• According to Freud, the anxiety and conflicts were believed to be converted into physical symptoms.
• Dissociation can be viewed as severance of the connections between ideas and emotions.
• Dissociation involves amnesia, feelings of unreality, estrangement, depersonalization and sometimes a loss or shift of identity.
• Sudden temporary alterations of consciousness that blot out painful experiences are a defining characteristic of dissociative disorders.
Four conditions are included in this group—Dissociative amnesia, Dissociative fugue, disseminative identity disorder and depersonalization.
1. Dissociative Amnesia: is characterized by extensive but selective memory loss that has no organic cause (e.g., head injury). Some people cannot remember anything about their past. Others can no longer recall specific events, people, places, or objects, while their memory for other events *** intact.
• This disorder is often associated with an over-whelming stress.
2. Dissociative Fugue:
Symptoms:
• Unexpected travel away from home**or workplace.**
• The assumption of a new identity. •Inability to recall the previous identity.
• The fugue usually ends when the person suddenly ‘wakes up’ with no memory of the events that occurred during the fugue.
3. Dissociative identity disorder, often referred to as multiple personality, is the most dramatic of the dissociative disorders.
• It is often associated with traumatic experiences in childhood.
• The person assumes alternate personalities that may or may not be aware of each other.
4. Depersonalization involves a dreamlike state in which the person has a sense of being separatedboth from self and from reality.
• In depersonalization, there is a change of self-perception.
• The person’* sense of reality is temporarily lost or changed.
• The patient experiences change in his body parts.
