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Dissociative processes destroy the meaning and belief structure of lived experience. The unconscious unlinking of narrative, affect, sensation, movement, spatial dimension, and memory makes traumatic experience sometimes unrecognizable and/or unknowable. The context of these processes is predicted by the neurobiology of mid-brain structures, especially the temporally located hippocampus and amygdala and their relation to frontal and parietal structures (cerebral cortex) as well as the autonomic centers of the medulla (Metcalfe and Jacobs, 1996; Panksepp, 1998; Schore, 1994). The shift from early nonverbal representational modes of thinking in infancy and childhood to more verbal modes may be responsible for the typical amnesia of childhood (Bauer, 1996; Terr, 1991). However, these early modes of visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, and visceral coenesthetic experiencing continue in the background, in the “not-conscious,”† and form the hidden nucleus of affective experience and associated complex nonverbal narratives. Reports of persons with dissociative adaptations tend to have more nonverbal content and are often labeled regressive in the analytic situation. However, awareness of these variations in the psychological processing of experience will allow construction of a coherent narrative through which affect can be contained and explored.
The elucidation of these states of “regulated dysregulation” will proceed via an initial description of some of the dissociative adaptations in logic and affect perception. This view will be broadened by an inquiry into the neurobiology of affect and its relation to dissociative processes. A clinical vignette will illustrate these processes as they appear in the consultation room.