depersonalization007

Eric Lindblom

Project Lead

Harvard

(h2o)

Dissociation:

The French psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859-1947) initially coined the term splitting in his book L'Automatisme psychologique. There, he emphasized its role as a defensive mechanism employed in response to psychological trauma. While he considered dissociation an initially effective defence mechanism that protects the individual psychologically from the impact of overwhelming traumatic events, a habitual tendency to dissociate would likely be a marker of a more pronounced psychopathology.

The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition considers symptoms such as depersonalization, derealization, and psychogenic amnesia to be core features of dissociative disorders. However, in the normal population mild dissociative experiences are highly prevalent, with 60% to 65% of the respondents indicating that they have had dissociative experiences at least some of the time. ^[1]

Waller, N., Putnam F., & Carlson, E. (1996). Types of dissociation and dissociative types: A taxometric analysis of dissociative experiences. Psychological Methods 1:3, 300-321.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28psychology%29

Harvard University

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