lacanian attachment analysts
Multiplicity
From: A Time to Be Born.
Jeni Couzyn, Claire Weissmann Wilks (Illustrator)
a theoretical framework for understanding multiplicity and dissociation (text)
Multiplicity imbues our unconscious, preconscious, and conscious life.
We are multiple whether we know it or not or whether we like it or not........ to borrow from Stevie Wonder's song:
Ev-erybody's mul-tiple,
in their own wa-y!
Many contemporary analytic writers and clinicians have a perspective based upon creative and defensive multiplicity.
Defensive multiplicity is a defence against impossible traumas by splitting the self so that one self is experiencing the trauma whilst another self "escapes" into the sky, so to speak, or deep down into the unconscious. It is called dissociation. Repeated traumatic experience may produce many internal selves which has been called "Multiple Personality" or in psychiatric language "Dissociative Identity Disorder".
Creative Multiplicity is being in touch with different selves within the psyche as occasion demands. Sometimes this can be a baby or child self, at other times a teenager, grown-up, lover, Mother, Father etc.
©lacanian attachment analysts 2001