Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond Edited by Paul F. Dell and John A. O'Neil New York:  Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2009,  864 pp.

Paul Dell and John O'Neil have drawn together the work of 68 scientific investigators from a variety of fields to provide in this text an encyclopedic view of current thought and research in the field of dissociation. The book resulted from a request to define dissociation for the International Society

for the Study of Dissociation, now called the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. Because dissociation is a complex and controversial concept with different meanings for investigators from different disciplines, the process was lengthy and difficult.

The editors hoped this book would clarify the concept, phenomena, and pathogenesis of dissociation, underscore the differences among researchers in the field, and inform the Work Group drafting the Dissociative Disorders section of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). Structurally, the book is divided into thirteen parts, each containing several topically related chapters: the first half is devoted to the concept of dissociation itself; the remainder to the dissociative disorders, dissociation in other psychiatric disorders, and assessment and treatment of dissociation.

Over the last half century, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has published four editions, plus revisions of the third and fourth editions, of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM-I, published in 1952, was the first manual of mental disorders to provide a glossary of descriptions of diagnostic categories. Except for organic mental disorders, the DSM-II used diagnostic terminology without theoretical implications to classify disorders. Beginning with the third edition published in 1980, the APA introduced diagnostic criteria, a multiaxial system with the following goals: to be compatible with the current International Classification of Diseases; to be useful to clinicians diagnostically and therapeut