Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Sullivan.
Before moving on to discussing modern psychoanalytic discussion of dissociation, I would like to briefly summarize the stance taken by three major figures in the early part of the history of psychoanalysis: R.Fairbairn, D. Winnicott, and HS. Sullivan.
Fairbairn’s theory of a
schizoid mechanism is closely linked with splitting and dissociation that was
discussed by Janet, Morton Prince, etc. As Fairbairn goes (1952),
… So far as the manifestations
of dual and multiple personality are concerned, their
essentially schizoid nature may be inferred from a discreet study of
the numerous cases described by Janet, William James, and Morton
Prince … The personality of the hysteric invariably contains a
schizoid factor in greater or lesser degree, however deeply this may be
buried. (p. 5.)
Unfortunately, Fairbairn’s
notion of dissociation was not specific enough, and was discussed
interchangeably with "schizoid," and "splitting” (van der Hart,
et al., 2009), lacking a focus on its unique nature of division in psychic
organization. Although schizoid problems became one of the main focuses of the
British object relations theory, it developed apart from the concept of
dissociation originally described by Breuer in his notion of “hypnoid”
phenomena and double consciousness.
Winnicott, one of Fairbairn’s
contemporaries, also discussed dissociation in many contexts of his analytic
theories. Winnicott distinguished a healthy and natural dissociation from
trauma-related dissociation (Goldman, Abram, p. 339), the former being the basis
for the true self, while the latter is a
defensive maneuver when traumatic situations occur.
Winnicott
suggests that the primitive agony that happened in the past is not part of his
personal history if he or she was not ready to accept it. The assumption here
is that there is only one subject, the patient, who went through the experience
but never experienced it, who would eventually take that experience in and
integrate it in the past. There is no particular hint that there could have
been some separate and independent subject which experienced the primitive
agony on behalf of the patient as the primary agency. Thereby, despite his
major contribution to the analytic discussion of the notion of dissociation,
Fairbairn and Winnicott’s idea of dissociation was manly dealing with what van
der Hart called type (1).
H.S. Sullivan’s discussion of
dissociation is also worth examining to do justice to the pioneering nature of
his view, which waited such a long time to be accepted into the mainstream of
analytic theories. However, the stress Sullivan put on this notion in his
theorizing was remarkable. “[F]or 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” (Stern, Dell, p. 653). Sullivan and interpersonal school
theorists discuss dissociation primarily in the context of trauma theory.
Sullivan’s conceptualization of “good me,” “bad me,” and “not me” is of special
interest. Among them, “Not me” is only directly experienced in a severe
nightmare or observed in a dissociative state (Sullivan, 1953). This experience
is never learned because of the pain that it
involves and is only experienced in primitive states (or what he calls the “prototaxic”
or “parataxic” level). We might be able to speculate that Sullivan’s idea of
dissociation might have reached a state where a subject (“not-me”) is
independent of the main subject (“me”), perhaps on the level of the type (2) as
van der Hart delineated.
