What if There Were No Ghosts: A Dissociative Perspective On The Sixth Sense

The Sixth Sense is a movie about a nine-year-old boy, Cole, who sees ghosts. They are scary ghosts, ghosts who frighten him, get him into trouble, and make him feel like a freak. But the truth is, there are no ghosts. The only ghosts that exist are the ones inside our minds. For most of us, these ghosts, the ones inside us, can be understood as the internalized self and object representations we have taken in, projected, and reinternalized over the course of our lives. We are haunted by many of these specters. They criticize us, taunt us, humiliate us. They also frighten us by the intensity of their impulses, which threaten to erupt at any moment. Fortunately, many of us have more benign ghosts as well, those that soothe, comfort, or provide an encouraging word. For others, however, because of a confluence of external trauma and internal capacities, these ghosts become dissociated self states, each with their own structure, autonomy, and investment in separateness. Cole can be understood in this light, not as a child who possesses the extraordinary albeit frightening capability of seeing and talking to ghosts, but rather as a severely traumatized child who has responded to his trauma by dissociating into relatively stable, enduring parts. Each of the ghosts in the movie, including the psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, represent different personality states or alters of the child identified asCole. Cole is not a freak. He is a child with dissociative identity disorder.