Author's reply

Dissociation begins with hypnotists, was developed by Janet, promoted by Freud and ruined by the absurdities of multiple personality disorder. ¹ Consider Janet ² hypnotising ‘Lucie’, an alternative personality of this patient producing automatic writing:

1. Q. ‘How are you?’

2. A. ‘I don't know.’

3. Q. ‘There must be someone there who hears me.’

4. A. ‘Yes.’

5. Q. ‘Who is it?’

6. A. ‘Someone other than Lucie.’

7. Q. ‘Ah, Indeed!’

8. A. ‘Another person.’

9. Q. ‘Would you like us to give her a name?’

10. A. ‘No.’

11. Q. ‘Yes it will be more convenient.’

12. A. ‘Alright, Adrienne.’

13. Q. ‘Very well Adrienne. Do you hear me?’

14. A. ‘Yes.’

In 1889 Binet observed that Janet ‘… himself created her by suggestion’. ³

Hacking ⁴ showed that the first 19th-century fugue states in young men were in French military conscripts exploiting the novel long-distance continental railways. In older persons fugues are only found with dementia. Experimental attempts by excellent social psychologists over 60 years have completely failed to replicate repression ⁵ and dissociation. Freud's own accounts of his cases with alleged repression/dissociation were completely unreliable, ⁶ particularly as shown in the Freud–Fliess correspondence. ⁷ Further, Pope et al ⁸ have shown that a phenomenon like dissociation (i.e. losing complete trace of some important event and then recovering it through memory) has not been found so far in world literature preceding 1786, and by then Mesmer was actively using hypnotic procedures. If dissociation is a genuine human experience, it is remarkable that it was not known before that time.

There is no case of proven ‘dissociation’ fulfilling Pope's criteria without organic disorder, although many cases of alleged dissociative memory loss exist, not to mention the generally rejected syndrome of dissociative identity disorder, of which dissociation is the artefactual foundation no matter how much the name or term may be changed.