Dissociation

“ Knowledge must precede dissociation, so that dissociation is nothing more than a decision to forget. What has been forgotten then appears to be fearful, but only because the dissociation is an attack on truth. ”

“ That general and systematized dissociation are phenomena which can be, and frequently are, induced by the conative force of purely subconscious processes, in view of the multiform data offered by hysterics can be open to no manner of doubt. The process may be also formulated in terms of conflict.
Laws governing the lines of cleavage of personality.—In systematized dissociation there is a cleavage between certain organized systems of experiences and 505functions and the remainder of the personality. The contracted personality is consequently shorn of much. ”

“ As usual, once the dissociation is established, there is [Pg 97] no limit to its manifestations. Picture three or four Dissociates at work at a table, all bent upon producing signs of the marvellous, all blind to the mechanism at work, and with the hypersensitiveness of the dissociated stream ready to draw on the memories of the unconscious.
Mixed with this is the possibility of more elaborate deceit: when the hands of all are raised from the table their knees may still be under it; and if the knees are clear of it a blackened lath concealed up a sleeve can still work miracles. ”

“ The occurrence of definite dissociation with altered personality may be regarded as an attempt at solution, especially when it takes the form of the fugue with its independent activity and its independent consciousness. ”

“ Whatever the symptoms, the mechanism of the puzzling malady is always the same. There has been an abnormal dissociation. The ideas connected with the original shock, although submerged beneath the threshold of consciousness—in a word, forgotten—remain vividly alive in the subconscious, to act as perpetual irritants of the [234] nervous system and in time to give rise to the appearance of the symptoms of which the sufferer complains. Often, indeed, the dissociation is instantaneous, and the appearance of the disease symptoms equally rapid. ”

“ In order to allow the emergence of the transmitted ideas into the field of conscious knowledge, there seems to be always necessary some form of psychical “dissociation”—as in a trance, dream, reverie, or moment of absentmindedness. Such states of dissociation are not always easy to bring about voluntarily; and when they are brought about, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, it by no means follows that ideas received telepathically [85] will forthwith and rapidly rise above the threshold of consciousness. ”

“ As examples of such reactions may be mentioned: eating—eatables, short—shortness, sweet—sweetened, quiet—quietness.
*Partial Dissociation.*—We have employed the term dissociation to indicate a rupture of that bond—whatever be its nature-which may be supposed to exist normally between stimulus and reaction and which causes normal persons to respond in the majority of instances by common reactions. ”

“ The term "dissociation" will then be used for a process of activity of suppressed experience in which this activity is accompanied by consciousness so separated from the general body of consciousness that the experience of each phase is inaccessible to the other under ordinary conditions, in which the two phases can only be brought into relation with one another by means similar to those by which experience can be recovered from the unconscious. ”

“ Usually in all such cases the neurograms are isolated, etc., by dissociation. They still, however, may be strongly organized and conserved as an unconscious complex and sometimes may be excited as a subconscious process by an associated stimulus. In such conditions it very frequently is found that the dissociation is due to conflict between the emotion belonging to the complex and another emotional complex. The impulsive force of the latter dissociates the former complex which then cannot be voluntarily reproduced as memory, nor awakened by any association under normal conditions. ”

“ But even here the position would not be altogether satisfactory, for we should be driven to regard the process of suppression to which the paralyses and anæsthesias are due as itself a mode of activity of the suppressed experience. If, in place of regarding dissociation as a state of independent activity, we hold independent consciousness to be a necessary part of the concept of dissociation, it is evident that hysteria wholly fails to answer to the definition, for there is no evidence whatever of such independent consciousness. ”

“ Or, again, sentiments, thoughts, dispositions, tendencies, instincts which, though intimately belonging to the individual, have been restrained, repressed, concealed from the world for one reason or another, may, being set free through dissociation 550from the repressing thoughts, rise to the surface and take part in the synthesis of the new personality.
In other words there is a rearrangement and readjustment of the innate dispositions and those deposited by the experiences of life which go to form personality. Some by the process of dissociation are expelled from the personal synthesis ”

“ Fundamentally, dissociation of consciousness means the same thing as Gross's disintegration of consciousness. By accepting the idea of sejunction we have only a new term of which psychiatry has certainly enough. Dissociation according to the French school is a weakness of consciousness due to the splitting off of one or a series of ideas. They separate themselves from the hierarchy of the conscious ego and begin a more or less independent existence. [77] The hysteria doctrine of Breuer and Freud was developed on this foundation. ”

“ The first possibility which occurs to us is that we should connect the term "complex" with the process of dissociation as so defined. A complex would then be a body of suppressed experience with an activity independent of the behaviour of normal life and accompanied by consciousness dissociated or separated from the consciousness which accompanies that behaviour. ”

“ The dissociation is apt to involve a certain number of acquired traits and certain innate dispositions and instincts, while other outlived and repressed traits and innate dispositions and instincts are apt to be reawakened and synthesized into an altered abnormal personality. ”

“ As to the mechanism by which pathological dissociation is effected, it may be well to point out here that there is no reason to suppose that it is anything more than an exaggeration of the normal mechanism by which, on the one hand, mental processes are temporarily inhibited from entering the field of consciousness, and, on the other, physiological functions are normally suppressed and prevented from taking part in the psychophysiological economy. ”

