Spaltung

Translated into French, according to the use that one makes some, by " séparation" , " clivage" or " dissociation" , the German term Spaltung is itself only the translation by Freud of a frequent expression in the French psychiatry of the XIXe century, that of " double conscience " , used in particular by Pierre Janet. For this one, the cleavage of the conscience is " a primary education feature of the hysterical affection. It rests on an innate weakness of the psychic capacity of synthesis, signing the degeneration of the hysterical individuals " (city by Freud in the Defense neuro-psychoses, 1894). On their side, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud consider initially that hysteria is marked by the appearance of particular state of consciousnesses which they define as " hypnoid states " , close to the state of dreams and characterized by a difficulty of associating; the cleavage of conscience is thus secondary; it comes owing to the fact that the representations which emergent are cut associative communication with the remainder of the contents of the conscience (On the psychic mechanism of the hysterical phenomena, 1893, taken again in Studies on hysteria, 1895). But this concept of hypnoid conscience remains quite vague… One could then stop with the definition that Eugen Bleuler gives of Spaltung like fundamental disorder of the schizophrenic thought: intrapsychic dissociation, according to him, makes the subject unable to organize a speech according to the traditional ways of the signifiance and association.

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