Some Terms Defined

• Dissociative Disorders by Bill Conway, 9/3/97
  
  

Thanks for joining us. From the hint you've given of your thinking, we are very likely to agree at many levels. I have defined trauma as any situation in which pain, affect, or drive-based need is triggered in excess of our ability to modulate it; and I define abuse as any situation in which another person inflicts intentionally pain, affect, or drive-based need on an individual who is unable or rendered unable to modulate it. I define dissociation as a normal phenomenon, the mental experience that occurs when we focus our attention on something other than the obvious source of affect. We dissociate when a patient's communication makes us think about it hard enough for a moment that we miss the person's next words. A child who learns to think of "something else" when being beaten or raped has also learned to use dissociative technique to decrease the density of the untoward experience.

Yet since the act of "paying attention" is a function of the affect system (it is the affect triggered by a percept that locks our higher functions to the task thus declared), each of our dissociative moments is also an ideoaffective complex. When the bad scenes for which we use our dissociative skills occur often enough and at great enough density, they come to form a script with its own rules for the management of the affect contained therein.

We are born with nine affects that flick on and off all the time no matter what we'd like them to do. Personality, character, the self—these are terms for the complex patterns of affective magnification each of us learns over a lifetime and that define us for self and others. Tomkins said often that personality involves the differential magnification of innate affect.

If we have learned to handle a bad scene by hitting the button for a dissociative script, then that script contains the patterns which make up a particular differential magnification scheme, and therefore a handy-dandy miniature personality or self. Dissociative identity disorder, then, would be viewed in our system as a series of scripts through which scenes involving trauma and abuse have been handled by shifting attention to methods of affect management devised for other situations. Treatment, then would require attention to each of the innate affects as well as the methods used by an individual to shift from ambient affect to the dissociative script.

• Response Some Terms Defined by B. Lynch, 1/11/98
  • On Intent by Don Nathanson, 1/11/98
  • Terms defined, response by B. Lynch, 1/11/98