What's something you've been enjoying thinking about recently? Could be DID/system-related or not, whatever sounds fun to answer.
I made a post about it before but was talking to wife about it again last night. The fact that in the 18th and 19th century the study of dissociation, or auto-hypnotic ability, was this huge broad category of medicine, psychology, physics, and spirituality that branched off and began to specialise. Mesmerism, hysteria, Spiritism, and Psychoanalysis were all knocking on different doors to the same house and in Europe, Freud won with his bullshit fantasy model, but in Brazil, Spiritism really took hold.
To the point where there are Spiritist Hospitals that along with psychiatrists and nurses employ mediums that tell you if your mental health ailment could be due to spirits hanging around from past life trauma and help you to release them. Like the "symptoms are not explained by cultural practices such as mediumship" in the DSM for psychiatric disorders is there in part because mediumship is so prevalent and largely harmless (if not actually beneficial) in Brazilian culture.
Like, if you wanna get all purely scientific then you can explain it as traumatic events getting warped by the autohypnotic brain into something that seems like it happened to someone else in a past life which makes it easier to process in a similar way to how IFS asks you to distance yourself from your parts so that you may be your most helpful self in resolving internal conflict, but I do wonder what the world would have been like if Freud hadn't abandoned dissociation as a model and instead developed it to incorporate the strange way in which traumatic memory can present in some patients.
Would we have have explored the dissociative ability of the healthy mind? Understood how hysteria and the placebo effect really worked? Discovered endogenic plurality as a genuine psychological model? Or even developed more accepted spiritual models of Psychotherapy? I mean like half of my therapists have had spiritual beliefs but it's always discussed in a hushed tone like "oh you're a friend of Glenda Goodwitch too?" We know that culture can have a strong influence on how a mental health condition can present, and I don't think it's very helpful to try and view those presentations through a western lens, they're their own thing, but we can imagine how our own lens might have been different.
I dunno, I guess I just wonder if we're denying some core aspect of human nature when we try to be completely scientific sans spiritual, if we have been wholly rejecting techniques that have worked for centuries or millennia on the basis of being spiritual instead of being curious about their real world practical uses.
What was that scene in Contact? Where Matthew Mchorbalorba asked Jodie Forrester if she believed in God because 96% of the population believes in one God or another so it would be very misrepresentative to send an atheist to go meet sky daddy