ABSTRACT
In the classical "modern" perspective, the traits of the dissociative personality all seem synonymous with inevitable social dysfunctionality rather than pathology. Unable to deal with conflict and ready to take refuge in a mixture of reality and illusion, the dissociated subject seems, by definition, unsuited for any serious productive task. The dissociative mechanisms were correlated with the impossibility of steadily distinguishing facts from representations. This chapter considers the indistinctness between facts and representations as a pre-symbolic characteristic linked to the childhood phase of psychic development. On the contrary, one might say that with the growth of technology, present-day social practices tend to permanently settle in the grey area where facts and representations become confused, and that this confusion has become the humus that the social networks need, if they are to reproduce and thrive. A niche in the sense is a space that is partly real and partly symbolic, the result of the interpenetration of social and psychic operations.
