GeistHaus

Inner Life

Self-States

Most of us speak of “myself” as if it were one thing. But anyone who has snapped at a partner and then, an hour later, wondered who that was, knows it is more complicated. We move between different versions of ourselves: a small, frightened one that wants rescuing; a brisk, capable one that gets through the day by feeling nothing much; a stern inner voice that lists our failures; and, on good days, a steadier self that can hold all of this in view.

A self-state is one of these versions: a recognizable package of feeling, thought, bodily tone, memory and way of relating that tends to arrive all at once and then give way to another. Mardi Horowitz (1987) defined a state of mind as a recurrent pattern of experience and behavior, with its own characteristic emotions, self-image and expectations of others, that a person moves into and out of. Schema therapists call the same phenomenon a mode: the set of schemas and coping responses that are active in a person at a given moment (Young, Klosko & Weishaar, 2003).

Having many self-states is normal. Contemporary relational analysts go further and argue that a healthy self is not one seamless thing but a well-connected family of states that can talk to one another (Mitchell, 1993; Bromberg, 1998). Trouble comes less from multiplicity itself than from states that are walled off from each other, swing abruptly, or take over without the rest of the person being able to step in.

Core Ideas

How Different Thinkers See It

Fairbairn: The Split Ego

W. R. D. Fairbairn was one of the first analysts to describe the mind as divided into several sub-selves, each tied to its own internal relationship. In his 1944 paper on endopsychic structure, collected in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (Fairbairn, 1952), he proposed that a child who cannot bear a frustrating parent takes that parent inside and splits the experience. The central ego relates to an acceptable, ordinary version of the other. A libidinal ego stays attached to an “exciting object,” a version of the parent who promises love and never quite delivers. An antilibidinal ego, which Fairbairn first called the “internal saboteur,” is allied with a “rejecting object” and attacks the self’s own longing. Fairbairn’s picture is the ancestor of many later models: the hungry child, the inner attacker, and the more realistic self that tries to get on with life.

Berne: Ego States

Eric Berne, who trained in psychoanalysis and drew on Paul Federn’s idea of ego states, built transactional analysis around three of them: Parent, Adult and Child (Berne, 1961). The Parent state reproduces attitudes taken in from caregivers, either nurturing or critical. The Adult deals with present reality. The Child relives the feelings and responses of childhood, whether playful, compliant or rebellious. Berne’s language is deliberately plain, and his popular book Games People Play (Berne, 1964) made it widely known. The simplicity is both its strength and its limit: it is easy to recognize yourself in it, and easy to over-use.

Young: Schema Modes

Jeffrey Young developed schema therapy as an integrative approach for people whose difficulties didn’t yield to standard cognitive therapy. Its mode model is now the most detailed map of self-states in clinical use (Young, Klosko & Weishaar, 2003; Arntz & Jacob, 2013). The main families of modes are:

Child modes
The vulnerable child feels lonely, frightened, abandoned or defective. The angry child feels furious that core needs are going unmet and expresses it in an undirected, childlike way. Schema therapy also describes impulsive and contented (happy) child modes.
Coping modes
Ways of handling pain that once made sense but now cost a great deal. The detached protector shuts feeling off, often through distraction, numbness or busyness. The compliant surrenderer gives in to others to keep the peace. Overcompensating modes do the opposite of what the underlying belief predicts, for example by dominating others to avoid feeling small.
Inner parent modes
The punitive parent attacks and punishes the self, often in a voice that echoes a real person. The demanding parent insists on impossible standards and treats rest as failure. Many people experience these as simply their own voice rather than as something taken in.
The healthy adult
The part that can notice the other modes, comfort the vulnerable child, set limits on the angry one, and stand up to the inner critic. Much of the work of schema therapy aims to strengthen it.

Schema therapists use the mode model collaboratively, mapping with the client which mode tends to follow which, and naming them in the client’s own words.

Horowitz: States of Mind

Mardi Horowitz approached self-states from research on stress and grief. His configurational analysis tracks the states a person enters, the self-images and role-relationship models (expectations about how self and other will behave) that organize each state, and the defensive controls that steer between them (Horowitz, 1987). He distinguished, for example, well-modulated states, in which feeling is expressed smoothly; under-modulated states, in which emotion floods out of control; and over-modulated states, in which emotion is tightly held back and the person seems stiff or distant. He also described “shimmering” states in which a person flickers between expressing and suppressing something. His approach is notable for treating shifts in state as observable events that can be described reliably.

