Kluft's (2005) "dissociative surface"
<p>Nov 07, 2014 05:50 PM</p>
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<a href="http://www.psychforums.com/dissociative-identity/topic151350.html">http://www.psychforums.com/dissociative-identity/topic151350.html</a></p>
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By popular request, this is a thread about Dr. Richard P. Kluft's term "dissociative surface". The term refers to what the clinician (psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, counselor, social worker) usually sees when the patient has DID.</p>
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The following quote is from pages 600-601 of Kluft's chapter 40, A Clinician's Understanding of Dissociation: Fragments of an Acquaintance, in the 898-page book Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond edited by Paul F. Dell and John A. O'Neil and published by Routledge in 2009. The book was awarded the ISSTD's Pierre Janet Writing Award for the best publication on dissociation in that year.</p>
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Dissociative identity disorder (DID) and allied forms of dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS) are psychopathologies of hiddenness (Gutheil, quoted in Kluft, 1985). […] My own studies on the natural history of DID indicate only 20% of DID patients have an overt DID adaptation on a chronic basis, and 14% of them deliberately disguise their manifestations of DID. Only 6% make their DID obvious on an ongoing basis. Eighty percent have windows of diagnosability when stressed or when triggered by some significant event, interaction, situation, or date. Therefore, 94% of DID patients show only mild or suggestive evidence of their conditions most of the time. Yet DID patients often will acknowledge that their personality systems are actively switching and/or far more active than it would appear on the surface (Loewenstein et al., 1987).</p>
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What we usually see is the "dissociative surface" (Kluft, 2005), which takes effort to appreciate and decode. Alters need not assume executive control to influence the course of events. The dissociative surface reflects covert efforts of alters "behind the scenes" to influence behaviors, attitudes, feelings, and perceptions, or demonstrate the unintended leakage of other alters' feelings, issues, or intentions into others. Such intrusions are often subjectively experienced by the alter apparently in control as "made" passive-influence phenomena, like many Schneiderian first-rank symptoms of schizophrenia (Kluft, 1987; Ross & Joshi, 1992). Potential contributions/contributors to what is seen at the dissociative surface are listed in Table 40.1, and characteristic observations creating an index of suspicion for the activities in Table 40.1 are found in Table 40.2.</p>
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Kluft's (2005) "dissociative surface"
Psych forums
By popular request, this is a thread about Dr. Richard P. Kluft's term "dissociative surface". The term refers to what the clinician (psychiatrist, clinical ...</p>