Dissociation and complexity: A psychiatrist’s perspective

Dissociation and complexity: A psychiatrist’s perspective

Yulia Perch, MD

Analytic Idealism’s claim that individual human consciousness is a segment of a universal mind, separated from it via dissociation, is supported by the neurobiology of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), according to psychiatrist Dr. Yulia Perch. In this essay, complexity science and Dr. Perch’s own clinical experience are used to demonstrate that dissociative processes in a living psyche are not specific to DID, but widespread and inevitable.

...The mind is also immaterial. This is self-evident, but we can’t help but speak of ‘beautiful mind,’ ‘heavy thought,’ ‘warm feeling.’ We describe an entity wholly inaccessible to our sense-perceptions in sense-perception terms. And then we forget that these expressions are allegorical. I believe that the idea of dissociation as an omnipresent generative force within the psyche would not feel so alien if we explicitly maintained that the mind is not a thing. It need not break to give rise to a great variety of distinct parts.  And if the mind is not a thing, what is it?...

An objection to Analytic Idealism—the notion that human minds are dissociated segments from one universal mind, which underlies all reality—stems from the popular perception that Dissociative Identity Disorder is the only clinical manifestation of dissociation. In reality, dissociation is far more common and a lot less dramatic, existing on the continuum from pathological to normal, from adaptive to maladaptive.

Hereafter I propose a taxonomy of dissociation based on the degree of autonomy (degree of freedom) established by the dissociated parts. In the spirit of complexity science, I emphasize that these are not exact categories but large-scale overlapping patterns spread over the many dimensions of the psyche....