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Diamond's model is simple and straightforward, two characteristics that recommend it. He aims to integrate the two broad categories of unconscious defense in psychoanalysis, dissociation and repression, and then add splitting to the model. On repression, he takes the usual view: repression is the unconsciously motivated removal of mental contents from awareness that have already attained verbal-symbolic form. Dissociation, by contrast, is the “segregation” (a word Diamond often uses and that I like) or sequestration of mental contents that have not yet attained verbal-symbolic representation. Because these contents cannot be worded, they cannot become conscious (at least not in Diamond's model, in which, as in Freud's (Breuer and Freud 1893; Freud 1895, 1915), consciousness requires verbal-symbolic representation) and therefore cannot be forgotten. Such psychic contents were never conscious, really, in the first place. They are registered only on the somatic level, and so when they threaten the stability of the mind, segregation is the only way to deal with them.
Diamond recognizes two different kinds of dissociation. Primary dissociation, the conception often used by trauma theorists, who are often not identified with psychoanalysis, comes into play in response to trauma, and is an “unconscious protective autoregulation that keeps psychic