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Defenses

Dissociation

Dissociation is a temporary break in the threads that normally hold experience together: memory, awareness, and a sense of who you are. Under emotional pressure, a person may “space out,” lose a stretch of time, feel oddly unreal, or do something completely out of character and later feel it wasn’t really them. Something too difficult to face finds expression, but in a state that keeps it at arm’s length.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by “a temporary alteration in the integrative functions of consciousness or identity” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). Both the troubling idea and the feeling or impulse tied to it stay out of awareness, “but are expressed by an alteration in consciousness.” The person may be dimly aware that something unusual is happening without recognizing it as their own.

Dissociation protects against material experienced as “too threatening, too conflict-laden, or too anxiety-provoking” to be fully acknowledged, such as the memory of a trauma. Because the feeling surfaces in an altered state, the person can feel less guilty or threatened by it. The cost is that experience goes missing: the DMRS notes that dissociation “may result in a loss of function or in uncharacteristic behavior,” and what happens in those states is hard to remember, own, or learn from.

Where It Sits

Dissociation belongs to Level 5, the Neurotic Defense Level, within the Neurotic Defensive Category, which the DMRS describes as the “middle-range of adaptiveness.” Neurotic defenses keep something out of awareness while letting it find partial, indirect expression.

The DMRS scores this level in two groups. Dissociation and repression form the hysterical group (Level 5a); reaction formation and displacement form the “other neurotic” group (Level 5b). The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale placed dissociation at a broader “mental inhibitions” level that also included the obsessional defenses.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify dissociation:

Examples

Nine missing days

Pierre Janet described P., a 30-year-old railway employee in eastern France who was easily upset by any hint of accusation. His brother had charged him, groundlessly, with dishonest acts. On 3 February 1895, crossing a bridge in Nancy, P. felt a sudden pain in his head, and his memory stopped. He came back to himself nine days later near Brussels, with no idea how he had gotten there: “how he accomplished that singular journey, he does not in the least know.” Janet and his colleagues later recovered the missing days. Gripped by fear of the accusation, P. had slipped away, avoiding imagined pursuers, with the idea of taking refuge abroad under a false name. Only when thoughts of his family returned did he come to.

Pierre Janet, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (1920), pp. 45–50

Two states of consciousness

Josef Breuer’s patient Anna O., who fell ill at 21 while her father was gravely ill, is a far more severe case. Breuer found “two entirely separate states of consciousness, which alternated very frequently and spontaneously.” In one she knew her surroundings and was sad and anxious but relatively normal; in the other she hallucinated and was “naughty,” and afterward she complained of gaps in time. Breuer believed her habitual daydreaming, which she called her “private theater,” had laid the foundation for the split. Hers is an extreme picture; the DMRS items also describe brief, milder versions, such as suddenly feeling “spaced out.”

Josef Breuer, “Miss Anna O.,” in Breuer & Freud, Studies in Hysteria (1936), pp. 14–16, 28

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Repression
In repression, the idea goes missing but the feeling is still felt in ordinary consciousness. In dissociation, “both the idea and associated affect or impulse remain out of awareness,” and they come out through a change in the person’s state.
Acting out
Acting out means acting on feelings without reflection or regard for consequences. In dissociation, the act comes out of an altered state: the person experiences it as out of character and is surprised by it afterward.
Absorption and daydreaming
Getting lost in a daydream or a routine task isn’t dissociation in the defensive sense. Breuer noted that in ordinary reverie “every disturbance therein, as for example, every call, reestablishes its normal unity, nor is it followed by any amnesia.”
Dissociative disorders
The defense describes how a person handles a particular stress. A dissociative moment, even a striking one, is not by itself a diagnosis.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count dissociation among their characteristic defenses:

History

The French psychologist Pierre Janet developed the idea of dissociation in the late nineteenth century, notably in L’automatisme psychologique (1889). In lectures given at Harvard Medical School and published in 1907, he described hysteria as involving “a tendency to the dissociation and emancipation of the systems of ideas and functions that constitute personality.”

Breuer and Freud’s “Preliminary Communication” of 1893, reprinted in Studies in Hysteria (1895), agreed with Janet and Alfred Binet that “the splitting of consciousness, so striking in the familiar classical cases of double consciousness, exists rudimentarily in every hysteria.” Breuer traced the split to dreamlike “hypnoid states.” Freud soon parted ways with both. By 1894 he described a “defense hysteria” in which the split was the result of pushing an unbearable idea away, and in Studies in Hysteria he wrote that “whatever I treated changed itself into a defense hysteria.” His path led toward repression; Janet’s kept dissociation at the center.

Not every scheme puts dissociation in the same place. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales both place it among the middle-range defenses, the DMRS in its hysterical group at Level 5. George Vaillant, by contrast, listed dissociation among the immature defenses and noted that these defenses are common in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Research tools followed. Bernstein and Putnam (1986) developed the Dissociative Experiences Scale, a 28-item self-report questionnaire, defining dissociation as “a lack of the normal integration of thoughts, feelings, and experiences into the stream of consciousness and memory.” They noted that it “occurs to some degree in normal individuals.”

Sources