Bromberg: Standing in the Spaces

Philip Bromberg, a relational analyst, argued that the self is made up of multiple self-states and that dissociation is not only a pathological process but an ordinary way the mind keeps states apart (Bromberg, 1998). Under trauma, dissociation hardens: states that hold unbearable experience are kept rigidly out of contact with the rest. Health, in Bromberg’s phrase, is being able to “stand in the spaces” between self-states: to feel like one self while being many, and to tolerate the conflict between states rather than banishing one of them. His work, along with Stephen Mitchell’s (1993) and Jody Messler Davies’, shifted many analysts from asking “what is this person defending against?” to asking “which self is present now, and which one is missing?”

Ryle: Cognitive Analytic Therapy

Anthony Ryle developed cognitive analytic therapy (CAT), a time-limited approach that blends object-relations thinking with cognitive psychology (Ryle, 1990; Ryle & Kerr, 2002). CAT describes people in terms of reciprocal roles, such as “criticizing to crushed” or “neglecting to abandoned,” learned in early relationships and then played out with others and with oneself. For people whose experience swings sharply, Ryle (1997) proposed a multiple self-states model: a small number of partially dissociated states, each organized around a reciprocal role, with abrupt switches between them. CAT therapists often draw these states and the paths between them together with the client, so that switches can be recognized as they happen.

Self-States and Dissociation

Self-states lie on a spectrum. At one end are ordinary shifts we all recognize: work self, family self, the self who comes out at 3 a.m. In the middle are sharper switches in which a person can barely recall, from one state, what they felt in another. At the far end are the severe divisions seen in dissociative disorders, where states are so walled off that memory and identity are disrupted. The defense of dissociation describes the moment-to-moment process of keeping experience out of connection, and the dissociative personality style describes people for whom it is a central way of coping.

The key questions are not “how many states?” but “how much do they know about each other?” and “how smoothly does the person move between them?” This is close to what the differentiation and integration capacity describes.

How It Shows Up

Examples

The following vignettes are composites, not real people.

Two Accounts of One Phone Call

On Sunday, Dana says her mother’s phone call “went fine, I just kept it short and got on with the laundry.” On Tuesday, she tells it again, long and shaky: her mother criticized her again, nobody has ever been on her side, and she cried in the car. Neither account is false. Sunday’s comes from a detached, coping state that got her through; Tuesday’s from a hurt, child-like state that finally caught up. A schema therapist would see the detached protector and the vulnerable child taking turns.

The Inner Prosecutor

Raj makes a small error in a presentation. That evening he writes a list of everything wrong with him, in a tone he later recognizes as his father’s. A few days on, he writes more gently: the error was small and most people didn’t notice. The harsh list comes from what schema therapy would call the punitive parent mode; the gentler take from something closer to the healthy adult. What helps is not banishing the critic but noticing when it has taken the floor.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Mood
A mood is a lingering emotional tone. A self-state is broader: it includes a self-image, an image of others, a way of thinking and often a characteristic voice. A mood can be part of a state, but states can switch within minutes while moods drift.
Personality style
A personality style describes the enduring pattern across time. Self-states describe what moves within that pattern. Two people with the same style may have very different repertoires of states.
Dissociative identity
Everyone has self-states; very few people have states so separated that identity and memory are fractured. Ordinary multiplicity should not be confused with a dissociative disorder.
Roles
Social roles (parent, manager, friend) are chosen and adjusted on purpose. Self-states often arrive uninvited and carry feelings out of proportion to the present situation.

History

The idea that one person contains several selves is old. Nineteenth-century French psychiatry, especially Pierre Janet’s work on dissociation, described “subconscious fixed ideas” and split-off systems of memory and feeling. Freud’s structural model of id, ego and superego (1923) divided the mind into agencies, but these were functions rather than selves. Fairbairn’s endopsychic structure (1944, collected 1952) was the first analytic model to describe several sub-selves, each with its own object.

Paul Federn developed the concept of ego states, which Eric Berne simplified and popularized in transactional analysis in the late 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s Mardi Horowitz brought states of mind into empirical research. Anthony Ryle’s cognitive analytic therapy (from the 1980s) and Jeffrey Young’s schema therapy (from the 1990s) turned self-states into practical tools for treatment, with schema therapy’s mode model now widely studied. In parallel, relational psychoanalysis, through Mitchell, Bromberg and Davies, reframed the self as multiple and dissociation as part of ordinary mental life.

Sources