Interest in dissociation has had a checkered history. Janet (1889) published his first book, L'automatisme psychologique, to explore the psychological processes involved in the linkage of traumatic experiences to psychopathology. His ideas attracted the attention of James who devoted much of the 1896 Lowell Lectures to Janet's dissociation theory. Jung went to study with Janet in 1902, and thereafter used dissociation as his operational model of the mind. Breuer and Freud initially thought and wrote about dissociation and recognized its connection with trauma, but Freud abandoned this perspective in favour of fantasy, repression and the Oedipal complex. Interest in the effects of psychological trauma was short-lived in both psychiatry and psychoanalysis for the next sixty years. Janet's contributions fell into near oblivion. Jung's work was itself largely dissociated from classical psychoanalysis. It