Dissociation as a clinical and empirical construct

Dissociation involves a disruption of and/or a discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behavior. As a psychobiological mechanism, dissociation is already available in early stages of development, and it allows individuals to protect themselves from distressful and overwhelming stimuli. However, when dissociation is relied upon as a person’s primary response to stress, it becomes pathological and it can generate severe symptoms such as amnesia, depersonalization, derealization, identity alteration, and identity confusion. The symposium will discuss the actual scientific evidence concerning the overly activated dissociative processes, their origins, characteristics, and clinical outcomes. Schimmenti will compare two competing models of dissociation (the trauma model and the fantasy model), and will illustrate the superiority of the trauma model for the assessment and treatment of dissociation. Farina will show that early relational trauma negatively affect the integrative functions of the mind and their contents, and will propose that dissociation can be conceived as a disintegrative process that involves the higher-level integrative functions of the mind. Palmieri and colleagues will discuss two clinical cases, in which patients' and therapist's physiological measures were collected during each session, showing evidences that the desynchronization phases between the patient and the therapist were often linked to dissociative processes, usually associated to the patients' narratives of their core relational trauma.