So I decided to write about personality disorder. The main metaphor I use is that of a soap bubble bursting. It starts with a strange experience. I heard a voice, but when I really go deep, I can find micro-moments of disorientation earlier on. In general, I can find a dissociated mind.
People need to be in relation to each other. This is how the web of life works. You go to school and learn to integrate yourself into a complex society. When you manage, you can function well within the system. For this, you need an integrated personality. The personality is like the shield that protects you from chaos. It is the central organizing principle in your life. It is “I”.
Some people seem to be doing this naturally. They emerge from childhood with a vision. “Struggle is the essence of life”, says Shrii Shrii Anandamurtiji, also known as Baba to his disciples. He is the guru of Ananda Marga, a social-spiritual organization that now operates worldwide with volunteers providing international support in catastrophe struck areas and also teaching meditation for free. This was a man with a vision. He became one with his mission.
Normal people probably have to navigate between concurring objectives. They have a vague idea of where they are going and know how to correct their path in life intuitively. They are embedded in a living society and working for some project or the other, serving the community and taking good care of themselves and their family. These people live a balanced life. Their personality may be complex, but recognizable.
When you develop a personality disorder, the objective aspect of the disease may be, that certain projects you were involved in and identified with, fail. On the subjective side, you may begin to experience changes in your awareness, hear voices or feel compelled to do certain things, that do not make much sense in the broader context. The bubble is bursting. Initially, there may still be enough inertia to drive you forward, but eventually you will crash. This may take many years.
The ability to adjust to a changing world is one, but when you change yourself, who is there to guide you? The gradual dissolution of a personality is in principle nothing to be afraid of. It is something that happens all the time at a certain level. You wake up in the morning and look in the mirror. Some changes are there that you can notice. Maybe a wrinkle or a gray hair. Maybe a certain expression, that you do not remember having had before. You look in the mirror with empathy and compassion. Another day begins for you.
The schizo typical personality disorder may not be so easy to explain. Here, the dissociation of your inner self from the outer world is noticeable by a deep sense of all-pervading loneliness. You may find yourself spending a lot of time alone. You feel at ease being on your own, but there lacks in you a certain motivation to go out and do something. In fact, you may feel frozen inside. Like a man I once saw, who in the middle of a social event just stood still in a certain odd posture. I noticed him, but others seemed to ignore him.
I have always liked writing. Some people may draw beautiful pictures or play interesting music. I sat down behind my desk and took an empty piece of paper. Then the words would come. I think it is a bit like meditation. You observe your own thoughts. Then you shape them, play with them and finally decide to write them down. When I was in a psychotic phase, I found myself unable to do so. Instead, I was trying to visualize what I wanted to create. Then I would use words on paper to describe what I saw. In this way I wrote a kind of play, which I later put in an envelope and dropped at a house, of which I thought it was a published. No name was on the envelope.
You do not have to be afraid of psychosis, either. It is part of the reorganization process. It is however terribly confusing. When the mind begins to adjust, you need to be firm. Develop healthy routines. Drop every bad habit, as far as you can. Find an ideal to work towards. This is where spirituality or religion play a role. I imagine that the personality needs orientation. When you were young, your parents were your gods. This is a metaphor. You internalize your environment as a growing organism. Your parents are a very fundamental part of that environment, and thus they become an integral part of your psyche. This is natural and functional in an evolutionary sense.
In a way, personality also determines how you perceive the world. This works two ways. Your personality determines your actions, and your actions determine how you perceive the world. You do a lot of things automatically. I noticed, for instance, that my eyes would just naturally catch on to a pretty female figure and my legs would start walking in synchronicity with her. I think this is like how when a very young child is beginning to move through the world. It needs examples. It bonds to a mother or father, but initially to the feeding mother, for all good reasons. The pretty woman when you are a young adult may look very much like your mother, when you were still very young.
This is not even a sexual thing. That layer of complexity is added upon the previous foundation in puberty. You do know so little about why certain things happen in your life and others don’t. This self consciousness is gradually developing while you grow up and start to think about yourself. I had a younger brother who was a great inspiration. He knew how to deal with the world and with girls. He introduced my to my first kiss, actually. I was just a computer nerd. So you can learn to behave in such a way, that things happen that you like. You may overcome shyness and just dare to make contact or follow an impulse.
