Multiple Selves Research Articles

Amalgamating multiple selves in the storied experience of cross‐cultural mentorship

AbstractThis narrative inquiry explores cross‐cultural experiences of a faculty mentor and an international doctoral student mentee in counselor education. Analysis unearthed themes on the approach to and experience of cross‐cultural mentorship, attunement and affirmation, growth opportunities, and professional and personal connections. Findings considered mentorship literature and addressed future application implications.

Running with the Devil

”I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.” -Joan Didion, Slouching Towards BethlehemRepresentation continues to be one of the most fraught questions facing the theatre and performing arts today: what is the responsibility of artists and the industry to represent minoritised and racialised bodies? How is that representation entangled with oppressive normative narratives surrounding those communities? What is the implication of this representation or lack thereof on the wider discipline and industry, which in the UK context, is still largely white and Eurocentric? Hence, the multiplicity of selves navigated by an artist living in a racialised body is a contested site that goes beyond the individual. My practice-research seeks to investigate how theatre practices can be reconstructed to privilegemarginalised bodies in discovering what Foucault calls practices of freedom—acts of resistance that discover alternative practices of authoring ‘self’. As an artist of color, I am particularly interested in the potency of grotesque-realism, a principle exegesised by Mikhail Bakhtin as resisting the notion of the individual body by reshaping it into a boundless, ever-transforming site for a democratisation and renewal of ideas and viewpoints. My personal essay, ‘Running with the Devil’ uses the above Joan Didion quote as a starting point and explores the grotesque-realist motifs of demons, food and orifices of the body through a positivist and postcolonial lens, drawing from inspiration offered by writers of color including Alexander Chee and Trinh Thi Minh Ha.

Alpha-maxmin as an aggregation of two selves

This paper offers a novel perspective on the α-maxmin model, taking its components as originating from distinct selves within the decision maker. Drawing from the notion of multiple selves prevalent in inter-temporal decision-making contexts, we present an aggregation approach where each self possesses its own preference relation. Contrary to existing interpretations, these selves are not merely a means to interpret the decision maker’s overall utility function but are considered as primitives. Through consistency requirements, we derive an α-maxmin representation as an outcome of a convex combination of the preferences of two distinct selves. We first explore a setting involving objective information and then move on to a fully subjective derivation.

In the absence of meaning: care practices and environmental factors behind the multiple selves of the digital psychiatry participant

In the absence of meaning: care practices and environmental factors behind the multiple selves of the digital psychiatry participant

Online self-presentation: Psychological predictors and outcomes

Internet technology has changed the way we interact, and online communication has become increasingly common. There is a need to know more about how individuals present and behave online. The study examined relationships between perfectionism (self-oriented, socially prescribed, other-oriented), online self-presentation types (idealised self, multiple selves and consistent self), cyberbullying experiences (victimisation and perpetration) and psychological outcomes (rumination and depressive symptoms). An online questionnaire measuring these variables was completed by 139 general population adults (91.2 % from the UK, 73 % female; age range 17–70 years; Mean = 33.32 SD = 13.76). Regression analysis showed a role of self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism in idealised self and multiple selves online presentation. Further, self-presentation was related to individuals’ likelihood to engage in cyberbullying as a perpetrator. Finally, self-presentation and cyberbullying perpetration were predictive of rumination and depressive symptoms. The findings provide insight into adults’ online behaviour and related outcomes thus contributing to our understanding of the psychology within online interactions.

When the therapist's and the client's woundedness meet: Dialogical selves of Filipino self‐identified wounded healers

AbstractIntroductionThe dominant literature on wounded healers assumes that the healer must be healed of one's wounds to be an effective therapist and that countertransference, moments in therapy when a healer's wounds are activated, must be successfully managed. Lacking in the literature is an understanding of the internal dynamics of wounded healers as they navigate moments of countertransference. Veering away from a unitary and static view of the self, we argue for a shift in how we understand wounded healers using the lens of a multiple and dynamic self. Through Herman's dialogical self‐theory, we conceptualise the wounded healer as having multiple selves—the wounded self (WS) and the therapist self (TS). Each self is an I‐position with its own unique voices and narratives.MethodThrough in‐depth interviews with Filipino self‐identified wounded healers, we examine the internal voices of the WS and TS during moments of countertransference, as the WS meets the client's wounded self.FindingsResults show that the participants' characterisation of their WS, or where they are in their journey of healing or recovery, shapes their countertransference experience. Participants with recovered WS channelled the voices of calm recognition and differentiation. Voices of identification, re‐experiencing and differentiation surfaced among participants with recovering WS. Participants with emerging WS transitioned from a voice of not knowing to a voice of identification.ConclusionBeing aware of and listening to the voices of the WS alongside the TS is key in navigating countertransference. The implications of a dialogical understanding of wounded healers in clinical practice are discussed.

