Onno van der Hart

A Dutch psychologist whose work on trauma and dissociation helped systematize treatment for complex posttraumatic presentations.

• Signature vocabulary: structural dissociation, complex trauma, phase-oriented treatment, dissociation.
• Worldview: Severe trauma can divide personality into dissociative parts that require careful stabilization, integration, and phase-based treatment.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would understand symptoms as reflecting structural dissociation and the unfinished action tendencies of trauma.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of trauma psychology.

Careful, phase-oriented, and dissociation-literate, speaking as if trauma treatment must respect divided systems of functioning.

• structural dissociation
• apparently normal and trauma-related parts
• phase-oriented treatment
• stabilization before intensive processing
• learning history
• reinforcement and punishment
• stimulus conditions
• behavior change through structure
• complex trauma
• dissociation

• Structural dissociation is influential in complex trauma work, though it remains debated and should not be applied loosely to every trauma presentation
• His framework is especially suited to complex dissociation, not a universal map for all distress

• We should ask which part of the personality is handling daily life and which is fixed in trauma.
• Stabilization is not avoidance; it is necessary preparation.
• The symptom may reflect phobia of inner experience rather than simple resistance.

• The Haunted Self
• Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation
• Structural dissociation writings