Sub-personalities

by Peter Shepherd

Under sufficient stress, the Adult can be impaired to the point where the Parent or
Child take over inappropriately and reactively. They have been restimulated
overwhelmingly by similar situations to the original recordings, and the "I" takes on
the identity of the Parent or Child viewpoint - that of imposing on or being imposed
on; of dominating commandingly or feeling dominated; of controlling or being
controlled; of being cause or being effect; of opposing or being opposed. Most
people, in their transactions, compulsively and unknowingly slip into Parent or Child
type sub-personalities.
In Freudian terms, individual behaviour is determined by the "id" forces (the
unconscious instinctual drives, the uncurbed passion of the child, the raw
requirements of primitive thinking), under control of the conscious function of the
"ego", which itself has been modified by the development of an ego-ideal or "super-
ego", a learned mode of controlling the ego, that may consist of conscious belief
systems linked to sub-conscious roots.
As Freud says, "The ego is the part of the id which has been modified by the direct
influence of the perception-consciousness system. The ego has the task of bringing
the influence of the external reality to bear on the id and endeavours to substitute
the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns supreme in the id. In the
ego, perception plays the part which in the id devolves upon instinct".
The Child, then, is the world of feelings and the id; this corresponds to right-brain
mental processes.
The Parent is the hypnotic world of commands, the superego which directs his
conscience; this corresponds to left-brain verbal belief systems with repressed right-
brain emotional and traumatic components, and with energetic roots into the
unconscious primal lower-brain.
The Adult is the mature ego of rational thought and free expression; this corresponds
to integrated functioning with the left and right brain in un-repressed inter-active
communication.
The stereotyped, habituated combination of all these is the "persona", Jung's term
for the mask that is one's presumed face to the world. This mask will be switched as
the ego reactively identifies with one or other dominant sub-personality from his
collection of Parent- or Child-type identities, to meet the perceived demands of his
circumstances. He will tend to have a chronic, seemingly permanent mask that he
identifies as his personality, as "me!", but also many temporary masks for acute
situations, which he may not even realise he possesses and uses, since they are
adopted reactively and sub-consciously.