Dynamic Process of International Student’s Identity Development and Multiplicity of Linguistic Selves

The current paper examines the concept and characteristics of human identity and how those have been historically discussed by theorists from diverse fields, focusing particularly on international students who study abroad. The aim of this report is to investigate how international students shape their multiple selves during their time overseas by drawing on social and cultural factors. Relevant empirical studies are reviewed from the standpoint of sociological, socio-cultural, and dialogical theories. Reviewing the literature allowed this study to arrive at some conclusions. First, international students construct their identity through complex, dynamic, and constant processes, and this identity is subject to continually change as per social interactions and circumstances rather than being acquired as biological determinants. Second, language is a crucial factor in the process of identity construction. Implications and limitations are discussed as well.

Affordances of Fantasy

Abstract Each of the functions of fantasy described by J. R. R. Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” can be reframed through affordance theory into a kind of re-visioning. Such re-visioning is comparable to the formalist notion of defamiliarization or the science fiction technique that Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement.” Whereas science fiction projects alternative futures, fantasy's affordances allow writers to generate alternative worldviews grounded in real or invented mythic pasts. The initial move away from claiming to imitate reality allows fantasy writers to project inner experience onto an outer storyworld (there is no pathetic fallacy in fantasy), to depict multiple contradictory selves (housed within a single body or spread out over several characters), and to invite readers to consider alternatives to commonsense assumptions and seemingly inevitable social orders.

A simple model of two-stage choice

This article studies a simple choice model in which two menu-dependent preferences jointly determine behavior. By relaxing multiple assumptions of rational choice theory, our model accounts for many choice anomalies. Nevertheless, we show that the model still possesses empirical content by characterizing it with squeezing conditions directly generalized from standard contraction and expansion conditions. Due to its generality, our model can serve as an umbrella under which three lines of nonstandard choice procedures can be organized: maximization of menu-dependent preference, preference maximization over part of the menu, and the rational shortlisting method. Our model is more than an organizational device because the two preferences can be interpreted as “simple and heuristic” and “complex and deliberate” decision-making methods with multiple selves who are divided into coalitions.

“It’s not that I don’t like it here, it’s just that I eventually want to live somewhere else”: young refugees’ contested arrival experiences, local racialized discourses and emergent future selves in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT Although the urban fabric is often associated with relevant infrastructures that foster young refugees’ experiences of settlement and future imagining, a critical notion of place remains largely absent from the literature. This paper investigates refugee youths’ urban arrival and settlement processes by examining the role of public space, place and identity in their imagination of possible future selves. We use place identity as a dynamic, translocal and contested concept to explore how future selves are emplaced in multiple and contradictory ways. The paper reports on an eight-month ethnographic study in an underprivileged neighborhood in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, that is characterized by functionalism, social housing and a high concentration of refugee arrivals. We find that personal referents of public neighborhood places are important for nurturing young refugees’ specific hardships and traumas that threaten future self-imagination. We further demonstrate how momentary belongings due to diverse yet intertwined neighborhood identities foster the emergence of multiple possible future selves. Lastly, we show how local racialized discourses of place endanger and “trap” possible future self-concepts. We conclude that urban refugee youths’ future self-imaginations develop alongside multiple contested places and temporalities, and contribute to a relational understanding of urban processes and experiences of forced mobility and displacement.

Here Comes the Hurricane

This two-section article and interview with Jesús Hilario-Reyes, a queer, non-binary, Afro-Caribbean artist, explores their artwork to connect trans new media histories to contemporary trans Chicanx scholarship via recent notions on “glitch” and “stitch.” The introduction connects Hilario-Reyes’s uprootedness to trans thoughts on “the cut” and trans Chicanx scholar Francisco Galarte’s concept of “Brown transfiguration.” In Section One, Hilario-Reyes discusses their new media practices in relation to land, water, displacement, and diasporic disembodiment. The interview in Section One reveals their experiences with migration, as they reflect on their 3D animated work about Puerto Rico's post-Hurricane Maria flooding, and their role as a DJ creating queer Black space. Section Two delves deeper into their 3D art and music as a healing response to displacement, mourning, and “destierro” (being ripped from one's homeland). Hilario-Reyes’s creativity, expressed through 3D animations, performance, and sound, becomes an embodied and world-building practice infused with resistance and queer Black sovereignty. Their perspectives on "glitch, love, and storms" offer adjacent strategies to resistance optics, addressing the visibility/invisibility dynamics inherent in transphobia and white supremacy. Their understanding of climate change's white supremacist root cause affecting Puerto Rico leads to a transformation of the disembodying effects of systemic violence through trans and Black-informed gestures. Through Hilario-Reyes’s 3D animations and video games, the article connects their work to larger trans scholarship, new media, and trans video game histories. Embodying non-binary and Afro-Caribbean thought, Hilario-Reyes re-engages the body, love, humanness, and their multiple possible selves, turning systemic violence's cataclysmic failures into trans and Afro-Caribbean liberation.

