Dissociation and the Interpersonal Self7

HISTORICALLY, THE CONCEPT OF DISSOCIATION is usually distinguished from that of repression based upon earlier vs. later developmental themes and/or severity of anxiety. Dissociation has traditionally been associated with traumatic or profound anxiety occurring either in pre-verbal times or, if later, potentially of annihilating proportion. Anxiety-laden experience cannot be processed either verbally or emotionally, since the psyche is too undeveloped or fragile to even assimilate the experience, or the assault on the psyche is too profound. Repression, in contrast, is usually thought to occur either when anxiety-laden events can be put into words, the psyche is strong enough to handle them or the experience is anxiety-producing but not annihilation-producing. Dissociation then has traditionally been discussed as reflecting earlier and/or more severe psychological disruption, essentially inaccessible to subsequent awareness. Davies and Frawley (1992) have referred to the vertical split of dissociation in contrast with the horizontal split of repression.

Classical psychoanalysis, which was really the only psychoanalysis until the late 1940s, defined its purview as problems which revolved around repression of oedipal themes; the neuroses, if you will. This was distinguished from "character pathology" which was thought to be either pre-oedipal, pre-verbal or traumatic in origin; in other words, usually earlier and more serious. Such pathology was characterized by dissociation, not repression. There was no articulated psychoanalytic method for these problems because it was believed that earlier psychopathology, aside from being possibly pre-verbal, left character in a narcissistic state, unable to relate meaningfully to the other and therefore unable to form a