Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
How much of what you consciously experience in your daily life is influenced by hidden unconscious processes? This mystery is one of the many that continue to confound our understanding of ourselves. We do not know how conscious impulses, desires or motives become unconscious or, conversely, how unconscious impulses, desires or motives suddenly become conscious.
Advances in technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging permit scientists to directly measure brain activity. This ability has led to a revival and reconceptualization of key psychoanalytic concepts, based on the idea of inner forces outside our awareness that influence our behavior. According to psychodynamic theory, unconscious dynamic processes defensively remove anxiety-provoking thoughts and impulses from consciousness in response to our conflicting attitudes. The processes that keep unwanted thoughts from entering consciousness are known as defense mechanisms and include repression, suppression and dissociation.
Suppression is the voluntary form of repression proposed by Sigmund Freud in 1892. It is the conscious process of pushing unwanted, anxiety-provoking thoughts, memories, emotions, fantasies and desires out of awareness. Suppression is more amenable to controlled experiments than is repression, the unconscious process of excluding painful memories, thoughts and impulses from consciousness.
If you are grieving over the death of a loved one or the breakup of a relationship, you may consciously decide to suppress thinking about the situation to get on with your life. Or, in another example, you may have an impulse to tell your boss what you really think about him and his abysmal behavior, but you suppress this thought because you need the job. In both cases, the desire is conscious but is thwarted by the exercise of willpower resulting from a rational decision to avoid the action. The impulse or drive may display itself in other ways, however: you may develop a nervous cough around your boss even though you are not sick. Or a suppressed sexual desire may resurface in a careless phrase or slip of the tongue. In general, “forgotten” thoughts, memories and urges can influence behaviors, conscious thoughts and feelings and can express themselves as symptoms or even as mental illness.
Although some claim that suppression is a psychoanalytical myth with no scientific support, fMRI data suggest otherwise. Psychologist Michael C. Anderson, now at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and his colleagues carried out what they call a “think/no-think” experiment to explore the brain basis of memory suppression. Two dozen volunteers had to memorize 48 word pairs (for example, ordeal-roach or steam-train). Subsequently, while lying in a scanner, subjects were shown the first cue word and had to either recall the second, associated word (called the respond condition) or prevent it from entering consciousness (suppress condition). Actively suppressing the matched word while lying in the scanner had the effect of reducing recall of the word afterward (as compared with the respond condition); this result is not just simple forgetting that occurs with the passage of time.
The imaging data that Anderson and his colleagues collected showed that the volunteers suppressed the words by recruiting parts of the brain involved in “executive control,” namely, areas in the prefrontal cortex, to disengage processing in sectors of the brain important for memory formation and retrieval, in particular the hippocampus. This finding is noteworthy because earlier experiments showed that the amplitude of activity in the hippocampus is proportional to memory recall—the stronger the activity, the higher the likelihood of remembering. A second intriguing observation is that the brain is more active when avoiding recalling a memory than during recall itself. People suppress unwanted memories by exerting willful effort that can be tracked in the nervous system in ways only dreamed of by Freud—who was, after all, a neuroscientist by training.
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Add Comment"But when in her other state, she claims not to recall anything related to her rape." I think it is clear from the rest of the article that she isn't just claiming not to recall, but in fact does -not- recall, because involuntary defensive neurobiological processes are blocking recall. It's not as though the room where these memories are stored has the lights off, but as far as she is aware (in this state) this room doesn't exist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisArticle says: "Dissociation may be the result of a disruption of certain connections among brain regions. Hence, dissociative disorders may result from the failure of coordination or integration of the distributed neural circuitry that represents subjective self-awareness."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisComment: It may be added, just for completion, that not merely the 'integration of the distributed neural circuitry' but also the 'architecture' of the neural circuitry as well as the slow electrical activity of the glial cells (e.g. astrocytes) etc. will have an influence as recent research papers indicate.
This is Soooo widespread, that it isn't funny.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, I am terribly sick of putting up with it.
People really need to recognize it; and any thing that will further that end such as research, should be used in force.
This is Soooo widespread, that it isn't funny.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, I am terribly sick of putting up with it.
People really need to recognize it; and any thing that will further that end such as research, should be used in force.
This is Soooo widespread, that it isn't funny.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, I am terribly sick of putting up with it.
People really need to recognize it; and any thing that will further that end such as research, should be used in force.
I work in a prison with the mental health population. I have seem so many cases of women who during a "disassociated" mental state, committed a crime. They do not have memory of it. They have no reason to lie as they are in prison for life. We truly must work to understand the brain, mind and mental states so that we may help this problem. These women are living desperate lives...because of actions, they don't even remember.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree with technophile50's comment and gave light to a better understanding. It's true, for the people the room just does not exist at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think, it's important, according to the last comment of debralovesgospelmusic, that we remember the suffering experienced by someone with DID, as the personality moves here and there, rooted in a fragmentation...Expose the benefits of the talking cure in some patients would be interesting too.
I discovered information at The Veteran's Hospital in Durham, NC which stated that dissociation was recognized by writers. Of course it is, they have a piece or your mind. I have experienced dissociation many times and not just because I endured some trauma. I have had problems locating things in my apartment because my neighbor has jacked me up into another state, maybe psychologists call it a paradigm shift, I don't know. For three years I completely lost memories of repeated sexual abuses I endured during my military enlistment. I even acted some of them out not realizing they were actually repressed memories of my assaults. It wasn't until 1989 that I began to put things together. Even bits of the event were put into a film.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, do we really dissociate or are we just having our memories ripped off?
"I even acted some"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCorrection - acted out