Attachment Trauma: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder and Multiplicity edited by Valerie Sinason (Brunner-Routledge, Hove,  East Sussex; Taylor & Francis, New York, 2002).  280 pp.

Like the topic of dissociation itself, chapters comprising this book vary in quality and style, and do not form an integrated or comprehensive whole, but the variety of contributions make for compelling reading that informs and enriches one in original and unexpected ways. So it is an important collation of views. One emerges with considerable respect for the diverse authors who have had the courage to grapple with people whose lives and selves have been shattered and fragmented through complex, cumulative human-generated traumata, at times originating within families of victims-witnesses and also perpetrators, of extreme, perverse, sadistic and criminal nature. Accordingly, understandably, these deeply damaged people present their varieties of defensive personalities/alternate selves to therapists in ways that challenge the credulity, quickness of response, cunning in ‘therapeutic holding’ and emotional robustness of any professional or other who encounters such a personality compendium-person.

Such encounters are inevitably difficult, including for those who themselves have previously encountered their like, and scepticism is an easy way out — as with deniers of the Holocaust: even reading is not easy. To deal with but one ‘patient’ client is demanding, to be forced to deal with several in the form of but one certainly demands ‘nothing short of everything’, including flexibility in therapeutic responsiveness and the development of new coping strategies.

I treated the book itself like a smorgasbord — except eventually, gradually I ate everything, so to speak, of this great feast. Valerie Sinason's own chapter I chose to read last. I would recommend it to be read first by those who are relatively unfamiliar with such clientele because of the vivid graphic description of a first encounter with a ‘many in one’ victim-witness-perpetrator-adult-child girl-boy-woman, which was handled by a vituoso assessor in her own inimitable style. Clearly a therapist who can accept the