Dissociation, a group of phenomena long recognized as commonly exhibited by traumatized individuals, is a topic that is frequently misunderstood or entirely overlooked. On one hand, it has been identified as a phenomenon of central importance in the field of psychology for over a century and is much more prevalent than is generally recognized. On the other, it rarely receives the attention it deserves.

One reason for this state of affairs is that dissociation is a phenomenon that is difficult to grasp conceptually. It covers a wide range of manifestations that do not have an obvious common denominator. For example, depersonalization, feeling unreal or detached from one's own experience; psychogenic amnesia, memory difficulties because of psychological factors that are not within the range of ordinary forgetting; ...