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In the October 1989 issue of this Journal my paper, ‘Multiple personality, dissociation, and C.G. Jung's complex theory', appeared and received a favourable response. After a favourable review in the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation News (a professional clinical organization newsletter published in Chicago) (Coons 1990) I received over a hundred requests for reprints. This paper has also subsequently been reprinted in a comprehensive multi-volume reference work on analytical psychology (Papadopoulos 1993). Because my paper has attracted such attention, I feel it is important - and ethically required - to offer a correction to the conclusions I reached in that publication.
I had four goals in writing that article: first, to introduce a survey of the new psychiatric literature on multiple personality and the dissociative disorders to a Jungian clinical audience whom, I noticed, did not seem to be exposed to this fertile new line of research in ‘Jungian’ publications; second, to emphasize the central roles of (a) dissociation and (b) polypsychism in Jung's complex theory; to point out, third, how he derived his theory from the nineteenth-century French (Ribot, Janet, Binet, Flournoy) and American (Prince) clinical traditions; and, fourth, why the clinical phenomenology derived from the complex theory was of vital clinical utility today.
However, three years after writing this piece I am no longer convinced