Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Chapter 12. Various Therapeutic Techniques (9)

So long as this mapping is documented in the textbooks of R. Kluft, F. Putnam, C. Ross, and other experts, this should be considered as one of the standardized treatment methods among experts. Certainly it might be meaningful for DID patients to at least attempt to make a list of the profiles of the identities as a first step of their treatment. This can be compared to a review of system that the physician performs. When we visit an internist for some medical problems, an internist performs examination throughout the body to make a list of the problems.
Treatment of DID was pioneered by many experts, but especially Richard Kluft’s name is worth mentioning. When he started to communicate his own works since 1980s, many clinicians are at awe with what he reported. He revealed his works with 33 DID patients (Kluft, 1984), including the number of different identities of the each patient that he clarified with the use of mapping. It ranged from two to 86. These are listed by the technique of mapping.
Kluft, R (1984) Treatment of multiple personality disorder. Psychiatric Clinics of North America 7(1): 9-30.)
In his work, Kluft indicated the number of months that it took for each patient to achieve integration, and among these, ten of them took less than four months. He is stating that one third of his patients achieved integration within several months! By indicating that with the use of mapping he achieved this success in his treatment, it gave pressure to many clinicians who felt that they should follow the steps of Kluft to achieve similar success.
However, recent experts of DID treatment seem to be much more cautious. According to his revised textbook, Ross (1997) writes as follows. “Since the 1989 edition of this book, the main evolution in my practice concerning mapping is that I no longer request extensive written system maps early in therapy. Instead, I am more inclined to let the system unfold naturally, and I restrict my mapping to the key alters involved in the current pressing problems.”(p.313) and we do not hear any particular retort from Kluft yet.
Ross, C.(1997) Dissociative Identity Disorder. Diagnosis, Clinical features, and treatment for multiple personality. John Wiley & Sons.

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