Using the past to fertilize but not determine the future: Reflections on dissociation in the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation

It does not seem too much of a stretch to see the history of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) over the past three decades as facing similar challenges to those that at least some of our traumatized clients have faced. We came into the world 34 years ago packed with possibility, vigor, and hope. Our founding mothers and fathers were full of joy and excitement at our birth and full of expectation and enthusiasm for our fertile and healthy future. Our first few years were positively explosive, numbers built, clinical insights proliferated (e.g., Bowman, Blix, & Coons, 1985; Braun, 1988; Caul, 1984; Coons, 1984; Kluft, Braun, & Sachs, 1984; Ross, 1984; Spiegel, 1984), and research expanded from case observations to larger clinical series (e.g., Coons, Bowman, & Milstein, 1988; Kluft, 1984; Putnam, Guroff, Silberman, Barban, & Post, 1986). Yet our growth and exuberance met a painful and head-on challenge in the form of the recovered-false memory debate and the ritual abuse controversies. This began in the early 1990s and continued with ferocity through the mid-1990s. During this time period (and to some extent after it), standard professional debate about the existence of child abuse; organized perpetrator abuse, especially that involving satanic rituals; and dissociative disorders moved from conferences and the pages of journals to courtrooms, politically charged professional schisms, and personal attacks (e.g., the picketing of therapists’ offices, removal from or non-renewal of academic appointments, and orchestrated media defaming). The crux of these battles revolved around the ability of the human cognitive system to forget and then later remember (either cued or uncued) memories of earlier abuse (e.g., Brown, Scheflin, & Hammond, 1998). In working through those confrontations and the wounds they left, we as a clinical and research society have been able to gain from a more sophisticated view of memory and the impact of trauma and dissociation on it (Belli, 2012; Brewin, 2014; Freyd & Birrell, 2013; Huntjens, Dorahy, & Van Wees-Cieraad,