The Widening of the Concept of Dissociation

Although H. S. Sullivan (1953) gave more explanatory power to dissociation than repression, as a way to understand the human psyche, until recent years dissociation has not been a widely used conception. The classical psychoanalytic model had been so dominant and influential in the United States that even analysts from other perspectives tended to use Freudian language even when it was incompatible with their theory. Through the use of concepts that reflected a one-person psychology instead of the two-person psychology of participant observation, Sullivan's interpersonal legacy was ignored even by many who were influenced by him. For instance, the term “resistance” was used to refer to resistance to memory rather than resistance to alternate forms of relatedness to the analyst in the transference. The key concept of transference often referred to the inner world of the patient only, without regard to the influence or interaction of the participating analyst. It took an innovative classical analyst (Gill, 1982) to relationalize the concept and to integrate interpersonal philosophy with interpersonal language. The seminal work of Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) made many analysts far more conscious of the philosophical and practical distinctions between drive and relational theories and helped lead the way to a sort of retooling of the theoretical lexicon. The concept of dissociation is now becoming far more prominent in the literature (e.g., Bromberg, 1994, 1996; Davies and Frawley, 1994; Hirsch, 1994) to address phenomena once ascribed to repression only.

Despite dissociation being a key ingredient in Sullivan's understanding of all the problems of living, until its recent revival it was associated with more serious psychological difficulty, early or preverbal pathology, and the extreme splitting often connected with psychic trauma. The questionable category of multiple personality disorder was perhaps the most widely used referent when speaking of dissociation.