Personal Multiplicity Theory

An extension of The Human Multiplicity Theory.

Chapter 3 – From Fragmentation to Psychological Polytheism

Introduction

The argument developed so far has remained deliberately close to psychology. Chapter 1 began with ordinary internal plurality: people can experience more than one motive, affect or position without ceasing to experience themselves as one continuing person. Chapter 2 then showed that psychology has repeatedly encountered more organised forms of internal differentiation, from Janet’s subconscious activity and Jung’s relatively autonomous complexes to dialogical positions and contemporary parts models.

There is, however, a danger in allowing psychology to provide the entire frame for the problem. If multiplicity is considered only when discussing the human mind, it can appear to be an unusual condition requiring special explanation.

The natural world suggests almost the opposite starting point. Living systems repeatedly achieve larger forms of organisation through the coordination of smaller differentiated units. Cells form multicellular organisms; colonial animals can combine repeated modules into physiologically integrated colonies; social insects coordinate information across individuals; and schools, flocks and other animal groups can generate organised collective behaviour from interactions among animals that remain recognisably individual.

These systems are not all the same kind of entity. A multicellular human, a coral colony and a flock of birds should not be collapsed into one biological category. Their boundaries, reproduction, degrees of interdependence and mechanisms of coordination differ substantially. Yet they confront us with a common conceptual problem: being one organised system at one level does not require being one undifferentiated thing at every level beneath it.

That wider biological fact changes the psychological question. Instead of asking why the human psyche should contain multiplicity at all, we can ask whether psychological multiplicity might be another instance of a much more general organisational principle: complexity produced through differentiation, relationship and selective integration.

Multiplicity is not the opposite of organisation

Herbert Simon addressed this problem at a general systems level in his classic paper The Architecture of Complexity. Simon defined a complex system as one composed of many interacting parts and emphasised that the behaviour of the whole cannot necessarily be inferred trivially from knowledge of the parts considered separately (Simon, 1962, pp. 467–468). He then argued that complex systems frequently exhibit hierarchical organisation, in which systems contain subsystems that may themselves be further decomposed into subordinate systems (pp. 468–470). Near the end of the paper, he returned to this as an empirical observation, arguing that a large proportion of complex systems found in nature display hierarchical structure (p. 482). (Brandeis University Computer Science)

Simon is particularly useful because he also cautioned against the argument we are about to make. Analogies between physical, biological, psychological and social systems can illuminate genuine structural similarities, but they can also create superficial equivalences (Simon, 1962, pp. 467–468). We therefore should not argue that a human psychological part is a cell, or that a psyche literally functions like an ant colony. The relevant comparison is narrower. In each case, an apparently singular higher-level system may contain interacting differentiated subsystems, and the properties visible at the higher level can depend upon relationships among those subsystems rather than upon their disappearance. (Brandeis University Computer Science)

This gives us a useful way of reframing the familiar opposition between one and many. The question is often posed as though these were mutually exclusive descriptions. Yet a complex system can be one at one level while remaining many at another. The higher-order unity does not necessarily cancel the lower-order multiplicity. Indeed, in many biological systems the larger organisation depends upon keeping useful differences intact.

Evolutionary biology provides one of the clearest examples.

Multicellular life is organised multiplicity

A multicellular organism can feel like the obvious example of biological unity because we encounter animals and plants as bounded individuals. Evolutionarily, however, multicellularity presents a remarkable problem: how do lower-level cellular units become integrated strongly enough that selection and function can operate at a new, higher organisational level?

Michod frames the problem almost exactly this way. In his analysis of the transition from unicellular to multicellular life, he asks how groups of cells become individuals and describes a sequence involving group formation, increasing cooperation, regulation of conflict and eventual specialisation of cells in functions important to the higher-level organism (Michod, 2007, pp. 8613–8614). In volvocine algae, which provide examples ranging from unicellular forms through undifferentiated colonies to organisms with differentiated reproductive and somatic cells, increasing specialisation can make the fitness of lower-level cells increasingly dependent upon the group to which they belong (pp. 8613–8615). (ResearchGate)

The point is not merely that many cells happen to sit next to one another. A pile of cells is not automatically a multicellular individual. Integration requires relationships. In Michod’s account, the transition involves increased cooperation, mechanisms limiting destructive conflict, increasing group size and division of labour. Some lower-level units cease performing all functions for themselves because different functions become distributed across the larger organisation (Michod, 2007, pp. 8613–8615). (ResearchGate)

West, Fisher, Gardner and Kiers make the distinction even more explicit in their review of major evolutionary transitions in individuality. They separate such transitions into two broad steps: first, a cooperative group forms; second, that group becomes sufficiently cohesive and integrated to constitute a new level of individuality (West et al., 2015, pp. 10112–10113). The second transition involves recurring features including division of labour, communication, mutual dependence and sufficiently low levels of within-group conflict for the higher-order organisation to persist (p. 10113). (ResearchGate)

This is important for our use of the word integration.

