General Interest > Thought Reform

the DISSOCIATION issue

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dragonfly:

dragonfly:

starry-eyed pirate:
Yeah, Awake, your post rings like a bell. Total social confusion. The misinterpretations.  Not even knowing where your boundaries were. That can even be more traumatic than the time spent in the program, well, in some ways.  Just because the pressures of the real world are on you by then and though you need time to reintegrate, the world aint gonna wait. ... You've been kidnapped, tied up, taken way an held for ransom...

And I really think all the instilled guilt and shame is a huge deal too, cause before the program I never felt that way.  I didn't have a "conscience".  That was something they developed within me.  And I learned how to feel guilty and ashamed.  And I have been manipulated and enslaved by those ideas ever since.  No one talks about it.  You just finally, somehow get out, and have to cope, there is no time to search for answers, this makes everything much more difficult, when if someone could have explained what we have discovered, here, for ourselves, on fornits, shortly after I got out, then I might have saved so much wasted time, but anyway...

starry-eyed pirate:

--- Quote from: "dragonfly" ---The whole Diedrich acid experience consciousness transmitted across the generations, inbred with the communists and there I was 16 months of a collective contact high replicating Chuck Diedrich's trip...
--- End quote ---
:roflmao:  :tup:  O0

Awake:
I am intending to connect a particular line of influence with this post that may point to earlier roots of program philosophies related to dissociation, I think it ties in with the discussion so far, however this may be more interesting in relation to CEDU, as it points to the philosophy behind the “I and ME” propheet. Although the Cedu version contained a hodgepodge of distortions, I don’t think you’ll find this to be an unrelated coincidence.



Divided Consciousness: Multiple Controls in Human Thought and Action. Ernest R. Hilgard 1977

Ch.1 Divided Consciousness and the Concept of Dissociation


“The unity of consciousness is illusory. Man does more than one thing at a time – all the time – and the conscious representation of these actions is never complete. His awareness can shift from one aspect of whatever is currently happening inside his body or impinging on him from without, or events that are remembered or imagined. Furthermore, as an active agent, he is always making decisions and formulating or implementing plans, and he likes to believe that he exerts control over what he is doing; often, however, he may be deceived about the causes of his behavior.” P.1

“The problems of conflict, indecision, self- deception, on one hand, and persistence toward deliberately set goals, on the other, are important and baffling. Psychologists have proposed a number of ways of accounting for the manner in which an individual controls his behavior, especially when one kind of control is set against another, as in the voluntary – involuntary distinction, or the conscious-subconscious distinction. “

“Common criticisms of multiple personality make the assumption that this is a so called iatrogenic disease – that is, a disease created by the physician treating the person. The criticism has often been made, early voiced as a danger by Janet, and by William James, who was worried about one of Prince’s earliest cases. After hearing a lecture by Prince, James said:

It is very easy in the ordinary hypnotic subject to suggest during a trance the appearance of a secondary personage with a certain temperament, and that secondary personage will usually give itself a name. One has, therefore, to be on one’s guard in this matter against confounding naturally double persons and persons who are simply temporarily endowed with the belief that they must play the role of being double.” -- Divided Consciousness: Multiple Controls in Human Thought and Action. Ernest R. Hilgard 1977

(Ernest Ropiequet "Jack" Hilgard (July 25, 1904 - October 22, 2001) was an American psychologist, professor at Stanford university, who became famous in the 1950s for his research on hypnosis, especially with regard to pain control. Along with André Muller Weitzenhoffer, Hilgard developed the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales from the 1950s onwards. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hilgard     )


“Although there was great interest in dissociation during the last two decades of the nineteenth century (especially in France and England), this interest rapidly waned with the coming of the new century (Ellenberger, 1970). Even Janet largely turned his attention to other matters. On the other hand, there was a sharp peak in interest in dissociation in America from 1890 to 1910, especially in Boston as reflected in the work of William James, Boris Sidis, Morton Prince, and William McDougall.”      

“Over a hundred years ago, in his Principles of Psychology (1890), William James put forward a fascinating account of the self. In that theory, he makes a distinction between two aspects of self, the self as subject, or the "I", and the self as object, or the "Me."  James goes on to investigate the nature of these two aspects of self. He concludes that the me comes in three basic types: the "material me", the "social me", and the "spiritual me." As for the I, James concludes that, at least for the purposes of psychology, there is no need to postulate a subject of experiences, a metaphysical I that goes beyond the physical being who does the thinking. Rather, he concludes that 'the passing thought ... is itself the thinker'….

