agentj (agentj) wrote in multiplicity, @ 2007-10-25 22:04:00 |
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Current mood: | curious |
Well, this is interesting....
I'm a bookaholic. So this past weekend I went to some thrift stores and bought some books. I found a book titled Balanced Personality: How to Solve the Conflict between Desire and Conscience from 1943. The book is in amazing condition; it even still has its dustcover intact.
Anyway. It's a how-to book. I thought it would be fun to read how a psychology book from 1943 would read. Make a good laugh.
So here I get to Chapter 2: The Group That Works Within
Each one of us is a combination of many people.[... Y]ou are also a combination of many different and conflicting individualities, all concurrently at work within you. When you say, "I want," what you really mean, "Part of me wants." It may be the overwhelmingly major part, but still it is only a part.I'm sure the author wasn't really thinking of a true multiple, but still. Imagine a world where psychologists viewed patients in this manner, thinking of them as groups of individual needs, rather than glomming the person's needs under a general umbrella. What a different approach they would have on dealing with multiples!
[...] The personality is not a unified thing. Like a community, it is an interweaving of various elements. Some of them work independently, some of them work with or against the whole, some of them are not always orderly, and few of them are always loyal.
You are, in short, a bundle of individuals who divide into parties and who play politics in the same way the men do with whom you can shake hands. Like these other men, they sometimes change party affiliations, and some of them are capable of grotesque and underhanded things so that their colleagues are not always aware of what they are really doing. Under these circumstances, occasional inner conflict is inevitable. "You" do not want—you merely entertain individual wants which are active and often conflicting.
These conflicts arise because each one of the individualities within us does his own habit forming. Some develop habits of achieving satisfaction in a particular way. Others, who it must be admitted often think they know all the answers before any of the questions have been thought out, build up elaborate systems of censorship and control.
[...]
We often go wrong because some of the individuals inside have formed a coalition and temporarily seized the government; man's mind rebelling against itself, part of the personality inducing the other parts to engage in this or that behavior. It is impossible to escape the influence of the various groups within us, just as it is impossible for the national government to escape the influence of the farmers, the laborers, or the businessmen. At times, any given group may be inactive because it is indifferent, but it will not remain indifferent very long.
[...]
If we do not use good method in controlling these groups, any success we have is due to pure chance. Good method in self-control—self-leadership would be a much better term—requires: (1) an insight into the nature and needs of the individuals in each group; (2) the integration of the conflicting interests of the different groups; (3) the avoidance of unnecessary interference, so that there is no trace of oppression or tyranny; (4) but discipline, carried out with no fooling, when the situation requires.
[...]
What is needed is intelligent understanding, administered by kindness with no trace of weakness. Observe that the place to begin is intelligent understanding.