Do you need an anaesthetic?

I went to a professional meeting the other week.
I had not been for some considerable time and was interested in what others were doing in their practices.

An attractive woman gave a presentation on ‘Dissociation’ that she had diagnosed in a man in his 70‘s. ‘Dissociation’ is a process in which, according to the professional cognoscenti, fragments become ‘split off’ from access to ‘normal ‘ consciousness’ which is seen as an integrated whole.

I find myself often being affronted by such notions because the notions are lifted holus bolus from the background and the people whose lives they were originally formulated to explain, and treated as if they had an existence of their own applicable to humankind as a whole, peasants, university professors childcare workers, and army generals. Such processes and notions become to be treated as if they were universal processes of the human condition which, clearly, is not necessarily so.

Now, a force such as gravity might be common to all bodies that posses mass but to imply that dissociation is a process that can be applied to all folk, saviours and sinners alike is stretching reason to breaking point.

In all such discussions I have found there is much excitement and chatter that goes in to distinguishing the ‘dissociative process’ (whatever that is supposed to be) and not much about the persons life as a whole, which to my mind should be the nexus of the whole operation.
Indeed there are a lot of such concepts.
Notions of ‘transference’ and ‘the unconscious’ are a couple I find particularly obnoxious, not because there is anything the matter with them per se, but because they are riveted in place as absolutes, like stations of the cross in the church of psychotherapy and can be used by a devout believer to explain just about anything at all about anyone however problematic or repugnant that might be.
I am reminded of a client who had given up on her mother who was a devout Christian because her mothers answer to anything problematic was prayer, and, if there is anything at all in the church of psychotherapy with the same explanatory power as the Christian Holy Trinity it is Dissociation, Transference, and The Unconscious.

Anyway!

She gave a sensitive presentation for the most part. But then, all of a sudden she began to break into cognitive neuro-speak.

“He looked this way and I knew the left hemisphere had kicked in, and there had been a blockage, an emotional dysregulation of the prefrontal limbic hypothalamic axis that had probably occurred as a child. I realized his fear was the outcome of a damaged attachment that had occurred as the result of a distant capricious, non available mother. “

She went on in this way for some time, interweaving her own observations and thoughts of her clients conduct with observations about his neurophysiology and even her own neurophysiology as it was occurring in the present.

It seems she thought that she had similar access to her own brain as she did his.


I was aghast.

I thought:-

"Don’t bother to examine the nervous system.

Don’t bother with xrays or MRI or fMRI scans of the cerebrum.
We can tell what’s wrong just by talking and watching your eyes!
It’s your brain that‘s been injured!

Your mother gave you a brain injury as a child by damaging your attachment.
But wait!

There is even more!

We can help.

And we don’t even have to study or even conduct an examination of your nervous system.
Nor do we even have to bother with an anaesthetic, an operating theatre, or surgical instruments.

With the latest cutting edge science we can tell what is wrong just by looking and talking about your past.

We can do neurosurgery right here on the couch. We can link brains and my brain can do neurosurgery on yours as we speak."


What I found horrifying was that she absolutely believed every word. Everybody afterwards nodded sagely and gave her a round of applause.

I gave a weak smile but just could not bring myself to ask whether or not she had given him an anaesthetic.