Prologue (11)

In psychoanalysis, subjects of repression are memories, desires, fantasies and so on. It can be complicated as a so-called complex, such as the Oedipus Complex, but usually its subjects are rather simple units of mental contents which might back and forth through a barrier separating conscious and unconscious (“repression barrier”). However, in Dr.Yoro’s case, it is about the entire experience of the loss of his father at the age four. Or you can say that it was who he was at that age that was lost, based on Dr.Yoro’s own description of the event, which is too massive and complicated as a subject of repression. It is rather the mechanism of dissociation that was mobilized to make his traumatic memory separated from his usual self.

Another reason why dissociation should be considered as a main mechanism in Dr.Yoro’s case was that his story has a striking similarity with episodes observed in DID cases. Patients with DID who have childhood trauma would start talking about their painful stories when they switch into childhood personality, while the main personality has only a foggy memory of it, or is totally amnesic about it.
However, I am not suggesting here that Dr.Yoro has DID. The way that he lost, then recovered and finally processed his past painful experience was very similar to that of patients with DID.

I would like to make a comment on an analogy that I keep conjuring up concerning dissociated past traumatic memories. They make me think of the ‘recovery’ tool of the computer. I am fond of this tool of Microsoft very much. “Recovery is a time machine”, said someone and I think that it is really true. If there is some trouble on my PC that I cannot fix by just rebooting, I use this tool and go to the ‘recovery point’ which was made automatically when the computer was working OK. Thus my PC recovers ‘who it was’ when it was operating normally, and it starts from there. Thus, ‘recovery point’ is made for the sake of normal functioning of the PC.
However, in human being, unlike the computer, the time that traumatic event occurred, an equivalent of ‘recovery point’ in PC, is made when the mind could no longer operate normally. It was a critical moment when the usual mode of mind froze up as a defense against trauma.