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babyfacedoldsoul's review
5.0
A great book for anyone looking to learn more about dissociation and dissociative identity disorder from a nonjudgemental and informative lens.
zachbrumaire's review
4.0
In The Myth of Sanity, Martha Stout seeks to destabilize the dichotomy between the normal, unitary self and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Beginning with a careful and highly compelling taxonomy of trauma, she guides the reader through various manifestations of the prevalent, but (/and thus) overlooked phenomena of disassociation. Disassociation can range from forgetting oneself while viewing a movie, to a sense of distance or fog between one and reality, to the outright absence of one's own self. Such experiences, though uncanny, play important psychological roles, especially with respect to situations when the subject is tasked with responding too experiences too overwhelming to process or contradictory to interpret. DID, she explains, merely differs in degree and context-appropriateness.
The implications that a self-dividing, self-relating, dialectically-organized personality is not a clinical aberration, but in certain senses, the norm, poses not only a philosophical challenge to the prevailing metaphysical models, but also to the political and spiritual edifices which depend on an atomized, internally coherent, always already-self interested default political subject.
Stout's insights, for example, might be used to build a richer, deeper solidarity across lines of nero(a)typicality; to challenge prevailing legal norms around culpability, motivation, and rehabilitative justice; to make us rethink at the deepest levels what it means to have a relationship with another (or, for that matter, with oneself) given that neither party can be fully located in a fixed social or metaphysical space. If we ourselves are composed of intra-personal relationships subject to (generated by?) psychological flux, how much more deeply must our inter-personal relations be organized around principles of dynamism.
That said, Stout's text is not without substantive flaws. Though she occasionally makes reference to vaguely monolithic (systemic?) injustices which produce much contemporary trauma, her work reads oddly apolitical. For a text devoted to a disorder highly correlated with sexual assault, there is shockingly little discussion of patriarchy and no discussion of queerness. Likewise, while the necessity of employment is occasionally noted, but the ways in which labour conditions and material scarcity shape and produce mental illness is strangely flattened. Ditto the total silence on critical race and anti-colonial theory. We are left with the question: in a text on the splitting of the self, what can we make of the absence of DuBois, of Fanon?
(But perhaps we should be grateful. After all, the one example of non-Western example of knowledge production to receive a lengthy description--a three page discussion of Buddhist meditation theory--reads as uncritical medical eclecticism at best. Such loosely related culturally appropriative tangents do not a comprehensive analysis make.)
As such, this text confines itself to an uncomfortable space of trading in powerful, even revolutionary politically implicature while silencing itself on the areas of life at which it might have a broader impact. By all means, if you are interested in the politics of subject-conception/subject-formation, take some time with this text, but pay at least as much attention to its omissions as you do to its case studies and analysis.
The implications that a self-dividing, self-relating, dialectically-organized personality is not a clinical aberration, but in certain senses, the norm, poses not only a philosophical challenge to the prevailing metaphysical models, but also to the political and spiritual edifices which depend on an atomized, internally coherent, always already-self interested default political subject.
Stout's insights, for example, might be used to build a richer, deeper solidarity across lines of nero(a)typicality; to challenge prevailing legal norms around culpability, motivation, and rehabilitative justice; to make us rethink at the deepest levels what it means to have a relationship with another (or, for that matter, with oneself) given that neither party can be fully located in a fixed social or metaphysical space. If we ourselves are composed of intra-personal relationships subject to (generated by?) psychological flux, how much more deeply must our inter-personal relations be organized around principles of dynamism.
That said, Stout's text is not without substantive flaws. Though she occasionally makes reference to vaguely monolithic (systemic?) injustices which produce much contemporary trauma, her work reads oddly apolitical. For a text devoted to a disorder highly correlated with sexual assault, there is shockingly little discussion of patriarchy and no discussion of queerness. Likewise, while the necessity of employment is occasionally noted, but the ways in which labour conditions and material scarcity shape and produce mental illness is strangely flattened. Ditto the total silence on critical race and anti-colonial theory. We are left with the question: in a text on the splitting of the self, what can we make of the absence of DuBois, of Fanon?
(But perhaps we should be grateful. After all, the one example of non-Western example of knowledge production to receive a lengthy description--a three page discussion of Buddhist meditation theory--reads as uncritical medical eclecticism at best. Such loosely related culturally appropriative tangents do not a comprehensive analysis make.)
As such, this text confines itself to an uncomfortable space of trading in powerful, even revolutionary politically implicature while silencing itself on the areas of life at which it might have a broader impact. By all means, if you are interested in the politics of subject-conception/subject-formation, take some time with this text, but pay at least as much attention to its omissions as you do to its case studies and analysis.
islomar's review
4.0
Great reading.
Very recommended for anyone interested in mental health, covering specially the trauma and disassociate states.
