If there is a strong suggestion that there is no essential self to be found in the human brain, then what would you say are the determining characteristics that define us as “unique individuals”? If in fact we are?
(Page 8) Watkins talks about ego states and multiple personality disorder (MPD), his study findings bring to mind the quote by Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage”. An individual has many ego states to go with particular situations encountered daily, be it at work, with family, hanging out with friends etc. Watkins ruminates an of ego states being large or small of which can be prior experience or present, representative of “cognitive structural systems that are covert that are organized segments of personality, often similar in content to true overt multiple disorders”.
While reading this piece I thought of the many ways that MPD can have an adverse effect where crime is concerned. MPD is more prominent in people who commit suicide and pedophiliac’s. Foucault immensely significant in modeling understandings and observations of power, moving away from the scrutiny of actors who use power as a mechanism of coercion, and away from the inconspicuous organizations in which those actors operate, to saying that ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and “regimes of truth”, power, for Foucault is what makes us what we are. Do people in a position of power have a larger capacity MPD? And if so are what makes them able to control that innervation? And how does the feeling of loneliness and depression intensify MPD to the point of suicide?