Psychological Process
In the development of the human personality, there are two processes that are essential: integration and differentiation. Through integration a person learns to put concepts together, like a shirt and a pair of trousers, to build more complex units known as clothes. By differentiation the person separates general concepts into specific meaning, such as the differences between a comfortable shirt and an uncomfortable shirt. Such differentiation allows humans to experience one set of behaviours in a different situation to another.
Psychological processes do not exist on an either/or basis. Things such as moods and emotions like depression, anxiety, and fear exist on a continuum with differing degrees of intensity. It is the same with differentiation-dissociation. Disorders such as multiple personality disorder are often in the extreme end of the continuum that begins with normal differentiation. It is a matter of intensity. Therefore, the general principle of personality formation in which the process of separation has resulted in discrete segments, called ego states, with boundaries that are more or less permeable.
Ego states exist as a collection of perceptions, cognitions and affects in organised clusters. An ego state may be defined as an organized system of behavior and experience, whose elements are bound together by common principle. When one of these states is invested with ego energy, it becomes "the self" in the here and now. This state is executive and experiences the other states which are then invested with object energy.
Ego states vary in their volume. A large ego state may include all the various behaviors activated in one's occupation. A small ego state are the behaviours one experiences in a simple action, such as using a mobile phone. They may represent current modes of behavior and experiences or, as with hypnotic age regression, include many memories, postures, feelings, etc. that were apparently learned at an earlier age. They may be organised into different dimensions. For example, an ego state may be built around the age of 10. Another one may represent patterns of behavior toward a father or authority figures and thus overlap with experiences from the age of 10. Behaviors to accomplish a similar goal may be uniquely different from one ego state to another, especially in true multiple personalities.
Read more about this topic: Ego-state Therapy
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.”
—Robert Bly (b. 1926)