Very recommended for anyone interested in mental health, covering specially the trauma and disassociate states.
thaydra's review
3.0
I read this book mostly during breaks while at work. An interesting look into the mind of divided individuals, and touches on how we all are survivors of mental trauma of some sort.
impayton_irl's review
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
A must read. The author writes of her clients from whom she has learned immense amounts about dissociative identities from lovingly, and that very writing style was what made me fall in love with the book. Extremely impressed with the maturity and humanity within this.
zach_brumaire's review
4.0
In The Myth of Sanity, Martha Stout seeks to destabilize the dichotomy between the normal, unitary self and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Beginning with a careful and highly compelling taxonomy of trauma, she guides the reader through various manifestations of the prevalent, but (/and thus) overlooked phenomena of disassociation. Disassociation can range from forgetting oneself while viewing a movie, to a sense of distance or fog between one and reality, to the outright absence of one's own self. Such experiences, though uncanny, play important psychological roles, especially with respect to situations when the subject is tasked with responding too experiences too overwhelming to process or contradictory to interpret. DID, she explains, merely differs in degree and context-appropriateness.
The implications that a self-dividing, self-relating, dialectically-organized personality is not a clinical aberration, but in certain senses, the norm, poses not only a philosophical challenge to the prevailing metaphysical models, but also to the political and spiritual edifices which depend on an atomized, internally coherent, always already-self interested default political subject.
Stout's insights, for example, might be used to build a richer, deeper solidarity across lines of nero(a)typicality; to challenge prevailing legal norms around culpability, motivation, and rehabilitative justice; to make us rethink at the deepest levels what it means to have a relationship with another (or, for that matter, with oneself) given that neither party can be fully located in a fixed social or metaphysical space. If we ourselves are composed of intra-personal relationships subject to (generated by?) psychological flux, how much more deeply must our inter-personal relations be organized around principles of dynamism.
That said, Stout's text is not without substantive flaws. Though she occasionally makes reference to vaguely monolithic (systemic?) injustices which produce much contemporary trauma, her work reads oddly apolitical. For a text devoted to a disorder highly correlated with sexual assault, there is shockingly little discussion of patriarchy and no discussion of queerness. Likewise, while the necessity of employment is occasionally noted, but the ways in which labour conditions and material scarcity shape and produce mental illness is strangely flattened. Ditto the total silence on critical race and anti-colonial theory. We are left with the question: in a text on the splitting of the self, what can we make of the absence of DuBois, of Fanon?
(But perhaps we should be grateful. After all, the one example of non-Western example of knowledge production to receive a lengthy description--a three page discussion of Buddhist meditation theory--reads as uncritical medical eclecticism at best. Such loosely related culturally appropriative tangents do not a comprehensive analysis make.)
As such, this text confines itself to an uncomfortable space of trading in powerful, even revolutionary politically implicature while silencing itself on the areas of life at which it might have a broader impact. By all means, if you are interested in the politics of subject-conception/subject-formation, take some time with this text, but pay at least as much attention to its omissions as you do to its case studies and analysis.
The implications that a self-dividing, self-relating, dialectically-organized personality is not a clinical aberration, but in certain senses, the norm, poses not only a philosophical challenge to the prevailing metaphysical models, but also to the political and spiritual edifices which depend on an atomized, internally coherent, always already-self interested default political subject.
Stout's insights, for example, might be used to build a richer, deeper solidarity across lines of nero(a)typicality; to challenge prevailing legal norms around culpability, motivation, and rehabilitative justice; to make us rethink at the deepest levels what it means to have a relationship with another (or, for that matter, with oneself) given that neither party can be fully located in a fixed social or metaphysical space. If we ourselves are composed of intra-personal relationships subject to (generated by?) psychological flux, how much more deeply must our inter-personal relations be organized around principles of dynamism.
That said, Stout's text is not without substantive flaws. Though she occasionally makes reference to vaguely monolithic (systemic?) injustices which produce much contemporary trauma, her work reads oddly apolitical. For a text devoted to a disorder highly correlated with sexual assault, there is shockingly little discussion of patriarchy and no discussion of queerness. Likewise, while the necessity of employment is occasionally noted, but the ways in which labour conditions and material scarcity shape and produce mental illness is strangely flattened. Ditto the total silence on critical race and anti-colonial theory. We are left with the question: in a text on the splitting of the self, what can we make of the absence of DuBois, of Fanon?
(But perhaps we should be grateful. After all, the one example of non-Western example of knowledge production to receive a lengthy description--a three page discussion of Buddhist meditation theory--reads as uncritical medical eclecticism at best. Such loosely related culturally appropriative tangents do not a comprehensive analysis make.)
As such, this text confines itself to an uncomfortable space of trading in powerful, even revolutionary politically implicature while silencing itself on the areas of life at which it might have a broader impact. By all means, if you are interested in the politics of subject-conception/subject-formation, take some time with this text, but pay at least as much attention to its omissions as you do to its case studies and analysis.
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