What Is Dissociation?

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Normal dissociative processes are involved in creative imagination, but also in the generation of error.

The effects of dissociation operate in many realms, ranging from everyday life to the sciences.

Dissociation's effects play a large role in criminal justice, influencing judgments of guilt and innocence.

The process of dissociation is often considered only in terms of its most severe clinical manifestation, dissociative identity disorder (DID). However, dissociation is actually a completely normal process, present in everyone, but typically at far lower intensities than those of DID.

Normal dissociation enables us to disengage our psychological processes from the ongoing tangible reality around us. This is useful; dissociation can provide us with temporary relief from tragedy, or even from everyday drudgery. Dissociation can also support our imagination, as we allow our minds to create new concepts in art, literature, or the sciences, creating concepts which do not yet exist in physical reality (e.g., Sharps & Price-Sharps, 2026).

Yet normal dissociation has a dark side, as well. In great affairs and in everyday life, dissociation can cause us to believe in things that actually don’t exist. In my laboratory, we have shown that normal dissociation contributes significantly to unsubstantiated paranormal beliefs, and even to the perceptual reconfiguration of everyday things into paranormal objects and entities, ranging from alien spacecraft to Bigfoot (Sharps & Price-Sharps, 2026).

The influence of dissociation extends even into the sciences. Astronomers, for example, have sometimes interpreted natural physical features of other planets as evidence of extraterrestrial life, or even as the work of extraterrestrials (e.g., Sheehan, 1988); and our........

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