Multiple Self-states Research Articles

Multiple Selves, Multiple Gods? Functional Polytheism and the Postmodern Religious Patient

The experience of self as multiple and the sense of self as unified and continuous are both experiential realities with equal psychological importance. Clinically, appreciation of both the multiplicity and unity of self engenders a corresponding attention to the “functional polytheism” in the religious lives of patients. In both the psychological and religious realms, there needs to be some ground beneath us when we are standing in the spaces between multiple self-states and multiple god-states.

Speech and Sensuality; Speech and Separation: Commentary on Paper by Sarah Hill

This discussion attends to the way the author addresses issues of bilingualism, multiple self-states, primary nonverbal attachments, and the complexity of countertransference identifications in a treatment with several overlapping language worlds. Language or rather speech practice is considered as a carrier of object ties, as a repository of affect and unconscious meaning. I approach Hill's clinical report by thinking about how Hill situates aspects of identity within particular language worlds. Why exactly is it that language demarcates identity, the distinctions of self and other, and the positioning of identity in history so acutely? We see that language has amazing constitutive power in this case, a case where language and attachment, language and early loss, language and traumatic memory, and language and development are so intertwined. This discussion also takes on the author's use of her countertransference and her dream material illuminate conflicts and ruptures in a treatment with a French-speaking patient. Various theories of language and the philosophy of language as well as attachment theory are used to examine the dynamics and processes in Sarah Hill's case. I consider also the role of a lost language world in the analyst's early childhood may have pressed powerfully on the treatment.

Being in Rhythm: Dissociative Attunement in Therapeutic Process

ABSTRACT Dissociative attunement is a profound rhythmic encounter in therapeutic treatment. Attunement is a synchronized awareness of implicit knowing that is nonlinear and bidirectional. Empathically attuned clinicians are like microtonal tuning forks. They resonate with a variety of emotional pitches and will resonate with nuanced shifting of emotional tone. This resonance is the basis of dissociative attunement. Concepts such as empathic attunement, affect attunement, “the unthought known,” “implicit relational knowing,” and “a two-person unconscious” help us to understand unique aspects of projective identification, transference, and countertransference within the dissociative frame. However, dissociative attunements are systemically self-emergent moments in which multiple self-states are shared by means other than projection. Using clinical vignettes, I demonstrate how dissociative attunement can paradoxically appear to be misattunement. By synthesizing scientific and theoretical concepts applied to these clinical moments, we can understand dissociative attunement as a therapeutic tool as well as a pathway to vicarious traumatization.

The Return of the Dissociated: Discussion

Psychoanalysis and politics intersect variously. Some psychoanalytic writings have critiqued society, whereas others have applied socially critical insights about class and race to illuminate transference—countertransference enactments and other clinical matters. The hegemonic politics of psychoanalysis, less intentional but equally influential, define maturity and mental health by idealizing of some psychological and behavioral traits and some clinical stances (especially authoritarianism), and by demonizing of certain categories of persons (notably nonheterosexuals and people of color), certain types of practice (e.g., social work), and certain sorts of ideas (e.g., that clinical and theoretical practices are political practices, too). One way to redress these problems is to reclaim the marginal—homosexuality and queerness, affect's presence in politics, and the political in the psychical (in which instance, the concept of multiple self-states may be useful). Any such effort requires recognizing and articulating one's own subject-position, that is, one's own class, race, gender, or sexual location.

Missing the Mark

Abstract In this article, the idea of sin and a significantly altered version of Winnicott's potential space are brought together to depict the complex relational and psychological dynamics of sin in counseling interactions. From this perspective, sin signifies the total or partial collapse of potential spacesubjugation to the other's constructed representations, which includes the absence of recognition of one's assertions and the concomitant negation of the other's desires and needs, and overwhelming experiences of distrust, betrayal, and hopelessness that attend chaotic disruption and associated hopelessness of repair. In those moments, there is reduced potential subjectivity, spontaneity, agency, communion, value, aliveness, meaning, and continuity unless the other is confronted with his/her sin. It is argued that this perspective accounts for the presence of multiple self-states as well as oft-neglected aspects of the client-counselor interaction. Specifically, this view draws attention to the shifti...

Something Is Happening Here Thoughts and Clinical Material Regarding Multiplicity, Gender, and Touch in a Psychoanalytic Treatment

There has been much consideration in recent years of the nature of gender as socially constructed. During the same time there has also been much consideration of the nature of consciousness and of self-experience, and a calling into question of the experience of a unitary self versus multiple self-states. This paper offers case material of a patient who presents with traumatically induced multiple self-states. The author considers the way in which the gender of different self-states reflects both cultural and personal experience; the way in which the patient's and the therapist's respective and mutual experience of their genders are intersubjectively experienced; and the impact of an inadvertent touch in the course of treatment, in the light of both multiplicity and gender.

Betrayed as boys: psychodynamic treatment of sexually abused men

Introduction. The Sexual Betrayal of Boys. Encoding Sexual Abuse as Sexual Initiation. Struggles about Masculinity. Same-Sex Abuse. The Familial and Cultural Context of Abuse. The Effect of Chronic Boundary Violations. Dissociation and Multiple Self-States. Intimate Relatedness. The Patient-Therapist Dyad. Gender and the Therapeutic Relationship (with Sue A. Shapiro). Group Therapy. Afterword.