2.  Psychosomatic Disorders: Disorders in which there is a real physical illness that is caused by psychological factors (usually stress)  Somatoform: Disorders in which there is an apparent physical illness, but there is no organic cause  Usually people go to the doctor rather than a psychiatrist/psychologist!

3.  Conversion Disorder: Anxiety is converted into physical symptoms (may lose feeling in a limb, paralysis, blindness, deafness, perception of pregnancy)  This is what interested Freud!  Rare in our time  Hypochondriasis: People interpret normal sensations as symptoms of a dreaded disease (headaches, stomach cramps, etc.)  May move from physician to physician looking for treatment and diagnosis  NOT faking it for attention  Relatively common  Body dysmorphic disorder:  Preoccupation with defects in one’s body  When faced with an imperfection, concern about it becomes obsessive

5.  Type of disorder in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings  Types  Dissociative Amnesia: Loss of identity  Dissociative Fugue: Involves flight from home and the assumption of a new identity with amnesia for past identity and events  Dissociative Identify Disorder (DID)

6.  Two or more distinct identities are said to alternately control a person’s behavior  Typically the original personality denies any awareness of the others  Usually not violent (not Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde)  Personalities have their own names, memories, speaking voices, mannerisms

7.  Is it simply an extension of our own normal capacity for personality shifts?  Are clinicians who discover it just triggering role-playing by fantasy-prone people?  Are these patients, like actors, convincing themselves of the authenticity of their own role enactments?

8. SKEPTICS BELIEVERS  DID patients also tend to be highly hypnotizable  Seem to be localized to time and place  Number of cases and personalities (3-12) has been ballooning over time  Not very prevalent outside of N. America  Nonexistent in Japan and India  British consider it a “wacky American fad”  Is it a cultural phenomenon created by therapists in a particular social context?  Therapists go fishing for identities  Distinct brain and body states associated with different personalities  Can have different blood pressures!  Handedness and visual acuity can change based on the personality!

9.  Psychoanalytic perspective: defenses against anxiety caused by the eruption of unacceptable impulses  Learning (behavioral) perspective: behaviors are reinforced by anxiety reduction  Maybe it should be included under PTSD? A response to childhood trauma  Child abuse is reported in ¾ of cases of DID  One of the personalities is often a child  “Having the abuse happen to someone else”