From: Martin Ling (martin@nodezero.org.uk)
Date: Tue Jun 13 2000 - 16:20:04 MDT
On Mon, Jun 12, 2000 at 10:34:41AM -0500, altamira wrote:
>
> I posted a message including a question I was pondering: Are there people
> who've undergone such radical personality changes that they wouldn't enjoy
> being with their former selves?
>
> Someone posted the response that such people would be known as
> schizophrenics. (Sorry, I deleted the earlier posts, so I can't reproduce
> them here).
>
> [snip]
>
> What if a person had undergone such a radical personality shift that he wold
> loathe his former self and wish to forget the former self as though it(he?)
> had never existed? Was the former self a necessary precursor of the present
> self? If so, could loathing the former self be considered the same sort of
> unpleasant emotion as loathing one's present self? If it were possible to
> destroy or alter a portion of the brain so as to entirely eliminate the
> memory of the earlier self, would this change the present personality of the
> person?
In extreme cases this could (and has) resulted in dissociative identity
disorder (aka multiple personalities disorder). Please not that this is
*not* what schizophrenia is (although that is a common misconception).
These cases tend to develop in childhood, especially following abuse.
Martin
-- -----[ Martin J. Ling ]-----[ http://www.nodezero.org.uk ]-----
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