Any personality theory can be divided into 'structures' (nouns) and 'processes' (verbs, action)...
A personality theory -- or a model of the personality -- with its particular number of 'invisible structures' or 'metaphorical organs' or 'compartments' -- is different than any biological study of 'anatomy' in that the study of anatomy is predominantly 'physical' and 'empirically visible' -- if we do an autopsy of a dead person's body we can expect to find a 'heart' and a 'brain' and a 'liver'...and so on...
Not so if we were to do an 'autopsy' of the 'mind' or 'pscyhe' because here everything postulated in terms of 'structures' or 'ego-states' or 'compartments' or 'pscyho-organs' is invisable, and thus, 'metaphysical' -- i.e., 'above physics'.
In this regard, a hardline and hardnose empirical skeptic like David Hume would say -- 'Bah! Humbug!....If it's invisable, it doesn't exist. (Hume didn't know about 'bacteria' and 'viruses' back then, although if he was alive today, he would most definitely argue that they 'exist' because they can be seen under a microscope....
In contrast, a 'Central Ego' or an 'Id' or a 'Superego' -- can't even be seen under any microscope....Thus, 'Commit these 'nonsensical, conceptual postulates' to flames!!....would argue the most stringent skeptic and deconstructive philosopher in the history of Western Philosophy -- the empirical hardliner, David Hume. Hume didn't even believe in the existence of 'The Self' -- because again, it can't be seen....
Obviously, the same stringent empirical logic would be applied to the concept of 'God'... which for self-preservational purposes, Hume kept this argument mainly to himself....He wanted to keep his 'head' as well as his 'mind' -- although, presumably he didn't use the term 'mind' either...because it too would be an 'invisible concept'....so let's just say he wanted to keep his 'brain' as well as his 'head'...There were a lot of religious people in high places walking around who didn't take too kindly to Hume's line of thinking.....Very simple...you chop off his head and you 'cut off his particular line of thinking'....
Things like 'egalitarianism' and 'freedom of speech' and 'democracy', and 'dethroning the Churches of the power they had back then'...were on their way....during the course of 'The Enlightement' -- of which David Hume played an early part -- but, still, you had to be very careful of some of the things you said...and believed...As even today, not everyone was 'open-finded' and 'flexible' and 'accepting' in their thinking...
Anyways, I part company from the still esteemed David Hume...I am not as hardline an empiricist or skeptic or deconstructionist as Mr. Hume... Still, I respect his line of thinking....even as I disagree and go another way...
Man thinks in terms of 'metaphors' all the time -- 'Hegel's Hotel' is a metaphor -- and any personality theorist who thinks in terms of 'structures' and 'compartments' and 'pscyho-organs' is thinking in terms of metaphors...
We can get sick or healthy using metaphors -- and 'good' or 'bad' 'associations'...
When we use 'metaphors' and 'associations' and 'generalizations' -- we are playing a type of 'epistemological' and/or 'ethical' fitting game....
Our metaphors, associations and generalizations have got to be useful, functional...or else....do what David Hume told us to do...'Commit them to flames!' (before they commit you to flames!)....
Freud used 3 'metaphorical organs' or 'compartments' in the psyche: 1. The Id; 2. The Ego; and 3. The Superego -- all of them 'invisible' of course -- and inferred and 'structuralized' in terms of certain repetitively and clinically observed cognitively- judging (the Superego) vs. emotionally and behaviorally impulsive (the Id) vs. 'cognitively-mediating', 'problem-solving', 'conflict-resolving', and 'compromise-forming' functions (the Ego).
Then Melanie Klein came along and offered a completely different point of view -- the idea of an 'internalized object' where an internalized object could be further subdivided into an 'internalized father' and an 'internalized mother' and then a 'good internalized father' as opposed to a 'bad internalized father' (and similarly with the 'internalized mother'). Here all associated cognitive-emotional-behavioral functions of the 'internal object' were contained in the same 'ego-state' or what I would further sub-classify into a 'superego-state', a 'central ego state', and an 'underego state'. Then, rather than, or in addition to, talking about 'internalized fathers and mothers', we could also -- which I have chosen to do -- go the 'multi-bi-polar route' and now what used to be 'The Superego' -- and what would quite likely have Freud turning over in his grave if he were to be able to telepathically hear or read about this from his final 'resting point' (maybe Melanie Klein can transfer the news to Dr. Freud and make it more palatable to him...) -- I have 'split' into 4 'Sub-Superegos': 1. The Altruistic-Nurturing Superego; 2. The Narcissistic-Self-Interested Superego; 3. The Dionysian-Hedonistic Superego; and 4. The Apollonian-Righteous-(Rejecting) Superego.
