Multiplicity

My abnormal psychology teacher, Professor Kramer, has earned my eternal adoration, and he has no idea. We were talking about Dissociative Disorders in class yesterday. I have taken three psychology classes so far, and there's a pattern with Dissociative Disorders. The first class, Psych 101, had Professor Beers, who was awesome and said, "I've never seen what I believed to be a real case of DID, so I'm skeptical." The second, Psych 200, has Professor Fantl, who insisted that DID is not real. (Why? Because there's no chemical cause.) He says that the "repressed memories" are actually implanted by therapists, and that DID is also caused by a therapist saying that the patient has it. (Explain to me, then, Professor, how one of my insiders told my therapist about it, and not the other way around.) I'm still in that class, and it is highly annoying to know that he doesn't believe in it. (He, of course, has no idea that I have it.) And, of course, there was Brielle, the CSL teacher I made the mistake of confiding in, who insisted that I just thought I had DID. Grrr.

Abnormal Psych class was the third time Dissociative Disorders have been gone over in class. When Professor Kramer got to DID, he did not deny it existed. He did not say that therapists implanted it into the patient's head. He said there is controversy about it, but he went on to explain that this is because no two cases of DID are exactly alike, and it bothers the psychiatrists that some people are coconscious and others are not, etc. He also said that integration was rare, and did not have to be the end result, which surprised me, because all you ever hear about in the psychiatric literature is that integration is the end goal. He did not treat the discussion like it was a waste of time, or foolish, or that it didn't exist. For the first time ever, I have met a professor who believes in DID. I was so happy that I left the room practically dancing on a cloud, I swear. What sucked was that I had no one to share it with, as none of them would have understood how wonderful it feels.

There was a girl in the class who has a friend that was diagnosed with DID last week. She discussed him, saying that one day chocolate ice cream was his favorite thing in the world, and the next he would, seriously, say, "Have you ever seen me eat chocolate ice cream?!" Professor Kramer took this example, discussing how each personality differs. He did not laugh at it or make it sound like less than it was. He talked about how hard it was, not only for the people around a person with DID, but for the person him or herself. He understood.

Professor Kramer has no idea that he just made this entire horrible semester worthwhile for me.