Normative dissociation

Cardeña [71] has advised that, "To be useful as a concept, dissociation should not be applied to ordinary instances of less-than-full engagement with one's surrounding, experiences, and actions. Rather, it should pertain to qualitative departures from one's ordinary modes of experiencing, wherein an unusual disconnection or disengagement from the self or the surrounding occurs as a central aspect of the experience" [p. 23]. Bearing this admonition in mind, it seems reasonable to assert that the utility of the term depends on its ability to capture a distinct, and therefore meaningful, aspect of experience. It does not follow, however, that theorizing necessarily proceed from the premise that what is called dissociation must be by definition unusual and not ordinary. In this article I have endeavored to make the case for the primacy and ubiquity of dissociation in normal human experience. In most cases, the manifestations of normative dissociation may be understood as instantiations of absorption (and concomitant phenomena) as they operate in different arenas of mental activity. When absorbed in everyday activities, the material or task captures the phenomenological field, allowing for healthy temporary escape into alternate universes or a level of engagement that promotes optimal performance. In daydreaming, absorption engages persistent concerns or unaddressed challenges, with opportunities for resolution arising in part through the flow of wider associations and in part through testing and rehearsal of alternatives in fantasy. In pure fantasy, absorption and the imaginal process are merged to allow for fanciful explorations unconstrained by convention or reality. In dreaming, we may identify dissociation in its involuntariness and memory deficits and in the discontinuity of its phenomenology with the waking state. In most cases the normative dissociative experience is an admixture of absorption and its object, with intense focal concentration and suspension of contextual features - such as self-awareness and reflection, feelings of relatedness to self or the world, constraints of normal thinking, or awareness of volition - which allow for the conditions necessary to the achievement of its benefits. The fact of the pervasiveness of such experiences does not disqualify their essentially dissociative nature. I have also argued that pathological dissociation represents, at least in part, a disorder of normative dissociative processes by examining the forms (absorption in activities, daydreams, fantasies, and dreams) and functions (processing, escape, and reinforcement) of dissociation in daily life. Additionally, I have discussed some of the implications of these findings for the putative dissociative continuum. By appreciating the pervasiveness, mechanisms, and utility of the dissociations of everyday life, we illuminate one "portion of our being at once most familiar and most mysterious" [72, p. 1] and perhaps, also, gain a fresh vantage point from which to consider the impressive clinical and empirical knowledge base that has accrued in the study of the dissociative disorders.