The Curious Reader’s Guide to Dissociation: Understanding Dissociative Processes, a Commentary

Associative processes that provide salience through sorting of mental content rely upon dissociative processes to remove non-salient content from awareness, like not noticing the glasses on your nose. When association fails in trauma, as capacities to assimilate and accommodate experience are outstripped by that experience being outside the usual range of human experience, then more elaborate dissociative experience like depersonalization and derealization may become active to help us tolerate our perception even if it costs the price of isolated affect or additional amnesia for experience. With repetition of traumatic experience identity confusion and identity alteration may occur, effectively generating the less common dissociative identity disorder. This guide first explores the basis of dissociative experience as a prelude to the reader’s foray into the subject of this special issue of this journal. Additionally, the writer delves into aspects of the work of a world-class collection of authoritative articles to fully flesh them out or emphasize critically important perspectives. Finally, the centrality of the relationship in psychotherapy is emphasized as a requirement for effective treatment when persistent dissociative processes dominate the activities of a wounded human mind.