Dual Centered Psyche

the subjective experience of psychic multiplicity, which we can think of as many inner personalities operating in one person, was widely considered pathological. For another, my professional culture routinely used adjectives such as needy, hostile, nurturing

Schwartz identifies psychic multiplicity as the operative paradigm of IFS, explicitly naming it and challenging the monolithic cultural assumption that plural inner personalities are pathological rather than normative.

Schwartz, Richard C, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 1995thesis

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Another excursion on psychic multiplicity leads directly into a review of the anima concept… Jung seems to agree with the description of the self as the ‘collective aggregate of all individual souls’ and to be ‘compounded of many,’ quoting Origen: ‘Each of us is not one, but many’

Hillman situates psychic multiplicity at the core of the anima concept, marshalling Jung’s own citations of Origen to argue that the self is constitutively plural rather than singular.

Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985thesis

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we must abandon our attempts at an archetypal approach based on polycentricity and accept analytical psychology a prisoner for monotheism in its current Protestant direction

Hillman frames the choice between polycentricity and monotheism as existential for archetypal psychology, arguing that a single-centered model forecloses the plurality of individual differences.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis

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we must abandon our attempts at an archetypal approach based on polycentricity and accept analytical psychology a prisoner for monotheism in its current Protestant direction

In the parallel text, Hillman repeats his polycentric thesis as the heuristic criterion for choosing between rival psychological frameworks.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis

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deny the multiplicity and polycentricity of the psyche… Jung’s preference for the self, says Hillman, unduly narrows a psychology that in every other respect stresses the plurality and multiplicity of the psyche, the archetypes and complexes

Samuels surveys the post-Jungian debate, reporting Hillman’s critique that privileging the self over complexes betrays Jung’s own polycentric commitments.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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The polytheistic alternative does not set up conflicting opposites between beast and Bethlehem, between chaos and unity; it permits the coexistence of all the psychic fragments and gives them patterns in the imagination of Greek mythology.

Hillman argues that polytheistic psychology — his preferred model for the dual or plural centered psyche — enables integration of fragments without imposing hierarchical unity.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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An archetypal psychology that would give proper due to many dominants, that would recognize the interpenetrating psychological reality of many Gods… is forced to question, even abandon, psychological monotheism and its emphasis… upon the ego-self axis

Hillman explicitly demands that archetypal psychology abandon the single ego-self axis in favor of recognizing multiple archetypal dominants as equally legitimate centers of the psyche.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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In a polytheistic view of the psyche, conflicts no longer seem so decisive. From the start, the motive in polytheism is to honor all sides. The idea is not to conquer or be conquered. There is no one hierarchical, unified head.

Hillman describes the therapeutic and ethical implications of a polycentric psyche, in which no single center commands hierarchy and conflict becomes productive multiplicity.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

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To the dreaming model of embodied imagination, a multiplicity of subjectivities is the norm, not the pathology. There is no single subject but a host of substantive beings, each manifesting its own subjectivity mixed with the medium of our physical bodies.

Bosnak grounds psychic multiplicity in the embodied imagination, asserting that plural subjectivities are the structural norm of dreaming consciousness rather than a clinical exception.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting

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Monotheistic psychology counters what it must see as disintegration and breakdown with archetypal images of order (mandalas). Unity compensates plurality. Polytheistic psychology would meet this so-called disintegration in its own language

Hillman contrasts the monotheistic compensatory response to psychic fragmentation with a polytheistic model that accepts plurality as its own valid psychological language.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

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The preference for self and monotheism presented there strikes to the heart of a psychology that stresses the plurality of the archetypes… A primacy of the self implies rather that the understanding of the complexes at the differentiated level… is of less significance

Hillman reads Jung’s late equation of self with monotheism as a structural subordination of the plural archetypal complexes that archetypal psychology seeks to rehabilitate.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting

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Polytheism is the name given to a specific religious situation. The situation is characterized by plurality, a plurality that manifests itself in many forms… Such a situation would be sheer anarchy and chaos were it not possible to identify the many orders as each containing a coherence of its own.

Miller provides the theological underwriting for psychic polycentricity, arguing that plural orders each possess internal coherence — precluding both anarchy and the need for a single sovereign center.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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the revelation of multiplicity within its apparent unity… The emphasis on wholeness and unity as the goal of psychic transformation can lead the unwary to suppose that for Jung the human psyche is ideally some kind of homogeneous substance

Clarke warns that Jung’s individuation telos of wholeness can obscure his equally insistent claim that psychic unity harbors irreducible multiplicity at its core.

Clarke, J. J., Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994supporting

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Because these figures are in special relation forming, if you will, a two-headed archetype, or a Janus-Gestalt, we shall find it impossible to say good of one without saying bad of the other as long as the two remain in polar opposition

Hillman’s senex-puer dyad offers an early model of a dual centered archetype, in which two poles form an irreducible structural pair rather than resolving into a single dominant.

Hillman, James, Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present, 1967supporting

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accepting the mind’s ability to encompass many perspectives at once means that we can acknowledge the truth of two apparent opposites and move forward creatively… there are advantages to having many minds in close communication with each other yet operating with a certain amount of autonomy.

Schwartz articulates the functional advantages of the plural mind, where multiple semi-autonomous perspectives coexist rather than collapsing into a single viewpoint.

Schwartz, Richard C, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 1995supporting

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To know the names means to gain and retain consciousness about the dual nature… the guessing of the names of the dual nature, of the two sisters, is as difficult a task initially for women as it is for men.

Estés frames a woman’s psyche as constitutively dual, requiring conscious recognition of the two competing centers of the self rather than their suppression into unity.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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the self-care system provides a fantasy that ‘makes sense’ out of suffering but splits the unity of mind and body, spirit and instinct, thought and feeling… JUNG’S DUPLEX SELF: LIGHT AND DARK

Kalsched invokes Jung’s duplex self to show that traumatic splitting enacts the dark potential of a dually structured psyche when its opposing centers lose communication.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting

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I am not convinced that, with these two ways of looking at the psyche—the reductive and constructive as I have called them—the possibilities of explanation are exhausted. I believe that other equally ‘true’ explanations of the psychic process can still be put forward

Jung signals that no single theoretical center exhausts psychic explanation, implicitly endorsing a model in which multiple — potentially dual or more — perspectives constitute irreducible psychological truth.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921supporting

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Out of the multitude of conflicting forces, the plurality of the opposites, a structure has to be built which will combine these opposing forces, and in which the manifold diversity of the pairs of the opposites will be held together in the firm embrace of a supra-ordinated unity.

Neumann argues for a synthetic integration of plural psychic forces — a position that acknowledges multiplicity as the raw material while insisting unity remains the ethical telos.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting

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With dual awareness, Rob was in two places at once—experientially back ‘in’ the memory, reexperiencing… the state he was in as a child… and also aware of his current surroundings

Ogden’s dual awareness technique offers a somatic-therapeutic operationalization of the dual centered condition, in which two experiential positions are simultaneously held without collapse into one.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015aside

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Consciousness and the unconscious are created into a polarity at the same moment out of original twilight states; and they are continually being created at the same moment.

Hillman presents consciousness and unconscious as co-arising polarities rather than sequential developments, supporting the view that the psyche is constitutively dual rather than evolving from singular to differentiated.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015aside

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