Personification

Using the Dialogical Self in Psychotherapy and Counselling

John Rowan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135151669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychopathology
• Index: Psychology

Personification discusses the theory behind multiplicity of the person and considers the implications that the relationships between the different parts of the same person have in practice. Providing both historical and contemporary insights John Rowan reveals new thinking and research in the field, as well as offering guidelines for using this information in practice.

The book also looks closely at the practice of personification – a technique involving the turning of a problem into a person and allowing a two-way dialogue through which the inner critic can be addressed and explored.

As such areas of discussion include:

• the use of multiplicity in therapy
• group work and the dialogical self
• the transpersonal

This practical, straightforward book will be ideal reading for anyone using personification in their therapeutic work, including psychotherapists, counsellors and coaches.

Part I
Introduction

Introduction

This is a book which does three things:

a It shows how important the idea of multiplicity within the person is to all psychotherapists, counsellors and coaches. We cannot understand people or work with them efficiently unless we understand that they are not simple creatures with just one will, just one outlook, just one set of wishes and needs. Within each person there are differing and sometimes conflicting desires.

This puts the book in line with the recent academic thinking on constructivism, constructionism, postmodernism and so forth—though not with the more extreme expressions of this tendency. It helps to question notions like The Unconscious, The Denial of Death, The Real Self, The Organismic Tendency, The Collective Unconscious, The Brain, The Genital Character, The Anal Character, and so forth.

The trouble with such notions is that they claim to be true. What we are doing in this book is to question the whole idea of one truth, one true belief, one answer to any psychological question. The answer is always multiple, always provisional, always questionable.

b It explains how the basic idea of multiplicity within the person goes right back in history, and how it has been used in therapy in recent times. It is not a new idea, and it has been used in interesting and fruitful ways by a host of therapists of different persuasions—but all ignoring the others and therefore losing valuable inputs which it would be better to acknowledge and use.

Many of them have made the mistake of simply saying that their version is right. Either the others are wrong or they are simply ignored An enormous fault in the field of psychotherapy is ignorance of the person next door working in the same field, or active avoidance of any consideration of the others, or even rejection of the person next door.

This puts the book in line with the passion I have always had about bridge-building. It hurts me to see the way in which writers in this field so strongly tend to quote only their own colleagues and friends, and to ignore parallel work in other fields. Freud talked about the “narcissism of small differences” and this is widely and wildly rampant in the field of psychotherapy. This book powerfully challenges that whole way of thinking.

c It gives a full account of the latest theory and research in the field, including a critique of some of the most popular ideas still being used at present. In particular, it critiques the concept of subpersonalities, saying that this concept lends itself too readily to reification and misplaced concreteness. It offers instead the notion of I-positions, developed and researched by a whole new school of theorists. The work of this school—the International Society for Dialogical Science—is explained and illustrated by examples. The connections between the dialogical self school and other recent developments—narrative therapy, assimilation theory, schema therapy and so forth—are also brought out and linked up.

This means that this book is up to date on what I believe to be the leading edge of solid scientific work in psychotherapy at present. It is a guide to a whole new world of discovery in the field. So what does this book do? It presents a comprehensive new way of making sense of personality and psychotherapy. It suggests substantial changes and advances. It links up with other challenging approaches to the work in a stimulating way. It is historically well founded, and goes on to break new ground.

But one important point to make is that all the way through, although the emphasis is clearly on technique, there is also a deep and consistent respect for, and understanding of, the relational approach. There is no contradiction between wanting to be real and relational and using effective techniques. The therapist is always an authentic trickster, and this paradoxical title is certainly adopted here. There is much more about this in Chapter 5.

There is also a secret desire behind the book. It is to try to influence the whole group of writers associated with the dialogical self. This is a movement started by Hubert Hermans in Nijmegen. He is a real polymath, having a wide knowledge of psychology and psychotherapy, and an extensive interest in the world beyond. He has made valuable links with researchers in Italy, Portugal, the USA, Poland, Brazil and many other countries—the 2008 international conference which he organized had people coming from 45 different lands.

My question to them is a simple one—why do you not use personification more in the actual therapy you conduct and research? The question goes to Giancarlo Dimaggio, William Stiles, Katerina Osatuke, Miguel Gonçalves, Jaan Valsiner, Paul Lysaker, Katarzyna Stemplewska-Zakowicz, João Salgado, and of course Hubert Hermans. Many others not mentioned know who they are.

But the main thrust of this book is to show everyone in the field of psychotherapy—not only those above—how useful is the idea of personification, and the concept of I-positions in relation to that. Hence I have felt it necessary to mention every field in which personification is used, and to critique it in the light of the new ideas. This gives both the positive introduction to each school and the essential critique to bring it into line with current theory. Thus much of this book may look familiar, but now each school is subjected to the insights developed in the light of dialogical self theory. This throws much new light on each one.

To put it another way, the historical material in the 1990 book on Subpersonalities seemed so well arranged and useful that it seemed pointless to research it all over again. People familiar with that book will therefore find much of the material in Chapter 4 is unchanged, though seen through another lens. In 1990 it was the scene in the morning light, so to speak, but now it is the same scene but in the evening light. It is certainly not unknown in other spheres such as painting and drama for the artist to return to a previous scene and see it afresh. So the old material has been revolutionized or “carnivalized” (Zizek) rather than rewritten. This then makes it possible to move on and into the new territories, having done justice to the old ones.

It is then possible to take the whole idea further, into the realm of the transpersonal. So long as we remain talking about ego states, subpersonalities, complexes and so forth, none of them leads us in the direction of the transpersonal—the spiritual, the divine, the numinous, the sacred, the holy. But as soon as we start using instead the notion of I-positions, it becomes possible to think in terms of talking to our soul, talking to our spirit, talking to God, talking to the Ultimate—and getting answers back! Because each of these can represent an I-position, and each of them can be talked to, and talk back. I used to think that the problem with prayer was that it was generally a one-sided conversation: I talked to God, but God never talked to me. Now that has all changed.