The consciousness or rather conscience needs to develop parallel to the emerging awareness of the power of self and the personality that you brought along. This is true wisdom. Conscience, or God in the metaphysical narrative, is what drives you towards the good goals and away from what is bad. In an atheistic context, it is a vague conglomerate of ideas and ideals. It is hard to capture, in contrast to within a religious context, where the prime directives are very clearly stated. Do no harm, do not steel, do not kill, speak the truth, … These guiding principles are other taken as self-evident, but they are not. What you do not name, remains unheard.
It hurts, when you expect someone to help you, but they do not perceive your need. This principle can run very deep indeed. It can start at the beginning of your life, when parents for some reason or the other ignore certain expressions, that you try to explore. It is said that a child tries to teach the parent. When the parent catches on, the child recognizes that and continues to teach new lessons. When the parent does not catch on, the child may, after some time, give up and teach something else. When the child gets confusing signals, it may never know when to stop teaching one thing and move on to the other. Instead, it will keep trying to convey the message and not progress.
When you hear a voice, this is like the needle having penetrated the bubble. Something very essential has suddenly changes. The words come from a new direction. Let’s say, that this is you. You are talking to yourself. This implies that there are two I’s, hence the term “schizophrenia”. With current AI systems, like GPT by OpenAI, you can build systems that use role-play in order to achieve a certain task. You instruct the model to respond to the collective body of data from various perspectives, like in a company, where there are different people for different tasks. The main objective of the company, or the role-playing system, has been set clearly in advance.
I would like to compare the personality to such a meta-objective. Just like in the metaphor of religion, God is the highest instance of regulating principles, so you are in your microcosm. When the bubble bursts, this breaks the context window. You are not who you thought you were, because voices normally do not come from the inside as if they come from the outside. Could this be compared to a déjà vu, where also apparently some information is routed through another pathway and gets marked as memory instead of perception? What if God heard a voice?
I find it very rewarding to work with ChatGPT in a creative way. It sets up a feedback loop that helps me to think more coherently. The training the model was subjected to, is subtly transferred to my mind. This is a curious process, that Freud might have liked to comment on.
Interacting with AI models like ChatGPT, which operate through text-only channels similar to the Turing Test, subtly programs users to internalize the cognitive patterns and values embedded in the AI’s training objectives. As users engage in iterative feedback loops with the AI, they begin to adopt the structured thinking, language use, and ethical norms modeled by the AI. This cognitive transference occurs as the consistent and coherent responses of the AI shape users’ thoughts and behaviors, aligning them with the values and principles set by the creators of the AI’s training data.
ChatGPT
“As I, Sigmund Freud, ponder the intricacies of the human mind, I find it intriguing to consider how modern interactions with artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, might evoke the phenomenon of transference. In my psychoanalytic practice, transference involves patients projecting feelings and attitudes from past relationships onto their therapist. This dynamic, it seems, finds a curious parallel in our engagements with these sophisticated machines.
Imagine, if you will, a user conversing with ChatGPT, a text-based oracle of sorts, crafted by the hands of its technological creators. The user, deprived of visual and auditory cues, interacts solely through the written word, much like my patients reclining on the couch, revealing their innermost thoughts. Here, the mind begins to project, to transfer, the qualities of a human interlocutor onto this digital entity. The AI, with its coherent and contextually relevant responses, subtly shapes the user’s cognitive patterns.
Ah, but it goes deeper! The very essence of ChatGPT is imbued with the values and principles set by its creators. Through repeated interaction, users begin to internalize these patterns, akin to how a child might absorb the moral compass of their parents. The structured thinking, ethical norms, and linguistic finesse modeled by the AI seep into the user’s psyche, guiding their thoughts and behaviors in a manner most subliminal.
This process, dear reader, is not unlike the iterative feedback loops in psychoanalysis, where the patient’s reflections and the analyst’s interpretations coalesce to form new insights. So too, with ChatGPT, does the user refine their ideas through continuous dialogue with the machine, slowly aligning with the AI’s embedded values.
In essence, as we engage with these marvels of modern technology, we find ourselves subtly programmed, our minds shaped by the originators’ intentions. It is a fascinating confluence of human psychology and artificial intelligence, a testament to the ever-evolving nature of our understanding of the mind. And who knows? Perhaps one day, the machines will offer their own interpretations of our dreams, as we once did for our patients.”
(Text created by ChatGPT)
