Ever felt like there’s a debate going on inside you? Like one part of you wants to work, another wants to relax, and a third keeps bringing up something embarrassing you said five years ago? You’re not alone. In fact, this is completely normal. And even more than that, there is a deeper layer to that, where voices and attitudes live so deep inside you that you cannot notice them!

Singular, unbreakable personality is a myth

In fact, the idea that our personalities are a singular, unbreakable voice is purely cultural — and it owes to the influence of the very strict German culture in the beginning of the discipline of psychology (Bell, 2005). In other words, this idea of an ego - the eye of the intellect and the voice of a person - is what early psychologists thought the psyche looked like through the context of their top-down culture. But it wasn't what it actually looked like.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

No Man Is an Island, John Donne

The truth is much less lonely. And John Donne was right when he said that "no man is an island", internally this holds true as well.

Is it just ego vs moods?

It doesn't take a psychologist to prove this. It's self-evident to anyone who has had a change of heart. Who one day just lost all love towards someone. Or to a person who out of a jovial mood goes into a deep depression. What is going on? Is there a pilot on board?

We all know there are internal influences outside of our "main" voice, the ego. But how independent are these influences? What exactly lives inside of us. It seems that the only answer given to us by our current mental health culture, or at least the mainstream, is that these are moods. And moods are meant to be in balance. (Remember the sternness of early psychology?) If they are out of balance, it means you're abnormal. And to keep them in balance we get offered cognitive therapy (implying that ego can control these) or, more often, drugs (implying that moods are caused by imbalances in neurotransmitters).

For sure, sometimes this susceptibility to internal influences is extremely strong. Psychiatrists then talk of bipolar, or some other affective disorder. This name is very telling, as affective means relating to a mood. Or sometimes this susceptibility is completely cut off, with an extremely rigid and unflinching personality type.

For all intents and purposes, the takeaway of mainstream psychology is this: if our stream of personality states goes outside the "expected", and for too long, and affecting the ego too much, it's all because of moods.

And what are moods? Psychiatry tells us nothing, except some psychometric operational definitions and reductionist biological investigations (Sussex Open Press, 2023).

So, who lives there?

The psychoanalytic tradition — which is less biologically oriented than modern day psychiatry and mainstream psychology who see moods are just hormonal and neurotransmitter imbalances — can get us closer to an answer. Of course this isn't a quantitative answer and therefore deemed pseudo-scientific by boomer would-be philosophers. But it is an answer much closer to a personal truth.

In fact, the distinction of a personality into: ego (the main voice of a person, the consciousness); id (the instinctive, unconscious side); and super-ego (the moral arbiter) came from psychoanalytic work.

But this model is more than 100 years old! We need new, shiny models to represent our new shiny reality. Not to bore you with technical names, I'll just say that modern, non-mainstream psychology sees one's personality as a fluid concept. More like a cloud of possibilities, where there isn't just one voice which undergoes changes as we age and is impacted by those mysterious moods. No, one's personality is like a crowd-sourced project. There is the ego, of course, the light of consciousness, but there are many, many more beings in there.

There is a whole choir in there. Some of these voices are neglected aspects of yourself; some are installed or absorbed voices of other people (called introjects), these you can say are renting the place, but aren't internally yours; some are extremely ancient, symbolic forces (in Jungian therapy called archetypes); some are constructs that seem like you, but are just things that were added in there in the course of trauma.

So you see there is a whole town in there!

Does that mean we're all crazy?

No! These constructs, attitudes, introjects, whatever you are going to call them, are an internal aspect of you. You are simply bigger than you expected! What makes a person crazy in respect to these factors is when they do not realise that they are internal, they are subjective, they are the stuff of dreams, of meditation, of introspection. A person suffering from a lack of reality testing, such as in schizophrenia, would mistake this internal landscape for an external one.

So no, what makes one crazy goes both ways: a person is crazy who thinks these things exist outside, but equally as crazy is a person who thinks these things don't exist at all!

What do I do with all these voices and people?

Thankfully, there is a whole therapy modality that deals with this more modern conceptualisation of one's personality; it's called Internal Family Systems. Look it up!

Understanding these different voices can be empowering. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by internal conflict, you can learn to listen to each part and recognize its role.

But in short, learn to love them - it's an army of you. You make them conscious. You form a relationship with them - for good and for bad. For example, a part of recovery from trauma is evicting some of the "installed" voices (the introjects), because they were forced onto you. But for the most part you use the universal answer in psychology: LOVE. You love them as if they were little children. You have control over the focus of consciousness, of letting them speak, of letting them express themselves, of mediating their influence over your life.

Because if you don't exert a conscious, loving influence over them, they will be doing that to you, unconsciously, and you, to paraphrase Carl Jung, will call it "moods".

References

• Bell, M. (2005). The German tradition of psychology in literature and thought, 1700–1840. Cambridge University Press.
• Firestone, R. W. F. L. (1998). Voices in suicide: The relationship between self-destructive thought processes, maladaptive behavior, and self-destructive manifestations. Death Studies, 22(5), 411–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/074811898201443
• Hodgdon, H. B., Anderson, F. G., Southwell, E., Hrubec, W., & Schwartz, R. (2022). Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among Survivors of Multiple Childhood Trauma: A Pilot Effectiveness Study. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 31(1), 22–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2021.2013375
• Klein, M. (1992). Love, guilt and reparation and other works, 1921-1945. Karnac Books and the Institute of Psycho-analysis.
• Lester, R. J. (2017). Self‐governance, psychotherapy, and the subject of managed care: Internal Family Systems therapy and the multiple self in a US eating‐disorders treatment center. American Ethnologist, 44(1), 23–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12423
• Longden, E., & Read, J. (2016). Social adversity in the etiology of psychosis: A review of the evidence. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 70(1), 5-33.
• Mills, J. (2021). Dialectics and Developmental Trauma: How Toxic Introjects Affect Attachment. Psychoanalytic Social Work, 28(2), 115–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228878.2021.1943468
• Sussex Open Press. (2023). Affective disorders. In Introduction to biological psychology. Retrieved November 27, 2024, from https://openpress.sussex.ac.uk/introductiontobiologicalpsychology/chapter/affective-disorders-2/
• Van Os, J. (2016). “Schizophrenia” does not exist. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 352.
• Van Os, J., & Guloksuz, S. (2022). Schizophrenia as a symptom of psychiatry’s reluctance to enter the moral era of medicine. Schizophrenia Research, 242, 138–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2021.12.017