“How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity”
“One of the psychiatrists on Columbia’s psychiatric unit, Aaron Krasner, now a professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale, described the comments in the news as “very condemning and discrediting. I think this speaks to the rage that dissociative conditions incur in certain people. There is an ineffable quality to dissociative cases. They challenge a conventional understanding of reality.” He told me that he was troubled by the narrowness of medical literature on these states; there are no medications that specifically target the problem. “Dissociative fugue is the rare bird of dissociation, but dissociation as a phenomenon is very common,” he said. “I think as a field we have not done our due diligence, in part because the phenomenon is so frightening. It’s terrifying to think that we are all vulnerable to a lapse in selfhood.”…
Cases of dissociation had a whiff of the mystical, and doctors tended to stay away from them. Dozens of articles from the turn of the twentieth century, published in the Times, recount miraculous, inexplicable transformations: a Minnesota reverend, missing for a month, realized that he had travelled across the county and enlisted in the Navy, “though never before in his life had he even gazed on the ocean”; a professor thought to have drowned was discovered, three years later, using a new name and working as a dishwasher; a deacon in New Jersey woke up and “realized the room he has occupied for more than a year was strange to him” and his Bible was marked with someone else’s name. He had been missing for four years…
in the decades after Bourne’s disappearance, the study of dissociation largely vanished. The prevailing schools in psychology and psychiatry — behaviorism and psychoanalysis — adopted models of the mind that were incompatible with the concept. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, several thousand people claimed that, having been abused as children, they had developed multiple selves. The public responded to these stories much as it had to the surge of dissociative cases at the turn of the century: this sort of mental experience was considered too eerie and counterintuitive to believe.”