You can see the influence of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy (Dionysus vs. Apollo) in this configuration, as well as Freud's distinction between the 'Primary' (Dionysian) and Secondary (Apollonian) Process. Then there is the 'Narcissistic-Altruistic Bi-polar Superego Split'.
To bring in another metaphor, there is basically a 'parliament of the personality' that is being built up here that includes: 1. 'The Minister of Nurturing and Support' (The Altruistic-Nurturing Superego); 2. 'The Minister of Narcissism (or Egotistic Self-Centredness) (The Narcissistic Superego); 3. The Minister of Pleasure, Sensuality, and Sexuality (The Dionysian Superego); 4. The Minister of Ethical Righteousness, Morality, and Defense (The Apollonian Superego).
The 'Mid-Zone Region' consists of 3 separate parts: 5. a 'Debating' or 'Therapy' Room which I also call: 'The Gestalt Room' or 'The Psycho-Drama Room' or 'The Bi-Polar Debating Room') and which is overseen by 6. 'The Central Ego' (which is like 'The Manager' or 'The Vice President' or 'The Chief Advisor' of 'The Corporation' or 'The Parliament' and who answers only to 7. 'The President' or 'The Chief Executive Officer' or 'The Prime Minister') which in the personality is 'the First Person -- 'I' -- as in 'Self' -- the final resting place of 'behavioral accountability'.
In a healthy person, the 'I' or 'The Self' is in control of both 'The Central Ego'...and the rest of the personality...but sometimes 'dissociated', 'isolated', 'alienated', 'suppressed', 'repressed' parts of the Self 'break loose' -- like 'criminals breaking out of prison', or like 'inmates going crazy in an asylum'....or The Central Ego and/or President are 'too weak' to handle an 'out of control, internal civil war' -- often because The Central Ego, and/or President and/or Apollonian Superego is too harsh, restrictive, and authoritarian -- or alternatively, too 'liberally permissive'...
We all have 'inmates' in our personality. In DGB Psychology, they are 'contained', 'locked up' for the most part, in our 'Shadow-Id Complex (SIC) Compartment' -- or 'SIC Bay' ....(The name here has changed from past papers where I used the names 'SID Complex', 'The SID Compartment', and 'SIGGY's Cave' .) Our SIC Bay is listed and described further down the 'ladder of the personality here' -- in the unconscious -- but first we have 4 different 'splits in the Underego' to talk about...and then 'The Dream Weaver'...
The 'Underego' can be divided into four 'special interest splits': 8. The Apollonian-Rebellious Underego; 9. The Dionysian-Hedonistic Underego; 10. The Narcissistic/Selfish Underego; and 11. The Altruistic-Co-operative (Compliant, Pleasing, Approval-Seeking, Disapproval-Avoiding) Underego.
12. is 'The Dream Weaver' -- the part of our personality that 'weaves' our dreams, fantasies, nightmares, and creations together, using perceived material from both above it on the personality ladder -- and below it....
13. Is 'SIC Bay' (or 'The Isolation Ward' or 'The Quarantine Quarters').....a combination of our past and present 'traumacies' and 'phantasies' (both positive and negative fantasies)...a combination of 'oral' and/or 'anal' impulses -- they could be Dionysian impulses, Narcissistic impulses, Altruistic Impulses, Rebellious Impulses, Secret Traumacies, Ghosts from our past....'transferences', 'compensations', 'defenses', mixed with 'perceived needs', complexes...which it may take a good psychologist/psychotherapist and/or 'psycho-theorist' (like me) to help sort out for you...
