Daydreaming and dissociative amnesia sit on the same psychological spectrum
Drifting off in a dull meeting and losing all memory of who you are may look unrelated, but psychologists place both on one continuum called dissociation. What unites them is a pulling away from reality, which is different from psychosis, where reality itself is misperceived.
Dissociation covers experiences from mild emotional distance from one's surroundings to a severe disconnection from physical and emotional life. The DSM-5 recognises it both as a family of disorders and as a symptom of other conditions. Its causes are thought to involve neurobiology, trauma, anxiety and psychoactive drugs.
At the gentle end, it can work as a coping strategy for handling stress, boredom or conflict, and it includes everyday daydreaming and harmless altered states of consciousness. Further along lie the dissociative disorders: depersonalisation-derealisation disorder, where the self or the world feels unreal; dissociative amnesia; dissociative fugue, in which people forget their identity or take on a new one; and dissociative identity disorder, once called multiple personality disorder. Memory loss features in some of these but not all.
The French philosopher and psychologist Pierre Janet, who lived from 1859 to 1947, is credited with the concept. Unlike later thinkers, he did not see it as a defence. He believed it struck people with an inborn weakness in mental functioning that tipped into hysteria under stress, with trauma just one of many pressures that could set off what we would now call dissociative symptoms. A separate line of thought came from Eugen Bleuler, who linked dissociation to schizophrenia.
Interest has risen and fallen. It was intense in France and England in the late 19th century, and in America it peaked between 1890 and 1910, particularly in Boston through figures such as William James and Morton Prince, before psychoanalysis and behaviourism crowded it out. A 1944 review of 76 cases dating from the 1790s to 1942 described patterns still recognised today. Ernest Hilgard's neodissociation theory in the 1970s revived attention, and writing on multiple personality grew through the 1980s. Research on PTSD, neuroimaging and population studies has since brought dissociation back into clinical focus.
Source: Dissociation (psychology)
