Why don’t you try making up some “cool shit,” and try to get it published in a reputable, peer reviewed psychology journal. Then come back and tell us about it when you have succeeded.
Bye.
The history of psychology is littered with “cool shit” that turned out to be false. And we still have a long way to go yet, but at least we seem to be moving toward more science-based studies. Like in a lot of fields, however, progress is slow because the old guard still believes whatever they want to believe regardless of what the facts show. Real progress in entrenched fields like this one, especially because it’s a soft science instead of a hard science, basically requires waiting for the old experts to die off. Followers of people like Freud and Jung are more interested in the metaphysical and wild theories than being grounded in reality, and these people still run a lot of journals. Having something accepted for publication in a journal that promotes paranormal beliefs like ESP and past-life regression wouldn’t make it any more real, and the field of dissociative psychology is not much better.
Perhaps it will take someone doing the experiment you suggest to convince you, but the same principles that are used to debunk paranormal woo-woo, quack medicine and so forth can and should be applied to the wacky parts of psychology as well. People are doing it, papers are being published disputing the old theories, and eventually the weight of opinion will be there to toss the concept of multiple personalities on the same heap as phrenology, mesmerism and demonic possession. It wasn’t too long ago that homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder, and that got removed. It’s a process like anything else, and some people fight the progress because they’ve built their lives around theories and beliefs that are on the way out.
It strikes me that there is a philosophical problem here. In order for the claim “MPD does not exist” to be true, every single identified case must be dismissed as deliberate, conscious fakery, which seems prima facie rather unlikely. Because, if that is not so, MPD demonstrably exists in some form, and the only question to ask is what that form is. Denying it boils down to saying, “You’re not crazy; you only have a delusion to that effect.”
Much as I think the whole Billy Milligan MPD claim was total bullshit, here is an update on him.
In the midst of the whole Sybil bruhaha, Milligan, a serial homophobe (he served time for several attacks on gay men) and rapist [del]beat the rap[/del] was declared “not guilty” by virture of being a multiple personality. According to him, the personality who committed the rapes was Adalena, a lesbian.
I think the whole “satanic cult multiple personality” hysteria is going to be remembered as one of the worst eisodes in medical history. Suddenly too many people were being told they were the victims of ritual satantic sexual abuse and multiple personalities. Innocent lives and families were destroyed because of it.
Wiki on the subject.
John W. Kennedy, isn’t it more a case of saying “The evidence that’s been provided for MPD so far really is rather weak, and been taken way too far. There’s not really sound footing to believe the claims that it is true.” Isn’t there really a burden on the purveyors of MPD to prove their claim that it exists?
One cannot prove a negative. Once evidence has been provided, it can be critiqued (methodological flaws) or given a new theoretical framework. Claiming that those who find the multiple personality hypothesis convincing do so on the basis of television shows or whatever isn’t convincing, as just as many portray people claiming to have multiple personality disorder as confederates looking to get a lighter sentence.
In any case, “not guilty by reason of insanity” is not a useful verdict in my opinion. Anyone that commits a violent crime is by definition not normal, whether due to psychopathy or due to eating twinkies. The conception that a criminal must be punished is a tribalistic one based on the retributive game theory model. It’d be more useful if they were apprehended and studied methodologically (such as presence of variation from the norm in the prefrontal cortex or amydala). Should individuals still constitute a threat, they could be isolated from society. If not, they could be rehabilitated and given the means to contribute to society. Should patterns emerge in these variations, interventions could be staged for individuals that are likely to commit violent crimes. It could be argued that those completely lacking in empathy due to their physiology can never contribute to society and should be isolated from society on that basis alone, but that’d obviously be a contentious issue.
With that said, I’m fairly sure implanting memories ranks somewhat below vivisection without anaesthesia by members of unit 731 or purposefully giving civilians syphilis in Tuskegee. It’s odd, too, that the psyche is fragile enough to have false memories implanted in it under hypnosis by the dreadfully sly therapists asking leading questions, or duplicitous enough to come up with, on the face of it, a wholly implausible secondary personality (complete with memorising which is the more or less intelligent and with differing EEG readings), capable of manipulating dim witted therapists… Yet not to have the unconscious construct a secondary personality for an individual? The capacity of an individual to have pretty wide mood swings is present in the (I think undisputed thus far) minds of those with manic depression, those with intermittent paranoid schizophrenia and people with temporal lobe epilepsy.
Hell, I don’t think there’s any more merit to multiple personality disorder than there is to glossolalia, but in any individual case I can only speculate as to whether the individual is consciously trying to deceive.