Psychodynamic Repression

Dissociative disorders are disruptive breakdowns in memory, awareness, identity, and perceptions. There are many things that describe dissociative disorders. Psychodynamic explanations are the repression of painful memories, thoughts, and impulses to avoid pain of facing reality. Examples could be repressed memories of traumatic childhood events, and/or abuse. The person will pretend in their mind to be another person, who is seeking safety. They could experience bad thoughts, and impulses that they unconsciously try to disown or deny by assigning these thoughts to other personalities. These personalities can be exhibited in a variety of situations and the person many times feels as thought they are observing other parts of themselves. The person is in touch with reality, but is also aware that these other personalities are subparts of their own identity.

Behavioral explanations are the drifting of the person’s mind and attempting to forget the learned response they have developed by the use of operant conditioning caused by the horrifying event. The person will do behavior that rewards them and will repeat this behavior if they than experience a positive response. If the person can reduce their amount of anxiety that surrounds the traumatic experience they can increase the likelihood of forgetting. The behavioral explanation fails to explain how a person can escape from the painful memories, how the memories grow into a complex disorder or why people develop a dissociative disorder in the first place.

State-dependent learning explanations are the observed experiments on animals. The animals are given certain drugs and taught to perform certain tasks. A certain level of arousal experienced by the animal will most likely help them to remember the memories better. People who are prone to develop dissociative disorders have a state-to-state memory that is usually rigid and narrow. Each of their thoughts, memories, and skills are tied extensively to a particular state of arousal. When they are exposed again to a memory of a certain experience that is almost identical to the situation when the original memory was first acquired the person may experience the dissociative state. Different levels of arousal may produce different groups of memories, thoughts, and abilities.

A self hypnosis explanation is a sleep like state that is suggestible. During hypnosis people remember events that have occurred but were then forgotten. Hypnotic amnesia is when people are told to do things under the hypnosis. A signal like a snap or clap is given and then they are woken up and the activities that were performed are forgotten. Dissociative disorders may be a form of self hypnosis where people hypnotize themselves to forget horrifying events and experiences that have occurred that they have in the past been unable to deal with. Usually the dissociative disorder is developed when a child is four to six years old because they are very suggestible. They separate themselves from their body, fulfilling a wish to become some other person or persons to escape the trauma.