The idea that a person is not one self but many is an old and widespread one. Shamanic cultures recognised several souls in each person, from as few as three to twenty or more; Plato divided the psyche into three; and from the nineteenth century onwards psychology rediscovered the idea through dissociation, Freud’s id, ego and superego, Jung’s complexes and a whole family of parts-based therapies, from psychosynthesis and Transactional Analysis to Voice Dialogue and Internal Family Systems. Therapeutic Shamanism stands in this long line, and its map also holds the parts that have left us and the beings that are not part of us at all.
What does it mean to say a person has parts? #
That the ‘I’ is a crowd. Most people assume there is one single self in charge, but anyone who has argued with themselves, or found a frightened child’s feelings arriving in an adult’s working day, has met their parts. Each part has its own needs, drives, agendas and stories, and our sense of who we are moves from one to another, usually without our noticing.
In Therapeutic Shamanism this is the inner tribeInner Tribe. The community of parts-of-self that a human being actually is. Health is not one part’s triumph but a well-run tribe: every member honoured, every member doing its proper job, the Adult in charge. Read the full answer. There is no one, single ‘I’. The thing we call ‘I’ is made of different parts, and just as shamanism is concerned with living well within the great Tribe of all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, it is equally concerned with living well within the tribe inside us.1 Psychotherapists describe the same territory as sub-personalities, and there is a lot of variation in how they divide it up; some of these ways of looking at the parts, shamanic and psychotherapeutic alike, are very useful.1 See What is the inner tribe?
How old is the idea? #
Shamanic cultures understood it long before psychology did. Far from having the single ‘soul’ most people in the West assume they have, shamanic cultures understood each person as having several. The number varied from culture to culture, from as few as three to fifteen, twenty or more, and each had its own function. Some must stay in the body, because they give it life and the body dies when they leave. Others can leave without causing death, such as the part that travels the shamanic realms, or the parts that are lost in soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer.2
Anthropologists call this belief soul dualism, or soul plurality. A common form is a ‘body soul’, tied to breath and bodily life, and a ‘free soul’ that can wander in sleep, trance and illness. Among the Inuit, traditionally hunter-gatherers of the Arctic and most now living in transition, one soul is linked to breathing and another accompanies the body like a shadow, with beliefs differing between groups. The Tagbanwa of Palawan in the Philippines, shifting cultivators of upland rice, count six souls, the free soul being the ‘true’ one, and across many of the Austronesian peoples, most of them farmers, illness is understood as soul loss and healing as bringing the wandering soul home.3 The farming civilisations kept the idea too. Daoist China spoke of three hun and seven po, and ancient Egypt divided a person into five or more parts.3 See Do people have more than one soul?
What did the ancient written traditions make of it? #
They already talked to their parts. The psychotherapist John Rowan, who traced the history of the idea, found the earliest record of someone speaking to a part of themselves and being answered in an Egyptian text he dates to about 2200 BC, a dialogue between a man weary of life and his soul.4 In the Republic Plato divided the psyche into three, reason, spirit and appetite, and in the Phaedrus pictured them as a charioteer driving two horses, one restrained and honourable, the other unruly. Augustine noticed that his old pagan self, apparently gone since his conversion, came back to life in his dreams, and in the twelfth century Hugh of St Victor wrote a dialogue with his own soul.4
For centuries the main way of understanding someone taken over by another personality was possession. Rowan placed possession near the far end of a single line running from altered states and ordinary moods, through subpersonalities, to possession and multiple personality.4
How did modern psychology rediscover it? #
Through hypnosis and dissociation. The mesmerists of the late eighteenth century, and the French physician Pierre Janet, whose L’Automatisme psychologique (1889) gave psychology the words ‘dissociation’ and ‘subconscious’, found split-off states of mind that could behave like second personalities. William James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890), gave each person many ‘social selves’; in 1892 Alfred Binet described several distinct consciousnesses in one person, each with its own memory and even its own moral character; and by 1904 Boris Sidis and Simon Goodhart were saying that multiple personality was only an exaggerated form of something quite normal.5
What did Freud and Jung add? #
Freud gave the parts a structure. In The Ego and the Id (1923) he divided the psyche into the it, the I and the over-I, which his translator Latinised as id, ego and superego: the id holding the drives, the superego holding the morals taken in from parents and society, and the ego mediating between them and the world.6 Therapeutic Shamanism questions the picture underneath. In it the id is something monstrous that has to be reined in, which is one more instance of the dominant culture’s belief that our inner nature cannot be trusted; anthropology, and humanistic psychotherapy from Carl Rogers onwards, show that belief to be far less true than it first appears.7
Jung found his parts by experiment. In word-association tests at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich he met emotionally charged clusters he called complexes, which can override the conscious will and which he described as ‘splinter psyches’. He went on to describe the great figures of the psyche: the persona, the face we show the world; the Shadow; the anima and animus; and the Self.6 In Therapeutic Shamanism the Shadow is what happens when parts are denied. When we try to deny parts of ourselves they do not go away, but grow stronger and out of our control, turning into the ‘monster’ we see as other.8 In his later work Jung came to see the archetypes as human interpretations of something deeper and more than human, which he called psychoid archetypes, and his work was influenced by shamanism.9 See What can Jung’s psychology offer shamanic work?
