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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA AND DISSOCIATIVE processes is established on firm empirical grounds (Van der Kolk, 1987; Spiegel, 1991; Herman, 1992; Warshaw et al., 1993; Marmar et al., 1994). In many clinical and epidemiological studies, patients likely to suffer from dissociative mental states—not only those diagnosed within the category of the dissociative disorders, but also many of those suffering from eating disorders and borderline personality disorders—have reported memories of childhood sexual, physical, or emotional abuses (Kluft, 1985; Bliss, 1986; Herman, Perry, and Van der Kolk, 1989; Putnam, 1989; Ross, 1989; Palmer et al., 1990; Strick and Wilcoxon, 1991; Waller, 1991; Gunderson and Sabo, 1993; Van der Linden, 1993; Everill and Waller, 1995; Dalle Grave et al., 1996). Because of the relationship between traumatic experiences in childhood and development of these disorders in adult life, both dissociative disorder and borderline personality disorder have been regarded as forms of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (Ross, 1989; Gunderson and Sabo, 1993). Measures of dissociative experiences (such as the Dissociative Experience Scale [DES]: Bernstein and Putnam, 1986) have shown, in these diagnostic categories, how often and how tightly dissociation is linked to traumatic memories (for a review, see Van IJzendoorn and Schuengel, in press).
Various studies, however, suggest that exposure to trauma is not always followed by dissociation or by the development of posttraumatic