Here's a book recommendation for thos interested in issues of consciousness, identity, 'mind':
The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness / Martha Stout (2001)
Amazon Link
It is a book about dissociative disorders. Stout views them as a continuum, from the mild 'normal' dissociative episodes we all experience (ever drive home from work and realize, once home, you don't remember the drive?) to full-blown dissociative identity disorder (DID), which used to be called multiple personality disorder (or is sometimes incorrectly referred to in common discourse as 'schizophrenia'). It should be noted that not all theorists subscribe to the 'continuum' view.
The following are some excepts, I hope they pique your interest:
p.9
"For the mental universe of the extreme trauma survivor is so full of violence and violation, natural demons and unnatural acts, that one wonders - I wonder every day - how such people find the courage to decide to go on living. It is a place where trusting someone is not an option, and where the genius of one's own imagination becomes an inescapable stalker. In sucha landscape, whnever the inhabitant becomes so bone-weary that she lets down her guard a little, another memory cabinet door swings open to reveal precisely the thing that she cannot endure. This thing is different for each person, but always hovers at the outside limit of terror. Letting down her guard is at once what she most achingly desires amd what she most vigilantly avoids. It is a universe of fear and exhaustion - especially exhaustion- and people will try almost anything, however irrational, to make it stop."
p.10
"In seeming contradiction to self-injury, prior to recovery some trauma survivors study, buy, and stockpile weapons against outside threats."
p. 26
"All human beings have the capacity to dissociate psychologically, though most of us are unaware of this, and consider 'out of body' episodes to be far beyond the boundaries of normal human experience. In fact, dissociative experiences happen to everyone, and most of these events are quite ordinary."
p. 53
"Meaning is the important thing. It determines whether or not the mental corridor to helplessness and death will open up, or remain shut and disregarded by us, as that channel usually does. And the meaning we ascribe to a threatening event is determined in part by 'our ability to anticipate, protect, and know ourselves,' as Macfarlane and de Girolamo have put it."
p.104
"We are a thoroughly shell-shocked species."
p.214
"Dissociative identity disorder - and all of the even more subtle dissociative reactions - rob us of our present reality, and create disruptions in our personal lives, sometimes catastrophic ones. And ultimately, our dissociative behavior causes us, in an ironic vicious circle, to be more at risk, to be more vulnerable to the potential global traumas that threaten the life of our species as a whole. For many of us, switchers or not, to discuss crises such as stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, organized genocide, environmental atrophy, and pandemic starvation is so frightening that we dissociate from our true emotions within seconds, and our conversations are over-intellectualized and motivationally bereft. We do not take effective action; we take a mental exit."
