On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Gomi no Sensei wrote: > On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, David Rodemaker wrote: > > > An important thing is to differentiate between pathological sadism or > > masochism and the sadistic or masochistic identity. Childhood abuse can be > > much more reliably linked to PTSD, Disassociative Identity Disorder, and > > Borderline Personality Disorder, among other syndromes - there's little > > clinical evidence to a BDSM lifestyle being linked to childhood abuse. > > About as little as there is clinical evidence for DID, the existence of > which is still pretty strongly debated, or was last time I checked, sometime > in the 1999-2001 area. Not disputing the claim that evidence is weak, mind, > just making a sidebar comment. IANAP (I am not a psych...) but it was my impression (mostly from a recent New Yorker article about the diagnostic manual etc.) that there is controversy about many or most diagnoses/syndromes as well as about the effects of abuse. Which wouldn't surprise me given the difficulty of the science.