Table of Contents

Preface
CHAPTER 1 The coronavirus and other plagues
CHAPTER 2 An overview
CHAPTER 3 What is trauma?
CHAPTER 4 A bunch of fives:
CHAPTER 5 Definitions: Further definitions
CHAPTER 6 Dissociative identity disorder
CHAPTER 7 War and atrocity
CHAPTER 8 A further cornucopia of concepts
CHAPTER 9 An ending that cannot conclude
REFERENCES
Index

About the Author

Dr Valerie Sinason is a poet, writer, child psychotherapist, and adult psychoanalyst. A member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists and of the British Psychoanalytical Society, she helped to pioneer the field of disability psychotherapy and served as founding President of the Institute of Psychotherapy and Disability.  She is also the founder of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in London, and has worked extensively with severely traumatised individuals suffering from dissociative identity disorder. Previously, she has worked as a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, the Portman Clinic, the Anna Freud Centre, and St. George’s Hospital Medical School in the University of London. Her many books include Mental Handicap and the Human Condition: New Approaches from the Tavistock, now in its second edition.

Reviews

“This amazing little book helps each of us to speak and understand the unspeakable. Are we brave enough to know the truth in this dangerous but lifegiving journey? The book warns and encourages us that knowing can retraumatise at each life stage but also make us strong. Enjoy the clarity and beauty of Valerie’s whistle-stop tour of trauma and dissociation.” Baroness Hollins, Emeritus Professor, University of London; Emeritus President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists: “Valerie Sinason ventures into troubled emotional spaces to hear what we don’t know and, often, don’t wish to know. In plain language she has enabled us to see forms of cruelty and the psychic consequences which lead to the extreme splitting of psyches into dissociated and multiple self-states … A book of interest to clinicians and a much wider audience.” Dr. Susie Orbach, Psychoanalyst and founder of The Women’s Therapy Centre, London, and The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, New York, and author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, The Impossibility of Sex and Bodies and Bodies