The Disunity of Consciousness in Psychiatric Disorders

Author(s):  
Tim Bayne

It is often said that the normal unity of consciousness fragments, and perhaps even breaks down entirely, in psychiatric disorders. This chapter examines ways in which the unity-or, better, unities-of consciousness might be lost in the context of psychiatric disorders, such as multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, and depersonalization.

1992 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M. Labott ◽  
Frank Leavitt ◽  
Bennett G. Braun ◽  
Roberta G. Sachs

The increase in reported cases of Multiple Personality Disorder underscores a great need to differentiate clearly this from other psychiatric disorders and from simulation of Multiple Personality Disorder. Two sets of Rorschach signs have been advanced as clinical markers by their developers, namely, Barach and also Wagner, Allison, and Wagner. As the Wagner signs are prevalent in much of the research on Rorschach responses in Multiple Personality Disorder, the purpose of the present study was to evaluate these signs using Wagner's administration and the resulting Rorschach protocols of 16 Multiple Personality Disorder patients and 16 psychiatric controls. Analysis indicated that this system was deficient in correctly classifying these 32 protocols. A new marker, the Splitting Response, emerged, however, which was more useful. This response, in combination with at least one Dissociative response, produced an accuracy rate of 94%. These new criteria may be useful aids in the detection of Multiple Personality Disorder from Rorschach protocols. Replication is urged.


Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri

If in heteronymic simulation I am a subject other than the subject I am, there are evidently as many other I’s as there are possible acts of simulation. Pessoa, inhabiting countless lives, says that by creating in imagination a multiplicity of virtual subjects, each of which is him, he has ‘ubiquitized’ himself. So he affirms a thesis I will call ‘Subject Plurality’: I am many subjects other than the subject I am. We need, though, to distinguish two versions of this thesis, for it can be read as making either a diachronic claim or a synchronic one. Interpreters of Pessoa have been drawn to present the Pessoan self as a sort of parliament or confederation of souls. Despite Pessoa’s appeal, once, to the metaphor of a colony—and there only in connection with the phenomenal unity of consciousness rather than with reference to the multiplicity of heteronyms—the ‘confederation’ theory is not Pessoa’s. It is a Proustian, not a Pessoan, picture of multiplicity. An appreciation of this distinction is crucial to seeing why Pessoa’s multiplicity of I is not reducible to another mental illness, multiple personality disorder. The distinction between successive and simultaneous subject plurality has found a surprising application: understanding Afrofuturism’s experimentation with multiple sonic selves.


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