Authentic Counselling Training
Personality Dissociation:
Subpersonalities and Multiple Personality
[Under construction: 1 July 2005 ]
Identification and Dis-identification
Recognition of a subpersonality enables us to step outside it and to observe it. In ‘psychosynthesis’ this process is termed ‘dis-identification’. Being able to identify a subpersonality and then dis-identify is a therapeutic process. According to Diana Whitmore (1), awareness is not enough. We need gradually to develop a steering ability to keep ourselves from slipping, as though mechanically, into this or that subpersonality. We are in trouble when a subpersonality takes over long-term.
Integrationists believe that if a subpersonality
appears to be inadequate or hostile, whilst it cannot be got rid of, it needs
to be transformed. A pluralist response to a seemingly inadequate subpersonality is to find out what value it has for the
client, what its strengths are, and its needs. For instance, one client who
felt constrained by and very cross with a subpersonality
which was involving her in self-destructive behaviour, came to recognise that
an important part of herself was locked up in that `inadequate' subpersonality which the more powerful everyday subpersonalities were refusing to acknowledge. The self-destructive
behaviour was the only way that the repressed subpersonality
could make itself heard. The key to working with this subpersonality
was not encouraging the client to disidentify with
the subpersonality, but to disidentify
with the self-destructive behaviour.
According to Piero Ferrucci (2), who was drawing on Jungian roots, subpersonalities may be degraded expressions of the
archetypes of higher qualities. Compassion can become degraded into self-pity;
joy can become degraded into mania; peace can become degraded into inertia;
humour into sarcasm; intelligence into cunning, and so on. Symmetry permits the
reverse transformation, and degraded aspects may be elevated: self-pity can be transformed into compassion, and so on. Subpersonalities then need to be recognised,
separated out (dis-identified), transformed and
re-integrated.
I am not so sure. I prefer to kick around in the same dust that gets on the
shoes of ordinary clients and course participants. For me, each person is
unique, and to be worked with uniquely. In the context of individuals, “archetypes”
and “higher qualities” with too much certainty fit people into matrices of theoretical
construction.
References
- Whitmore, D., 1991, Psychosynthesis Counselling in Action,
- Ferrucci,
P., 1982, What We May Be,
Personality
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