Book analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 3

Book analysis - Essay Example Those individuals who have a compulsion to erase most painful memories from recall are the most vulnerable to become MPD. Those individuals who have been subject to abuse or trauma as a child have a strong incentive to discard remnants of those experiences. The trouble is that memory is a physiological-neurological construct as opposed to being purely a facet of the mind. Moreover, even this tendency toward partial amnesia is promoted by a ‘self’ that is in itself conditioned by early traumatic experience. Hence the subject is twice challenged to relieve himself/herself from the conflicted mental makeup. The outcome of this churning is the compromised solution of a MPD, whereby, the subject swings between the original composite personality and the forced-aspiring personality. The former is the personality as it is, whereas the latter is the personality desired. The interesting thing about memory is how it is tagged with verbal identifiers. These identifiers are culturally determined and are usually dependent upon the prevalent ideas, norms and fashions attached to the particular cultural milieu. In this context, memory is an extension of the language faculty in humans. Usually, it is the most emotive experience which is also the most memorable. Emotions arise out of subjective feelings. They are also fleeting and replicable in various similar situations. Hence our psyches crave for a method in which the valued experience is concretized. Words and set-phrases that were earlier acquired from the cultural environment are perused for this purpose. Hence, to answer a famous literary poser, calling a Rose by any other name, changes everything about the object and its associations. As Hacking observes in the book, the process of acquisition of memory and even the development of intelligence has a strong basis in semantics. Yet, the obvious danger is that the semantics might ‘justify’ apparently