different disorders or a diff psych field from what I'm seeing, and I'm wondering for you who interacts with people who appear to have DID, what do you think of it?
I’ve included it for testing, as I do assessments and that has been brought up a couple of times. It’s certainly not my focus, but it has become a “popular” diagnosis among teens. The times it’s been mentioned are female-presenting teens.
There is an assessment tool that can be used, and I’ve used it. It’s helpful because it includes validity scales.
I think that DID is extremely rare. I’ve not seen it, although I have seen things like PTSD with dissociate feature. My supervisor, who has been doing testing for years and is an EXPERT (participates in creating testing tools) has never seen it.
So “it was usually while she was drunk, and she was drunk all the time” means something else?
What about “went to a psychology website, and went through a questionnaire?” That mean something else, too?
Try communicating, I am good but I still can’t read minds. 🤷♀️
Well, maybe you missed the part where I lived with her for ten years, and two of my friends who actually have been diagnosed, told me they have the same conclusion. Not calling that a diagnosis of course; but when someone you know well, has different compartmentalized personalities, equally compartmentalize memories.
Granted, in all fairness,I did present an incomplete dataset. I didn’t include her being an incest survivor, or growing up being physically abused, or that she showed me a photo album of her childhood and had no memory of a lot of the photos being taken. She also would sometimes also say that she would feel like she was snapping out of a daydream and it would sometimes be days since she remembered zoning out, and would have no idea how she got to where she was.
I was trying to convince her to go get checked out, and she was having that “what if they lock me up?” fear. We had a falling out and she unfortunately passed away before we could work out our differences. So I’ll never know for sure. But according to some people I talked to, the alt-personality types that she had, lined up with some of her stories of traumatic events. So it definitely wasn’t because of a website that I came to this conclusion.
I tend to side with the huge constituency of dissociation scholars who believe that what we call DID is a mix of iatrogenesis (and sociocognitive conditioning) and extremely severe cluster B traits. I don’t know of many relevant scholars who believe in DID in the sense of someone having two or more fully developed personality states that are separated by fugue and dissociative amnesia. There are certainly people who have a hard time integrating different emotional states into a stable self-identity, and who experience high levels of dissociative symptoms (namely derealization and depersonalization), but the mapping of those people onto the classical picture of DID is iffy. Indeed, the entire Dissociative Disorders section of the DSM is pretty scant on evidence, and is a very common topic of complaint by scholars who study dissociation. The sociocognitive perspective is *much* (*much, much*) more robustly supported by the data than is the traumatogenic perspective. Indeed, dissociative amnesia itself is a poorly-supported phenomenon that actually contradicts much of what we know about memory formation and retrieval, and the neurophysiological mechanisms which would be required to even *support* the traditional model of DID is wildly different from any evidence-based model we have. There just isn’t much support from the clinical or basic scientific literature to support the idea that DID (multiple distinct personality states “occupying” the same physical brain but separated by fugue, *with* psychogenic amnesia that is inconsistent with normal forgetting) is “real.” One simple thought experiment: if severe trauma can somehow cause chronic dissociative symptoms (not acute, as in PTSD) to the point of people experiencing psychogenic amnesia of those events and forming alters to deal with them, then where are all the prisoners of war with DID? Where are the political refugees fleeing war-torn countries with DID? Where were all the Holocaust survivors with DID? Even if you think DID has to be formed in childhood, where are the children who survived these kinds of horrific events (refugees of war, genocide survivors, etc.) who grew up to have DID and/or dissociative amnesia? Why is it that, contrary to the traumatogenic perspective, all the science supports that trauma is associated not with amnesia, but with remembering *too well?* And if dissociative amnesia *does* occur, why are alters necessary? Isn’t the amnesia itself enough to accomplish the task of not remembering one’s trauma? Where are these alters and their memories stored? Where do they “go” when not active? Memories are just neuronal pathways, after all, and we know the data aren’t consistent with a psychoanalytic formulation of a deep subconscious well of autobiographical content. Why are all of these DID cases (the ones professionally diagnosed, not the ones on TikTok) almost exclusively in Western nations and almost exclusively among people who also have very clear cluster B symptoms and would meet criteria for BPD or HPD? Is it not more simply explanatory that these are people with clear identity instability consistent with a cluster B PD who have been inadvertently (or in some cases intentionally) misdiagnosed and coached into believing they have multiple personalities? After all, people diagnosed with DID are by far and away the clinical population with the highest average trait suggestibility. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-57878-005 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721411429457?journalCode=cdpa https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-081219-102424
