Dissociation and the Dynamics of Personality: Trauma, Consciousness, and Culture

Dissociation and the Dynamics of Personality addresses the nature of personality in trauma-dissociation and proposes a dynamic understanding of persons that fundamentally challenges conventional views of the self and consciousness.

This important book provides a clear and coherent understanding of how childhood trauma can lead to a range of dissociative responses, addressing the fundamental issues underlying the controversy in this field. By recognising causal complexity and the dynamic convergence of biology and culture, Boag demonstrates the significance of trauma-dissociation for understanding personality and consciousness. Drawing upon both philosophy of mind and current psychiatric and neurobiological evidence, this book proposes a dynamic understanding of persons that fundamentally challenges the conventional view of the self and consciousness.

Dissociation and the Dynamics of Personality will be of interest to readers concerned with the trauma-dissociation controversy, including philosophers of mind and psychiatrists. It will also interest psychological practitioners and psychologists, as well as anyone concerned with the implications of the dissociative mind for understanding personality.

Simon Boag is Associate Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University, Australia. He has published extensively on the topics of personality psychology and psychodynamic theory and is the author of Metapsychology and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis and Freudian Repression, the Unconscious, and the Dynamics of Inhibition (both Routledge).