Integration in this biological literature plainly does not mean that the cells become identical. Increasing integration can involve the opposite: greater specialisation. Cells become more different in function while becoming more dependent upon one another as constituents of the same larger system.

The resulting organism is therefore not whole because its multiplicity has been removed. It is whole because its multiplicity has acquired relationships through which differentiated functions can contribute to a common organismic life.

This does not prove that psychological multiplicity has the same evolutionary origin or mechanism. It does establish that the proposition difference prevents unity is biologically untenable as a general rule.

Coral and the degrees of being one

Coral makes the problem still more interesting because the boundary between module and colony is visible in a way that is easily overlooked within highly integrated vertebrates.

Rosen’s classic treatment of coral morphology explicitly approached coral growth as modular organisation, examining how repeated coral units contribute to colony form and how the arrangement and replication of those units generate larger morphological structures (Rosen, 1986, pp. 115–118). A coral colony is therefore not structurally simple merely because the observer can recognise one colony. Its visible unity is constructed through the repeated organisation of subordinate modules. (JSTOR)

More recent work shows that the degree of integration among coral modules itself varies considerably. Swain and colleagues describe colonial organisms as repeated modules in which physiological integration can permit resource transfer and colony-wide responses to environmental stimuli (Swain et al., 2018, p. 1). Among scleractinian corals, they describe a continuum extending from colonies whose polyps have relatively little living connection to forms in which polyp structures and functions become highly integrated (pp. 1–2). They also discuss evidence for communication, coordination, division of labour and resource movement among polyps, while emphasising that integration varies across species rather than forming one all-or-nothing category (pp. 2, 5–8). (physicalgenomics.northwestern.edu)

This is particularly valuable conceptually because it prevents us from replacing one binary with another.

Nature does not always offer a simple choice between:

independent units

and

one fully integrated organism.

There can be degrees and forms of integration.

The lower-level units may retain substantial local organisation while participating in increasingly consequential relationships with the larger whole. In coral, the biological details include tissue connections, gastrovascular continuity, resource translocation and coordinated responses; in other systems the mechanisms are entirely different. What persists across the comparison is the possibility that the individuality of the larger system depends upon how its constituents are related, not merely upon whether constituents can still be distinguished. (physicalgenomics.northwestern.edu)

That observation provides a much more useful background for discussing psychological fragmentation than the image of a previously solid object being smashed into pieces.

Collective organisation need not produce a new organism

The same principle can also be seen at a looser level of organisation, where the constituent individuals remain much more autonomous.

A school of fish is not a multicellular organism. A flock of birds is not physiologically integrated in the manner of a coral colony. A mammalian pack remains a social grouping of animals, each retaining its own nervous system, metabolism and reproductive individuality.

Yet such groups can nevertheless acquire collective properties that cannot be located straightforwardly in any single member.

Couzin’s review of collective cognition examines this problem across swarming insects, schooling fish and flocking birds. He describes collective decision-making as emerging through interactions among individual state, social behaviour, environmental information and processes that amplify or diminish information within the group (Couzin, 2009, pp. 36–38). In social insects, collective behaviour can go further still: colonies can function as distributed information-processing systems during activities such as foraging and nest-site selection even though the relevant processing is distributed among individual animals and their interactions (p. 39). (PubMed)

Feinerman and Korman make the levels especially clear in their review of social insects. They distinguish individual cognition from collective cognition, arguing that colony-level behaviour can derive in differing proportions from the capacities of individual insects and from the connectivity and communication among them (Feinerman & Korman, 2017, pp. 73–75). The cognitive competence visible at the colony level therefore need not correspond simply to one especially knowledgeable insect acting as a miniature central executive. (PubMed Central (PMC))

This gives us a second important distinction.

