Internal space

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

I found an excerpt from this book on the idea of "internal space". So it would seem it's not nearly as unheard of as people would like to imply.

Patients may report an internal architecture inhabited by alternate personalities, as in the following example:

All of the parts inside of me have rooms. Every room is different. My room is at the far end and there's more space between my door and the door next to me. Diana's room has walls made out of mahogany. She has three big huge windows and she looks out onto a garden. Um. Julia's room has bunk beds in it and a rug on the floor and teddy bears and dolls and stuff like that in it. Every room is different. (SCID-D Interview, unpublished transcript)

--Me

Comments

Re: I want this book

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Herbert Spiegel is the guy who gave an interview to the New York Times Review of Books in 1998 sneering about how he 'debunked' the Sybil case. This is apparently his entire claim to fame, and he has appeared on a few talk shows as the token skeptic, repeating the same lines. He is one of those people who believes multiplicity is all about self-hypnosis and that all of us are gullible, highly suggestible "Grade Fives" and "fantasy-prone personalities."

I wasn't convinced by his evidence against Sybil, either. Don't get me wrong, the book (and, even more so, the movie) is a sensationalistic exaggeration with many events probably totally invented for dramatic value, but several people who knew the real Shirley Mason said that she was really multiple, and remained so even after her therapy with Connie Wilbur (she said she "invited the others back" because she was lonely without them). Just because Wilbur had a lot of dubious and shady practices doesn't mean she coerced all her clients into multiplicity.

His son David Spiegel, who co-authored the book quoted from, does believe in multiplicity and has published a lot of papers, even though he thinks it's all dissociation and no one really has more than one personality, etc. We saw his office once when we were in therapy with someone at the Stanford clinic, although he was on the phone when we came by.