Need Opinion on New Book About Dissociate Identify Disorder Formerly Multiple Personality Disorder?

Question by DID Today: Need opinion on new book about Dissociate Identify Disorder formerly multiple personality disorder?
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Best answer:

Answer by Natalie (Color my world….)
Definitely a book for sufferers and their loved ones, it also has some of the comprehensiveness normally found only in technical works. Good overview of origins, treatments, and relationship to post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder. Written in an informal, accessible style. Avoids lurid, melodramatic, and typically misleading Sybil-like tales. Not that these tales are untrue, but they are extreme and unrepresentative cases.

The focus is mostly on female victims of dissociation, as they are much more likely than males to seek treatment. However, there is little in the book that doesn’t apply to male victims as well.

Compare to Steinberg’s Stranger in the Mirror, which is more intense and dramatic but not as good as an overview. For clinicians, a good introduction, before moving on to the clinical books by Colin Ross and James Chu.

POSTSCRIPT: Books on this subject often lack historical perspective. To get some, try Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud and learn especially about Pierre Janet.

The 1950s saw the height of two fashions that obscured the reality of DID, psychoanalysis and the schizophrenia fad. But 1957 saw two remarkable exceptions. The first is the Oscar-winning film, The Three Faces of Eve. The DID case here is extreme, which can mislead viewers into thinking that “real” DID has to be that blatant. And the underlying abuse is left largely implicit. It’s still an eerie and powerful film and well worth watching.

The other is the classic Battle for the Mind, by the distinguished British psychiatrist William Sargant. He covers an amazing range of topics for a book of moderate length and ties together a wide range of pathologies – brainwashing, sudden political and religious conversion, combat and other psychological trauma, abreaction and catharsis, coerced confessions, “programming” (a la Manchurian Candidate), and Pavlov’s little-known later work on traumatic stress in dogs. The book is dated in only a few respects. A post-1960s look at the same phenomena, emphasizing the rise of cults and drugs, is Conway and Siegelman’s book, Snapping.

(BTW, these two works might help to dispel the strange idea that the 1950s were “repressive” or unsophisticated. People who think this are watching too much television. The period marked Hollywood’s silver age, including not only Three Faces of Eve, but the original and much superior versions of such movies as Manchurian Candidate and Lolita. The 50s were the last decade when popular culture was controlled by adults, and that culture has to be absorbed through films, plays, and books, not television.)

What do you think? Answer below!

 

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