14. Is our 'Personal Transference Template' -- all our childhood memories that are still impacting our present day personality, particularly the most pleasant and/or unpleasant memories that have been 'woven' into our unique 'transference complexes'...'the serial signature' of our personality...
15. Is our 'Mythological Chamber' where we visit all our ancient 'Archetypes', 'picture symbols', 'Greek and Roman Gods'....and/or other Cultural Gods and/or symbols....
16. Is our 'Genetic Potential Self' -- the self that 'God/Nature/Our Creator' meant us to be...spiritually this may be referred to as our 'Soul'...
17. The other newest member of my personality-team here is our 'Apeiron' or worded otherwise, our 'Chaotic (Undifferentiated, Cosmic) Bi-polar Cave'...(or our CBC)...here because of my fascination with Anaximander's 2560 year old 'Cosmology'. Biblically, our CBC can be referred to as our internalized or introjected 'Noah's Ark' where everything starting from 'protons' and 'electrons' starts to move through our body and our personality '2 by 2'.
In this regard, bi-polar evolutionary elements start to slowly differentiate themselves from each other as they begin to climb up our 'Personality Ladder'...right up into our conscious personality, or alternatively might be stuck 'underground in the un/subconscious' of the personality such as never leaving The CBC here, or perhaps a little higher up in SIC Bay, where a particular bi-polar element triggers alarm bells in our 'Psychological Defense System (PDS)' -- 'danger!, danger!' 'hold this thing down before it goes any further'...and so it gets 'locked up'.... but then at night..when our PDS is not on full conscious alert, our Dream Weaver sneaks in, grabs a hold of it and 'weaves' it into one of our dreams...or nightmares...
Or under the influence of alcohol, this 'dissociated bi-polar element' escapes from SIC Bay....shoots its way up to the conscious personality, and 'overwhelms' the Central Ego....
In such a fashion, we get 'Bi-Polar Disorder (BPD)'. Essentially, every type of 'neurotic disorder' is some type of BPD including 'Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)' of which I differentiate between Anal/Apollonian OCDs and Oral/Dionysian OCDs which again -- if a person is 'stuck' in an 'Apollonian OCD' or a 'Dionysian OCD' -- is a type of Bi-Polar Disorder. 'Psychosis' is when a person 'loses control' not only of 'reality' but also his or her 'Mythological Chamber' which 'spills out' symbolic-mythological material, becomes mixed in with 'personal transference material/complexes', shoots up further through SIC bay but is impossible to control there, and 'continues to shoot up further like an exploding volcano' overwhelming our conscious personality....
'Borderline Disorder' is where a person generally utilizes some form of Anal OCD (a very 'anal-retentive' type of personality and lifestyle) to prevent some form of 'psychosis' from exploding up into the conscious personality. This used to be called a 'nervous or psychotic breakdown'....
Again, a good psychologist/psychotherapist will need to work with a combination of the mythological and/or transference material to make sense of everything that is happening...and why an 'explosion from SIC Bay' is happening now in the person's life...What was the 'recent and/or current stressor' that has 'over-tipped' the previous, precarious 'homeostaitic-dialectic balance' -- such that 'civil disorder' has broken out in the personality? It is not uncommon for 'extreme anal-retentiveness and self-restraint' finally 'exploding outwards one day' in 'oral impulsiveness'...like in 'Manic Depression' -- the old more specific name for what is currently called 'Bi-Polar Disorder'.
There you go -- the current 17 part DGB model of the personality -- and a brief description of how the different parts interact with each other...
There is a lot of Western History, Philosophy, and Psychology in this short synopsis of my DGB Personality Model -- with influences from Anaximander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Spinoza, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Adler, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Erich Fromm, Eric Berne, Foucault, Derrida, Masson...
I have been building models of the personality for over 30 years now, starting with my first one called 'Evaluation and Health' which was my Honours Thesis in Psychology in 1979. That model was primarily a model of the activities of 'The Central Ego'. I knew when I finished that essay that I had a lot more research and learning to do in order to understand the more sub/unconsconsicous elements of the personality. I didn't expect it to take 32 years! However, if you go back and look at Freud's timetable, he presented his first major essay on the 'personality' in 1894 (The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence). It wasn't until 1923 -- 29 years later -- that Freud finally produced his last major model of the personality that has become the famous triadic model of 'Classical Psychoanalysis' (Id, Ego, Superego that reflects the Hegelian 'classic dialectic equation' of Thesis, Anti-Thesis, and Synthesis with Fichte, Schopenhauer, and mainly Nietzsche bridging the gap -- Apollo vs. Dionysus.)
