Prologue: The Dissociative Spectrum

It is with great promise and excitement that I welcome the reader to this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. We are bringing together a group of diverse clinicians to discuss dissociation and dissociative process. Both in the literature and in consulting rooms, dissociation has become a highly debated topic. To some, the concept of dissociation may seem to be the natural replacement for repression as a central organizing construct around which psychoanalysis is built. To others, dissociation is a concept that is often overused or ill-applied. Regardless of one's position, it's safe to say that much of what we do clinically is influenced by our relationship to this concept. Approaches to trauma, the nature of self-experience, understandings of defense and adaptation, transference, and countertransference are all shaped by our underlying views of what we mean when we refer to dissociation and dissociative processes.

In this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, we have brought together a variety of perspectives illuminating current and emergent views on dissociation and dissociative processes. Through this endeavor, we hope to provide the reader with an opportunity to question and appraise the theoretical and clinical usefulness of this concept. Some of the ideas found here are part of ongoing traditions within psychoanalysis; others are new offerings from other domains of psychotherapy. We hope that through this work, the reader will be better able to consider the concepts of dissociation and dissociative processes as a spectrum of experience along which one can observe the subtleties of intrapsychic and relational experience. It's a broad subject; our brief survey has no aspirations to be representative or complete. Instead, consider it more like a snapshot: a single scene containing a group of compelling characters.

In the first article, “Dissociation and Its Disorders,” Harold Blum provides a springboard for our issue in laying out the historical, etiological, and definiti