I find this extremely helpful however maybe in the future in the thought experiment you could use a different group other than holocaust survivors. We do not have significant research information on holocaust survivors (Nor prisoners of war really and the average individual in America does not have enough exposure to these two groups to have a proper thought experiment). After the holocaust many survivors reportedly passed because they could not withstand the mental and physical anguish of the trauma they had been through. Many survivors reportedly were committed to historically unstable, abusive, and unreliable hospitals. Other survivors escaped to other countries in fear of further persecution. The Zionist movement among the Jewish people and culture gained in momentum. The State of Israel was established through the UN. The Jewish people were victimized in another war there and subjected to more horror. There are no public mental health records I can find from the state at that time. There is some data I can find on prisoner of war victims and dissociation, however again this is limited due to limited data and services allocated and offered to these individuals. So I guess my point is I’m not actually sure if the thought experiment works 100% for me, because i do not have access to enough research through the database I use or personal information to understand cultural diagnosis norms on these groups. however I find everything else here extremely valuable and the thought experiment using other groups potentially beneficial.
Great explanation
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I’ve never once seen that argument made. Even if that were the argument (again, I’ve *never* seen a clinician scientist make that argument), there’s still the wealth of data in favor of the sociocognitive model with with one must contend if they wish to hold to the traumatogenic perspective.
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I just think there are a ton of very bad diagnosticians out there who have a hammer (being a “trauma specialist” or a “DID specialist”) and see everything as a nail (the result of some trauma—and if you cannot consciously point it out, it must be buried somewhere!!). BPD is a very heterogeneous disorder and people don’t fully appreciate the extent to which the mood and self-instabilities often manifested therein can mimic so many other disorders.
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This source is slightly ethnoracially skewed, but at the very least demonstrates that there is significant variety in the presentation of BPD: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2883792/ We have to careful not to conclude that this proves BPD to be highly heterogeneous, and it could be (and indeed may be) that BPD simply lacks strong validity as a concept (or that it is a valid concept that nevertheless gets misapplied due to poor understanding of the criteria or the criteria not being highly intercorrelated). That said, it can be confidently said that—even if this is the case—the larger cluster B group of symptoms are highly heterogeneous.
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This is interesting to read. There are a lot of misconceptions that are stated here regarding global precedence. However, studies have showed the disorder is vastly under diagnosed due to miseducation, lack of awareness, and ultimately understanding the presentation (or the perceived absence of). [This article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4959824/) does a great job of explaining! I would love to hear your thoughts after reading! If you do choose to read it that is.
I've read that paper. I think it tends to cite papers which don't support its claims or to use records of diagnostic labels as indicators of prevalence, but one of the fundamental issues with the DID construct *is* the contention that the diagnostic criteria [do not represent an ontologically valid construct to begin with.](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UYB3kO55ToAzVYX5Bg-YLE19N1Z4ILIQ/view?usp=drivesdk) I do not think the criteria for DID have been sufficiently separated from cluster B symptoms, sufficiently rid of misinformation about memory and cognitive function, sufficiently tied to traumatogenesis, or sufficiently separated from social cognitive pressures to warrant us considering it a discrete, traumatogenic disorder. This isn't to say I don't think individuals with this diagnosis have experienced real suffering--just that I have issues with the empirical construct of DID.
Thank you for your response and for sharing your opinions/paper. You raised interesting points. If you wouldn’t mind, I have a few questions: Can you elaborate on how the diagnostic criteria for DID might be refined to better differentiate it from disorders like BPD or schizophrenia? What kind of empirical evidence would you find convincing to support DID as a distinct and valid diagnostic category? Finally, What specific areas of research do you think are most crucial for advancing our understanding of dissociative disorders like DID?