A higher-order unity does not have to become a new organism before it becomes analytically meaningful.

A pack can remain many animals while behaving as one pack for some purposes. A school remains many fish while direction, cohesion and collective response can be properties of the school. An ant colony contains individual insects while some information-processing problems are resolved through relations among them.

The appropriate description depends upon which process we are trying to understand.

This principle is already familiar within complex-systems theory. Simon’s hierarchical account does not require a subsystem to cease existing merely because it participates in a higher-order structure; nor does it require all interactions to occur equally strongly at every level. In what he called near-decomposable systems, interactions within a subsystem can be stronger or more immediate than interactions between subsystems, allowing relatively specialised local organisation to coexist with larger-scale coordination (Simon, 1962, pp. 473–478). (Brandeis University Computer Science)

That notion will become particularly important when we later consider psychological compartments. For now, its significance is simpler: unity does not require unrestricted internal uniformity.

What fragmentation would mean in a naturally multiple system

The wider biological comparison allows us to revisit the term fragmentation more carefully.

If multiplicity itself were fragmentation, every multicellular organism would be fragmented simply because it contains many cells. Coral would become progressively “more fragmented” as its modular organisation became more visible. A flock would be pathological because it contains birds rather than one gigantic bird.

Clearly this is not what is meant when we describe an integrated system as fragmenting.

The significant question is relational.

Are the differentiated constituents communicating sufficiently for the functions that depend upon their relationship?

Can specialised components perform their roles without disabling the larger system?

Can conflicts among lower-level interests be contained sufficiently for the higher-level organisation to persist?

Can information needed in one part of the system reach the places where it is required?

The evolutionary-transitions literature makes this relationship explicit. West and colleagues do not define a new level of individuality merely by the presence of many cooperative units. Transformation into an integrated entity depends upon communication, division of labour, mutual dependence and the regulation of damaging within-group conflict (West et al., 2015, pp. 10112–10113). Michod similarly treats cooperation, specialisation and conflict mediation as central to the transition from cellular group to multicellular individual (Michod, 2007, pp. 8613–8615). (ResearchGate)

This gives the present thesis a stronger basis for distinguishing psychological multiplicity from psychological fragmentation.

Psychological multiplicity refers to differentiated psychological organisation within one organism.

Psychological fragmentation, in the specific theoretical usage proposed here, refers to a condition in which differentiated psychological domains lack sufficient communication, mutual recognition or cooperative organisation to participate reliably in a coherent shared life.

The second definition is ours. It should not be mistaken for an established diagnostic definition of dissociation or fragmentation.

Its rationale, however, is not arbitrary. It follows a wider systems principle: the existence of parts and the quality of integration among parts are separate variables.

In fact, natural systems suggest that eliminating differentiation could itself damage integration. If every cell in a multicellular organism performed the same function, the organism would lose the advantages of division of labour. If every member of an animal group had to possess exactly the same information and respond identically, many forms of collective decision-making would become impossible. Complexity can depend upon preserving differences while organising their interaction. (ResearchGate)

The psychological implication is therefore worth investigating:

perhaps internal difference is not what a healthy psyche has overcome; perhaps some internal differences are among the resources through which a healthy psyche functions?

That remains a hypothesis. Biology has given us an organisational precedent, not proof of the psychological model.

Integration need not mean fusion

This distinction also clarifies the otherwise ambiguous word integration.

Integration can be imagined as fusion: several previously distinct things become one thing by losing the differences between them.

But the biological examples above show another meaning. Cells can become more integrated as their functions become more specialised, not less. Coral modules can remain identifiable while physiological relations among them increase. Individual insects remain insects while colony-level information processing depends upon their interactions.

Integration can therefore mean:

differentiated constituents becoming sufficiently interoperable to support a larger organisation.

This is close to the conception of integration that Human Multiplicity Theory will adopt.

It does not require every psychological process to become consciously accessible. It does not require all perspectives to agree. It does not require every specialist function to acquire the same information or authority.

Rather, it suggests that a healthy psychological organisation may preserve functional differences while improving the accuracy and appropriateness of relationships among them.

