Discussion
The controversy around the notion of dissociation goes back to the period where psychoanalysis started in the end of the 19th century. Freud encountered clinical cases where splitting of consciousness was indicated by Breuer and Janet, and apparently dismissed the idea. Freud might have felt that he needed to choose either the belief in a mind being single or multiple and picked the former. His choice must have been correct in the sense that psychoanalytic theories based on that belief prospered in the way that we all know. However, some analysts should have encountered cases with apparent multiple minds and felt they need to take a second look at their theoretical approach to them, such as Janne Rampl-de Groot (1981). She stated in her “Notes on Multiple Personality”(1981) that “the purpose of this paper is to draw attention to my experience that both ‘splitting’ and ‘multiple personality’ are originally present in all normal humans”(ibid, 615). It is remarkable that her “turn” was so drastic that she concluded that multiplicity is the natural state of mind.（以下略）