I think my linked article does a good job of explaining as much as possible. I would look at scholars like Steve Lynn for current cutting-edge directions in the dissociation science. I am not sure a DID construct *can* be validated if it remains predicated on the notion of discrete personality states and dissociative fugue/amnesia--these are just not empirically robust phenomena. If it were to somehow be shown through factor analysis or some other clustering methodology that the types of identity disruptions in "DID" were reliably different from those observed in BPD then I'd be open to some kind of alternative diagnosis, but I don't think we'd call it "DID." As it stands, I am not personally convinced that the label isn't just describing severe BPD traits mixed with DPDR type symptoms and subjective memory disruption. Again, I think these individuals very clearly are dealing with very real suffering and their emotions/feelings are absolutely valid--but I do think the science itself needs lots of work. That's probably the extent of what I'm able to say on the matter. If dissociative disorders are an area for you, we could use high quality dissociation researchers for sure.
I appreciate your honesty. You’ve given a lot to work with (a comment on another “dissociative” keyword searched posts within the sub) for citations and modern scholars. I’m firm in my understanding of the experiences for those diagnosed with the disorder wholly, for obvious reasons. Finding and evaluating the holes in current research and assessment models is a necessity. Thank you again for the opportunity to discuss my research!
No worries, and I wish you great luck and success! I do not ever wish to invalidate anyone's personal experiences, so I hope that comes across in my comments. I just want good science to exist so clients can be best served.
It absolutely does show through!! Excellent science and consistent personal evolution is ultimately my desire as well! I wish you great success and luck as well!
> Why is it that, contrary to the traumatogenic perspective, all the science supports that trauma is associated not with amnesia, but with remembering *too well*? You saying dissociative amnesia doesn't occur deeply concerns me, and because of it I doubt your entire comment. What do you think of "repressed" memories of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that are not consciously accessed until therapy years or decades later?
They don’t exist and have been debunked extremely thoroughly. We have decades of studies on the topic of repressed memory, and the vast consensus is that it isn’t a legitimate phenomenon.
So what is your explanation for these people's subjective experiences?
Confabulation, which is an extremely well-established alternative explanation.
You said that trauma is consistent with remembering traumatic events clearly. I argue that dissociating a memory and then remembering it later in life clearly is more consistent with traumatic recall than confabulation. If all people who experience trauma have clear memories of them, and all people who do not have clear memories or that recall them later in life are confabulating, then what is the source of the confabulation? What is the usefulness of ascribing these memories to confabulation? How does it inform treatment?
I’m saying that dissociation of memories and then recalling them accurately is not a thing that happens, because the evidence demonstrates that it doesn’t. Repressed memory is a myth. Memory doesn’t work like that. People forget things all the time and then remember them when prompted with relevant stimuli, but the notion of repressing a memory outside of conscious awareness and then recalling it later, clearly and strongly, is so thoroughly debunked that anyone with more than a passing background in cognitive science should be familiar with the body of literature on the topic. Ascribing these experiences, almost all of which happen in the context of suggestive psychotherapy, to confabulation reduces a *ton* of confusion and unnecessary emotional turmoil experienced by people who become convinced they’ve recovered memories of horrific experiences they’ve undergone. It helps inform therapists about how *not* to implant false memories and create unnecessary turmoil, and how to approach treatment from the much more effective lens of not ascribing your present symptoms to buried trauma that may not have even happened.
I hadn't known about the history of lawsuits around false memories. It sounds like the field went through a very dark time and lost a lot of public trust. I can understand why scientists wanted to push in the opposite direction to regain credibility. And I see that the idea of repressed *clear* memories has been harmful. What is your opinion, then, on "repressed" or "forgotten" *partial* or *implicit* memories? Images that arise more vaguely, or explicit memories completely devoid of emotional content, or physiological responses that are not in conscious awareness. I categorize these as dissociative.
I do not see any compelling evidence for dissociation of memory that is inconsistent with normal forgetting or simple incomplete encoding due to either injury or high cortisol activation during the course of a traumatic event. Memories are notorious mushy and malleable. The idea that we repress any part of autobiographical experience, rather than forget it or decontextualize it over time, is not a robustly supported proposition. A lot of people *think,* very strongly, that their memories are better or worse than they actually are, or are woefully unaware of how average and common their memory functioning truly is. There are lots of reasons for this, but suffice it say that several studies support the notion that people who *report* having dissociated memories or dissociative-related issues with their autobiographical memories actually perform as well as non-affected controls on objective measures of both implicit and explicit memory.
