Dissociation (n.) widens with the gap between conscious and unconscious — toward neurosis in the neurotic, schizophrenia in the psychotic; psychotherapy's aim is to narrow and abolish it.
Dissociation (n.) leaves a split-off part of the psyche only apparently inactive; in fact it possesses the personality and falsifies its aims in its own interest.
Dissociation (n.) is, for an age, also its recovery — the climax of a pregnancy heralding birth; the Roman breakdown was the age that bore Christ.
Dissociation (n.) shows in the modern rupture between faith and knowledge — like one person in two frames of mind sketching the same experience; modern society is neurotic.
Dissociation (n.) sets in when consciousness drifts far from equilibrium: the ego convulsively fights an invisible opponent — or suspects its next-door neighbour of being the devil — while falling victim to an inner Government opposition.
Dissociation (n.) is not healed by being split off, but by more complete disintegration — the powers striving for unity then turn him toward the integration he had always sought outside himself.
Dissociation (n.) is, in the French school's sense, a weakening of consciousness in which sequences of ideas split off from the hierarchy of ego-consciousness and lead an independent life; Gross's "sejunction" is only a new word for it.
Dissociation (n.) between conscious and unconscious is what neurotics, and many normal people, suffer from at bottom; since the unconscious holds both instinct and the seeds of the future, it is a separation from the source of all life.
Dissociation (n.) is the modern concept at the root of psychogenic neuroses and psychoses, which Dorn approached when he moralized the war of the four elements as a four-horned serpent the devil fixes in the mind.
Dissociation (n.) of spirit and matter, left unbridged when alchemy died, produced better science and medicine but deposed the spirit, so that the psyche is now suspected of being a mere by-product of brain chemistry.
Dissociation (n.) is an advantage when we choose it, letting us concentrate by dismissing everything else; when it happens to us against our will, it is the loss of a soul.