(R.D. Laing. The Divided Self; a study of sanity
and madness. London, Tavistock, 1960, p. 214-7).
"Even when one felt that
what was being said was an expression of someone, the fragment of a self behind
the words or actions was not Julie. There might be someone addressing us, but
in listening to a schizophrenic, it is very difficult to know "who"
is talking, and it is just as difficult to know "whom" one is addressing...
One may begin to recognize patches of speech, or fragments of behaviour cropping
up at different times, which seem to belong together by reason of similarities
of the intonation, the vocabulary, syntax, the preoccupations in the utterance
or to cohere as behaviour by reason of certain stereotyped gestures or mannerisms.
It seemed therefore that one was in the presence of various fragments, or incomplete
elements, of different "personalities" in operation at the one time...
With Julie it was not difficult to carry on a verbal exchange of a kind, but
without her seeming to have any overall unity but rather a constellation of
quasi-autonomous partial systems, it was difficult to speak to "her".
However... even this state of near chaotic nonentity was by no means irreversible
and fixed in its disintegration. She would sometimes marvellously come together
again and display a most pathetic realization of her plight. But she was terrified
of these moments of integration, for various reasons. Among others, because
she had to sustain in them intense anxiety; and because the process of disintegration
appeared to be remembered and dreaded as an experience so awful that there was
refuge for her in her un-integration, un-realness, and deadness. Julie's being
as a chronic schizophrenic was thus characterized by lack of unity and by division
into what might variously be called partial "assemblies", complexes,
partial systems, or "internal objects". Each of these partial systems
had recognizable features and distinctive ways of its own. By following through
these postulates, many features of her behaviour become explicable.
The fact that her self-being was not assembled
in an allover manner, but was split into various partial assemblies or systems,
allows us to understand that various functions which presuppose the achievement
of personal unity or at least a high degree of personal unity could not be present
in her, as indeed they were not.
Personal unity is a prerequisite of reflective awareness, that is, the ability
to be aware of one's self acting relatively unselfconsciously, or with a simple
primary non-reflective awareness. In Julie, each partial system could be aware
of objects, but a system might not be aware of the processes going on in another
system which was split off from it. For example, if in talking to me, one system
was "speaking", there seemed to be no overall unity within her whereby
"she" as a unified person could be aware of what this system was saying
or doing.
In so far as reflective awareness was absent, "memory", for which
reflective awareness would seem to be prerequisite, was very patchy... The absence
of a total experience of her being as a whole meant that she lacked the unified
experience on which to base a clear idea of the "boundary" of her
being. Such an overall "boundary" was not, however, entirely lacking...
Rather, each system seemed to have a boundary of its own. That is to say, to
the awareness that characterized one system, another system was liable to appear
outside itself... It was only "from the outside" that one could see
that different conflicting systems of her being were active at the same time.
Each partial system seemed to have within it its own focus of centre of awareness
: it had its own very limited memory schemata and limited ways of structuring
precepts; its own quasi-autonomous drives or component drives; its own tendency
to preserve its autonomy, and special dangers which threatened its autonomy.
She would refer to these diverse aspects as "he", or "she",
or address them as "you". That is, instead of having a reflective
awareness of those aspects of herself, "she" would perceive the operation
of a partial system as though it was not "her", but belonged outside.
She would be hallucinated".
We do not yet have psychoanalysts for organzation systems unfortunately.
What large organizational system has the channels to advocate the need for
such specialists?
