(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

This morning I'm revisiting an idea I contemplated a little over a year ago -- that 'fragmented personalities' are far more common than any of us suspect. We are used to thinking of "selves" as something that are handed out one to a customer. That is: in popular belief, one body = one self.

I'm no longer convinced that this is how it works at all.

I'm not talking about what the medical community calls Multiple Personality Disorder, though I think that this is possibly only an exaggerated case of what goes on in all of us.

Please bear with any generalities or imprecision in the following questions. This poll is meant to be intuitive and illustrative, not scientific or precise.

To protect anonymity, I am setting this poll so that only I can see the results. I'll post the figures as people reply.

Which of the following, if any, match your experience?

[Poll #199820]

Comments

[alobar.livejournal.com]

I took the quiz, but a lot of the choices squicked me out. Not your fault. I just hate the shrink worldview. I/we am/are legion, but *NOT* fractured. Over the years I have come to feel that people who have no conscious awareness of plurality within are at one end of a spectrum & those with myriad distinct persons within are at the other end. There also appears to be a second axis, perpendicular to the first with internal peace at one end and internal strife at the other.

Although I sure have no proof of this, I feel the population distribution along both axes to be a Bell-shaped curve. Because of shrink-induced social stigma, many pretend they are one person internally, when they are not. Depression (imo) can easily come from repression of one or more of those living within. I strongly feel there is no correlation between one's perceptions of internal persons and so-called "mental illness". However, I do feel that being at war with oneself is perhaps prone to make it very hard to be functional, or love oneself.

While I have not yet had the opportunity to get to know the man personally, I am inclined to speculate that perhaps Bush, our prez, suffers from having no internal dialogs, and therefore no hesitancy about doing amazingly stupid shit -- whereas I, in my plurality, am far more likely to examine options from many different angles, change my position several times, and then proceed from a perspective of unanimity or at least a clear consensus, subject to later revision.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

There also appears to be a second axis, perpendicular to the first with internal peace at one end and internal strife at the other.

This is an excellent point. If I had thought to explore that angle the questions asked would be a bit different.


Because of shrink-induced social stigma, many pretend they are one person internally, when they are not.

Indeed. Or, many never think to question the prevailing view.


I strongly feel there is no correlation between one's perceptions of internal persons and so-called "mental illness". However, I do feel that being at war with oneself is perhaps prone to make it very hard to be functional, or love oneself.

I agree heavily. To me the indication of mental illness would not be the presence of internal persons (whole or partial) or other deviations from the "psychic norm" -- but rather the level of peace one is able to find within and without.