Associative Identities Therapy: A unified theory for the development and treatment of Psychopathologies

The disease theory of Multiple Personality Disorder is that unhappiness in adulthood stems from trauma in childhood (Gleaves, Hernandez, & Warner, 1999) and the trauma is so severe that the individual creates multiple identities to cope with it (Spanos, 1994) whereby several distinct states of mind or personalities reside in one body. Each of these personalities has its own sense of self and has its own habits of thought, emotions, and memory. Unlike Multiple Personality Disorder, which is more like a disease, where a person has it or does not have it, most professionals feel that dissociation ranges from a normal state, daydreaming, to more pathological forms (Waller, Putnam, & Carlson, 1996). It has been thought that Dissociative Disorders are rather rare but dissociative experiences are very common (Kihlstrom, Glisky, & Angiulo, 1994). Stone (1993, 2000) theorized that dissociative personalities or identities are in fact normal and everybody has these multiple personalities but only some people are aware of most of their multiple personalities whilst most people have less awareness of most of their multiple identities.This keynote presentation will make a distinction between disassociate identity disorder and dissociative identity personalities; formulate a unified theory for the development and treatment of specific psychopathologies based on disassociate identity personalities: associative identity therapy.Depression as a specific psychopathology will be used as a case formulation: depression is seen as the expression of a depressed identity dominating other identity personalities. Associative identity therapy aims to increase the patient's awareness of his other identity personalities, especially the opposite of his depression identity thereby reducing the dominance of his depression identity and thus curing the patient from depression.