Authentic Counselling Training
Personality Dissociation:
Subpersonalities and Multiple Personality
[Under construction: 1 July 2005 ]
Origins of
subpersonalities
Each of us has our own unique complement of unique subpersonalities. How we come to have the various subpersonalities we have is more easily categorisable. Rowan points to six different areas of personal experience giving rise to subpersonalities. I have added a seventh drawn from the work of Virginia Satir.
1. Social and occupational roles: it is a common experience to feel a different person in a different role. See Roberto Assagioli (1965) (1).
2. Internal conflicts: this is the Jekyll and Hyde phenomenon, of two opposing forces in one's personality. In his novel, The Strange Story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2), Robert Louis Stephenson considers the dark and tragic experience of personable Dr Jekyll. Equally dark, but less tragic, Herman Hesse, in his novel, Steppenwolf (3), considers the experience of Harry Halle, who appears to be half human and half wolf. From a clinical perspective, it is somewhat irritating that both authors make important use the literary device of chemicals (drugs).
3. Introjected significant others. This provenance, especially valuable as a guide for a practitioner working with a client who has been subjected to childhood abuse, has been developed by Virginia Satir (4)
4. The personal unconscious: the subpersonalities come from inner splitting. In object relations theory, there is the anti-libidinal ego (internal saboteur) and the libidinal object (exciting object). See Fairbairn (5).
5. Fantasy images: we may identify with a hero or heroine, or with an admired group, and take on their characteristics. These fantasy images may come from the past or future, as well as from the present. They may be adopted consciously or unconsciously. It is important to recognise that we do not become, or mistake ourselves for that person.
6. The cultural unconscious. Rowan illustrates this from John Southgate and Rosemary Randall (1978) (6), who call a certain social phenomenon the Patripsych - the `internal constellation of patriarchal patterns': "by this we mean all the attitudes, ideas, and feelings, usually compulsive and unconscious, that develop in relation to authority and control".
7. The collective unconscious: this concept comes from Jung as the place from which archetypes come. [According to Rowan the shadow often seems to emerge as one of the subpersonalities, the shadow representing all those things we hate most about ourselves. I think that this is highly simplistic. Different subpersonalities may hate different things in oneself.]
In his first book on subpersonalities (7), John Rowan proposes a developmental theory of how subpersonalities evolve from inception to maturity.
References
1. Assagioli, R., 1965, Psychosynthesis,
2. Stephenson, R.L., 1880, The Strange Story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
3. Hesse, H., 1927, Steppenwolf, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
4. Satir, V., 197
5. Fairbairn, W.R.D., 1952, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality,
6.
7. Rowan, J., 1990, Subpersonalities,
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