Authentic Counselling Training

Personality Dissociation:
Subpersonalities and Multiple Personality

 [Under construction: 1 July 2005]

Who has written about subpersonalities?

Subpersonalities per se are poorly recognised in the literature. There is at present no systematic book devoted to an explanation of how to use subpersonalities with clients and with people intent on developing their personal awareness. The term does not appear in any text on personality theory. It is not in the dictionaries of psychology nor in the dictionaries of psychotherapy. Yet the thing itself is used by virtually every clinician who has ever written about working with people, and by more and more psychologists paying attention to what is there, as distinct from what is theoretically supposed to be there.

John Rowan (1) catalogues the therapies and therapists who have made use of the general idea of the personality being divided up into different parts:

·      Freud: ego, id and superego.

·      Jung: complexes or archetypes.

·      Federn, Berne and John Watkins: ego states.

·      Lewin: subregions of the personality.

·      Perls: topdog and underdog, or retroflection.

·      Klein, Fairbairn and Guntrip: internal objects.

·      Balint: the child in the patient.

·      Mary Watkins: imaginal objects.

·      McAdams: imagoes.

·      Hilgard: the hidden observer.

·      Tart: identity states;

·      Winnicott, Lake, Janov and Laing: the false or unreal self

·      Gurdjieff: little I's.

·      Goffman: multiple selfing.

·      Stone and Winkelman: energy patterns.

·      Mahrer: deeper potentials coming to the surface.

·      Mair: a community of self.

·      Ornstein: small minds.

·      Gazzaniga and Minsky: agents and agencies within the mind.

·      Gergen, Martindale, O'Connor and Shapiro: subselves.

·      Strauss or Rossan: subidentities.

·      Markus: possible selves.

·      Kihlstrom and Cantor: self-schemas.

·      T.B. Rogers: prototypes.

·      Beahrs: alter-personalities.

·      Assagioli, Redfearn and Rowan: subpersonalities.

·      Mearns: configurations of self.

Clinically, the phenomenon of subpersonality is considered to be a form of dissociation (formerly termed disassociation, a term that is now used for a type of depersonalisation), a word used generally to characterise the process whereby a co-ordinated set of activities, thoughts, attitudes and emotions become differentiated from other parts of the person's personality, and function independently.

John Rowan

John Rowan is a founder member of the Association of Humanistic Psychology Practitioners and a Vice-President of the European Association for Humanistic Psychology. His workshop interests are creativity, men's groups, sexuality and sex roles and subpersonalities which he began researching in 1974. He practises primal integration and teaches at the Institute of Psychotherapy and Social Studies. He has written a seminal work on the humanistic approach to counselling (The Reality Game) (2), and amongst numerous other publications, co-edited with Windy Dryden Innovative Therapy in Britain (3).

In his first book on subpersonalities, Subpersonalities: The people inside us (1), Rowan reviews research from academic psychology which seems to support the concept of subpersonalities. However the book is not a manual and is not very specific in guiding the use of subpersonalities in counselling and psychotherapy.

Rowan defines a subpersonality as a "semi-permanent and semi-autonomous region of the personality capable of acting as a person". (4) Rowan refers to a discussion of dissociation by Beahrs (1982) (5) that dissociation is not an either/or phenomenon, but exists along a dissociative continuum. At one end of this continuum are fluctuations of mood, which come and go and are basically quite transient. Further along the continuum, but still well within the range of normal experience, are the roles and ego states and subpersonalities within which individuals perform state specific and life activities. At the further end of the dissociative continuum are the alter-personalities and more completely dissociated parts we find in multiple personality, fugue states and amnesia which are not characteristic of subpersonalities.

Rowan’s second book on subpersonalities, Discover your Subpersonalities: Our inner world and the people in it (6) is less theoretical, more practical, and more inviting as an introduction.

Piero Ferrucci

Piero Ferrucci is a former student and collaborator of Roberto Assagioli. He is a staff member of the Psychosynthesis Institute of Florence, Ita;ly, and a member of the board of the Italian Society for Therapeutic Psychosynthesis. In his book, What We May Be (1982) (7), Ferrucci sets out with wonderful clarity the techniques of psychosynthesis. He has a chapter on subpersonalities entitled ‘A Multitude of Lives’. The book is a treasure and packed full of insightful and insight-generating matieral.

References

1.      Rowan, J., 1990, Subpersonalities, London: Routledge.

2.      Rowan, J., 1983, The Reality Game, 1983, London: RKP.

3.      Rowan, J. and Dryden, W., 1989, Innovative Therapy in Britain, Buckingham: Open University Press.

4.      There is a useful article by John Rowan on subpersonalities in Changes (The Magazine for the Helping Professions), Vol 7, No 1, February 1989.

5.      Beahrs, J.O., 1982, Unity and Multiplicity: Multilevel consciousness of self in hypnosis, psychiatric disorder and mental health, New York: Brunner/Mazel.

6.      Rowan, J., 1993, Discover your Subpersonalities: Our inner world and the people in it, London/New York: Routledge.

7.      Ferrucci, P., 1982, What We May Be, London: Turnstone Press.

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 p.g.h@btinternet.com

This document in all parts is copyright © Peter Hughes from the date of construction given above. Please feel free to make use of them for solely personal purposes. However, should you wish to use them for teaching, training, commercial or other purposes, you are required to ask me first.