Concept
Dissociation
A division of mental life in which a group of ideas, memories or functions runs on apart from the main body of consciousness, cut off from associative contact with it. French psychiatry described its extreme forms as double conscience, and Pierre Janet traced it to an innate weakness of psychological synthesis. In 1893 Breuer and Freud took it up as the splitting of consciousness present, at least in rudiment, in every hysteria, Breuer accounting for it by hypnoid states. Freud soon explained the split dynamically instead, as the outcome of a conflict between mental forces kept in place by repression, and the term receded in psychoanalysis until interpersonal and relational analysts and students of trauma took it up again in the twentieth century.
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- Related
- Hypnoid state
gave rise to
- Hypnoid state 1893 The hypnoid state was put forward to account for the splitting of consciousness that French psychiatry had described as double conscience. The Preliminary Communication holds that this split exists in rudiment in every hysteria, says the authors here agree with Binet and the two Janets, and groups the tendency to dissociation with the abnormal states it calls hypnoid. Breuer's theoretical chapter values hypnoid states above all for their power to bring about the splitting of the psyche.
developed by
- Josef Breuer 1895 In his theoretical chapter of Studies on Hysteria Breuer accepts, after the French researchers, that a splitting of mental activity occurs, and devotes a section to unconscious ideas and the splitting of the psyche. He prefers to speak of a splitting of the psyche rather than of consciousness, and makes hypnoid states its main condition in the major hysterias.
reworked by
- Sigmund Freud 1910 In his Clark University lectures Freud sets Janet's account of hysterical dissociation, an innate inability to hold mental processes together in a unity, against his own: the split is not a deficit of synthesis but the result of an active struggle between two psychical groupings, kept up by repression and met in treatment as resistance.