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The writing of Psychoanalysis, by practitioners and theorists of all stripes, has been remarkably slow in overcoming its reticence with regard to one of the most common and compelling features of intrapsychic and intersubjective experience. The capacity to dissociate has, until recently, been so strongly (and often so sensationally) linked to psychosis, multiple personality disorder, and the horrors of child abuse that the dissociative features of everyday life have been difficult, even risky, to observe and to avow. Things began to change by the late 1980s. But it wasn't until 1994 that a major psychoanalytic text—Nancy McWilliams's (1994) Psychoanalytic Diagnosis—redirected the attention of large numbers of students and practitioners to the documented frequency of dissociation as an adaptive resource and as an aspect of character structure. Over the past 10 or 15 years, interpersonal and object relational analysts, especially, have made it more and more difficult to ignore the significance of dissociation as what Philip Bromberg (1998), following Peter Goldberg, has called “a fundamental organizer of personality structure” (p. 190).
Still, the prevailing tendency within and beyond the psychoanalytic community is to continue to think of dissociation chiefly in relation to a system of alters, a multiplicity of personalities more or less hidden according to the functioning of the dissociator and the perspicacity of the clinician. This tendency is motivated in large part by the all-too-human wish to believe in the reality of a fully integrated or “whole” self—a wish that stubbornly survives, like cockroaches and kudzu, all modern efforts to eradicate it. To discover a dissociative disorder—to imagine that dissociation plays a role only in the patient's pathology and not in her normality as well—is, in effect, to shore up one's sense that a riven self is the product of a disordered but treatable mind. To recognize that dissociative processes play a role in everyone's no