10ofRods
Verified Anthropologist
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Well, yes, I do think it can be a conscious choice.
Dissociation includes what we anthropologists study as "trance states" and can be invoked by some people at will. Margaret Mead discovered that in Bali, children's upbringing tends to encourage dissociative trance states, but that those who are very good at it are often trained early on to be a kind of shaman. Interestingly, for the Balinese, children who startle easily as infants are considered more likely to dissociate (and entering an involuntary startled state is indeed a kind of dissociation - turning one set of patterns off in the brain and going into another set).
I don't know what compartmentalization means, exactly, because that term isn't used in the research I read about dissociation. The term is used here on WS once in a while, and I can't tell if the people who use the term think it's voluntary or involuntary. I do know a little about how the term is used in counseling and by clinical psychologists (where some therapeutic techniques involving teaching people how to compartmentalize consciously - in order to create a boundary around traumatic memories). So, that kind of compartmentalization is thought by psychologists to be something a person can learn to do.
Note that the above article categorizes "compartmentalization" as a form of dissociation (a milder form?)
This older article:
APA PsycNet
talks about how it's natural for people to "compartmentalize" negative thoughts about themselves (Freud and Bleuler think so too - it's a fundamental principle of psychoanalysis and as you can see from the article, still a prominent idea in psychology). The person puts positive thoughts about themselves in one "basket" (neural network, we'd say today) and negative thoughts in another. In the above article, the authors think that people who can't access their "positive" self-image basket or filing cabinet are the ones prone to depression and anxiety (more research needed, they say - which has most centered on MRI and SPECT analysis, to actually show how the brain shifts frames).
Is it voluntary? Learned? Habitual? Can it be severe enough to cause memory problems (probably)?
Here's an article exploring compartmentalization (dissociation) in PTSD patients. PTSD patients were more likely to have negative thoughts in general and to create mental boundaries against them. I assume all of the patients were in treatment, as it is a clinical article.
At any rate, all humans use "compartmentalization" (setting some thoughts aside while working with other thoughts), but it can be part of mental illness when there's not enough redundancy among the various parts of the psyche (as, for example, not being able to remember what one did while in the negative state):
In that article, the authors explore how dissociation can hang out on the boundaries of psychosis, since, by definition, being completely out of touch with reality is an extreme example of disassociation/compartmentalization. If the negative/anxiety-producing subset of thoughts gets large enough, then all of reality has to be walled off to avoid those thoughts (says the above article). This last article is by far the most interesting, because it is exploring amnesia as part of this dissociation issue. It also explores derealization and depersonalization (both common elements in criminal acts, particularly murder).
IMO.
