Posted by harrisonpope on April 20, 2006, at 13:08:40
In reply to historic CSA *trigger* » special_k, posted by pseudoname on April 7, 2006, at 14:11:01
Hello-
In response to some of your comments in the thread:
Natural human psychological phenomena, such as delusions, hallucinations, depression, anxiety, and dementia, have been portrayed in countless written works throughout the ages. Therefore, if "dissociative amnesia" were also a natural psychological phenomenon, then it also should appear in written works throughout history.
Is it plausible that dissociative amnesia has always existed, but for some reason was never explicitly portrayed in written works prior to 1800? This is NOT plausible. The mental experiences of human beings are the very stuff of literature; written works throughout history have consistently depicted mental phenomena of every variety. Shakespeare alone, or Greek tragedy alone, or the Bible alone, provides an encyclopedic enumeration of human psychological states. Similarly, nonfictional works, such as medical and philosophical texts throughout the ages, catalog human mental phenomena in detail. Why would dissociative amnesia not be included? Indeed, if dissociative amnesia can afflict as many as 30% of trauma victims, as some reviews have suggested, and if we consider that hundreds of millions of people have lived their lives in literate societies throughout the centuries prior to 1800, then millions of cases would presumably have occurred throughout history. That no one, anywhere, would have noticed a case, and described that case in a nonfictional work or a fictional character, over the course of 20 or 30 centuries, strains credibility.
A corollary to the above hypothesis, also deserving consideration, asserts that dissociative amnesia is indeed suggested in various writings prior to 1800, but that our ancestors might have visualized, interpreted, and described psychological phenomena differently from ourselves. For example, people in earlier centuries might have witnessed dissociative amnesia, but portrayed it as demonic possession or some other supernatural event, or described it in language entirely different from what we would use today. Certainly this may be true – but DISSOCIATIVE AMNESIA IS A VERY GRAPHIC AND STRIKING PHENOMENON; IF AN OTHERWISE HEALTHY INDIVIDUAL SPONTANEOUSLY DEVELOPS COMPLETE AMNESIA FOR A SPECIFIC, SEEMINGLY UNFORGETTABLE, TRAUMATIC EVENT, THEN A DESCRIPTION OF SUCH A CASE WOULD SURELY BE RECOGNIZABLE, EVEN THROUGH A DENSE VEIL OF CULTURAL INTERPRETATION.
Another possible hypothesis is that dissociative amnesia exists, but did not come into existence until after 1800. By analogy, AIDS, and the theory of relativity, did not exist two centuries ago. But these are not valid analogies, because phenomena caused by innate intrapsychic processes, such as psychosis, depression, anxiety, or dementia, occur in all cultures across history. Dissociative amnesia falls in this latter category; in other words, if the brain were inherently capable of spontaneously developing amnesia for a traumatic event, then the brain of an individual in classical Greece, or 18th-century England, or Tang Dynasty China, would possess the same capability as the brain of a modern individual, and therefore dissociative amnesia would have found its way into the written word centuries earlier.If you feel that you can rebut any of my arguments above, please do not hesitate to reply. Thank you all for your interest.
Harrison G. Pope, Jr., M.D.
poster:harrisonpope
thread:629255
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060406/msgs/635285.html