Posted by cricket on August 3, 2005, at 16:39:53
In reply to Re: Lost » cricket, posted by alexandra_k on July 30, 2005, at 19:45:39
Hi Tamar and Alex,
I am going to try to stretch my brain and jump in a bit. And hopefully not get kicked to the religion thread.
I might have a bit of a different perspective on this because I am a practicing buddhist and buddhism has a lot to say about the existence, or rather the lack of existence, of a self.
I’m not sure where Buddhism diverges from Dennett’s or Foucault’s theories but it would be interesting to see.
Let me first say that I just have a practicing layman’s knowledge of buddhism. Perhaps either one or both of you know more than I do but I will explain it as I understand it and then please jump in and correct me.
Buddhism does not believe in a substantial, immutable self. No big shakes for us in the post-modern era, but a radical thought for 2500 years ago and a big departure from Hinduism, which believes that reincarnation is not possible without a enduring self.
So in Buddhism the self is indeed a construct, a construct determined by interrelated causes and conditions. I am going to excerpt from the following URL http://www.westernbuddhistreview.com/vol2/ecological_self.html because I think it explains the no self concept clearly even though the article goes in a different direction.
We have “latent or unconscious tendencies laid down as patterns of habituation though the performance of action, actions not just of the body, but of speech and mind as well. Arising thus from previous activity, this karmic conditioning in turn shapes future actions, and these conditioning forces or energy patterns are not only multiple but of varying direction and intensity…We might imagine the self as an extremely complex vector problem, the sort of mathematical exercise where one must identify both the direction and velocity of different forces operating on an object in order to determine its trajectory from that point forward…The self is thus a complicated and ongoing interactive process, the immediate configuration of which determines the overall trajectory of the being, a trajectory that is constantly being altered as each moment brings a new equation of interacting conditionings – some newly created through current activity, others carrying over as the continuing influence of previous actions.”
So when we think of DID, and I don’t know of any buddhist literature that discusses this, it becomes so much more complicated. Each “self”, and alters certainly qualify as selves by the above definition, has its own set of interactive processes, its own trajectory. Is integration even possible from this viewpoint? It certainly wouldn’t be like shopping. I’ll take a bit from this alter, some of that, I don’t think I need any of that. Somehow the actions of body, speech and mind of the alters must be unified first? I don’t know. It seems discouraging to me.
Does anyone know a person who successfully integrated different parts? Could she no longer distinguish them? Or is integration really something else? Do you just socialize some parts, ignore others, give more airtime to the socially acceptable parts?
It makes my head ache. I think it’s time to bring this up to my therapist.
poster:cricket
thread:534847
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050801/msgs/537176.html