Drawing on the pioneering work of Janet, Freud, Sullivan, and Fairbairn and making extensive use of recent literature, Elizabeth Howell develops a comprehensive model of the dissociative mind. Dissociation, for her, suffuses everyday life; it is a relationally structured survival strategy that arises out of the mind's need to allow interaction with frightening but still urgently needed others. For therapists dissociated self-states are among the everyday fare of clinical work and gain expression in dreams, projective ...
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Drawing on the pioneering work of Janet, Freud, Sullivan, and Fairbairn and making extensive use of recent literature, Elizabeth Howell develops a comprehensive model of the dissociative mind. Dissociation, for her, suffuses everyday life; it is a relationally structured survival strategy that arises out of the mind's need to allow interaction with frightening but still urgently needed others. For therapists dissociated self-states are among the everyday fare of clinical work and gain expression in dreams, projective identifications, and enactments. Pathological dissociation, on the other hand, results when the psyche is overwhelmed by trauma and signals the collapse of relationality and an addictive clinging to dissociative solutions. Howell examines the relationship of segregated models of attachment, disorganized attachment, mentalization, and defensive exclusion to dissociative processes in general and to particular kinds of dissociative solutions. Enactments are reframed as unconscious procedural ways of being with others that often result in segregated systems of attachment. Clinical phenomena associated with splitting are assigned to a model of "attachment-based dissociation" in which alternating dissociated self-states develop along an axis of relational trauma. Later chapters of the book examine dissociation in relation to pathological narcissism; the creation and reproduction of gender; and psychopathy. Elegant in conception, thoughtful in tone, broad and deep in clinical applications, Howell takes the reader from neurophysiology to attachment theory to the clinical remediation of trauma states to the reality of evil. It provides a masterful overview of a literature that extends forward to the writings of Bromberg, Stern, Ryle, and others. The capstone of contemporary understandings of dissociation in relation to development and psychopathology, The Dissociative Mind will be an adventure and an education for its many clinical readers.
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Since it is now accepted practice to summarize an entire healing art based on one book's title, I thought that I'd give it a try. This title makes it plain that there is one mind that we all have to share, thus it is "dissociative". Now I understand why there are moments when "our" minds seem to have taken a holiday! It's not being lazy; it's being used by someone else! Thank you, Dr. Howell, for resolving so many of life's questions with your book title. You are obviously a brilliant, compassionate person and I can tell that you mix a killer Old Fashioned. Thanks also to memyselfandi for introducing me to this speedy and thrifty way to comprehend complexities: just grab the first word you see and riff on your existing prejudices until you feel the need for a nap!
memyselfandi
Aug 6, 2008
Dissociated from the people seeking help
The title, basically, captures the tone of this book: physically and emotionally removed from real people in distress. I recommend this book in order to highlight my points of how psychiatry is far more comfortable being removed from [dissociated], rather than related to, the humans seeking help. The book relates to readers who are far more comfortable seeing "patients" as objects to be observed rather than as real people who live lives far more akin to that of the "experts" on MPD/DID ever want to admit. This title alone describes a deep Freudian interpretation [slip!] about the the need for those who proclaim themselves "experts" on a diagnosis (diagnosis being nothing more than a fallible human theory) to be ever so omniscient over the consumers who seek their services. Is it that threatening to have "patients" be as human as the therapist? Why is there such a drive on the part of psychiatry to separate and dissociate "patients" from themselves -- to objectify, separate and remove patients to the point of being a "Abnormal, isolated body parts" = "The Dissociative Mind"? Would Armageddon begin if psychiatry would finally, some day, realize we are really all the same? I think not. Re-humanizing the mental health field would be the biggest accomplishment since cavemen discovered the ability to create fire. We eagerly await the day for such a book to be written.