From the vantage point of Hegel's Hotel, I think I would look at this little essay here as being my own 'rough equivalent' to 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' (1920) and 'The Ego and The Id' (1923). There are a 'ton of Freudian influences' in this little paper that you can't see yet: from essays like 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (1894), 'The Dynamics of The Transference' (1912), 'On Narcissism' (1914)...plus all the other influences mentioned above, most significantly, Anaximander's 'Cosmology' and Philosophy of 'The Apeiron (Chaos, The Shadow) and his philosophy of 'evolutionary bi-polar conflict'...Heraclitus' and Lao Tse's respective philosophies of 'opposites needing each other', Jung's concept of 'The Collective Unconscious' and his psychology of mythology, Adler's concept of 'lifestyle', 'conscious early recollections', 'inferiority and superiority complexes', Eric Berne's 'Transactional Analysis' and 'Games People Play', Fairbairn's 'rejecting' and 'exciting' objects, Erich Fromm's 'Man For Himself' and 'The Sane Society', Alfred Korzybski's 'Science and Sanity', S.I. Hayakawa's 'Language in Thought in Action' -- many of these influences were highly visible in my 1979 essay on what I would now call 'The Central Ego'...and 'Ego Psychology'...
The essay obviously needs to be extrapolated on, embellished, so that you might understand everything that is 'covertly hidden' -- assuming you are interested in pursusing where I am going -- as I put more meat on top of the skeleton that is this essay.These will need to be organized and fleshed out over the coming month or so...
I still want to completely re-write my 1979 essay, Evaluation and Health, as my contribution to 'Ego Psychology' and 'The Psychology of The Central Ego'...
Plus we have more work to do in other areas of Psychoanalysis...
Outside of Psychoanalysis and Psychology, I need to go back into the history of philosophy and finish a collection of different essays for each major time period and the major philosophers of my personal interest within each major time period...
I still probably need a good year or two to finish Hegel's Hotel...
One last thing. The model above of the personality is by necessity and abstraction -- 'generic' in its composition. It can be 'customized' in an assortment of different -- and opposing -- ways, depending on individual client need. There's none of this 'either/or' 'Oedipal-Instinct Theory' vs. 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory' garbage (at least in its overgeneralized, abstractive bi-polarity) because both traumacy-seduction and instinct-fantasy theory will be available for therapeutic usage depending on the particular individual client's details and needs....
And as for using 17 'metaphorical compartments' in the personality as opposed to Gestalt Therapy's '2 compartments' or Classical Psychoanalysis' '3 compartments'.
if this is too big and cumbersome a model to work with, no one here is saying that you need to work with all aspects of the model at the same time -- you might want to focus on 1, 2, 3, or 4 different areas in one sitting such as: 1. SIC Bay, 2. The Gestalt (Bi-Polarity) Therapy Room, The Apollonian Superego (or 'The Minister of Defense') and the client's 'Central Ego' overseeing -- and learning from -- the whole 'awareness' and 'contact' therapy process...And if you want, you can add 'mythological Gods' to the therapy process...
A quick example here. The therapist might say to his or her client. 'I think that your Cupid (or Venus or Aphrodite...) is locked up in SIC Bay. You are surrounding him with 'Character Armour' such that he can't get out....
Unless you want to live in an 'emotional wasteland', you have to let Cupid out, and let him do his thing, let him influence your Central Ego...Otherwise, both you and the people around you who you most care about -- and love -- are not going to see any of your love...
Bettter still, you might have the client experience this insight himself by 'acting out' a 'bi-polar-double-hot seat dialogue' in which 'Cupid' and 'Apollo' confront each other...
Either way, Mother Teresa would be 'guiding over the lesson' from the therapy session...
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If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
-- Mother Teresa
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-- dgb, April 26th-27th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain
