Global Perspectives on Dissociative Disorders

Individual and Societal Oppression

Vedat Sar, Warwick Middleton, Martin Dorahy, Vedat Sar, Warwick Middleton, Martin Dorahy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415718073
• eBook ISBN: 9781134914647
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

Dissociative disorders are one of the psychiatric consequences of childhood psychological trauma. While oppression is an aspect of traumatic conditions, dissociation undermines resistance to oppression throughout a person's lifespan. Neither oppression nor dissociation are restricted to particular cultures, and both can affect the individual as well as societies.

This collection engages with the universality of dissociative disorders and their close relationship to oppression. The chapters cover extreme examples such as ongoing incest in adulthood, children and adults forced to kill others, and abusive states in interrogation. Further subjects examined include the utilization of dissociation in postmodern societies to maintain oppression, the oppressive conditions of asylum seekers and the consequences of oppression as they are dealt with in psychotherapy. The final chapter considers how a paedophile pandering network employed multi-layered oppression to prevent the public becoming aware of the widespread and organised abuse of children.

This book will engender interactions between trauma investigators – those whose approach is close clinical observation, those who use instruments to survey groups of individuals, those whose research takes the form of investigative journalism, and those who examine the truth embedded or hidden in documents created for multiple, and at times, disturbing political purposes.

Portions of this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. It also includes material from other sources.

Stimulus Deprivation and Overstimulation as Dissociogenic Agents in Postmodern Oppressive Societies

VEDAT SAR, MD and ERDINC OZTURK, PhD

Department of Psychiatry, Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey

Societal conditions associated with overstimulation or understimulation may precipitate and maintain oppression among individuals and communities by inducing dissociation. Distortion of reality and the flooding of everyday awareness with irrelevant information by mass media is a type of community-wide overstimulation. Alternatively, stimulus deprivation enables single–minded thinking to be narrowly preoccupied with rigid religious ideas, traditional rituals, and postmodern thought and behavior patterns. Provoked sex is utilized as a soothing tool for those who live in overstimulation and as an opportunity for transient enjoyment and rejuvenation for those who live in stimulus deprivation. Chronic exposure to disproportionate stimuli resurrects the trauma-based developmental detachment between the sociological and psychological selves of the individual at the cost of the latter. The enlarged sociological self of the individual is misused to induce a conforming identity transformation of individuals and entire communities that is a prerequisite to setting and maintaining an oppressive system. Constituting overstimulation itself, the enduring fear of chaos in a world akin to crisis enables deliberate acceptance of oppression to restore a sense of control. In fact, the expectancy of crisis triggers the trauma-related dissociative fears of individual internal chaos, which are misused, in turn, to aggravate fears of external chaos again. By facilitating the denial of internal fears rather than integrating them, psychological theories and practices of the past century have failed in addressing the problem of individual and societal oppression.

Individual as well as societal roots of oppression have been a focus of interest for researchers and theoreticians from diverse disciplines. The experiences in Germany before and during World War II led sociologists to study the characteristics of the potentially authoritarian personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). A series of social psychology experiments demonstrated the astonishing willingness of the average individual to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal values (Milgram, 1963). Yet it remains unclear why an individual or a society allows itself to live under oppression, how oppression can be maintained, and why the affected subjects occasionally do not even develop awareness of it.

In this theoretical article, we propose that excessive, inconsistent, or diminished exposure to stimuli facilitates dissociation that is utilized by oppressive systems to evoke individual and societal submission. In the context of sociophysiology (Gardner, 1997), the working definition of stimulus here covers diverse types of input such as sensory perception, information, emotion, communication, attachment, knowledge, culture, religion, and art. Making the situation more complex is the fact that in postmodern societies, social stimuli are increasingly enriched by simulation and simulacra (Baudrillard, 1994). These are symbols and signs that replace conventional reality.

There are claims that contemporary societies facilitate dissociation (Gold, 2004; Schumaker, 2001). We hypothesize that this effect is achieved in individual and societal contexts through excessive stimulation and stimulus deprivation as observed in at least two ways: (a) flooding the community with irrelevant information delivered by mass media, which also distort reality; and (b) facilitating single-minded thinking by stimulus deprivation, as evidenced in rigid religious ideas, traditional rituals, and postmodern thought and behavior patterns. Provoked sex is utilized as a soothing tool or as an opportunity for transient enjoyment and rejuvenation. The disproportionate stimulation by societal means interferes with the individual’s ability to achieve the integrative mode of consciousness (Winkelman, 2011) necessary to maintain a high level of awareness.

