ABSTRACT
Ground-breaking advances in modern cognitive sciences and neurosciences have led us to revise our understanding of memories. In light of the new knowledge, memories must be seen as re-constructions of the past that are co-determined by the present and are continually reconstructed anew from their stored key elements. In contrast, traumatic memories are not shaped by this transformative power of the present. This chapter examines more closely the dissociated states of self that stem from traumatic experiences. Thus far, psychoanalysis has paid far too little attention to them. In the early days of psychoanalysis, J. Breuer and Sigmund Freud concerned themselves with abnormal states of consciousness and their dissociation in order to characterize split-off groups of ideas in cases of traumatically determined hysteria. Freud's one-sided opposition to Janet oversimplified the problem, and, thereafter, the term dissociation disappeared from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis.
