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In the clinical material presented here, I wish to address that aspect of relational theory that has begun to conceive of self, indeed of mind itself, as a multiply organized, associationally linked network of parallel, coexistent, at times conflictual, systems of meaning attribution and understanding. I hope to show how dissociation, even when conceived of as the overarching organizational mental process, always exists in a state of intimate tension with associational processes. Such an organization of self and of the multiple selves that constitute “mind” implies the carefully balanced maintenance of an optimal tension state between the primarily memory-based connections that give us a sense of psychic integrity and the dynamic processes that threaten to splinter our internal organization; a kind of counter-balancing of centrifugal and centripedal forces, allowing the parts to function as a system in well-established patterns of psychic meaning but threatening at times to fly out of control into chaos.
Elsewhere (Davies, 1996a, b) I have compared this way of understanding mind to the image and structure of a child's kaleidoscope. Multitudinous yet finite organizations of substructures, always shifting, yet always moving in relationship to one another; patterns, at first novel, becoming identifiable over time and with repeated exposure. Such repetitive patterns moving in and out of positions of prominence but reappearing with regularity and predictability, patterns representing our most significant formative relationships, provide a sense of character and agency, an experience that we are knowable to ourselves and others. Such patterns create meaning out of chaos, providing the lenses through which we view the world and interpret what happens to us.