A Timely Integration: Trauma, Dissociation, and Psychoanalysis: A Review of “The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis,” Edited by Elizabeth F. Howell and Sheldon Itzkowitz

Imagine the impact on the field of psychoanalysis if Freud had not revised his 1893 theory that posited that the source of hysteria involved childhood seductions, with a theory that privileged hysteria as caused by repressed, and therefore unconscious, childhood sexual fantasies, in effect grossly minimizing his patients’ allegations of childhood sexual abuse. How would Freud have dealt with the alleged perpetrators? Would he have gone on to privilege the unconscious as his object of investigation? And of importance, how might this have influenced his theories of psychoanalytic technique, psychoanalytic data, and psychoanalytic outcomes?

These compelling questions are taken up in The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working with Trauma, coedited by Elizabeth F. Howell and Sheldon Itzkowitz, two preeminent traumatologists, psychoanalysts, and authors, along with a bevy of cutting-edge contributors.

Today’s beginning and advanced psychoanalytic clinicians, in ever-increasing frequency, are encountering patients who have experienced a panoply of traumas and suffering from dissociation and dissociative disorders. This increase in trauma-based dissociation has created a burgeoning interest among psychoanalysts to better understand the history and etiology of dissociation and treat patients with trauma-based dissociation and dissociative disorders. This book, in seeking to address these clinical concerns, delivers on many counts.

The opening chapters of this scholarly work take a deep dive into the heritage of psychoanalytic theory-making of Freud and Janet, each of whom—

in different ways—has made a lasting impact on the concept of trauma-based dissociation and the issue of childhood sexual abuse in the preanalytic years of psychoanalysis. A central theme involves how Janet, in the late 1800s, began publishing his clinical work on hysteria, which established that the concepts of trauma (i.e., childhood sexual abuse) and the resultant dissociation of t