Sullivan’s idea of “not-me”
Although this
paper never allows any extensive overview of psychoanalytic notion of
dissociation in the history, Sullivan’s discussion is still worth examining in
order to do justice to his unique nature of the notion.
It is considered that “for Sullivan,
dissociation, not repression, was the primary defensive maneuver, because he
understood the primary danger to be the revival of intolerable experience, not
the breakthrough of primitive endogenous fantasy” (p.653). Thus, Sullivan and
interpersonal school theorists discuss dissociation in the context of trauma
theory. While interpersonal school is regarded as somewhat out of fashion in
the American psychoanalytic community, it was actually ahead of the time in the
context of the theory of trauma and dissociation.
Sullivan’s conceptualization of “good me”, “bad
me” and “not me”is of special interest.the first two states are experienced
more or less normally and are familiar to most of us. We tend to have separate
states of ourselves and either one of them tend to get activated when something
good (or bad) happen to us.In contrast, not me is experienced in rather unusual
situations where we try to hide ourselves in a different environment or need to
numb ourselves due to pain or shame.
Not me is only directly experienced in a
severe nightmare or only observed in a dissociative state (Sullivan, 1953)this
experience is never learned due to pain that it involves and is only experience
in primitive (or what he calls “prototaxic” or “parataxic” level. Sullivan’s idea of dissociation might have
reached the state where a subject (“not-me”) independent of the main subject (“me”)
Donnel B.
Stern, DB (2009) Dissociation and Unformulated Experience: A Psychoanalytic
Model of Mind (In Dell, Paul F. (Ed); O'Neil, John A. (Ed), (2009). Dissociation and
the dissociative disorders: DSM-V and beyond., Routledge/Taylor & Francis
Group, pp.654-666)
Stern’s unformulated experience and
dissociation
There seems to be a “growing chorus of
American thinkers” “who hopes to rescue dissociation from obscurity” in the
theory of psychoanalysis (Goldman, P338) and certainly Donnel Stern and Phillip
Bromberg should be two of the leaders of them.
Goldman,
D: Vital sparks and forms of things unknown
in Jan Abram (ed.) Donald Winnicott Today. The New Library of Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2012.
Stern’s basic stance is that dissociation is a
defensive process. He states: “…While dissociation is conceived in many ways in
the trauma literature, theories of dissociation tend to center around the idea
of a self-protective process that takes place when the events of life are
beyond tolerance” (p.653). Although there are some variations, current
literature on dissociation proposed by different authors can be described as the
defense model of dissociation. This model has a striking difference as well as a
similarity when compared with Freud’s concept of dissociation in the Studies in
Hysteria (1895). Their difference is obvious, as Stern proposes dissociation as
the main defense mechanism whereas Freud thought repression was, not dissociation.
As we saw above, when Breuer proposed the notion of the hypnoid state, roughly
equivalent to the dissociative state, Freud rejected the notion as it is not
dynamic, asserting that repression should be the one as defense mechanism is mobilized
actively in order to fend off the uncomfortable material from the conscious.
