Healing haunted hearts - Toward a model for integrating subjectivity - Commentary on papers by Philip Bromberg and Gerald Stechler

Self-organizing systems (Stechler and Kaplan, 1980) biased by dissociative experience provide a robust perspective for the modern understanding of the development of hysteria. Definition of self, framed as a function of self as agent, object, and locus (Schafer, 1968), illuminates the bias of depersonalization and the clinical presentation of persons subject to developmental influences (Main and Morgan, 1996) in early childhood, as well as to overwhelming trauma (Terr, 1991). Characteristics of self, such as coherence, continuity/consistency, congruence/incongruence, and cohesion are explored in this context. Affect is the primary organizing bias in the discernment of self and in the development of relatedness. Clinically observed isolation of subjectivity may result from the bias of intense affect, that is, shame, on self-organizing systems in a multiple self-state model.