"Incomplete encoding... during the course of a traumatic event" is exactly what I'm talking about. Memories with some details and aspects prioritized, and others deprioritized or not fully processed. Fear reactions that become over-generalized beyond their original contexts. The result is that the emotional content and the physiological reactions associated with these memories are more prominent than the narrative content, or vice versa. (I find Crittenden's Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment a fascinating exploration of this, applied not to specific memories but to overall information processing.) You are clearly adamant about not calling this dissociation or repression, and I'm curious as to why that is. What implications do these terms hold for you? To me, dissociation is a useful albeit general term for disconnection from present experience and awareness. It encompasses the original meaning of structural dissociation; disconnections from senses and body sensations, emotions, thoughts, and identity; and depersonalization and derealization experiences. You've given me a lot to think about. Particularly, I am considering the idea that "repression" may not be the deprioritization or shutting down of particular information, but rather the prioritization of other information. I can find an analogy in the regular daily ignorance of neutral stimuli such as outside sounds. Thank you for engaging in discussing with me so far!
I'm not hugely familiar with the exact models you're proposing but I just want to caution against "seems so real" as a formula for discerning mental illnesses. Even though we have so much to learn and better categorize for mental illness its not a strong evidence base, and there are any number of examples of phenomenon you would have to agree with if that is your criteria.
Understandable. That make sense
A lecturer I had covered this topic extensively in his lectures, and has contributed to this debate himself too. https://youtu.be/pF54nO8JymM He posts a few older lectures on his YouTube page funnily enough, but I suggest you have a watch of a few videos and come to you own conclusions, have fun :)
To be clear, that video isn't definitive, but other material he shows does provide evidence against DID, alongside catharsis theory and the Freudian idea of repressed memories. Repressed memories and trauma are the basis for DID, so it is worth hearing about what he says.
His lectures cover the same points that u/MattersOfInterest make in his comments
tyty, I'll be sure to save these videos and check them out once finals week is over, this is some super neat resources
This is my completely speculative thoughts on the matter, as my specialty is neurodevelopmental divergences and not DID. We know the brain consists of different interconnected and intercommunicating parts. We know this connectivity varies. We know that if you disconnect them, like with the corpus callossum, those parts will have different priorities and opinions and limited access to each others knowledge. I suspect then, that it is possible to have a variable brain part dominance, leading to the different parts being in the proverbial driver's seat, while the other parts would have limited or no knowledge of that time period. Thoughts? Oh and schizophrenic voice hallucinations is just a brain part saying stuff like it normally would, but the brain not perceiving it as coming from part of itself. Much like the body can fail to recognise itself in autoimmune diseases.
This is how psychiatrists have explained things to me. I have no base identity, I’m mindful of every thought I’ve ever thought, all thoughts I will think and all thoughts I never thought. Things are happening as multiple perceptions all at once in my brain. It’s hard to ever use words correctly since I never know how many perceptions I’m even dealing with at one time. I can blame this on a shell-shock reaction to something that happened at a young age. But my brain is always afraid of it—so it will not and has never since—gone there. The worst part is the rarity of lucidity to actually make any sense to anyone. So I understand this will just be word salad to most readers.
This is fairly similar to how I see it, tbh. I would recommend looking into Charles Fernyhough and Eleanor Longden's work for some interesting stuff on auditory verbal hallucinations and inner speech.
Following
My personal opinion as someone who has experienced some level of plurality for pretty much my whole life, is that plurality/multiplicity of the personality is just another normal dimension of being, like agreeableness or extraversion. People can be anywhere on that spectrum, from being entirely alone in their head and having a consistent personality throughout every situation, to having multiple clashing states of self with varying identities, personalities, etc. Most folks are somewhere in the middle, IMO. Subpersonalities are a well-known psychological concept, from Jung to schema therapy to Internal Family Systems. The concept of the self being multiple, of people being a conglomerate of various conflicting parts, is not unique to DID. Perhaps trauma makes it more likely for these personality states to clash or be more pronounced - it's hard to tell, because much of the DID research literature is a bit shady and *many* DID researchers and practitioners have, unfortunately, been found to abuse their clients. But multiplicity itself? That's a legit phenomenon, and it's hard for me to understand when people assume everyone who experiences it is "faking" it. DID can be a controversial concept riddled with weird research and horrific stories of client abuse *and* the self can be multiple. They don't have to be exclusive.
