Exploring Dissociation

A comprehensive, single-source guide to this growing field

Exploring Dissociation provides a comprehensive overview of the development of this rapidly growing field, using classic psychological theories of attachment, learning and memory, attention, and intergeneration transmission of trauma to map out future directions for assessment, treatment, and research. The book’s international contributors offer a mix of up-to-date research findings and innovative models, blending very different viewpoints in a multi-layered approach that helps define dissociation. The book examines the structure of dissociation, an attachment model of dissociation, parenting, executive functioning, peri-traumatic dissociation, and cultural perspectives.

As dissociation gains greater attention in mainstream psychology and psychiatry, a variety of theories about its development have been advanced. Exploring Dissociation organizes existing theories into a single source and adds new perspectives and theories to explore three central issues of the field: definition, development in both function and etiology, and identifying cognitive correlates. The leadings experts in dissociation, cognition, development, and clinical science combine existing literature with advanced study, using previous research to further new viewpoints.

Exploring Dissociation examines:

• a bipartite model of dissociation
  
• detachment and compartmentalization
  
• the function of dissociation
  
• developmental etiology
  
• etiological and intervention considerations
  
• parenting dissociation and trauma exposure
  
• dissociation’s early roots in hypnosis
  
• nonpathological dissociation
  
• cognitive strengths associated with dissociation
  
• dissociation’s relationship to inhibition
  
• and much more

Exploring Dissociation is an important professional resource for trauma and dissociation clinicians, therapists, and researchers, and a vital classroom text for graduate students in both cognitive and clinical psychology.