Dissociation and Metacognition: A Mixed Methods Analysis

Dissociation commonly occurs as a defense against trauma and can be understood as a breakdown in metacognition. The present research investigated the relationship between trauma, dissociation, and metacognition in subjects with PTSD, a trauma-related disorder. Specifically, we investigated a potential inverse relationship between metacognition and dissociation in participants who have undergone psychoanalytic therapy. Participants were patients admitted to the Austen Riggs Center, who consented to be a part of the Follow Along Study (FAS), a longitudinal investigation spanning 15 years. Quantitative and qualitative analyses examined differences in themes of dissociation across initial and follow-up-clinical interviews. Quantitatively, all subscales for metacognition showed significant and large improvements after psychoanalytic therapy. Qualitatively, follow-up-interviews revealed greater remembering, selfacceptance, emotional accessibility, generosity, and social connectedness. Thus, psychoanalytic therapy increased participants’ metacognitive abilities, allowed participants to develop a more coherent narrative of the self, and reduced participants’ dissociative tendencies. Implications and future directions are discussed

Imagining the Turkish nation through 'othering' Armenians

National identities are socially constructed and inherently relational, such that collective imagination depends on a dialectical opposition to another identity. The ontology of otherness becomes the necessary basis of social imagination. National identity can hardly be imagined without a narrative of myths, and the Turkish nation is no exception. This article argues that the Turkish nation was imagined as a modern nation with territorial sovereignty after the erosion of traditional Ottoman umma (religious community) identity. During the process of this imagination, the Armenians became the first ‘others’, whose claims over eastern Anatolia were perceived as a real threat to Turkish territoriality and identity. Based on the analysis of modernist theories of nationalism, the methodological concern of this study is twofold: to explore the causal link between the policies of Ottoman modernisation and the emergence of Turkish nationalism; and to incorporate the self and other nexus into the relationship between the emergence of Turkish nationalism and the process of ‘othering’ the Armenians