Chapter 4. Why does Dissociation Occur ? (7)

My psychodynamical understanding of what is happening in the doughters’ mind in the context of “relational stress”, is an inhibition of their projective and externalizing process: they do not express what they feel or think on their own, but just take in what they are imposed on. Many DID patients state that from their childhood, they intuitively know their mother’s intention and behaved in a way that their mothers expected them to. Obviously they have their own thinking and feeling, but they tend to keep them inside, ending up holding many different sets of mind inside. It is unclear why they are not likely to assert themselves or express their own feelings, but what is certain is that the coexistence of mothers’ feelings taken inside and their own should have been quite stressful as they are constantly conflicting each other in single minds. It is a situation where a mind is constantly torn apart by two or more centers of control with different perception, understanding, and feeling of the self and the world. In this context, we can refresh our view on the double bind theory. The double bind is a situation in which a person is given conflicting cues or messages. Bateson (1972) postulated it to be the basis on which schizophrenia develops. However we could rather consider this situation as typically exemplified in daughters trapped in the “relational stress”. A Japanese legendary psychiatrist Katsu An once proposed this exact idea (An, 1999).
Bateson, G., D. Jackson, J. Haley, and J. Weakland, ‘Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia’, Behavioural Science 1 (1956), pp251-254. In Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: a Revolutionary Approach to Man’s Understanding of Himself. New York: Ballantine Books.
My theory based on the relational stress” is obviously quite different from the dominant theory in the Western literature stressing on the childhood sexual and physical abuse. It is given that dissociative pathology is related to some traumatic stress of external origin and childhood abuse is only a part of it.