Discussion
In this paper I discussed what Izkowich refers to as “the dissociative Turn” and considered what might be its theoretical and clinical implications. I indicated that this issue originated from the way psychoanalysis started in the end of the 19th century. Freud encountered splitting of consciousness through Breuer and chose to go along monopsychism. He might have felt that he needs to choose either monopsychism or polypsychism and picked the former. His choice might have been right in that it resulted in this prosperity of the psychoanalytic movement. However, some analysts might have encountered dissociative cases and polypsychic state might be a real condition of human being and made his/her own “turn”, such as Ramle-de Groot (1981).
It is worth remembering
that Freud himself did not hide that he himself could have been a similar situation
like her. In a later stage of his analytic career, Freud stated as follows.
Depersonalization leads us on to the extraordinary
condition of “double conscience”, which is more correctly described as “split
personality.”But all of this is so obscure and has been so little mastered
scientifically that I must refrain from talking about it anymore to you. (Freud, 1936, p.245)
It is very fortunate that current
analysts might not need to make an exclusive choice that Freud faced: which of monopsychism
or polypsychism reflects the truth of human mind.
Here I reiterate beautiful
statement of Bromberg.
A noticeable shift has been taking place
with regard to psychoanalytic understanding of the human mind and the nature of
unconscious mental process- away from the idea of a
conscious/preconscious/unconscious distinction per se toward a view of the self
as decentered, and the mind as a configuration of shifting, nonlinear
,discontinuous states of consciousnesss in an ongoing dialectic, with the
healthy illusion of unitary selfhood.（Bromberg, 1998. p. 270.）
Lampl-de-Groot,
J (1981) Notes on Multiple personality. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 50;614-624
Bromberg, P (1998) Standing in the Spaces. Psychology Press,
New York, London.
