Dissociative Symptomology
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)]