ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the evolution of psychoanalytic thinking on dissociation and related phenomena, the dissociation of everyday life, attachment and dissociation, dissociation in adult trauma, and dissociation in severe early trauma associated with dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality. Evidence of the relationship between parapraxes and dissociative phenomena may be seen clinically. The sleepiness of the neonate and the demarcation between wakeful alertness and the sleeping state are the natural origin of dissociation, according to Donald Woods Winnicott, whereas motivated forgetting is usually not observed until about age three. DID continues to be perhaps the most misunderstood and vilified condition in the history of psychology, and observations from over sixty years ago still apply: that is, there are two types of believers, naive people and those with actual contact with such patients. Many refractory patients with borderline-like pathology, eating disorders, and some in very complex, long analyses might, in fact, suffer from unrecognised dissociative problems.
