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By Stephen Proskauer MD | January 8, 2008
VARIETIES OF SPLITTING IN OUR SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE
We all feel conflicted or split at times, but normally these conflicting feelings are contained within an overall sense of a unified self. After severe trauma, in psychotic states, or during spiritual experiences, however, we may experience what seem to be different voices from within ourselves or from outside. These voices originate from several psychospiritual processes, from neurotic conflict to psychotic projection to spiritual visitations of various kinds. Let’s review a few possibilities.Psychotherapy uncovers internal psychic structures variously labeled in different theoretical systems as personal voices, subpersonalities, or inner objects. These are normally viewed as aspects of the self with distinctive characteristics and ways of responding to situations. Unintegrated voices can oppose one another, causing internal conflicts or neuroses, as in the struggle between the demands of the needy child within and the stern voice of an inner critic. This is familiar territory for psychotherapists.In so-called dissociative states, found in survivors of severe trauma, these inner voices can be experienced as separate personalities sharing the same physical body, seemingly independent of one another and sometimes even oblivious to each other’s existence, as in the dissociative identity disorder depicted in the film The Three Faces of Eve. A person prone to extreme dissociation and psychosis may even develop the delusion that these voices are not part of the self but are intruding from an outside source. But what if some of these voices really do originate outside the self? This is the point at which psychotherapy leaves off and spiritual healing takes over. In shamanic practice we encounter embedded negative energy forms from the environment that can be removed by means of extraction ceremonies, as well as invasive entities that try to overpower the self and require depossession rituals to dislodge them. Both negative energy forms and possessing spirits can cause symptoms resembling the aftermath of trauma, and traumatic experiences can make people more vulnerable to such spiritual attacks.Not all attached spirits are negative. Sometimes benign ghosts of the dead attach themselves to us in response to our cries for help in crisis situations in order to help us through desperate times. Psychic practices like trance channeling and mediumship can also be seen as a temporary and benign form of voluntary spirit possession, in which a higher intelligence or the spirit of a deceased person is consciously and deliberately invited to take over the physical body for a time in order to convey teachings or messages from the spirit world. Another class of phenomena that I have seen in my practice is regarded as mystical truth by some and New Age fantasy by others: counterparts from past or future lifetimes and alter egos from other dimensions of reality, each manifesting as a separate entity that belongs to the same cosmic lifestream as the self and attaches to the self for mutual benefit. These counterparts and alter egos may need help returning to their own time/dimension after they are no longer needed.Because the psychobiological scientific tradition of diagnosis and treatment is divorced from spirituality in our fragmented culture, few practitioners have the wide perspective to perceive all of these phenomena let alone treat them. Psychiatrists and psychologists tend to discount spiritual phenomena as fantasy or psychosis while spiritual healers don’t usually have the background to understand the psychobiological domain and therefore tend to interpret all their clients’ problems as spiritually based. To cover the field accurately and effectively, a broad psychospiritual understanding is needed, an inclusive frame of reference that covers the full gamut of human experience. That’s the mission and potential of integrative psychiatry.
Topics: Disorders, Dissociation, Psychotherapy, Time, Uncategorized |
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