The main distinction that James draws at the beginning of his chapter on Self in Principles of Psychology (1890) is between the self as known (or me) and the self as knower (or I)

The issue of what is most central to the self appears once again in James discussion of the spiritual self, which he defines as " either the entire stream of our personal consciousness, or the present 'segment' or 'section' of that stream, according as we take a broader or a narrower view " (1890, Vol. I, p. 296):

When we think of ourselves as thinkers, all the other ingredients of Me seem relatively external possessions. Even within the spiritual Me some ingredients seem more external than others. . . . The more active-feeling states of consciousness are . . . the more central portions of the spiritual Me. (James, 1892, p. 181)

These active-feeling states are "the very core and nucleus of our self, as we know it."

And these states are "often held to be a direct revelation of the living substance of our Soul." But whether this is so or not is "an ulterior question," a question James attempts to answer when he turns to what constitutes the self as knower, or I.

James sums up his view of the self as knower or I and its relationship to the me:

The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as 'I' can remember those which went before, know the things they knew, and care paramountly for certain ones among them as 'Me,' and appropriate to these the rest. (1892, p. 215)  

The I which knows these past thoughts and appropriates them, "for psychological purposes" is neither a "Soul" nor "transcendental Ego" outside of time. "It is a thought at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative ofthe latter, together with all that the latter called its own" (1892, p. 215).

James' logic here is that, since the stream of thought is constantly changing, there is no reason to suppose some "fixed" entity beyond the stream itself. Rather, there are "pulses of consciousness" or thoughts, which are unified in themselves, involving, among other things, the immediate awareness of the body, and that these thoughts, as I's can remember and appropriate prior thoughts in the stream:

The nucleus of the 'me' is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time. Whatever remembered-past-feelings resemble this present feeling are deemed to belong to the same me with it.

” -- http://jbarresi.psychology.dal.ca/Paper ... l_Self.htm

“ George Herbert Mead  (1863–1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general.

A final piece of Mead's social theory is the mind as the individual importation of the social process. As previously discussed, Mead presented the self and the mind in terms of a social process. As gestures are taken in by the individual organism, the individual organism also takes in the collective attitudes of others, in the form of gestures, and reacts accordingly with other organized attitudes. This process is characterized by Mead as the "I" and the "Me." The "Me" is the social self and the "I" is the response to the "Me." In other words, the "I" is the response of an individual to the attitudes of others, while the "me" is the organized set of attitudes of others which an individual assumes.[17] Mead develops William James' distinction between the "I" and the "me." The "me" is the accumulated understanding of "the generalized other" i.e. how one thinks one's group perceives oneself etc. The "I" is the individual's impulses. The "I" is self as subject; the "me" is self as object. The "I" is the knower, the "me" is the known. The mind, or stream of thought, is the self-reflective movements of the interaction between the "I" and the "me." These dynamics go beyond selfhood in a narrow sense, and form the basis of a theory of human cognition. For Mead the thinking process is the internalized dialogue between the "I" and the "me."  Mead rooted the self’s “perception and meaning” deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects" (Joas 1985: 166) found specifically in social encounters. Understood as a combination of the 'I' and the 'me', Mead’s self proves to be noticeably entwined within a sociological existence. For Mead, existence in community comes before individual consciousness. First one must participate in the different social positions within society and only subsequently can one use that experience to take the perspective of others and thus become self-conscious.

Mead is a major American philosopher by virtue of being, along with John Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James, one of the founders of pragmatism.” -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead

…

I don’t know but, dissociation, hypnosis, the I and me, internal conflict…. Sounds a lot like Cedu to me, and add emphasis on a divided self concept in which one part is ‘real’ and the other is like an infection that needs to be exorcized, as indicated  by ‘running your anger’ at your ‘thinking’ in raps. (At cedu the tool of the “I and me’ is the “I” is your thinking which lied and could not be trusted, and the “me” was your feelings which was the real you. You were encouraged to cathartically play out this fight in raps.) All the tools were like that, and dissociation was a common theme. Very much of the time people were not yelling at each other, they were yelling at themselves. Yet again, it is very hard to tell what is ‘genuine’ in these displays, for they were always under the pressure from staff and peers. You had to be ‘working on yourself’.

I actually did not go through this propheet as it was at the end of the program, although I witnessed  that tool in action in raps on many occasions. Maybe some others can weigh in on this here. I get the feeling the I and Me was also a silent homage to the hidden influences preceding Cedu in a way.

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