“ If individuals of the first type are trying to build high without adequate foundations, those of the second are mistaking the foundations for a complete building. A dissociation of a different type occurs in them—a dissociation due to lack of use, to a mere failure to connect up that part of the mind concerned with sexual emotion with a great many of the mind’s other activities. Thus the sexual side has few and lower values associated with it than it might, and other possibilities of thought and feeling and action remain as mere possibilities, never realized in actuality. ”

“ The reaction character of mental life is still more distinctly manifested in the various forms of mental dissociation, such as are to be found in the psychopathic and neuropathic diseases and in the states of hypnosis, and in fact in all the phenomena belonging to the order known as the subconscious. Many of the most important methods in psychology and psychopathology are based on this reaction aspect of the moment-consciousness. ”

“ Of course the degree of dissociation of consciousness, the content of the fixed idea, and the physiological manifestations vary in individual cases, according to the nature of the case. Sometimes the disturbance of consciousness is slight and the physiological manifestations predominant.
From a consideration of all the facts we see that a conserved complex associated with strong feeling tones may play a disastrous and pathological part in certain individuals. ”

“ The more intense a stimulation is, the more extensive is the process of disaggregation, the higher mounts the moment-threshold giving rise to the different phenomenon of psycho-physiological and psycho-motor dissociation. ”

“ The most characteristic example of dissociation is the fugue in which a person shows behaviour, often of the most complicated kind, and lasting it may be for considerable periods of time, of which he is wholly unaware in the normal state. The fugue usually comes into being owing to the fact that some unpleasant experience has become unconscious by the unwitting process of suppression or is tending to pass into the unconscious through the agency of the witting process of repression. ”

“ Now we have known for many years from numerous observations that emotion tends to disrupt the mind and to dissociate the experiences which give rise to the affective state so that they cannot be brought back into consciousness. We may particularize further and, making use of the known impulsive force of emotion, attribute the dissociation (or inhibition) in many cases to a conflict between certain ideas belonging to the experience and other opposing ideas which, with the emotion, they have awakened. ”

“ It has been found that under some unusual stimulus—such as an injury, an illness, or the strain of an intense emotion—there may result a disintegration, or, as it is technically termed, a dissociation, of personality, giving rise it may be to hysteria, it may be to hallucinations, it may even be to a complete disappearance of the original personality and its [Pg 75] replacement by a new personality, sometimes of radically different characteristics. ”

“ At all events, the dissociation of the mind is the chief cause of the trouble, and its synthesis the chief means of cure. That much has been rendered certain by the newer researches in the field of the subconscious, and by the persistent search for that greatest of all secrets—the Mystery of Being. ”

“ Recessive states, becoming marginal and subconscious, lapse from voluntary control, they cannot be recalled deliberately and consciously by the activities of voluntary, recognitive, associative memories, constituting the mental life of personality, and hence may be regarded as mental systems in a state of dissociation. The lapsed states are present subconsciously when not completely blurred and obliterated by the process of decay or regression. ”

“ All of us in some degree, and many persons in a high degree, keep their beliefs and thoughts in separate compartments which have been called "logic-tight compartments." In these cases each of two sets of beliefs or thoughts is accessible to the other, but no effort is ever naturally made to bring them into relation with one another. The special feature of these cases is a failure of fusion or integration which brings them definitely into relation with dissociation. The state may be regarded as another epicritic form of dissociation in which any suppression is of a very incomplete kind. ”

“ In dissociation we have a phenomenon which runs through the whole of the dreaming life, and is scarcely less fundamental than the process of fusion by which the imagery is built up. The fact that the [67] reasoning of dreams is usually bad, is due partly to the absence of memory elements that would be present to waking consciousness, and partly to the absence of sensory elements to check the false reasoning which, without them, appears to us conclusive. ”

“ Gerald Balfour, whose writings on Psychical Research deserve the closest and most attentive study, discussed in the Hibbert Journal ten years ago the problem of dissociation, “whereby an element of the normal self may be supposed to become [Pg 92] in a lesser or greater degree divided off from that self, and to acquire, for the time being, a certain measure of independence.” ”

“ It should be noted that the formation of a secondary personality is primarily the result of two processes, dissociation and synthesis though it is subject to secondary growth through various processes. As a result of the first process, dissociation, systems of thought, ideas, memories, emotions and dispositions previously habitual in the individual may cease to take part in the affected person’s mental processes. The influence of 547these systems with their conative tendencies is therefore no longer for the time being in play. ”

“ The natural consequence is restlessness, agitation, anger, indecision, etc. The dissociation of personality, with the outcropping of the “b mood,” follows—a conflict due to the excitation of certain childhood complexes, conserved in the unconscious and embracing sentiments in which are incorporated the instinct of self-subjection or abasement. This “b mood” is a study in itself. ”

“ Dissociation, day-dreaming, and mental epilepsy are but few of the many milestones on a road, the end of which is insanity, or complete and permanent dissociation, instead of the partial and fleeting dissociation from which we all suffer. The lunatic never "comes to", but in a world of dreams dissociates himself forever from realities he is not mentally strong enough to face. ”

“ The second class of facts that seem to justify this conception of the consciousness of complex organisms are facts which have been studied and discussed widely in recent years under the head of mental dissociation or disintegration of personalities. Such disintegration seems to occur spontaneously as the essential feature of severe hysteria, and to be producible artificially and temporarily in some subjects, when they are thrown into deep hypnosis. ”