compassion for the multitude within

There is a movement today that recognizes the multiplicity of the psyche—that our inner world is made up of different parts. This plurality within us has in some sense always been how the discipline of psychology has understood the mind. Freud’s notion of the unconscious made every psyche have hidden recesses, places with thoughts and images and desires that couldn’t be known by other, conscious, dimensions of the mind. For Freud, these unseen areas of the psyche contained repressed desires and aggressions and hopes and images that would intrude into our thinking, our relationships, and our intentions. The movement today takes such a recognition of multiplicity within us further. In this understanding, we’re all made up of a set of inner beings, and these beings are the source of every aspect of our interior world. Each thought and image and desire and hurt and fear, every time I’m wanting to argue, or to enjoy, or to care for, or to lash out—these are all coming from beings inside me. These parts of my psyche are not simply emotions, but full-range beings within, to be approached as we would approach any person. Such an understanding is fundamental in Internal Family Systems and in Gestalt therapy with much older roots in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other traditions. This movement allows us to let go of a particular Euroamerican idea of people as good or bad, as worthy or unworthy of being punished. Every one of these inner beings is trying toward some positive purpose, wanting to flourish. As Marshall Rosenberg put it: “At each moment every living phenomenon is reaching out to life, trying to make life more wonderful, to meet needs in the best way they know how, at that moment, in those conditions.” The strategy that an inner being finds for trying to flourish might bring pain to others. When that happens we want to protect whoever is being affected; we just don’t need to do so in a way that suggests the one meeting its needs that way is deserving of punishment. Bringing together the multiplicity of the psyche with the compassionate approach of people like Rosenberg, we have the idea that we are all entirely made up of a set of beings and every one of them at every moment is doing its best toward a positive purpose under the conditions in which it finds itself. And this has radical implications for relating to others and relating to ourselves.