dissociation and repression

greenspun.com : LUSENET : History & Theory of Psychology : One Thread

relationships between dissociation and repression

-- Rosalia Giammetta (r.giammetta@inwind.it), March 03, 2003

Answers

Sorry, Rosalia, but there is no easy answer to this one, perhaps because we know so little about the actual processes behind the mechanisms of defense. There are a few things we can say with some confidence about repression: it is the basis for socialization (civilized sociaties assume people can control their sexual and aggressive impulses) and thus a certain level is "normal" (thus, Sigmund Freud was a bit off-base about that) and higher levels are the hall-marks of neuroses; the "failure of repression" is one indicator that a person is not neurotic but falls in the range of personality disorder or psychosis. Failure of repression might refer to unwelcome intrusive fantasies, or to the overt expression of sexual and aggressive impulses. Dissociation is a highly controversial defense mechanism. Some regard dissociation and dissociative identity disorder as severe pathology; others regard dissociation as a high-level defense, so that persons with dissociative identity disorder are as healthy as high-level neurotics. But generally the discussion then focuses not on the relationship between dissociation and repression, but between dissociation and splitting. But splitting is another defense with dozens of definitions and descriptions, although generally splitting is also regarded as a mark of personality disorder rather than of neurosis. There is quite a bit of discussion of these issues in the 1990s debates around repressed memories, but even there you'll find few definitive answers, in part because we know so much more about the manifestations of these defenses than we do about the actual mechanisms.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), March 03, 2003.

Hi Rosalia, Well here is another view on the topic. Think of it like dissociation is the result of repression. Let me explain. I want you to think in terms of memories, maybe bad memories or maybe not. OK if you have done your free association home work you know memories tend to be clustered around common meaningful themes, like files in a file drawer. Each file has all kinds of memories associated with it. Make a file and call it your mother file. Name it any thing. Now you can think of your personality as the whole file drawer, all them memories in all them files. That's your personality. Now suppose it is really painful and conflicting to remember the contents of one of them file drawers. Like you are walking down the street in the city and you see a little girl with a doll, and it reminds you of the time your mother for some reason known only to her threw one of your favorite dolls away, and that brings up the memory of when she ruined your favorite shirt washing it. Now you don't want to think about that file any more and you repress any thing more to do with mom. And when you do that, and you haven't got access to that mom file, then your personality is in a state of dissociation, it is split up kind of. Now the split might be so drastic that some of the files end up in another drawer altogether. Now you are a two drawer person, or a dual personality if there is little to no contact between the individual states of consciousness that represent the two drawers.

If you lived in France at the turn of the century, not this latest one but the one beginning 1900, then you could have gone to a French psychiatrist, Dr. Janet. And he could hypnotize you and put all the files back in order in one drawer. These days I guess you are on your own, so keep your files in one drawer and accessable.

Hope this helps. Best, David

-- david clark (doclark@yorku.ca), March 05, 2003.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