ABSTRACT
If one wished to read the contemporary psychoanalytic literature as a serialized Gothic romance, it is not hard to envision the restless ghost of Pierre Janet, banished from the castle by Sigmund Freud a century ago, returning for an overdue haunting of Freud’s current descendants. With uncanny commonality, most major schools of analytic thought have become appropriately more responsive to the phenomenon of dissociation, and each in its own way is attempting actively to accommodate it within its model of the mind and its approach to clinical process. A pivotal concept in the birth and development of interpersonal psychoanalysis (Sullivan, 1940, 1953) and “independent” British object relational theories (Fairbairn, 1944, 1952; Winnicott, 1945, 1949, 1960a, 1971d), dissociation continues to receive its most active clinical and theoretical attention from contemporary analysts whose sensibilities most directly represent one or both of these schools of thought (e.g., Bromberg, Chapters 5, 8, 10, 12–19; D. B. Stern, 1983, 1996, 1997; Smith, 1989; Mitchell, 1991, 1993; Davies, 1992; Davies and Frawley, 1994; Harris, 1992, 1994; Reis 1993; Schwartz, 1994; Grand, 1997). It has also found its way into the work of analysts writing from a self-psychological orientation, particularly those interested in the phenomenology of self-states (e.g., Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987; Ferguson, 1990) and has gained stature among Freudian analysts, both classical (e.g., I. Brenner, 1994, 1996; Kernberg, 1991; Shengold, 1989, 1992) and postclassical (e.g., Marmer, 1980, 1991; Goldberg, 1987, 1995; Gabbard, 1992; Lyon, 1992; Roth, 1992; Gottlieb, 1997). Cutting across the range of analytic persuasions, what is probably the most broadly accepted current understanding of dissociation has been well stated by Schwartz (1994, p. 191), who proposed that it “can be most simply understood as a self-hypnotic process that attempts to anaesthetize and isolate pain.” “The mind,” he wrote, “is essentially … fleeing its own subjectivity to evacuate pain.”
