Dissociative phenomena and symptomology include:

• Spontaneous trance (autohypnosis)
• Limited vision
• Analgesia/anesthesia
• Paresthesias (usually painless sensation, often described as burning, prickling tingling or numbness, skin crawling, itching, pins and needles)
• Sensory hallucinations, delusions, hyperacuity
• Alterations and distortions in sense of space or time
• Spontaneous regression
• Derealization (feelings of unreality)
• Depersonalization (feelings of not being real or alive, watching oneself in an act as though watching another person)
• Alterations and distortions in body image
• Internal sense of incohesiveness and disarray
• Hypermnesia 
• Memory disturbance (psychogenic amnesia [total, selective, & partial], 'scrambled memory' phenomena [e.g., traumatic triggering and flashback; spontaneous abreaction, regression or revivification, and so on])
• Alterations in sense of identify
• Shifts into dissociated functional states:

                   =--> Somnambulism (sleepwalking)

                   =--> Fugue states

                   =--> Behavioral Dyscontrol Syndromes

(episodic states such as "rage attacks," patterns of serial violence, chronic acts of self-injury/self-mutilation, addictive behavior and so on, can be understood as shifts into dissociated functional states )

                   =-> Dissociative Disorders (autohypnotic disorders) including dissociative identity disorder [formerly multiple personality disorder (MPD)]

Copyright 1987-2006 David L Calof ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

 

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