Dissociation can account for the phenomena which the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious tries to explain.
Dissociation is a defense mechanism whereby one loses track of time or of one's person.
Dissociation is an active defense phenomenon. When the integrity of the overall system is threatened, subsystems of ideas/wishes/memories/thoughts are forcibly repressed, dissociated, or split off.
Dissociation is not pathogenic, but a human capacity to dissociate one's awareness from experiences... it is a fundamental capacity without which we would be swamped by impressions, sensations and experiences.
Dissociation is a deficit phenomenon, an insufficiency of binding energy, caused by hereditary factors, life stresses or traumas, or an interaction among them, resulting in the splitting of fragments.
Dissociation is concerned with a lack of integration between mental processes and especially an inaccessibility of mental contents or processes to phenomenological awareness.
Dissociation is not the mark of a failing, but of a mind at work on other matters at that particular moment, more vital than consciousness.