are substituted for any kind of consensual reality, and a world where it is almost meaningless to talk about having “personality” at all.
The task of Deleuze and Guattari’s happy schizophrenic is to harness this condition of non-referentiality to the use of forging a new kind of self, in an essentially linguistic transformation, free of the moral and psychological despotism of Modernism.
Schizophrenia is very different from normal and average Splitting only in degree.
The concept of dissociation
The concept of Multiple Personalities has evolved over not just centuries, but millennia, and throughout cultures as varied as nomadic hunter gatherers of the sub-arctic to contemporary industrial societies. At its core, this concept involves the inherent capacity of the human psyche to dissociate or split.
Colin Ross defines dissociation quite simply: “Dissociation is the opposite of association…For definitional purposes the psyche may be reduced to a collection of elements in complex relationships with each other. Psychic elements include thoughts, memories, feelings, motor commands, impulses, sensations, and all the other constituents of psychic life. Any two psychic elements may be more associated … or relatively isolated and separate, which is to be dissociated.” (Ross, 1997, p 116).
Dissociation is an important factor in normal psychological functioning, allowing for a degree of mutability and adaptability which would be impossible without it. In the absence of healing the painful event causing the split personality it is true that the only option of the average person is to have amnesia of the causing event which again causes all these symptoms.
It is probably best to think of dissociation on a