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Multiple Selves, Multiple Voices: Working with Trauma, Violation and Dissociation.

P Mollon.

Wiley (1996).

ISBN: 9780471963301.

The book examines trauma-based dissociative disorders, including what was then called multiple personality disorder, and is now generally termed dissociative identity disorder (DID). Mollon combines psychoanalytic and clinical perspectives, drawing especially on Freud’s ideas about repression, Janet’s account of dissociation, and Winnicott’s distinction between the true and false self.

Its chapters address:

• The history and theory of dissociation.
• The psychological and biological effects of trauma and abuse.
• Memory, forgetting, confabulation, and “body memory.”
• Internal and external object relations.
• Therapeutic work with MPD/DID.
• Case illustrations and the therapeutic relationship.
• The problem of evil and severe psychological perversion.

Mollon cautions therapists against treating recovered traumatic memory as the primary goal, because suggestive methods may foster false memories or retraumatize the patient. Instead, he emphasizes a slow, respectful, empathic therapeutic relationship focused on healing psychological and behavioural disturbance.

The book is therefore best understood as a historically situated clinical study: useful for tracing psychoanalytic approaches to trauma and dissociation, but it should be read alongside contemporary diagnostic research and current clinical guidelines on dissociative disorders.

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