ABSTRACT
Clinical psychopathology, as a discipline, is based on phenomenology (Jaspers, 1913). This has been helpful to avoid precocious inferences about possible pathogenesis of psychiatric disorders and to remain in contact with diverging theoretical stances despite differing diagnostic and therapeutic extrapolations originating from them. Unlike other psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, dissociative disorders cannot be conceived as a unitary phenomenon in the community. Even patients with dissociative identity disorder (DID) and its subthreshold forms may claim only a subgroup of their symptoms that dominate their mental status during index admission or represent a particular individual pattern. To make the situation more complex, in addition to constituting disorders in their own right, dissociation may accompany almost every psychiatric disorder and may influence their phenomenology as well as response to treatment. Psychological dissociation in particular has its origin in “anger inside” which turns to “anger outside” during overt depression.