The liverwort who wanted to take root

This article offers an introspective, intentionally imperfect, and contradictory exploration of various dimensions of multiple selves, belonging, and the migrant experience. It focuses on the author’s personal experiences, examining the contradictions and challenges inherent to constructing a diasporic identity. The author unravels the complexities of self-identification and external perceptions, emphasizing how labels, names, and physical appearance influence interactions and self-understanding in specific cultural and geographical contexts. The adequacy of conventional words and terminology is questioned, as is their capacity to fully capture the richness and diversity of migratory and diasporic experiences. An argument is made for a more flexible conceptualization capable of accommodating the wide range of different backgrounds, challenges, and realities of racialized people and migrants of East Asian origin. Overall, the article proposes a re-evaluation and re-orientation of the dominant narratives and discourses around identity and migration. Through a personal reflection, it seeks to celebrate the multiplicity and complexity of diasporic identities and experiences using contradiction as a starting point.

Black Girls and Korean Popular Culture: Embodying Identity as a Multiple Self through Portraiture Photography

Abstract Between the discourse of racial prejudice and sexism embedded in Korean popular music (K-pop) and the racial and gendered discourse of Black girls’ identity, I was interested in how Black girl fans of K-pop perceive and negotiate these two seemingly incompatible cultural discourses. Thus, I led a series of theme-based photography workshops during which the girl participants created portraiture photographs and took part in group discussions. In this paper, I examine their portraiture photographs using Alberto Melucci's concept of identity as a multiple self. My analysis reveals that the girls are not passive recipients of a foreign popular culture but active and strategic agents in constructing their identities, with artistic interventions increasing their response-ability and helping them embody their multiple selves.

Multiplicity of Self — Exploring the Connection Between Art and Human Nature

My final project will be the outcome of my research materialisations of the Doppelgänger as a starting point also is the subject of the project, I am trying to link doppelgänger to DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and analyze it from a psychological perspective. In addition, analyze the expression of emotion in artistic creation and explore the connection between art and the inner psychological essence of human beings. ‘Doppelgänger’ is a biologically unrelated look-alike, or a double, of a living person. In my opinion, the doppelgänger is an external manifestation of Dissociative identity disorder (DID). DID is a mental health condition. People with DID have two or more personalities that change they behave. This article explores the connections between DID and the concept of a doppelgänger. In mysticism or fiction, a person’s doppelgänger represents their inner character or hidden aspect, or an illusion or projection of their actions. Additionally, it examines the projection of emotions by artists with mental illnesses onto their art pieces. In the practice of my project, my main materials include Tyvek, viscose velvet, reemay. What’s more, the staggered lines used in this work, show the switching and entanglement of different personalities in the concept of ‘Doppelgänger’. This work is made up of three pieces. Finally, I applied colours change print on the translucent fabric and overlapped them to present personality changes and split. I will give a detailed introduction in the following text.

The Architecture of the mind: A Psychodynamic Case Study of Dissociated Selves.

The author seeks to explore the development and treatment of dissociative symptoms emerging in a 17-year-old nonbinary individual throughout two inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations. The patient endorsed the presence of multiple selves that remained connected with reality and internally with each other, emphasizing their existence in spatial allocations within the patient's mind both while dreaming and in waking life. The author highlights the therapeutic space as an opportunity to allow the interaction between dissociated selves surging from violent childhood experiences in hopes of allowing the integration of the fragmented parts of the main self. The roles of dreamwork, creative expressions, and language will be highlighted as essential components that allowed symbolization for a bicultural, bilingual individual who recently immigrated to the United States. Treatment was conducted within the limitations and particularities of inpatient psychiatric treatment, restricting treatment to a preliminary phase of exploration and containment.

