As Bessel Van der Kolk has told us today so well, trauma changes and impairs not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. This new focus on trauma and dissociation is a paradigm shift. The emerging trauma/dissociation paradigm enables us to think differently not only about the structure of the human mind, how and why it becomes damaged, but also the processes by which it heals. The trauma/dissociation paradigm reorganizes our view of consciousness, of the unconscious, and of human motivation. It sweepingly restructures our understanding of all psychopathology that is not inherited.

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn published a groundbreaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this book, he proposed that rather than a linear progression toward more and better knowledge, it is paradigm shifts that allow for scientific progress. A paradigm is a theoretical model that can organize coherent thinking about a field of study. Kuhn described