The Abyss of Madness by Atwood George E

Author:Atwood, George E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2012-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

TRAUMA AND DISSOCIATION

What is the nature of the change that occurs when a person passes through a traumatic experience, but then seems not to know that he or she has done so? How does it come to pass that someone develops an amnesia for an event that has transpired? The best definition of dissociation that I have found was offered by one of my own patients, a woman who had been a victim, as a young child, of a long series of atrocious sexual assaults. The memories of these terrible events vanished as she grew up, and she only began to reclaim them after many years of psychotherapy and also after finding and marrying a man who made her feel loved and accepted. Some 15 years into the process of recalling and reliving her vast trauma, she one day remarked to me: “You know, George, I guess I just became someone none of this had ever happened to.”

A person who has amnesia for some emotionally traumatic event just has the amnesia, and that is it. He or she doesn’t remember it. In fact, as far as that person is concerned, it never occurred. The person becomes someone in whose life the event did not happen. That is what dissociation is.

How can a person become someone something did not happen to? Can it be said that this involves a splitting of consciousness? Consciousness does not and cannot split. It is not a material thing. Only material objects, like diamonds, can split. The person becomes someone for whom the incident did not take place, and nothing more. There is a tradition in our field that pictures consciousness as undergoing such splits: vertical splits, horizontal splits, dissociations that segregate one nucleus of experience from another. These images are all concretizing reifications, rather like the supposed brain changes referred to earlier; they refer to nothing objectively real, and they explain absolutely nothing. They are symbols we use to represent and master experiences that are beyond our capacity to assimilate.

Something happens in someone’s life. It is too much for the person to bear, so it is not borne. It is too much to be put into words, so nothing is said. It is too much to even be aware of, so awareness vanishes. The person has become someone for whom it did not occur. Of course, the person is nevertheless affected by the incident, whether or not he or she knows of its existence. The events of our lives have all kinds of effects on us, regardless of whether those events are accessible to our conscious recollection.

In a conference on trauma and dissociation I recently attended, I was asked about my views on so-called dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality. I answered that I had no “views” on multiplicity: It is a phenomenon one encounters from time to time, and that is all. The questioner continued to press on, explaining that some people in our field say it is real and is generated

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