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Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience: Narrative, Metaphor and Mechanism

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Abstract

Approaches to trance and possession in anthropology have tended to use outmoded models drawn from psychodynamic theory or treated such dissociative phenomena as purely discursive processes of attributing action and experience to agencies other than the self. Within psychology and psychiatry, understanding of dissociative disorders has been hindered by polemical “either/or” arguments: either dissociative disorders are real, spontaneous alterations in brain states that reflect basic neurobiological phenomena, or they are imaginary, socially constructed role performances dictated by interpersonal expectations, power dynamics and cultural scripts. In this paper, we outline an approach to dissociative phenomena, including trance, possession and spiritual and healing practices, that integrates the neuropsychological notions of underlying mechanism with sociocultural processes of the narrative construction and social presentation of the self. This integrative model, grounded in a cultural neuroscience, can advance ethnographic studies of dissociation and inform clinical approaches to dissociation through careful consideration of the impact of social context.

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Notes

  1. For a thorough discussion of the relationship between hypnosis and dissociation see: Hilgard 1986; Kirsch and Lynn 1998; Spiegel 1988; Spiegel and Cardena 1991; Butler 1996 among others.

  2. Differences in cardiovascular arousal were not found. However, unlike other studies that measured cardiovascular arousal during induced recall of traumatic events, this study took place immediately following the initial trauma, and did not ask participants to relive the event. Since cardiovascular responses to stress are generally acute, they may no longer have been present by the time measurements were taken (Delahanty et al. 2003).

  3. It should be noted that some evidence suggests script-driven arousal may be less closely related to actual trauma exposure than to other personality characteristics of the individual or the intensity of their “believed-in imaginings” (e.g., McNalley and Clancy 2005).

  4. Conversion symptoms, involving loss of sensory or motor functions due to psychological processes, have been viewed as examples of ‘somatoform dissociation’ (Nijenhuis 2004).

  5. This focusing may follow the classic ‘inverted U’ function with an optimal level of arousal appropriate for coping under situations of less-than-catastrophic stress. Lower level processing follows the basic pattern of organization in terms of fight or flight, or freezing, a strategy that allows animals to attempt to evade a potential predator by remaining motionless or ‘playing dead’ (Porges 2003; Kalin et al. 2005).

  6. This case is drawn from the work of the Cultural Consultation Service, based at the Sir Mortimer B. Davis–Jewish General Hospital in Montreal (Kirmayer et al., 2003) and is part of an ongoing research project on the place of culture in psychiatric theory and practice approved by the hospital research ethics review board. Details have been changed to protect patient anonymity.

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Acknowledgements

Preparation of this article was supported by a postdoctoral award to R. Seligman from the CIHR Strategic Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services (L. Kirmayer, PI) [STS-63312], and by a Senior Investigator Award, to L. Kirmayer, [MSS 55123].

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Correspondence to Rebecca Seligman.

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Seligman, R., Kirmayer, L.J. Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience: Narrative, Metaphor and Mechanism. Cult Med Psychiatry 32, 31–64 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-007-9077-8

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