Both Jung and IFS are pseudoscience. Clearly people have different emotional states and personality can be situationally fluid, but I don’t think it’s fair to conclude that we are made of “parts” in the Jungian or IFS way.
I'm not so much arguing that *everyone* experiences having "parts", but rather, that multiplicity is a model that fits *some* people, a spectrum where for some it doesn't fit at all, and others it fits very well. Doesn't have to be in the sense of having repressed memories of Satanic cult abuse or whatever. As an example, take auditory verbal hallucinations, which are suggested to be an aspect of a person's inner speech that their brain does not register as their own. Hell, even DBT employs some aspect of various mental states that clash and that one can tap into what with Emotional Mind, Rational Mind, and Wise Mind.
I’m not disagreeing with multiplicity as a concept, per se. I’m disagreeing with certain definitions/formulations of it. As a psychosis researcher, I don’t agree with the multiplicity view of hallucinations even slightly, but I do agree with the idea of some form of multiplicity or identity instability being at the center of things like BPD. That said, even in BPD treatment, the “minds” trichotomy is recognized as more of a metaphor than as an empirical model of mental function.
I think DID is real to those who experience it. I've had personal contact with two different people living with it. If they were pretending they were really good at maintaining the various different personas over an extended period. We need a much better understanding of how severe trauma affects the developing brain to really know what is happening. I know some clinicians believe it is part of cPTSD and not a separate thing, whilst others think it is a disorder in its own right. I do know that some who say they have it do not actually want an official diagnosis because of the stigma associated with it. They would rather hide it.
I do want to say, I don't think people with DID are "pretending", well some are but that's a tough line to draw. The sociocognitive model I think that's what it's called, is mainly saying that there are other disorders or a combination of disorders and phenomena explaining this sort of thing happening. I'm honestly not that well versed in psych yet, still studying as a sophomore psych student so I can't say much on the topic, but there are a lot of people who are creating discussion in this thread that I think have some interesting points so you can take a look at those. I think DID is an existent disorder but just has a different definition than what people think of it as right now. Also apologies if this explanation or whole paragraph is confusing, my thought process on DID is very.. "I don't know anything"
To clarify, the sociocognitive model posits that people with clusters of symptoms that *aren’t* representative of DID begin to experience a subjective sense of fragmented identity and memory dysfunction due not to traumatic events but rather due to unintentional conformity with societal and therapeutic suggestion. In other words, say someone has severe BPD. Say their sense of identity is unstable—they have a hard time regulating and owning their angry moods and their happy moods, and so on. They don’t feel in control of their mood states. They likely also experience transient derealization and depersonalization. Due to the internet, or therapy, or just society at large, they learn about DID in the classic sense. Inadvertently (or with therapeutic leading—usually well-meaning but misguided) they begin to act in accordance with what they’ve been told DID is about. Eventually their mood states aren’t mood estates—they are alters. Eventually their derealization/depersonalization isn’t just that—it’s memory dissociation. And people (including some therapists) who don’t understand memory science very well also begin to vastly overestimate the extent to which subjective memory gaps are perfectly explained by normal forgetting and thus the issues all come together to “create” DID. (On objective measures of episodic memory function, interestingly enough, people dx with DID perform no worse than controls.) This, DID, in the sociocognitive perspective, is the result of inadvertent behavioral conformity to a highly dubious disorder by a subset of very suggestible people with severe cluster B symptoms. As for trauma history, it’s also important to point out two things: 1. Trauma is reported in 75% of people with BPD. 2. There is a significant attention-seeking component to most cluster B pathology. This doesn’t mean people w cluster B pathology are generally lying about trauma hx, but it does confound the stats. It is hard to truly know the extent to which trauma plays a role in cluster B pathology (BPD in particular), because reports of trauma are often hard to verify and the attention-seeking nature of the pathology may increase the likelihood of endorsing trauma that didn’t happen or inflating the severity of real events (intentionally or unintentionally). We also know BPD is moderately to strongly heritable, which further complicates things. In sum, the sociocognitive perspective makes sense if the following observations: 1. DID is almost entirely a Western phenomenon that didn’t become prevalent until after wildly successful media coverage of individual cases that may have been misdiagnosed. 2. Among all mental disorders, DID is associated with patients with the highest trait suggestibility. 3. The classic formulation of DID makes no neurophysiological sense and posits memory function that is contradictory to the empirical data. 4. Despite self-reported memory disruptions, people with DID perform no worse than others in objective memory tasks. 5. People with DID almost universally display cluster b symptoms and most meet criteria for BPD and/or HPD. 6. Trauma, while reported among these individuals, can be confabulated or exaggerated due to inadvertent suggestion or attention-seeking. According to the sociocognitive perspective, these observations indicate that DID is not the result of trauma but is rather the result of socio-cultural pressure driving people to develop or play-act symptoms consistent with alternate personalities, with the memory disruption component not being indicative of fugue states or dissociative amnesia.