Of course, it is not all about God. Some of us prefer the Goddess anyway. But talking about Soul can take us deep inside the imaginal world of Henri Corbin, the world of the dreamweaver, the Underworld of James Hillman, and so forth. This level of insight is of course found in the various transpersonal schools, such as psychosynthesis, voice dialogue, some Jungians, the Almaas school and so forth. But here now is a demonstration that they need not be alone in their access to this rich and varied field. Now read on.

Chapter 1
A fresh look

In 1988 (published in 1990) I wrote a book entitled Subpersonalities: The people inside us. This was a pioneering effort, the first book to take such a concept and try to make all the connections that were required. It took until 1995 before any text on personality theory admitted that such things existed. Even now many of the main established texts do not mention such a thing. This book can be regarded as an extended critique of that pioneering text, because much has happened in the field since then.

In 1999 Mick Cooper and I co-edited a book called The Plural Self: Multiplicity in everyday life, which was a quantum leap forward from that. It included contributions from James Grotstein, Ruth-Inge Heinze, John Shotter, Alvin Mahrer, Brian Lancaster and particularly from Hubert Hermans. We were moving towards a realization that what was in the air was nothing less than a new theory of the human being, which reconciled the real multiplicity which is so obvious in the consulting room with the necessity for a self which undergoes all the vicissitudes of development from before conception to after death.

But it was not until the great international conference of 2008 that it became evident that what we had in the work of Hubert Hermans was nothing less than a reconciliation of the traditional view of the self, the modern view of the self and the postmodern view of the self. The traditional view gave us power relationships, agency and moral responsibility; the modern view gave us authenticity, choice and the existential edge; the postmodern view gave us the inclusion of all significant identifications, the decentring of the self, seeing the self as a linguistic construction and the questioning of all fixed positions. By taking up the notion of the dialogical self as a dynamic multiplicity of I-positions in the landscape of the mind we could resolve all this apparent antagonism and find something to live with.

People who have made the self into something single and simple still cannot grasp this, and struggle to see how the self can be multiple. They seem to think that having a single self is normal. But this means that they have to ignore the equally obvious truth that people are multiple. Who has not had the experience of being split? Who has not had the experience of enduring warring voices within? Perhaps it is the single self that has to be justified, in the face of the obvious multiplicity we encounter on all hands?

Years ago there was a big controversy in the pages of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology between the simplicity of Willard Frick (1993) and the multiplicity of James Fadiman (1993) and an attempt to heal the rift by Victor Bogart (1994), but the new thinking goes beyond this simple opposition by taking up quite a different standpoint.

The dialogical self

The new thinking comes from a number of different angles. The first and most prominent is the work of Hubert Hermans at Nijmegen University in the Netherlands. It was he who coined the term “the dialogical self”. The fifth international conference on the dialogical self took place in 2008 in Cambridge. What he did was to shift the nomenclature from the older ideas of subselves, subpersonalities, ego states and so forth, all of which lent themselves to misunderstanding as solid entities all too easily, and introduce instead a new vocabulary based on I-positions.

The notion of the “dialogical self” deviates from those associations and considers the self as a multiplicity of parts (voices, characters, positions) that have the potential of entertaining dialogical relationships with each other… The self functions as a society, being at the same time part of the broader society in which the self participates.

(Hermans 2004, p.13)

Hermans and his colleagues, for example Giancarlo Dimaggio, Jaan Valsiner and Miguel Gonçalves, have conducted many research studies to explore their theory, and it is now well established, as we shall see in more detail later in this chapter.

What is remarkable, however, is that this is not the only approach which is now opening up the realm of multiplicity within the person. William Stiles, who goes back and forth between Ohio and Sheffield, has developed what he calls assimilation theory, which again has produced a large research programme to explore the idea of listening to the different voices which emerge during the course of therapy (Stiles & Glick 2002).

The person-centred school has in recent years begun to use the concept, under the heading of configurations of self, particularly in the hands of Dave Mearns and Mick Cooper. And this has enabled them to speak freely of the parts of the person which are negative.

It is important that the person-centred therapist offer an equally full therapeutic relationship to not for growth configurations, like: “the ‘me’ that just wants to curl up and do absolutely nothing”; “the part that wants to go back”; and “the bit of me that wants to destroy this therapist”.

(Mearns & Thorne 2000, p.115)

This is quite a new departure for the person-centred school, and begins to sound much more like the psychoanalytic position about resistance.

Philip Bromberg, in the psychodynamic school, has made some very interesting points, showing that multiplicity is not at all foreign to that outlook.

A noticeable shift has been taking place with regard to psychoanalytic understanding of the human mind and the nature of unconscious mental processes—away from the idea of a conscious/preconscious/ unconscious distinction per se, towards a view of the self as decentered, and the mind as a configuration of shifting, nonlinear, discontinuous states of consciousness in an ongoing dialectic with the healthy illusion of unitary selfhood.

(Bromberg 1998, p.xxxii)

Of course it is well known that Transactional Analysis and Gestalt therapy speak often of different parts of the person, but recently the torch has been taken up by experiential process therapy—much more interested in research than these earlier advocates.

Process-experiential therapy has attempted to provide a comprehensive theory of treatment by integrating Gestalt and client-centered approaches. It combines the relationship conditions of empathy, prizing and congruence with more active interventions like empty-chair and two-chair work from Gestalt therapy, and focusing and evocative unfolding from Gendlin’s and Rice’s developments within client-ce...