ABSTRACT
The chapter summarizes how the term dissociation is used in understanding and treating trauma. The meaning of dissociation shifts slightly to fit each user's frame of reference. A psychoanalytic understanding of trauma and dissociation belongs within a long tradition of 'making the unconscious conscious'. Contemporary relational psychoanalysts think more about the return of the dissociated than the return of the repressed when think about achieving more integrated consciousness. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse wreaks relational trauma and intense chronic shame on its victims. The convergence of right brain theory and relational psychoanalytic theory is unambiguous in the Foreword Schore wrote for Philip Bromberg's book on working through enactments with relationally traumatized patients. In Allan Schore's understanding of relational trauma and its effects on the brain, dissociation is essentially a right-brain relational event. The right-brain process of ongoing therapy often reveals itself in what client and therapist feel in relation to each other.
