ABSTRACT
Coons (1986) followed up the work of twenty clinicians, each treating one patient with dissociative identity disorder (DID), then called multiple personality disorder (MPD), for an average of thirty-nine months. Nineteen had not treated DID before. Psychodynamic psychotherapy and hypnosis were the primary therapeutic modalities. Treatments averaged only one session per week, half the intensity currently recommended (International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, 2011). By 1986 the dissociative disorders field had evidence, quite striking by the standards of the day, that psychodynamic psychotherapy plus hypnosis resulted in outcomes that appear astonishingly brief and puzzlingly effective by today’s standards. With little or no data, but with profound fear of litigation and chastened by the caustic disapproval of many vocal and well-positioned authorities world-wide, the dissociative disorders field largely abandoned approaches which were effecting rather successful.
