Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

A Flight From Reality

For some individuals, their self-story is unacceptable – it’s too much to cope with so they seek to create a new self or at least lose the one they had. Take the case of Gene Saunders who had been experiencing considerable difficulties in his home life and had a huge argument with his eighteen-year-old son who called him a failure. Gene simply packed his bags and ended up 200 miles away in another town where he became ‘Burt’ – a short-order cook who had no memory of his past existence. This kind of memory loss is known as a dissociative ‘fugue’ state, from the Latin for ‘flight’.

‘Fugue states’ typically emerge in early adulthood and not very often after fifty years of age. They usually occur rapidly but also end abruptly and are thought to be a reaction to stress where the individual ceases to acknowledge who he or she is.

For example, Jeffrey Alan Ingram turned up at a television news conference in Denver in 2006 looking for his identity. All he knew was, that his name was ‘Al’. He asked the viewing audience, ‘If anybody recognizes me, knows who I am, please let somebody know.’ It turns out that he had been on his way to visit a friend dying of cancer but on arrival in Denver had gone into a fugue state. Eventually, his fiancée’s brother, who had watched the news, recognized Jeffrey who lived over a thousand miles away in Olympia, Washington. His own mother explained that this was not the first time Jeffrey had entered a fugue state, as a similar disappearance occurred in 1995 on trip to the grocery. He turned up nine months later with no knowledge of who he was.

Fugue states are just one of a number of conditions known as dissociative identity disorders (DIDs), formerly called multiple personalities, in which alternative selves or ‘alter egos’ are present. The first popular fictionalized account of DID was The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson but the idea that an individual can split into different personalities is a recurrent theme in modern culture. A notable recent example is Ed Norton’s alter ego, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt in Fight Club (1999). Just like Jekyll and Hyde, we watch as the anarchic character of Tyler Durden increasingly drags Norton’s upstanding character into criminality only to discover at the end of the movie that Durden is in fact his own alter ego.

The notion that we all have a good and bad side has become accepted wisdom although few of us would regard the different characterizations as different individuals. And yet this is exactly the claim with DID to the extent that it has been used in criminal cases as a defence plea. The first such case was in 1978, when twenty-three-year-old Billy Milligan was arrested following an anonymous tip-off for the rape of four college women on Ohio State campus the previous year. At first he seemed like the typical drifter: troubled childhood, abused by his stepfather, constantly in trouble. That changed after a psychological examination indicated he had at least ten different personalities, two of which were women. In fact, it was one of the women, Adelena, a nineteen-year-old lesbian, who claimed responsibility for the rapes. Another of Milligan’s personalities was the fearful and abused child, David, nine, who it was claimed made the telephone call turning in Billy. According to Time , investigators found the police telephone number on a pad next to Milligan’s phone. 35Milligan ended up being sentenced to ten years in secure psychiatric hospitals and was released in 1988.

Another famous case in which DID was used as defence was that of the Hillside Strangler, Ken Bianchi, who claimed that an alter ego, Steven Walker, had been responsible. However, this defence fell apart when a dubious psychiatrist suggested that most cases of DID had at least two alter egos. In the following hypnosis session, Bianchi conveniently manifested another alter ego, Billy. When police investigated further, they found out that Steven Walker had been a real psychology student whose identity Bianchi had tried to steal in order to commit fraud. Bianchi is currently serving a life sentence.

Although DIDs are recognized in the major psychiatric manuals, they are still considered highly controversial. The first cases, reported in the nineteenth century, are linked to the psychoanalytic movement. Not much was heard of DID again until 1957 with the release of a popular movie, The Three Faces of Eve , about a woman with DID, followed by a similar movie, Sybil , in 1976. Prior to the 1970s there had been very few cases of DID but suddenly the incidence exploded, which led many to question whether it was a real medical disorder or a fashionable fad. Also DID was primarily a North American problem with few cases reported in other countries. Those that were reported in North America also tended to come from the same specialists, which cast doubt on the source of the disorder.

Just like hypnosis and the actions of student prison guards, DID has been dismissed as an extremely elaborated example of role-playing in which a belief about dissociated states is promoted by society and supported by a few influential experts, namely the psychiatrists who are experts in the field. That is not to say that individuals with DID are deliberately faking their symptoms. Support for this comes from studies that reveal that different brain states can be manifest when the individual is in one of their alternative personalities. For example, brain-imaging studies have shown that patients with DID can manifest different patterns of brain activity when in different characters. 36In one patient the memory region seemed to shut down during the transition between one personality to another as if a different set of memories was being retrieved.

The evidence from brain-imaging studies is less convincing if one considers that we can alter our brain activity by simply thinking about different things. If I think about a time when I was upset or angry, my brain activity will change. However, one dramatic case in which the brain science backs up the claim of true separated selves comes from a recent German DID patient who after fifteen years of being diagnosed as blind gradually regained sight after undergoing psychotherapy. 37At first, only a few of the personalities regained vision, whereas others remained blind. Was the patient faking? Not according to the electrical measurements recorded from her visual cortex – one of the early sensory processing areas in the brain. When her personality was sighted, electrical activity was normal over this region but absent when the patient was experiencing a blind personality. Somehow, the parts of her brain that were generating the multiple personalities were also switching on and off the activity of the visual part of the brain. This finding is beyond belief – literally. To believe that you are blind is one thing, but to switch off parts of the lower level functioning sensory processing areas of your own brain is astounding. Somehow, the network of connections that operates further upstream in the brain to deal with complex concepts, such as the self and personality, can control earlier basic processing input relay stations downstream in the brain.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

If we are not brain-damaged or suffering from DID, to what extent can we experience a different self? In modern Westernized cultures, some people appear to lead complicated, multifaceted lives juggling private and public personas, whereas others lead a more simple existence such as subsistence farming in rural villages. The selves we present to the world must be a reflection of the different circles we inhabit. Sometimes those worlds can clash, which occurs when we discover a different side to individuals whom we thought we knew so well – the unfaithful spouse, the paedophile priest, the sadistic nurse or the corrupt politician. These are the contradictions in the self that we see so often in others. Public figures seem to constantly fall from grace by engaging in activities that seem so out of character. Is there anything that the science of the self illusion can do to cast some light on these transgressions?