another book that i enjoy!

In seminar today we talked about multiple personality disorder, or which is now renamed as “dissociative identity disorder” and that really sparked my interest because I love psychology and studying it and learning how so many cases diagnosed under the same case can vary tremendously.

I find it amazing how women and men alike can have different identities that range from ages, sexes and even ethnicities…

What interested me a lot from lecture is when it is mentioned that Locke says:

“For, since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self…in this alone consists personal identity, i.e., the sameness of a rational being; and as far back as this consciousness can be extended backwards to a past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.” (Licke, pg. 39)

You are what you remember. If you don’t remember, it wasn’t you.

I find this extremely interesting because as we touched on in lecture for a little bit, does this include when you are drunk? Or memories from when you are little? Or even forgetting what someone has said or a promise you had told someone from a long time ago…

Personally, I am a super forgetful person  when it comes to memories. When my cousins or siblings bring up a memory about me, it is rare of me to actually remember it.

So does that mean that mean that it was someone else?? Or…??

I like the whole discussion about memories and how “We constitute our souls by making up our lives, that is by weaving stories about our past by what we call memories.” (Freud)

Is Freud suggesting that our memories are made up? That we “weave” or “make up” stories about our past to make a “memory” worth recalling in order to make up who we are today?

I also find the “looping” effects very interesting and in fact very accurate. I find that, personally, I act differently around different people not because I am two faced or anything, but because they perceive me in different ways and that I have to live up to their expectation of who I am. First impressions usually stick pretty well to people, so in a lot of ways, I find that people live up to a label that people have labelled them at first UNLESS they want to show the other person that they are WRONG. I act differently in front of my family, my super close friends, my new friends, and the people I work with because they all have labelled me differently and I don’t want to prove them wrong  because that may cause a strain in our relationship…or because that is the personality that comes out when I am with a different type of people. Not sure if I made sense there but yeah… It depends how your personality clicks with different people that causes you to act differently?

Anyway, I feel like as a society, we make up people a lot  especially with stereotyping. If you dress or look a certain way or are interested in eating or behaving a certain way, you are labelled accordingly. A label that is made to “fit your personality”…to fit your description. And the labelling and description changes regularly. I feel like that is why so many people have so many identity crisis’ and don’t really know who they are.

Anyway, I feel like my blog post is getting really long and boring for you to read so I will probably end here.

Thanks for reading!

Jocelyn