The Minds of Billy Milligan (page 2)

Steve Egner

Frankiespeakin So what's your take?

Lady Lee In your experience, are the bizarre array of talents, languages, and physical skills of Billy Milligan's personalities common to others with MPD/DID?

Steve

Steve Egner

The idea of suddenly knowing a martial art, or several languages, seems unlikely to be a passively learned behaikour.
Truth is stranger than fiction, huh?

Thank you, LT. That's what keeps me thinking.

Steve

Lady Lee

Steve I would be really intested in that article so if you can find the link please post it.

One theory of DID is that each one of us has all aspects of the self. In infancy and very early childhood these aspects of the self are separate (one reason why young children can switch quickly from one emotional state to the next.) As a child matures the different aspects of the self become integrated into one personality. In cases of severe abuse that occurs early in childhood the child does not integrate these aspects. It is an interesting theory.

A few years ago I wrote a paper on Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD): Multiple Selves and Structural Interactionism http://members.shaw.ca/leemarsh/mpd-id.html

The article elaborates a bit more on this concept of the different parts of the self.

Lady Lee

Lady Lee In your experience, are the bizarre array of talents, languages, and physical skills of Billy Milligan's personalities common to others with MPD/DID?

They seem to be common in some people but not in others. I have met personalities that only spoke another language. Some personalities have different artistic abilities. They almost all have different interests.

I just found an article on the net about Milligan's 96 interview. I'm not sure if it was the same one you were referring to.

He makes a few errors in his assessment of DID patients. He assumes all DIDs are like him. They aren't. people present in different ways. The make-up of personalites are different depending on the types of trauma, the age it occurred and the needs of the person as well as the make-up of the family environment.

When I first started working with multiples I read the book and erroneously assumed they were all alike - that one part would not know of the others. I soon found out how wrong I was. While I have seen some similar "types" of personalities in some people they really are so diverse that each person needs to be assessed separately and not classed as a group as Milligan does.

I have worked with 3 people who fit the classic DID patient that we see in movies like Sybil. But I have worked with at least 8 others that have definite parts that take over but don't resemble the classic DID criteria.

Researchers in the field acknowledge there is a wide range of co-consciousness and working together that compromise the DID person. They see that dissociative disorders fall along a continuum with things like daydreaming at one end and DID at the extreme other end.

Milligan needs to do a bit more research and get up-to-date.

Lady Lee

LT

The idea of suddenly knowing a martial art, or several languages, seems unlikely to be a passively learned behaikour.

Some studies have shown that these behaviors often did have some experiental component to them. I recall where some people were spoken to as a young child in another language (as was one of my clients who had a personality who only spoke French - her father /abuser only spoke to her in French) or one who was blind (she had been locked in a dark closet for hours on end) and one who only barked like a dog (she had been treated like a dog and her food dish was on the floor under the table with no utensils).

Some parts actually learn the skill later in life to better perform their "job" (a protector personality will learn self-defense skills)

frankiespeakin

Steve,

I'm still in the learning stage of this,,I would say read alot of Jungs stuff and read what other have written about him.

I think and I say that cautiously,,that these different personalities are just part of the collective unconsciousness which we are all connected to,,and that this man's seemly posessions are cause by what Jung calls "oposites" or this man's refusal to acknowlege certain evil tendancies he has and these denials have lead to these multible personalities that take posession of him.

That is my guess anyway?

frankiespeakin

Here's an interesting site about C Jung:

http://www.acs.appstate.edu/~davisct/nt/Common/Archetypes/jung.html#definition

Satanus

I suppose suggesting that some of these personalities may be free roaming spirits of dead people is going off the deep end. They may have attatched themselves through cracks in the psyche. Maybe milligan invited them, calling for help while he was being abused. Just thoughts.

SS

Lady Lee

frankie

I agree that Jung's theories are very interesting.

My problem with applying it to this particular disorder is that Jung was not studying the traumatized personality. We know today that early trauma alters the way the brain develops and brain chemistry. While there is definite application to the parts of the self that remain separate in the DID patient his theory doesn't address why traumatized chuildren fail to integrate the parts of the self

Lady Lee

lol @ Satanus

Well I suppose there are some people who believe in that theory but I never had to do an exorcism on any one - not would I want to

The Minds of Billy Milligan

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