What Is Trauma-related Dissociation?

Abstract
The phenomenon of DID-like dissociation has been rightly understood as a psychological mechanism of coping with traumatic danger. Consequently, the mere presence of DID implicates caretakers in the sufferer’s childhood for traumatic betrayal and abuse, even in the absence of patients’ memories of such behavior or other proof of it. The correlation between DID-like dissociation and traumatic childhood has been a precious finding of our research; therefore, it became the object of the “memory wars”. The reason for such fury is that patients’ amnesia is reversible.

While acting in the mode of DID-like dissociation, a man employs selective inattention to certain transactions with the forces of adversity, with reversible amnesia in the aftermath. There are a few “somehows” that make it difficult to illuminate the psychological mechanism for that behavior, in order to then understand its normative use, i.e., without disorder.

“Selective” inattention means wanted inattention; the man has somehow anticipated and wanted it. Then he somehow tracks his behavior for its usefulness, with some criteria for when to end it. But the man typically initiates all that somehow without having intended it and willed it and he pursues it without effort.

In trying to understand the nature of that mechanism, our field has expanded the study to various other phenomena that could be generally called “dissociative”, merely because they manifest as unintended inattention while coping with adversity of all kinds. Such phenomena are depersonalization, flashbacks and inordinate self-absorption. However, inattention then is not wanted and is not selective as such. And amnesia for what was not attended is not reversible. We could still explain it as wanted and selective by attributing unconscious, empirically unknowable, selectivity and intent. This trend entails the risk of watering down the strict correlation between DID-like dissociation and traumatic adversity, because we cannot find a strict enough correlation of such “dissociation” and trauma.

The panel will discuss the literature and their clinical experience, debates and research about mechanisms and functions of various kinds of “dissociation."