Prologue (10)

Most readers might be satisfied with Dr.Yoro’s own explanation. He repressed his memory of the death of his father for a long time. That was an overload for his mind, and when the repression was removed, his mind got liberated and gained some extra freedom, and the symptoms disappeared.

Actually, I used this Dr.Yoro’s episode in my lecture of psychoanalysis for a graduate school of clinical psychology for several consecutive years. I presented this story and taught my students that psychoanalytic notions can be used to explain our own life experiences, just as Dr.Yoro demonstrates in his book. But recently I began wondering if it is really a good example of repression. Isn’t this rather an example of dissociation ? Can’ t his episode be better explained with the use of the notion of dissociation.
Here is the “dissociative” version of Dr.Yoro’s experience that I came up with later on.
Dr.Yoro had an intolerable experience of losing his father in his childhood. That experience is so traumatic that his mind got into a different mode in order to continue to go through his experience. That “different mode” of his mind corresponds to A’ in my diagram”2. A started to grow separately from A’ and that is why he lived for a period of time without vivid recollection of his father’s death. A’ kept being isolated and dormant until when Dr.Yoro was thirty years old, and it started to show up occasionally in his consciousness. Thus A’ was given a chance to get gradually assimilated to A.
I think that this “dissociative version” is better than Dr.Yoro’s own explanation based on the mechanism of repression. He said that he “repressed the death of my father”. He also said that he repressed the idea of “I haven’t greeted my father so I haven’t said” but what has been lost is not the single body of the information, but his experience itself with the emotion that he had at the age 4.