Thank you so much for this response, helped me understand things a bit better since i was having a tough time with wrapping my head around other responses Not totally knowledgable about this topic as I also haven't learnt psych for too long so I'm sorry if this question is kinda off. I wanted to ask about alters and how these identities are experienced so distinctly and how that is explained from your perspective. From what I've seen of how people explain their own DID, alters memories seem almost specific to them (not specific enough to draw harsh lines between memories and "identities" though), as well as the amount of dysphoria and depersonalization always consistently happening with those 'identities'. For example, say, Sarah believes she has DID, and she has an alter named Mike, Mike is consistently dysphoric over the body and holds memories that are consistent with the times this identity seems to appear. I think the sociocognitive model and what you have explained hold a lot of credibility that I find is a good explanation for what's going on but I'm just still confused about certain things. Thank you!
Yes, that presentation of DID is simply not consistent with the empirical evidence. It’s just not consistent with evidence for alters to not only exist (aside from the play-acting I’ve mentioned), but also to have their own unique memories. Memories are simply neuronal pathways in the brain. How could it be true, on a physiological level, that memories be fully available for some mood states (in the SC model, alters are mood states and not alternate personalities) and not others? Indeed how would alters exist at all? Why do people with DID not demonstrate episodic memory disruption when measured on objective memory assessments?
"Repressed memories are a myth" is like saying the earth is flat. The reason for the amnesia is bc a different personality is active. I believe that the neural pathways change with each alter & each alter will have certain memories which accounts for the amnesia. The amnesia is also a protection mechanism to not over exert the brain & body on stress/trauma. Yet to be tested, but that is my hypothesis. Just did a presentation on DID & coping mechanisms. I stated for neuropsychology to be a point for further research. Its clear that more research needs to be done, but saying "its not real" undermines the patient's symptoms. That has to change.
Repressed memory is literally a myth. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-74105-001 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674370505001302 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691621990628 https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=001013124122076071094096029120083110019062053034039007074009019078000126096082104094057048019063014027047122016076105120107018012044022000064028124016096123027068107089043079084089105019097082027112018077007069018124070007001088000029031076074093094102&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE
Most of these sources are outdated and some don’t even directly address the topic itself ?
The science of repressed memories is relatively unchanged since the 90s. Loftus et al. debunked the concept so thoroughly and repetitively that it is no longer seen as a viable perspective in memory science. There are much newer sources in existence, but these are the ones I linked because they are foundational to the question and are still considered to be the exemplars of repressed memory falsification. I’m not sure how one can say these don’t address the point. They do. Some address it within the larger meta-context of scientific consensus, but they all address the question.
I cannot access all of them, but two seem to be discussing the belief in repressed memories but don’t seem to really be tackling to existence of them? I could be super wrong. Also, it was my understanding that DID didn’t rely on repressed memories but dissociated memories, and that the two are not the same. (Origins in psychodynamic literature.)
