The Three-Pound Enigma by Shannon Moffett

Author:Shannon Moffett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2006-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The subjects were shown each of the images four times—twice under hypnosis and twice without being hypnotized. Both under hypnosis and not, one of the two times they were shown the grayscale pattern, they were asked to visualize it in color. They were also asked to visualize the colored pattern as black and white, once while under hypnosis and once without being hypnotized. In all cases their brain activity was recorded via PET as they were shown the images.

As you’d expect, both hypnotized and nonhypnotized subjects’ color-processing areas were active when they looked at the colored pattern, and showed decreased activity when they looked at the black-and-white pattern. In the case of the nonhypnotized trials, subjects’ brains reflected what was actually in front of them, even when they were trying to see the colored pattern as black and white or the grayscale pattern as colored. But while hypnotized and trying to “see” the black and white image as colored, subjects demonstrated “a significant increase in blood flow in the color-processing region of the brain,” Spiegel told me. “When they’re looking at color but think it’s black and white, there’s a significant decrease in blood flow.” Under hypnosis, he said, it appears that “believing is seeing.”

Clearly, the students in Spanos’s study didn’t actually believe they had DID, despite the hypnotic intervention. And it isn’t particularly surprising that the interviews that focused on the concept of compartmentalized personalities were more likely to plant the idea of using multiple personality disorder as a defense in the minds of role-playing college kids who had to keep up the act for only a few hours. But Spanos’s paper is often cited in the contentious debate over dissociative identity disorder as evidence that the illness is a figment of the imagination of either patient or therapist.

As a result of the confusion and acrimony surrounding the disorder, said Spiegel, “there are very few NIH research grants on dissociative disorders per se, because the kind of people that like doing research tend to be smart enough not to try to do research on this.” And, he added, “when people put in grants, they often don’t fare well in review committees because someone will say, ‘Not only is it a bad design, but the disorder doesn’t even exist, so it’s not worth spending any money on.’”

I asked Spiegel whether he and the psychiatric community had changed the name from multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder to evade some of the controversy surrounding the illness. No, he said. He believes the latter term more accurately describes the illness as “a failure of integration of aspects of identity, memory, and consciousness, not a proliferation of personalities.” In those with DID, some portions of the mind won’t be able to tolerate feeling angry, he said, and “others can’t tolerate feeling vulnerable or sad, so if something bad happens they say, ‘Well, it happened to her. It didn’t happen to me.’” So, as he likes to say, the problem with people like

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