There is a growing body of evidence linking the dissociative disorders to a trauma history, and to specific neural mechanisms.

The concept of homeostasis has served as a major building block, if not the cornerstone, of family theory and family therapy. Designed to account for the perceived stability of systems (and symptoms), homeostasis is an epistemologically flawed concept that has repetitively been used in the service of dualistic, animistic, and vitalistic interpretations of systems. Accordingly, homeostasis has led to quirky clinical formulations and a great deal of fuzzy theorizing. This paper contends that the notion of homeostasis is fundamentally inconsistent with systemic epistemology and should be replaced with the more compatible concept of coherence. Whereas homeostasis is a heuristic concept that is not part of a more encompassing theory, the concept of coherence is inseparable from the epistemology in which it is embedded.

The attempts to clarify (purify) the conceptual foundations of family therapy by means of “epistemology” have bred excitement, boredom, irritation and confusion. In the belief that at least the confusion can be alleviated, the present paper is offered as a study guide and something of a Rosetta Stone for translating the work of Gregory Bateson and Humberto R. Maturana. The paper demonstrates that Maturana's work is highly compatible with that of Bateson. In addition, several major points of contrast are argued: (1) Maturana's concept of structure determinism is an explicit ontological claim which directly implies an epistemology, whereas Bateson delineated an epistemology, but never clearly developed a corresponding ontology; (2) structure determinism is a more general concept than Bateson's concept of “mind” (i.e., cybernetic epistemology); (3) structure determinism deletes the remnants of objectivity from Bateson's theory (i.e., “the difference that makes a difference”); and (4) Maturana's concept of instructive interaction is a more general, nonsystemic version of what Bateson meant when he used the term “epistemological error.” Finally, it is claimed that the emphasis on epistemology has distracted proponents and detractors alike from the essential message of Bateson and Maturana: social systems and all human endeavor must be understood in light of our existence as biological entities that are coupled to a medium. The biological ontology implicit in Bateson's writings and explicitly delineated in Maturana's may (at long last) provide a sound foundation for the social and behavioral sciences.

This article describes the development and validation of the Multidimensional Inventory of Dissociation (MID). The MID is a 218-item, self-administered, multiscale instrument that comprehensively assesses the phenomenological domain of pathological dissociation and diagnoses the dissociative disorders. The MID measures 14 major facets of pathological dissociation; it has 23 dissociation diagnostic scales that simultaneously operationalize (1) the subjective/ phenomenological domain of pathological dissociation and (2) the hypothesized dissociative symptoms of dissociative identity disorder (Dell, 2001a). The MID was designed for clinical research and for diagnostic assessment of patients who present with a mixture of dissociative, posttraumatic, and borderline symptoms. The MID demonstrated internal reliability, temporal stability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and construct validity. The MID also exhibited incremental validity over the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) by predicting an additional 18% of the variance in weighted abuse scores on the Traumatic Experiences Questionnaire (TEQ). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) did not support a one-factor model of the MID's clinical scales (i.e., the 14 facets and the 23 diagnostic symptoms). In contrast, however, CFA of the MID's factor scales (Dell & Lawson, 2005) has strongly supported a one-factor model. It was concluded that both the MID's 168 dissociation items and the construct of pathological dissociation have a second-order, unifactorial structure.

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