2016年1月30日土曜日

So called SP (7)

Absence of anger in other parts of personality

Although not originally listed as one of the components of the definition of SPs, their anger and aggressiveness is accompanied by a lack of them in the host and other main parts of personality. As it was adeptly described by one of my clients who already depicted her own SP, parts of personality seen among patients with DID do not know how to express, or even feel angry and frustrated. The appearance of SPs is typically warranted in a situation where aggressive attempt at breaking off of any insult and intrusiveness exhibited by others. It is not necessarily a host personality in a critical situation who intentionally “summons” or “invites” SP into the scene. The host simply becomes at a loss and an SP might set in motion. The whole process occurs rather automatically. As will be discussed later, this automatism is a key in understanding the mechanism of dissociative switching among parts of personality, and appearance of SP might be hard to resist once a situation becomes difficult for the host to manage.

It is enticing to imagine that the host can “be angry but unconsciously” in these critical situations, but this would get us back to the starting point more than a century ago when Freud expressed his opinion against Breuer’s formulation about “hypnoid state.” In the Studies of Hysteria (1895).