The Psychology of Self-Deception - Ego Defence 3 of 10: Dissociation

Isolation of affect is probably most apparent when someone refers to an emotionally loaded event or situation in a casual, matter-of-fact, or otherwise dispassionate way. This can be called for in certain circumstances, for example, in providing the distance and objectivity that a physician needs to make the right or best decisions about the care of her patients. On the other hand, too much detachment does not make for a good physician, and, like most psychological processes, detachment is best if it can be conscious and pragmatic rather than rigid and defensive.

Isolation of affect is very common. Other forms of dissociation, while much more dramatic, are correspondingly less common. They are usually precipitated by an intensely traumatic event, leading to a disruption in the normally integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, and perception. These dissociative disorders, as they are called in modern classifications of mental disorders, may involve overlapping phenomena such as amnesia, possession trance, and stupor.

In dissociative amnesia, the person suffers a loss of memory, most commonly for the period surrounding the traumatic event. Such a condition has long been recognized. Already in the first century, the naturalist Pliny the Elder remarked that, ‘Nothing whatever, in man, is of so frail a nature as the memory; for it is affected by disease, by injuries, and even by fright; being sometimes partially lost, and at other times entirely so.’

In possession trance, the person reacts to the traumatic event by entering a dissociative state in which her identity is replaced by that of another person, animal, or inanimate object, or, more commonly, by a ghost, spirit, or deity.

In many cultures, certain forms of trance are recognized, accepted, and even exalted as expressions of religious fervor or manifestations of the divine. Possession trance, therefore, should only be considered problematic, or potentially problematic, if it is not sanctioned by the person’s culture or sub-culture.

In dissociative stupor, the person reacts to the traumatic event by becoming immobile and mute, failing to respond to stimuli such as the human voice, bright lights, or extremes of hot and cold.

Dissociative stupor—that is, stupor as a reaction to a traumatic event—is but one form of stupor, and it is important for the medical team to rule out other causes of stupor such as severe depression, schizophrenia, and organic brain disease.

A fourth kind of dissociative disorder is dissociative fugue, in which the person embarks on an unexpected journey that may last for up to several months. During this journey, there is memory loss and confusion about personal identity or even assumption of another, entirely different identity. And once the fugue ends, the memory of the journey is lost.

It should be borne in mind that, just like dissociative fugue, revenge and fame can also be construed as ego defenses.

Agatha Christie, the world’s most famous mystery writer, pulled a, now, famous vanishing act. On a cold December night in 1926, she went out in her beloved Morris Cowley roadster and didn’t return home for 11 days.

Her mother, to whom she had been very close, had died some months earlier, and her husband was having an affair which he made little effort to disguise.

Agatha never discussed this perplexing episode and also excluded it from her biography. Perhaps she contrived it as an act of revenge, maybe even as a publicity stunt, but a dissociative fugue is an equally likely explanation and also the one upheld by her then doctors.

In Agatha’s (telling?) own words, ‘Most successes are unhappy people. That’s why they are successes—they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice… The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves that they don’t give a damn.’

Denial is, of course, an important component of any dissociative disorder. Although commonly described as a ‘compartmentalization of experience’, dissociative disorders are, perhaps, nothing more than an extreme form of denial.

As our journey into self-deception has begun to reveal, ego defenses do not, for the most part, exist in splendid isolation, but involve a great deal of overlap between mutually reinforcing ego defenses.