Memory compartmentalization

• New Neurological Information About EMs, Self, DID, and Memory by Gail Shafarman PhD, 10/17/98
  
  

Thank you for posting your message. The work of Ramachandran is indeed fascinating. There appears to be a natural cross-over between his work and EMDR. Sandra Wilson has also been studying the impact of EMDR on phantom limb pain with extremely promising results. She gave a presentation at the 1997 EMDRIA conference that reported the results. There was a significant decline in discomfort that was directly related to the use of EMDR.

There are many theories regarding the effects of eye movement, memory retrieval, and processing. I covered a number of the possibilities in chapter 12 my 1995 textbook. One of the possibilities that seems supported by some work done with QEEG is that the traumatic memory becomes stored in one hemisphere and the rhythmical bilateral eye movement acts as an external pacemaker which resynchronizes the processing which has been taken off line due to REM suppression. In one of the cases there was almost complete amnesia for rape. After the EMDR session there was a retrieval of the memory (which was independently corroborated) and the QEEG registered the concomitant brainwave changes. One could view the experience of paralysis as a trauma and the response would then become understandable. Perhaps a longer period of eye movement, induced through EMDR, would have allowed Ramachandran's patients to retain and process the memory of the paralysis, instead of reverting back to am amnesiac/denial state. It is clearly an empirical question.

Another resource for you would be the conference presentation by Bob Stickgold who gave part of a keynote address with Bessel van der Kolk at the 1998 EMDRIA Conference. He is an expert in REM and described his view of the interface. All of the EMDRIA conference presentations were audiotaped and available.

While we know that DID is a controversial subject, you should direct your colleagues to studies done with patients suffering from severed corpus callosum. When each hemisphere is asked a question, often two different answers are given. This seems to me to be a foundation upon which people can begin to understand the dissociative phenomena.

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