Reply to Bromberg

Dr. Bromberg's observations of the clinical phenomena of dissociation, and his understanding of the therapeutic task imposed by these clinical facts, converge extensively with my own experience and understanding of dissociation. This is so despite some obvious theoretical—and, to some degree, epistemological—differences between his approach and mine. Bromberg's work encourages me in the belief that progress is being made toward a psychoanalytic theory of dissociation as a distinct type of organization of psychical life. But what of the differing theoretical approaches to this phenomenon?

Bromberg himself does not enter into a speculation about the theoretical difference but illuminates the discrepancy in a detailed critique of my use of two terms—“pseudointegration” and “inauthenticity”—that I employ to conceptualize what I see as central properties of the dissociative process. What, then, is the discrepancy?

Bromberg views the conceptions of pseudointegration and inauthenticity as ill fitting or even antithetical to a relational, polyvocal view of self-formation—ill fitting because these terms seem to imply the existence of a fixed, positivistic conception of self-integration. Bromberg's approach reflects more completely the impact of a post-modern view of the individual, in which psychic reality is naturally in flux, its truth not fixed but contingent on the prevailing interpersonal and social construction of reality. Bromberg, not tethered by any notion of normative wholeness, is able to conceive of dissociation as the basic organization of self-experience, a normal and everpresent substratum of personality organization. One could perhaps say that dissociation reflects the natural pluralism of psychical experience. His view is both bold and comprehensive and in many ways far surpasses my own view in scope and elaboration.

Dissociation, in Bromberg's approach, refers to the coexistence of alternative ego states, ever shifting in relation to one another. Ther