THE CENTURY OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL SELF

Compared to individuals in contemporary societies, the 19th-century individual was rather tradition directed (i.e., directed by personally assimilated sociocultural traditions) or inner directed (i.e., directed by individual desires and wishes). The development of urbanization, industrialization, mass media, public relations, marketing, digital computers, electronic communication devices, the Internet, and more recently social media has created a new type of individual who is prone to being controlled from outside (Battegay, 1987). This shift toward other-directedness (Riesman, 1950) took on a new dimension in the era of globalism, when communities were forced to undergo rapid changes in lifestyle, law, ethics, traditions, and social rituals without being prepared.

In an earlier paper on the theory of the functional dissociation of the self, we introduced the concept of the sociological self as an interface between society and the individual (Sar & Ozturk, 2007). In fact, as an individual mental process, it is more than an interface. The sociological self represents (as does the psychological self) a pattern of thinking, experiencing, and behavior that can utilize and interact with every mental capacity (e.g., emotions, alter personalities, the trauma-self) in its own way. The properties of the sociological and psychological selves are universal (see Table 1). The specific task of the sociological self is to save the psychological self from the destructive influences of others and to buffer psychological trauma. In contrast to the more unitary psychological self, if overloaded, the sociological self can be fragmented. The psychological self delivers observations and estimations about subjective experiences. It maintains the capacity of pure love, an intention toward maturity, a sense of individual uniqueness and self-orientedness. However, in contrast to the sociological self, once detached, the psychological self has limited authority on the actions of the individual. Healthy interpersonal relationships are based on a harmonious development and coupling of the sociological and psychological selves. However, developmental traumatization leads to detachment between the two selves. Subsequent enlargement and fragmentation of the sociological self restricts the further development of the psychological self and keeps it frozen.

TABLE 1 Properties of the Sociological and Psychological Selves

Sociological self	Psychological self
Modeling, imitation, copying	Creativity
Eclecticism	Authenticity
Dogmatism	Possibilities
Polarization	Synthesis
Negotiation	Choice
Reversibility	Constancy
Competition	Self-expression
Single-focus awareness	Multi-focus awareness
Cruelty	Compassion
Affiliation	Contact
Fusionary relationships	Boundaries
Metaphors, metonyms, symbols	Signs
Fantasies	Facts
Heroes and heroines	Icons
Religion	Spirituality

Notes: Adapted from Sar & Ozturk (2007).

Both excessiveness and scarcity of stimuli threaten the psychological self and cause the sociological self to be hypertrophied. An optimal average stimulus level supports the psychological self and its harmonious relationship with the sociological self. These effects are based on distinct properties of the two selves in relation to adaptation (e.g., perception of reality, synthesis, association, decision making). Whereas the sociological self benefits from its properties in processing the disproportionate stimulation, the properties of the psychological self need a protected space to operate. Developmental detachment between the two selves may be exacerbated by disintegrating experiences in adult life, such as cumulative traumatization, a single disruptive traumatic experience, deep disappointment, and exposure to disproportionate stimuli. The latter may happen after a drastic change in average stimulus level due to factors such as migration, psychiatric disorder, imprisonment, torture, compulsory life changes, or simply the exercise of choice.

In order to nurture the capacity of endurance or, alternatively, to induce overadjustment in the new generation, societies and families may enhance the development of the sociological self among their offspring, which may be misused by others and by the overall society to induce and maintain oppression. What is tragic is that a detached and enlarged sociological self may turn out to be a malevolent and nonempathic force not only for the individual but also for the family and society. People with an enlarged sociological self may learn how to become skillful with it for their own gain (e.g., by finding a special niche for their occupational and social capacities somewhere within contemporary society). Thus, the sociological self provides the basis for social alters that can collude with others’ in group relationships (deMause, 2002). We propose that the extreme dominance by the sociological self enables a socially dangerous and destructive style that characterizes the reversible person of our time (Sar & Ozturk, 2007). Rather than constituting an adaptive dialogical self (Blackman, 2005), reversibility is an ultraformalist obsessive position of the sociological self associated with an increased tendency to be directed by others. This is a consequence of being exposed to disintegrating experiences in adult life while striving for successful flexible adjustment to the oppressive environment. Although the reversible person may appear to be a strong opponent on the surface, he or she may become a covert (or overt) ally of the power.

