パンダの赤ちゃんの名前を応募した。日中の将来の良好な関係を祈って Win-Win (ウインウイン） いいと思うんだがなあ。
Toward the theory
of “Dissociation with capital D”
Abstract
Relationship
between psychoanalysis and dissociation has a very long and checkered history,
which dates back, of course to Freud. Already when he was working on the
Studies of Hysteria, he was dissatisfied with Breuer 's notion
of hypnoid states, and pivoted toward the theory of repression and libido
theory. What he abandoned later was not so-called seduction theory, but his
opportunities to become familiar with the experiences of atrocious and
traumatic life history.Freud's tendency of paying relatively less attention to
trauma and dissociation did not satisfy his contemporary Ferenczi,
and prominent analysts of the day, such as Fairbairn. Balint, and Winnicott
opted their ways a little more in favor of trauma and dissociation compared to
their great master. These analysts used the term and the notion of
"dissociation," but it never was accepted to the mainstream of
psychoanalysis and that still holds true on our age. Further down the road, it
was H.S.Sullivan who picked the notion, but his theory of dissociation was not
given much credit.
Thus, the
topic of trauma-dissociation has been discussed separately from the main stream
of psychoanalytic theories, but recently new views on dissociation have been
discussed in psychoanalysis. Authors such as P. Bromberg and D. Stern have been
proposing new way of looking at the theory. However,
their theories of so-called weak dissociation cannot capture the
essential part of the phenomenon of dissociation. I would propose in this paper
the theory of so –called strong dissociation, or dissociation with capitol
D.
Preface
Relationship between psychoanalysis
and dissociation has a very long and checkered history. Its origin obviously
goes back to Freud. Already when he was working on the Studies of Hysteria (1895) with Joseph Breuer, he
was dissatisfied with his co-author’s notion of “hypnoid states”, and
pivoted toward the theory of repression and libido theory. What he abandoned
later was not only his so-called seduction theory, but his opportunities to
become familiar and work with patients with experiences of atrocious and
traumatic life history.
Freud's tendency of paying
relatively less attention to trauma and dissociation did not satisfy
his contemporary Ferenczi, and leading analysts of the day, such as
Fairbairn, Balint and Winnicott, who
opted their ways a little more in favor of trauma and dissociation compared to
their great master. These analysts used the term and the notion of
"dissociation," but it never was accepted to the mainstream of
psychoanalysis and that still holds true on our age. Further down the road, it
was H.S. Sullivan who picked the notion, but his theory of dissociation was not
given much credit. Recently, there is a new trend in the discussion of the
notion of dissociation, which is lead by prominent authors such as P. Bromberg
and D. Stern. What I would like to attempt in this paper is to give some
additional view to the general trend of their discussion, which I call as the
theory of “Dissociation with capital D”.
Before going into discussion any
further, I would like to introduce a short vignette in order to make my purpose
of writing this paper clear.
A short
vignette
Ms.A, a female client in her late
twenties has been in psychoanalysis for the past three years. One day, when a
child personality shows up without her usual elegant and composed manner, her
analyst, Dr.B, initially felt blindsided. Then after recovering his composure,
he states “Well, Ms.A, let’s start our session anyway. I thought that you
wanted to express some child-like feeings and fantasy in such a telling way.
Now, what comes to your mind this morning?”
By that
time, her child personality quickly withdrew, reminding herself that she is not
“ready” to show up in the session. Then A came back and said to herself. “Well…I
remember once that my child part suddenly went ahead of me and spoke to him. At
that time he never even noticed the change of the tone of my voice. He is now a
step ahead, it appears, but still not ready to deal with us if it happens again
in the future.”
The purpose of my presenting this
telling (so I hope) vignette is to indicate that this is still the standard
attitude of the analysts who are not informed of the clinical manifestation of
the patients with dissociative disorder. This situation is not only unfortunate
for psychoanalysts but also unwelcoming to those potential clients for
psychoanalysis who have dissociative disorders. The main thrust of this paper
is to change the analytic milieu in this regard.
As I stated, dissociation has been
discussed increasingly in recent psychoanalytic literature. We can find very
precious messages from their works; the concept of dissociation not only plays
an important role in stressing the issue of trauma and supplement the deficit
model, but also proposes a paradigm with such concepts as therapist’s
spontaneity, subjectivity and enactment as a key to treating those suffer from
trauma. However, what is discussed as dissociation in their works is limited to
what Stern called “weak dissociation”. I
really doubt that the discussion of dissociation of this type still provide us
with insufficient theoretical basis for treating dissociative phenomenon
manifested by some clients, such as Ms.A that I described above.
