Bilingualism as an analogy of the switching of identities
Another example of switching, more complex and therefore more analogous to the switching of identities in DID, is bilingualism. If you are proficient in English and French, like some Canadians, usually you do not get two languages mixed up: you speak either English or French at a time and you switch into each other depending on who you address to. However, if you are a native speaker of some other language and are learning both English and French as foreign languages, you might experience a constant confusion.
This example of bilingualism can be more than just an analogy of the switching of different identities. Some DID patients do sometimes have different identities who speak different languages that other identities do not speak. One of these cases that readers might be familiar with is Anna O. in the “Studies of Hysteria” (Breuer, Freud, 1895). Although most identities share the same mother tongue, child personality typically has “age appropriate” intonation and vocabulary that other identities cannot immitate.
Freud,S (1895) Studies of Hysteria SE 1.
Recent studies of bilingualism indicated that in bilingual people the head of caudate nucleus appears to be involved in switching of languages (Crinion, J., Turner, R. et.al, 2006). Similarly, I speculate that perhaps there might be a localized area in the brain that is in charge of switching mechanism in dissociation. With the help of DID patients, we might be able to hunt it down by following their brain activities with fMRI. What interests me in relation to this issue is the headache that many DID patients report when they experience switching of the identities, especially when they come back to their “host personality”. I imagine that the area eliciting pain might be involved in switching. As is generally the case with headache, if there is increased blood flow in some area within the cranium due to its excessive activation, this might lead to enlargement of the vascular lumen, this causing pain.
The localization of the switching can be the same area as where the study of the bilingualism reported. As the head of the caudate nucleus receives projection from frontal lobe and temporo-parietal association area send sends out signals through thalamus to the entire body, it sounds well plausible.
Crinion, J., Turner,R., Grogan, A., Hanakawa, T., Noppeney, U., Devlin, JT., Aso,T, Urayama, S.,H., Fukuyama, H., Stockton, K. Science. Usui, K., Green, D.Q., Price, C.J. (2006) Language Control in the Bilingual Brain. Science. Vol. 312. no. 5779, pp. 1537-1540.
Multiple mind or multi-faceted mind?
Based on our discussions so far, we have two ways of having multiple attitude or experiences. One is related to switching as we saw in the perception of Necker cube or bilingualism, where a mind can experience one state of mind at a time and switches into the other(s). I propose to call this the multiple (dissociative) mind, with a connotation that it is analogous to the experiences of multiple personality disorder (also called DID).
The other way is experienced typically in our social or interpersonal relationship. We usually have different social roles, such as a parent, a spouse, a teacher, a driver, etc. and take the appropriate one depending on the social context. For example, when you talk to your young son, you have an attitude of a father, but when suddenly spoken to by your spouse while playing with your son, you talk to her not altogether as another partner parent, but as a spouse. You perform this shift of the attitude willfully and smoothly, and the shift causes no confusion in your mind. I would like to call this latter the multi-faceted mind. Like polyhedron, it has different faces side by side, but can roll over freely and express any of them smoothly, without switching.
Let us consider as an example a father wrestling with his small son. He does it as an adult and is careful so he would not hurt his son seriously. However, somehow he engages in this act seriously, making growling noise which adds thrill to this interaction. This example shows the father’s multifaceted mind where his childlike self and adult self coexist in paralell, like multifaceted object , and no obvious switching is occurring.
Imagine however, that this father assumes only the multiple mind and can take the role of either a child or an adult. When challenged by his son, he might switch into an another rivalious small child and start wrestling with his son seriously, easily overwhelming him without any adult like self-reflection and care.
To quickly add, this last example is only hypothetical and I have never heard of any young DID mothers switching into childhood identities and have hurtful interaction with their own children. It appears that mother’s instinct is powerful enough to prevent any deleterious interaction with children in a dissociative context.
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