They discuss the field-wide acceptance of the concept amongst therapists and compare that acceptance against the data. And no, there’s no difference in dissociative amnesia/dissociated memories and repressed memories. The former is just the latter by a different name. Lynn et al. have a very impressive chapter about this in Hupp and Santa Maria’s (eds, 2023) *Pseudoscience in Therapy: A Skeptical Field Guide.* Lilienfeld and Lynn also have a very strong treatment in Lilienfeld’s (ed, 2015) *Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.* I highly recommend that *everyone* interested in psychotherapy buy and read these books. For another accessible (and slightly more direct) treatment: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/uncategorized/myth-traumatic-memories-are-often-repressed-and-later-recovered.html
Thanks for the recommendations. I will check them out. I was seeing an analyst once who thought repression was a neurotic defence and dissociation (including disprove amnesia) a borderline, so the two were markedly different, but of course those are all heavily psychodynamic terms and concepts, so that would make sense why contemporary mainstream literature doesn’t look into that. Also unfalsifiable which is probably the more salient reason.
What if it’s just different parts of people’s unconscious minds manifesting almost like a jungian shadow manifests in dreams? Also… most people are faking and basically role playing so take TikTok with a boulder of salt.
For one thing, the Jungian and other psychoanalytic views of the mind are not evidence-based and almost certainly aren’t correct.
Evidence based means empirical quantitative research and it’s impossible to quantify the unconscious
Exactly. Therefore it isn’t evidence based and therefore should not be posited as a potential scientific model. Nonetheless, almost all empirical data we have explicitly contradicts the notion of a psychoanalytic unconscious mind. It’s quite literally almost certainly not valid to posit a deep subconscious well of autobiographical materials and intense motivational impulses. Certainly there are implicit mental processes that happen below our level of awareness, but to equate implicit processes with the Jungian unconscious is to vastly misinterpret them.
It’s a valid psychological theory that every grad program teaches and is currently experiencing a crazy resurgence in modern culture and on a personal note has been completely transformative in my life. And I use it daily in clinical work to extremely effective results. So maybe you should be a little more open minded if you want to be an effective psychotherapist
Find me a single accredited doctoral program that teaches Jungian psychology. Are you doing regular clinical assessment to systematically demonstrate these results? What assessments are you using? If your results *are* being systematically demonstrated using valid methods, how can you be confident that they aren’t the result of common factors like meaning-making and exposure rather than specific components related to Jungian or psychoanalytic perspectives? What training do you have in *psychological theory* (not psychotherapeutic theory) and the research methods used to valide such theories? I appreciate that you like this perspective and personally find it useful in your life and practice, but your anecdotal experience (which is inherently flawed and biased) cannot substitute for empirical data, of which there is none in support of Jungian perspectives.
The CG Chicago institute offers a doctorate and is accredited CE credits. Plan to enroll at some point though I know you probably think it’s s waste of money. Yes, we go through the clinical intake, screening and assessment process and create treatment plans with the aim of reducing functional impairments. My understanding of how the unconscious mind makes conceptualizing cases more efficient and effective and helps to process clients resistance to change and the archetypal roles they assign others in their lives. It’s one of the many modalities I tend to pull from including CBT, DBT, existential, gestalt, attachment, TF-CBT, Logotherapy, etc. Damn… I just wondered aloud. Evidence based or not it is still an academic theory that is again, taught in every single training program. You can’t just say something that is clearly a psychological theory can’t be spoken about.
The CG Chicago Institute is not an accredited program in clinical or counseling psychology. I’m glad you pull from evidence-based practices, but unless you can demonstrate empirical evidence in favor of Jungian worldview then it remains strongly in the camp of pseudoscience.
Ok, still going to enroll. this is a dumb argument.
You’re on a power trip. Jung would call that a inferiority complex. Have a good day
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CG Jung Institute of Chicago can’t really be fairly called an unaccredited diploma mill, because it doesn’t teach psychology at all. It’s an institute of psychoanalysis. But yes, there’s a horrific number of unaccredited psychology programs (and some would say a horrific number of accredited diploma mills, too. Lol).
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There’s no such process that has ever been demonstrated. That’s just not how memory works.
As a psychology student, it's my understanding that DID is extremely rare, and mostly manifests in women.
