ABSTRACT
Paul Ricoeur (1992) has analyzed the function of narrative in human lives, emphasizing it as the means by which people establish the continuity of their identity in the world. The various chapters in this book have provided many provocative examples of how people discontinue their narratives as well as how they “take up” their stories and once more continue them. These stories also demonstrate that the deliberate, automatic, or accidental break in this continuity is a fundamental human activity (e.g., Weil, 1977). If the term “dissociative” can serve as a hypothetical construct that describes reported experiences and observed behaviors that seem to exist apart from, or seem to have been disconnected from, the mainstream, or flow, of one’s conscious awareness, behavioral repertoire, and/or self-identity, it nicely articulates one of the major permutations in humankind’s psychological existence. Nevertheless, the history of this term (see Wright, Chapter 2), the attempts to identify its etiology (see Cardeña, Chapter 3), and the narratives describing dissociative phenomena demonstrate the problematic issues that remain, especially when the term is applied to nonpathological events in Western medical and psychotherapeutic settings and events in other cultures. These accounts point toward a reconceptualization of dissociation as a kind of narrative experience rather than observable conduct.
