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One hundred years ago Breuer and Freud recognized what we now call dissociation as the central mechanism of “hysteria.” The concept of dissociation was first formulated by Moreau de Tours in 1845 (van der Hart, 1996), and later, Briquet “explained hysterical symptoms as the result of a traumatic event that affected the brain's ability to process emotions” (van der Kolk, 1987, p. 6). Since then, researchers studying the impact of traumatic life events theorize that the phenomenon of dissociation is a commonplace variant of the “adaptive responses of children overwhelmed by exogenous trauma” (Kluft and Fine, 1993, p. xvii). Dissociation, or the splitting off of traumatic affect from conscious awareness, has been linked as a response to every type of traumatic experience.
Some soldiers dissociate from war-time events and then suffer the sequelae in the form of flashbacks, nightmares, and symptoms of hyperarousal, or experience the amnesia and numbing of affect seen at the reverse end of the psychobiological continuum. Research supports the understanding that a spectrum of dissociation exists from the natural daily biorhythms of altered states, like daydreaming, to “increasingly complex and symptomatic forms of dissociation” (Ross et al., 1992, p. 87).
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is an example of someone who suffered illness and isolation as a small child and overwhelming physical trauma as a young woman. Examples of her art are used to support the hypothesis that her traumatic experiences are reflected in her artistic selfexpression and that her work was influenced by the defense mechanisms of dissociation and repetition-compulsion.
A brief review of the psychodynamic background of dissociation and its relationship to creative production follows. Freud recognized that when object loss is too extreme or repetitious, the mental function of repression is used as a protective defense. The ego, the organizing part of the psychic apparatus, eliminates from consciousness a