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At least 667 records · Page 37Linked to original sources
PubMed1994

Recovered-memory therapy and robust repression: influence and pseudomemories.

A subset of the psychotherapists practicing trauma-focused therapy predicate their treatment on the existence of a newly claimed, powerful form of repression that differs from repression as used in the psychoanalytic tradition and from amnesia in any of its recognized forms. Recovered-memory specialists assist patients to supposedly retrieve vast quantities of information (e.g., utterly new dramatic life histories) that were allegedly unavailable to consciousness for years or decades. We refer to the hypothesized mental mechanism as "robust repression" and call attention to the absence of evidence documenting its validity and to the differences between it and other mental mechanisms and memory features. No recovered-memory practitioner has ever published a full specification of the attributes of this mechanism. That is, the properties it would have to have for the narratives developed during therapy to be historically accurate to any significant degree. This article reports a specification of the properties of the robust repression mechanism based on interviews with current and former patients, practitioners' writings, and reports to researchers and clinicians. The spread of reliance on the robust repression mechanism over the past 20 years through portions of the clinical community is traced. While involved in therapy, patients of recovered-memory practitioners come to believe that they have either instantly repressed large numbers of discrete events or simultaneously repressed all information about abuse they may have endured for as long as a decade.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Adolescent↗
PubMed1981

Multiple personality and spirit possession.

"Multiple personality" remains surrounded with a halo of the occult, and, as a rare exotic, fits uneasily into the framework of modern psychotherapy. Yet, the spirit-possession phenomena which it so closely resembles are widely distributed and commonly reported; and therefore, from the comparative perspective of anthropology, the truly interesting question is not why it occurs at all but why it occurs so seldom. This essay is an anthropologically motivated intellectual history of the perceived relation between multiple personality, possession, and kindred states. On the theoretical side, it concerns the creative role of psychological curing, the influence of theory upon the existence of the things which it is held to explain, and the influence of social and cultural factors on self-perception and the topography of the ego. I will begin by outlining the relation between multiple personality and possession, and follow with an account of how certain Western psychological theorists once tentatively allowed for the real existence of possession. Next I will examine cases of multiple personality in which possession was considered to play a literal role. As such an interpretation became increasingly suspect, decline of belief in possession was paralleled by a decline of interest in multiple personality as such and in the frequency of reported cases.

Anthropology, Cultural↗
PubMed1986

Hypnotic interview and age regression procedures in the elicitation of multiple personality symptoms: a simulation study.

Patients diagnosed as suffering from multiple personality (i.e., multiples) behave as though they possess two or more distinct personal identities. When behaving as one identity, these patients often display signs of amnesia for events that occurred while they were behaving as a different identity (Sutcliffe and Jones 1962; Taylor and Martin 1944). In most theoretical accounts multiples are conceptualized as the passive victims of unconscious psychological processes that are beyond their sphere of control. For instance, patients' secondary identities are typically described as "dissociated" mental entities, as "taking over" behavioral control, as behaving independently of (and often in opposition to) patients' wishes and intentions, and so on (Allison and Schwarz 1980; Gruenewald 1984; Prince 1930; Watkins and Johnson 1982). Our paper criticizes this traditional account and suggests instead that multiple personality may be more usefully conceptualized as a social role enactment. Along these lines we present a study using college student role players as subjects to test the hypothesis that the kinds of clinical interview procedures employed routinely to diagnose multiple personality may instead encourage and legitimate enactments of this syndrome.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

"Just some spirits": the erosion of spirit possession and the rise of "tension" in South India.

Based on research among possessed and mentally ill patients and an examination of depictions of mental health issues in the popular media in the state of Kerala, India, this article examines apparent changes in the incidence and form of spirit possession and the proliferation of psychological idioms such as "tension" and "depression." These changes involve a decline in the incidence of possession as well as the homogenization of the identities of spirits: spirits that were described as having names and personalities a few decades earlier are now presented as more anonymous. The homogenization of spirits and the use of psychological idioms are interpreted as signaling an erosion of context and the ascendance of universal categories, which, according to some theorists, is a characteristic of "modernity." It will also be shown that at the same time the "modern" can appear as simply another context, as when the idiom of possession permeates a psychological advice column in the print media.

Adolescent↗