ABSTRACT
Some features of the 125-year relationship of dissociative multiplicity, the existence in one human being of more than one center of consciousness, and psychoanalysis are discussed. Dissociative multiplicity was present at the dawn of psychoanalysis, as hypnoid hysteria, in Breuer’s celebrated case of Anna O. When Freud broke with Breuer and abandoned hypnoid hysteria, the subsequent development of psychoanalysis largely put dissociative multiplicity aside as pre-psychoanalytic error. Most of the ensuing psychoanalytic models of the human mind failed to account for the genesis or structure of such a multiple mind. At the same time, these psychoanalytic models still shine light on all psychopathology, including the dynamics of every center of consciousness in somebody with dissociative multiplicity. The current best exceptions to this overall pattern have arisen from the conjunction of object relations theory and attachment theory, both of which have contributed to relational psychoanalysis, where dissociative multiplicity is given a central explanatory role by some authors. I conclude that psychoanalysis can best reappropriate dissociative multiplicity by returning to the roots of the split: to hypnoid hysteria and rethinking both hypnosis and dissociation.
