OTOH if you were being raped…
In the classic psychoanalytic sense we think of hysterical dissociations. The old timers would argue whether a man could be hysterical because a man does not have a uterus. Hysterium is Latin for uterus. With the personality dissociated into enough different parts and the parts having amnesia for each others’ experiences you get a multiple personality disorder. Hypnotists generally use dissociation to speak of removing the consciousness from the feelings of the body. NLP will approach a problem like post-traumatic stress by doing a dissociation from the abused past self, “Okay, Mary, step out of the picture and look at a younger Mary [at the doorstep of impending trauma] as though you are watching her on a movie screen at a theatre.” Obviously, this sort of dissociative technique can also be well applied for pain control.
In its most basic meaning, to dissociate is simply to split. This is the term preferred by object relations theorists. The personality is split into separate parts or consciousness is split off from the body itself. In multiple personality disorders the split apart personalities appear sequentially. In a classic hysterical conversion the two parts manifest simultaneously, controlling different parts of the physical body. “I love my husband so much, but I’m paralyzed from the waist down!” Classic repression is another example of splitting with the repressed dissociated from consciousness.
Freud (1914) described repression as “the pillar upon which the edifice of psychoanalysis rests.” Traditional psychoanalysts interested in analyzing the psychosexual development of an essentially solipsistic organism preferred to think of repression (and the return of the repressed in symptom formation) as it affected the flow of consciousness. The object relations theorists see an oraganism seeking contact with external objects. They speak of pathology in terms of pathological splitting of the internal representations of objects and of the personality as it relates to those objects. It is at that point where splitting and repression are the same thing that the orthogonal disciplines of traditional psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic object relations theory intersect.
In the second half of the twentieth century, information technology followed a strikingly parallel path with structured analysis and design spawning the orthogonal discipline of object oriented analysis and design. Here the intersection between the disciplines would be the point where that diamond shaped decision point on classic flow charts becomes encapsulated within the concept of object oriented polymorphism. One method of processing is sequentially dissociated from another. Dissociation is a pretty important concept for man or machine…
Meanwhile, I am sitting in an apartment with a dysfunctional air conditioner on the hottest day of the year as the woman with bleeding fibroids in her hysterium rants incessantly at and about imagined adversities. Perhaps an hysterical dissociation from her miserably uncomfortable body leaves her desperate to find an object for her purposeless rage. Here is where TAK calms us both. My easy dissociation explanation is that by dissociating from my uncomfortable bodily feelings of sweltering heat and annoyance, I am able to escape, relax and focus. Is the same explanation applicable to the woman? She already seemed pretty outta touch; mightn’t a dissociative have made her worse?
If TAK does promote dissociation, how does it do it? Returning to the NLP example begun above, Mary is about to re-view (Bandler used to say “re-chunk”) her experience. The risk is that strong memories of the trauma will cause her to collapse back into the picture, and in an associated state re-experience the terror of an earlier time thus merely reinforcing her dysfunctional reactions. Strong positive anchors (conditioned stimuli for comfort) are held to allow her to maintain the dissociation and review more objectively the experiences of another woman – who just happens to be a younger version of Mary – and to learn from them without fear. Does TAK function as the positive anchor which provides the calm which allows the wearer to perform the higher psychological process of dissociation if he so chooses? If so TAK is not so much a dissociative as it is just a calming agent. Or does TAK actually promote dissociation thus allowing the wearer to step out of uncomfortable situations and achieve calm?
Tacitus made some insightful observations on a string entitled Initial TAK observation:
Tacitus’s emphasis of the calming aspects of TAK seem to support the notion that it is a calming agent. It is difficult for me to see how a pheromone working on the lower brain centers could induce such a complex psychological process as visual-kinesthetic dissociation. OTOH Bandler liked to emphasize the truth that the olfactory nerve “has direct cortical connections” unlike the other senses, which are filtered through lower brain structures.
And yet tacitus tells us it behaves like a mild dissociative and claims, “there can be no mistake about what it is doing.” In the next quote he refers to the reptile brain and perceptions of time and space. I am forced to wonder if we are dealing less with psychological dissociation and more with the threshold where true Out of Body Experiences (OOBE) begin when the spirit leaves the body. Certainly Daedelus’s sense of clumsiness is an indication of the spirit being out of sync with the physical body. And he’s gonna tell me I’m crazy, but I have read accounts of OOBEs beginning with strange nonphysical ringing sounds. OTOH “sounds seem to be altered and louder” may simply mean that focus is being directed away from the kinesthetic."
So.. whadda y’all think? Is TAK a dissociative and if so in what manner? Or is it simply a calming agent? Or is it a liberator of spirit?