It is ironic that political fates of contemporary democratic societies rely largely on swing voters who behave as saturation-dependent consumers asking for immediate service rather than as proactive citizens with long-term rational plans and commitments for the future of their society and the world. Misused in countries with limited resources to aggravate the sense of dependency among disadvantaged populations, in social welfare states and mass democracies this condition has pushed communities and leaders into a collision of mutual manipulation. Although the leaders have allegedly been responding to the desires and wishes of their voters (Curtis, 2002), in fact they have been addressing the voters’ detached, enlarged, and fragmented sociological selves. In this era, psychology has infiltrated every domain of life (i.e., from marketing to politics) as a legitimate tool facilitating the sociological selves of individuals rather than nurturing integrative processes.

EVOLUTIONARY ROOTS OF OBEDIENCE AND DISOBEDIENCE

Before moving toward further elaboration of the subtle psychological ways of setting and maintaining individual and societal oppression, an examination of the biological roots of obedience and disobedience (i.e., acceptance of or uprising against authority) is indicated.

Under conditions of threat, self-preservation rather than self-regulation becomes the predominant mode of existence for individuals and societies (Ford, 2009), which is common in dissociative states. According to the BASK (behavior, affect, sensation, knowledge) model of dissociation, evolutionary action systems operate in a relatively autonomous fashion in those conditions (Braun, 1988). However, not only fight and flight but also the more passive responses such as freezing and submission serve as a defense in all species, facilitating obedience to the perpetrator’s claims with the intention of survival (Nijenhuis, Spinhoven, Vanderlinden, Van Dyck, & Van der Hart, 1998). In addition, dissociation leads to a constriction of consciousness (Meares, 1999). Thus, higher order and complex communications are rendered relatively inaccessible during a dissociative state, yet the person remains relatively sensitive to simpler, lower order instructions. Such a condition may make the subject ready to fulfill instructions administered as simple commands.

In traumatic entrapment situations, appeasement becomes also a potentially relevant strategy leading to pacification, conciliation, and submission (Cantor & Price, 2007). What is interesting is that it appears to be primarily relevant only to one’s own and mostly social (mammalian) species. The paradoxical development of reciprocal positive feelings between hostages and their captors is known as Stockholm syndrome (Auerbach, Kiesler, Strentz, Schmidt, & Serio, 1994; Ochberg, 1978). This phenomenon enhances captives’ coping with traumatic experiences. From an evolutionary perspective, this is described as reverted escape (Chance, as cited in Cantor & Price, 2007). After being attacked, monkeys and apes tend to return to the attacker for comfort and safety rather than turning to another member of their group (Cantor & Price, 2007). Paradoxically, a dissociative crisis may also facilitate disobedience by eliciting active responses such as fight and flight, the disruption of enduring attitudes, and associations leading to the discovery of positive possibilities one was not aware of. However, this is less likely for individuals under oppression.

Individuals who have been subjected to periods of prolonged and intense coercive persuasion (brainwashing) may experience dissociation (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Stimulus deprivation serves as a preparatory phase before the enforced transformation of identity during this process. In the first phase of brainwashing, the intermittent delivery of stimuli in a variable ratio reinforcement schedule...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Global Perspectives on Dissociative Disorders: Individual and Societal Oppression
• 1. Stimulus Deprivation and Overstimulation as Dissociogenic Agents in Postmodern Oppressive Societies
• 2. The Role of Abusive States of Being in Interrogation
• 3. Parent–Child Incest that Extends into Adulthood: A Survey of International Press Reports, 2007–2012
• 4. Ongoing Incestuous Abuse During Adulthood
• 5. Dissociation and Symptoms of Culture-Bound Syndromes in North America: A Preliminary Study
• 6. Ethnic Syndromes as Disguise for Protest Against Colonialism: Three Ethnographic Examples
• 7. Dissociation and Identity Transformation in Female Survivors of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda: A Qualitative Research Study
• 8. Transference-Focused Psychotherapy with Former Child Soldiers: Meeting the Murderous Self
• 9. Boundary Modifications in the Treatment of People with Dissociative Disorders: An International Perspective
• 10. Seeking Asylum—Trauma, Mental Health, and Human Rights: An Australian PerspectiveThe Franklin Scandal: The Cover-Up of Child Abuse and its Analogues to Dissociative Identity Disorder
• 11. The Franklin Scandal: The Cover-Up of Child Abuse and its Analogues to Dissociative Identity Disorder
• Index