A Word on 'Sub-Personalities'

We can easily perceive our actual multiplicity by realizing how often we modify our general outlook, changing our model of the universe with the same facility with which we change dress.

Thus, life may appear to us at any time as a routine, a dance, a race, an adventure, a nightmare, a riddle, a merry-go-round, etc. Our varying models of the universe colour our perception and influ­ence our way of being. And for each of them we develop a corresponding self-image and a set of body postures and gestures, feelings, behaviours, words, habits, and beliefs.

This entire constellation of elements constitutes in itself a kind of miniature personality, or, as we will call it, a sub-personality. Sub-personalities are psychological satellites, coexisting as a multi­tude of lives within the overall medium of our personality. Each sub-personality has a style and a motivation of its own, often strikingly dissimilar from those of the others.

Says the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, "In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god."Each of us is a crowd. There can be the rebel and the intellectual, the seducer and the housewife, the saboteur and the aesthete, the organizer and the bon vivant, each with its own mythology, and all more or less com­fortably crowded into one single person. Often they are far from being at peace with one another."

As Assagioli wrote, "We are not unified; we often feel that we are, because we do not have many bodies and many limbs, and because one hand doesn't usually hit the other. But, metaphorically, that is exactly what does happen within us. Several sub-personalities are continually scuffling: impulses, desires, principles, aspirations are engaged in an unceasing struggle."

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