The Role of Disorganized Attachment and Insecure Environment in the Development of Pathological Dissociation and Multiple Identities

Dissociation is a splitting or separating of different aspects of experience and its representation, whether that experience arises from an internal or external source, environment or the psyche-soma. Normal dissociation is a useful process that occurs and is used by all humans. Pathological types of dissociation result from the experience of trauma greater than that which can be processed by the psyche. It is the premise of this presentation that dysfunctional or pathological dissociation has its roots in very early developmental, relational dysfunction between the infant and mother or primary caregiver, resulting in the failure of a good-enough secure or protecting environment and leading to acute or chronic trauma. Pathological dissociation ensues in both the sense of identity (vertical splitting), and in the representation of experience (horizontal splitting of experience and its compartmentalization or layering). Both are the results of trauma and become defensive processes against trauma. Furthermore, trauma produces a sensory and emotional overload in the infant that cannot be transformed into symbolic form to be known or thought because it exceeds the mother-infant unit's capacity to metabolize and integrate it (Bion 1967; Stern 2003). It is this last aspect, described by Bion as an impairment or deficit in alpha function that leads to an accretion of un-metabolized sensory experience, experienced in dreams as ideograms, or somewhat similarly described by Winnicott as the ‘cataloguing’ of mental functioning which ‘acts like a foreign body if it is associated with environmental adaptive failure that is beyond understanding or prediction’ (Winnicott 1954, p. 248).

Winnicott first presented his ideas of the relationship of the mind to the psyche-soma in 1949. He describes the psyche-indwelling-in-the-soma as the successful outcome of the process of ‘personalization’ that occurs as a result of the mother's ‘handling’ of her infant during the holding phase. This i