Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

by Valerie Sinason

Valerie Sinason's Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse addressed a subject that many professionals working in the field had been uncomfortable discussing. This new book covers the unexplored subject of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), and is the first major British book available for both clinicians and the intelligent lay public on this subject. Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity explains the phenomenon of DID, the conflicting models of the human mind that have been found to try and understand it, the political conflict over the subject, and, with the permission of patients, clinical accounts.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Mental Health

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Valerie Sinason, PhD, is a poet, writer, child psychotherapist and adult psychoanalyst. She specialised in working with abused/abusing and dissociative patients including those with a learning disability, and was Founder Director of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies until December 2016 when she retired from long-term clinical work.
Valerie continues with writing, supervision and short-term assessment work.
Dr Sinason’s extensive writing includes over 100 published, peer-reviewed papers.
She has written over 20 books and lectures nationally and internationally.

Reviews

[❄Elsa Frost❄ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Especially as someone diagnosed with DID, I find this book very useful for us. Additional attachment styles beyond the known 4 are described here, which I find incredibly helpful because I feel that the additional ones are more relatable than the known ones.

This book covers a variety on DID and even on DDs (dissociative disorders) in general. So if anyone is in need of information on these, this provides some information on DDs as well. Also covered are the topics of ritual abuse, organized abuse, and mind control, which can be helpful and validating for some.

[Anna K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I should have checked the publishing date before reading. Reading this book in 2023 is a joke.
It consists of articles/chapters written by different authors, of very different quality. Some articles are ok, but others only make one roll their eyes. There is absolutely no need to read academic literature on DID that is 20 years old, my bad, I guess.

[I-love-reading · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing. Some chapters are good or very good but overall there doesn't seem to be a central theme - some chapters are a personal theory or way of working that clash with others within the same book, and a number of these also fail to meet the treatment guidelines for dissociative identity disorder. Some chapters are about complex trauma and do not include anything significant about DID. I don't know if the book resulted from a collection of presentations given at a conference but it has that feel. Sue Richardson, Valerie Sinason, Joan Coleman, and the interview with DCI Clive Driscoll are very good (2nd edition, 2011)

[Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative and easily relatable to practice. The focus on how dissociative tendencies develop really interested me (not just severe trauma, but upbringing). Was the right mix of science and real life examples!