c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Body & Soul is a regular column exploring the interplay between spirituality and psychology. Pythia Peay is the author of”Putting America on the Couch,”to be published by Riverhead Books in 1997.)

(UNDATED) With elegant simplicity, William Shakespeare neatly expressed the challenge of being human:”To thine own self be true.” But hundreds of years after he uttered that comforting bit of advice, we find ourselves asking,”Which self?” A growing body of psychological theory contends that housed within our psyches is not one self, but many that change and grow over time. The dilemmas of modern identity, according to some thinkers, are more easily resolved when we draw on all of the manifestations of the elusive entity known as the self.

That dilemma is fodder for comedy in the recent movie,”Multiplicity,”in which Michael Keaton stars as a harried man struggling to fulfill an array of conflicting roles.

In his attempts to be both father, construction boss and supportive husband, Keaton’s character is pulled in so many directions that he forgets who he is.

A geneticist resolves Keaton’s identity crisis by creating several Keaton-clones. But in fact, this cinematic solution to a problem many of us experience contains a germ of philosophical truth.

It once was believed, for example, that a stable and unchanging sense of self was the goal of mental health. But originating with the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who wrote about the”masculine”and”feminine”aspects of the psyche, it was thought that individuals contain within them autonomous figures. In his memoirs, for instance, Jung wrote of his own”personality number one,”and”personality number two.” To Jung, such figures represented unconscious aspects of the self. When these manifestations of self were recognized and brought into balance and harmony, he theorized, psychological maturity would result.

More recently, pioneering psychologist Robert Jay Lifton overturns accepted notions of individuality in his book,”The Protean Self”(Basic Books). Lifton writes that we are evolving”a new sense of self appropriate to the … flux of our time.”Fluid like the Greek sea god Proteus, this flexible”protean self,”Lifton writes, is able to recombine disparate elements into new patterns of identity. He terms this”shape-shifting.” It is one thing for scholars to write abstract scenarios of the exciting potential of these new concepts of multiplicity. But in the real world, when told that they have more than one identity,”most people think they have a psychological disorder,”says psychotherapist Ruth Berlin, co-director of InnerSource, a psychotherapy center in Annapolis, Md.

People who have always assumed they have a single, stable idea of themselves may be surprised to learn that they are many-sided, Berlin says. But discovering that they possess an inner wealth of untapped potential can be liberating.

Berlin tells the story of a businessman who suffered from lack of feeling. A workaholic, he had within him, she says, a disowned and largely ignored aspect of himself she called the”inner hippie.”This wild and crazy character liked wearing bright colors and wanted to be an artist. By reconnecting to this long-denied aspect of his psyche, the man awakened emotions of deep passion. He felt alive again.

How can we discover the various personalities residing within us? One technique, Berlin suggests, is to notice people who arouse our admiration or dislike. Strong emotions in either direction may signal that such people symbolize disowned traits within ourselves.

Yet another technique involves paying attention to how we describe ourselves to others. Characterizing ourselves as rational or funny may describe inner figures like that of a scientist or clown. The appearance of strangers in dreams is yet another clue to undiscovered aspects of personality.

To help her clients harmonize their inner cast of characters, Berlin uses a method called”voice dialogue.”In this exercise, a person imagines sub-personalities seated in chairs around the room. Similar to a board of directors meeting, each personality takes a turn stating an unfulfilled desire. The mother in us, for instance, may say she wants more family time; the inner writer may desire solitude.

The chairman of the board in this exercise, says Berlin, symbolizes the”aware ego”_ a manifestation of the intuitive or knowing self that keeps the”big picture”in mind. It is the chairman who listens to everyone _ then makes decisions that, she says, are”best for the whole company.” For those struggling to stay afloat in a complex world, it is useful to speculate on the resources hidden deep inside what we once thought of as a monolithic self. After all, as Shakespeare also wrote,”Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

MJP END PEAY