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My personal introduction to clinical questions about Multiple Personality was around 1987 when I took some drawings by a patient of mine to my supervisor, John Bowlby, at the Tavistock Clinic. This woman, he said, I think may be a multiple personality, to which I replied, ‘A what?’ He continued by saying that there was a lot of literature on this in the USA. It would have been good if I could have magically obtained Mollon's book at the time.
This is a timely book that will be of great value to clinicians whether or not they work with people who might be at the extreme end of the continuum of multiple personality dissociative identity disorder. Many patients suffer from milder forms of -dissociation and I would therefore recommend this book to all practising therapists. In addition this book is based on experience in the UK as Phil Mollon is based at the Lister Hospital, Stevenage, and trained as a clinical psychologist at Leeds and in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. Many of the increasing number of books and articles are based on experience in the USA and, though Mollon faithfully examines this material, the clinical examples, which gratifyingly are numerous, are from a population we work with in this country.
The book starts with a discussion of dissociation, then reconsiders Freud's views of trauma, and looks at the work of the French pioneer and contemporary of Freud, Pierre Janet (Piaget's tutor). He then uses his background as a self psychologist to examine the effects of trauma and abuse on the developing self. In subsequent chapters he examines internal and external object relations and belief systems including how psychobiological processes react to the impact of trauma. He discusses contemporary work on memory and how this effects multiple personality, and works out how we can model what is happening in severe cases. There are practical explanations for clinicians on technique, the limitations of traditional approaches, dangers of retra