Which therapies work with the parts directly? #
A whole family of them, mostly from the twentieth century. The Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli began psychosynthesis around 1910 and published it in 1927; James had described a person’s ‘various selves’, and Assagioli called such roles subpersonalities, working to recognise, accept and integrate them around a centre of awareness and will he called the ‘I’. In psychodrama, Jacob Moreno, in Vienna and later New York, put inner and outer figures on a stage, with other group members playing them. In Transactional Analysis, Eric Berne built on the psychoanalyst Paul Federn’s ‘ego states’ to describe the Parent, Adult and Child in each of us (1957), popularised in Games People Play (1964). In Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls set the demanding ‘topdog’ against the excuse-making ‘underdog’, and gave each part a chair to speak from. John and Helen Watkins turned Federn’s ego states into ego-state therapy in the 1970s, often using hypnosis.
Hal and Sidra Stone developed Voice Dialogue in the early 1970s: our ‘primary selves’ run our lives, our ‘disowned selves’ carry what they reject, and the work is to develop an ‘aware ego’ able to hold both.10 John Rowan gathered the field together in Subpersonalities (1990) and Discover Your Subpersonalities (1993), defining subpersonalities as “semi-permanent and semi-autonomous regions of the personality capable of acting as a person”, and finding that most people have between four and nine.11 Richard Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems in the 1980s from family therapy, with its exiles, managers and firefighters gathered round a calm, compassionate Self. And in 1992 the Dutch psychologist Hubert Hermans described the self as a society of ‘I-positions’ that question, answer and argue with one another.12
Internal Family Systems, Voice Dialogue and Transactional Analysis are all parts-of-self psychotherapies, working the same ground as the inner tribe. See How does Therapeutic Shamanism relate to IFS, Voice Dialogue and Gestalt?, Who was John Rowan, and what are subpersonalities? and What are Parent, Adult and Child, and how do they compare with the parts of the self?
What does the shamanic map hold that the others mostly do not? #
Three things. The first is the parts that have left. Most parts-based therapies work with the parts that are present, however hidden or pushed aside. Shamanic cultures also knew parts that can leave the body altogether, lost in soul loss, which no amount of inner dialogue can reach until they are found and brought home.13 See What is soul-loss?
The second is the size of the self. Most psychotherapy is focused almost entirely on the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer and its concerns, so its maps are maps of the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer.14 In Therapeutic Shamanism the four main parts belong to the different realms: the body and the middle-world self to the middle-world, Soul to the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and Spirit to the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer. See What are the different parts of the self in Therapeutic Shamanism?
The third is what is not us. Psychotherapy usually treats the spirits as parts of the human psyche, ‘sub-personalities’, and so misses the real beings met in shamanic work, though there is nothing about being a psychotherapist that rules out accepting that spirits are real.14 Shamanic healing, for its part, has to tell a part of the self, which belongs in the person, from an intrusionIntrusion. Something lodged in us that should not be there, having entered through the holes soul-loss and Power-loss leave. Four broad types: unhelpful thought-forms, introjects, foreign-body energetic intrusions, and entity possessions. More about this, which does not, because taking away a part of someone creates soul loss.15 See What is an intrusion, and what is extraction?
Is having many parts a sign of illness? #
Not in itself. Janet met multiplicity in patients diagnosed with hysteria, but in 1904 Sidis and Goodhart said that it was an exaggerated form of something quite normal, and in 1936 the social psychologist Kurt Lewin said that relatively independent regions of the personality could be seen in normal people too, though Rowan notes that the insight was never followed up in psychology generally.16 In Therapeutic Shamanism the trouble lies not in having parts but in believing there is only one ‘I’, which causes people all sorts of problems; a healthy inner tribe is one where every member feels welcome and respected and has a voice.17 When that happens, every part can be what it is meant to be, and no part has demands placed on it that it cannot meet.
How many parts are there? #
It depends on the map. Plato and Freud each counted three, Rowan usually found between four and nine, and shamanic cultures anywhere from three to twenty or more.18 Therapeutic Shamanism works with four main parts, one for each realm, keeping the map as simple and uncluttered as possible,19 though the parts can be divided into any number of sub-parts.20