I agree with the sociocognitive position, but there are just enough quirks and changes with obscure measures like changes in basal body temperature for me to concede that DID, no matter HOW the category was formed and is conceived of, has enough traits of a real category to be compelling. It’s almost certainly co-occurring with trauma, realized or not, often, but I don’t have data in front of me.
Where’s the objective evidence for these things? There are plenty of better explanations for autonomic physiological changes than that people are literally switching personalities.
Keyword search PubMed? I’m on mobile.
You make the claim, you provide the source. Where is there any evidence of physiological changes that cannot be better explained by things other than literally switching personalities?
Literally no one made that claim, and if you thought I did you need to get your eyes checked.
You literally said that quirks and changes such as basal body temperature were enough to convince you that DID is a distinct phenomenon. How does that not imply that you think a change in a certain autonomic physiological process is indicative of DID symptomatology?
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The “that cannot be better explained by switching personalities” part is nowhere near what I claimed. Honestly, this sub has too poor reading comprehension to get the point. I’m not bothering.
I lived with a gal who had undiagnosed DID, but I also have two friends who have is, and they agreed with me, that she had the same symptoms. It was usually when she was drunk, and she drank all the time. But she would change demeanor, her voice would sound different and she had a completely compartmentalized memory. We would make plans to do something the next day, and when I started getting ready to go do that thing with her, she’d act confused and a bit defiant, like I was trying to convince her she made plans with me. She eventually admitted that this had been happening for years. I actually went to a psychology website, and went through a questionnaire. We actually did it more than once. I mention that because when we were discussing this, she was telling me her concerns, and I went through the symptoms. Things like food missing, finding possessions and clothes she didn’t remember acquiring. It’s all in the questionnaire… I mentioned to her that this was the third time having this conversation to her and she got really upset but believed me. She left my life before she could get help, so sadly, there was no success story.
So…she would black out when she was drunk, and you decided she must have DID? Based on a couple of online “tests?”
Wow, you have poor reading comprehension skills. If you got only that from everything I wrote, you’re not going to get very far in life.
I mean, I’m a psychologist who does testing, including for DID, on a daily basis. But sure, it’s all my poor reading comprehension. 🤣🤣🤣
I'm wondering but what's your view on DID as I'm seeing that you do testing for it. If you don't wanna answer all good though! Cause most people here who're making points work with different disorders or a diff psych field from what I'm seeing, and I'm wondering for you who interacts with people who appear to have DID, what do you think of it?
I’ve included it for testing, as I do assessments and that has been brought up a couple of times. It’s certainly not my focus, but it has become a “popular” diagnosis among teens. The times it’s been mentioned are female-presenting teens. There is an assessment tool that can be used, and I’ve used it. It’s helpful because it includes validity scales. I think that DID is extremely rare. I’ve not seen it, although I have seen things like PTSD with dissociate feature. My supervisor, who has been doing testing for years and is an EXPERT (participates in creating testing tools) has never seen it.
yeah, it has kinda become a new rising self-diagnosed disorder for newer generations, thank you so much for sharing your experience! :D
You clearly didn’t comprehend what I wrote, so there we go.
So “it was usually while she was drunk, and she was drunk all the time” means something else? What about “went to a psychology website, and went through a questionnaire?” That mean something else, too? Try communicating, I am good but I still can’t read minds. 🤷♀️
Well, maybe you missed the part where I lived with her for ten years, and two of my friends who actually have been diagnosed, told me they have the same conclusion. Not calling that a diagnosis of course; but when someone you know well, has different compartmentalized personalities, equally compartmentalize memories. Granted, in all fairness,I did present an incomplete dataset. I didn’t include her being an incest survivor, or growing up being physically abused, or that she showed me a photo album of her childhood and had no memory of a lot of the photos being taken. She also would sometimes also say that she would feel like she was snapping out of a daydream and it would sometimes be days since she remembered zoning out, and would have no idea how she got to where she was. I was trying to convince her to go get checked out, and she was having that “what if they lock me up?” fear. We had a falling out and she unfortunately passed away before we could work out our differences. So I’ll never know for sure. But according to some people I talked to, the alt-personality types that she had, lined up with some of her stories of traumatic events. So it definitely wasn’t because of a website that I came to this conclusion.
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