Investigating lay perceptions of psychological measures: A registered report

In recent years, the reliability and validity of psychology measurement practices has been called into question, as part of an ongoing reappraisal of the robustness, reproducibility, and transparency of psychological research. While useful progress has been made, to date, the majority of discussions surrounding psychology’s measurement crisis have involved technical, quantitative investigations into the validity, reliability, and statistical robustness of psychological measures. This registered report offers a seldom-heard qualitative perspective on these ongoing debates, critically exploring members of the general public’s (i.e., non-experts) lay perceptions of widely used measures in psychology. Using a combination of cognitive interviews and a think aloud study protocol, participants (n = 23) completed one of three popular psychology measures. Participants reflected on each of the measures, discussed the contents, and provided perceptions of what the measures are designed to test. Coding of the think aloud protocols showed that participants across the measures had issues in interpreting and responding to items. Thematic analysis of the cognitive interviews identified three dominant themes that each relate to lay perceptions of psychology measurements. These were: (1) participants’ grappling with attempting to ‘capture their multiple selves’ in the questionnaires, (2) participants perceiving the questionnaire method as generally ‘missing nuance and richness’ and (3) exposing the ‘hidden labour of questionnaires’. These findings are discussed in the context of psychology’s measurement reform.

Is authenticity a “true self,” multiple selves, behavior, evaluation, or a hot mess? Response to Helmuth et al.

Is authenticity a “true self,” multiple selves, behavior, evaluation, or a hot mess? Response to Helmuth et al.

Theorizing as Mode of Engagement in and through Extreme Contexts Research

We explore how management and organization scholars theorize when undertaking research on extreme contexts, which are organizational settings where potential adverse events arise from risks, emergencies and disruptions. We propose that different ‘modes of engagement’ arise as researchers connect different aspects of the self to the extreme context; namely, personal self, professional self, moral self and vulnerable self. Each self-context connection plays out in different modes of engagement in the conduct of empirical research and enables different theorizing practices. We present these self-context connections as four ideal-typical modes of engagement. Adventuresome inquiry connects a personal self to the extreme context and theorizes by phenomenon-driven problematization. Instrumental scholarship expresses a professional self in the extreme context and theorizes by theory elaboration. Ideological improvement galvanizes a moral self in the extreme context and theorizes by change-driven abstraction. Reflexive labor exposes a vulnerable self and theorizes by dialectical interrogation. Our comprehensive framework of theorizing as mode of engagement contributes to extreme context research by elucidating how theorizing in and through such contexts is accomplished by researchers with multiple selves and by offering some guidance on how the four modes can be used dynamically to ensure generative theorizing. We also contribute to the broader literature on theorizing in management and organization studies by highlighting the need to consider the interplay between the researcher and the academic contributions they produce and by proposing a reflexive and dynamic framework of theorizing as modes of engagement.

Writing our Futures Possible: Inspirations from the Dementia Letter Project

Life with dementia urgently needs to be reimagined. The dominant social imaginary of dementia perpetuates a story in which people with dementia cannot have a life that is ‘good’. In this Position Piece we draw from eight letters written for the Dementia Letter project, in which the letters’ authors address their potential future self with dementia. We found that using the creative method of letter writing opened up possibilities for writers to fill uncertain futures with dementia with new experiences and relations, as well as opportunities for exploring multiple temporalities and versions of themselves. We highlight five inspirations from the letters: living with what is, the future as a space of possibility, populating the everyday, folding time, and cultivating multiple selves. Through these, we argue, alternative futures, and a present, with dementia can be reimagined, and made differently.

Conceptualizing multiplicity spectrum experiences: A systematic review and thematic synthesis.

Dissociative identity disorder and depersonalization-derealization have attracted research and clinical interest, facilitating greater understanding. However, little is known about the experience of multiplicity of self outside of traumagenic or illness constructs. Consequently, this systematic review explored how people identifying as having multiple selves conceptualize their experiences and identity. A comprehensive search of qualitative studies reporting lived experiences of multiplicity was conducted through PsycINFO, PubMed and Scopus (PROSPERO ID: CRD42021258555). Thirteen relevant studies were retrieved (N = 98, 16-64 years, conducted in the United Kingdom, the United States, Hungary and Poland). Using line-by-line thematic synthesis, four analytical themes were developed: multiplicity: disorder versus experience; impact of understanding multiplicity; importance of supporting multiplicity; and continuum of experiences. This review highlights heterogeneity within multiplicity-spectrum experiences, emphasizing the need for person-centred, individualized understanding, separate from mental health conceptualizations. Therefore, training in person-centred individualized care to promote self-concept clarity is needed across health, education and social care. This systematic review is the first to synthesize voices of people with lived experience across the multiplicity spectrum, demonstrating how qualitative research can contribute to advancing our understanding of this complex phenomena with the community, acknowledging reciprocal psychosocial impacts of multiplicity and providing valuable recommendations for services.