Contemporary parts psychology provides a neighbouring psychological example. Internal Family Systems explicitly begins from what Schwartz calls the normal multiplicity of the mind, proposing that humans contain multiple sub-minds or parts rather than regarding multiplicity itself as the consequence of pathology (Schwartz, 2013, pp. 807–808). Within the IFS model, therapeutic problems concern the relationships, burdens, extremity and polarisation of parts, while improvement need not require their elimination (pp. 811–816). (sppc.org.pt)

IFS is not offered here as empirical proof that the mind has exactly the architecture it proposes. Its distinction is conceptually useful because it reaches the same systems question from clinical practice:

If multiplicity is normal, what has to go wrong for multiplicity to become psychologically painful?

The answer can no longer simply be:

there are several parts.

The investigation must move towards relationship.

From biological multiplicity to psychological polytheism

At this point James Hillman becomes more interesting than he appeared when psychology was considered in isolation.

Hillman need not carry the scientific burden of demonstrating that complex organisation can be multiple. Biology and systems science already make multiplicity unsurprising. Nor does Hillman need to prove that psychology has encountered differentiated internal processes; the history reviewed in Chapter 2 has already established that.

His distinctive contribution is to ask what happens when the implication of plurality is taken seriously inside psychological interpretation itself.

Hillman’s archetypal psychology adopts an explicitly polytheistic orientation. In his summary of the approach, he argues that an adequate psychological model must account for diversity both among people and within each person, and links this problem with the multiple or polycentric character he finds in earlier depth psychologies (Hillman, 1983, pp. 32–35). His argument is not simply that many psychological phenomena exist. He questions the assumption that those many phenomena must ultimately be ranked beneath one privileged psychological centre in order to count as integrated (pp. 33–35). (Scribd)

Hillman’s later discussion of personality makes the implication stronger. He treats multiplicity as fundamental to psychic life and uses personifying to preserve differences that might otherwise be flattened into abstract categories or subordinated immediately to the standpoint of the ego (Hillman, 1983, pp. 51–53). In this respect, his polytheistic language performs a psychological function: it permits different psychic perspectives to retain enough particularity to be encountered as perspectives rather than as defective variations of a single proper voice. (Scribd)

This does not make Hillman’s psychology a biological theory. The transition from multicellular individuality to archetypal personification is not a causal inference. We cannot say:

Cells specialise; therefore the psyche contains gods.

That would be exactly the kind of superficial analogy Simon warned against.

The legitimate argument is different.

Biology demonstrates that differentiated multiplicity and higher-order unity can coexist.

Psychological research and theory demonstrate that human mental life contains differentiated processes, positions and relatively autonomous organisations.

Hillman then poses a phenomenological and interpretive question:

What if psychological differentiation is not merely tolerated as an imperfection of unity, but approached as one of the psyche’s basic ways of organising experience?

That is where psychological polytheism enters the argument.

The ego need not represent the whole system

This wider frame also helps us understand why Hillman’s challenge to the ego matters.

In a complex biological organisation, no obvious principle requires every subsystem to contain all of the information possessed by every other subsystem. The logic of specialisation suggests the opposite. A specialised component can be competent precisely because it operates within a limited jurisdiction, while the larger system depends upon communication among many such competencies.

The same is true in looser collective systems. An individual ant does not need a complete internal representation of every colony-level calculation for collective behaviour to occur; some colony-level patterns arise from the distribution and interaction of local information (Feinerman & Korman, 2017, pp. 73–75). Likewise, Couzin’s analysis of animal collectives shows how group-level responses can emerge through patterns of local interaction rather than requiring one member to function as an omniscient executive (Couzin, 2009, pp. 36–39). (arXiv)

Again, this is not proof that the conscious ego functions like an ant.

It gives us permission to question an assumption:

Why should conscious awareness be presumed to possess the entire informational content of the psychological organism simply because it is the point from which the person presently reports experience?

Jung’s complexes had already weakened that identification. As shown in Chapter 2, psychologically organised material could influence memory, emotion and behaviour without being identical with the ego’s present intention. Hillman pushes further by refusing automatically to grant ego-consciousness interpretive sovereignty over whatever else appears in psyche.

The resulting stance is not:

every inner position is correct.

Nor is it:

every image is a literal independent being.

It is more modest:

the fact that a psychological perspective differs from the currently dominant conscious position does not by itself establish that the perspective is meaningless, pathological or illegitimate.

Its informational context may simply not yet be understood.

Personification as increased differentiation

Hillman’s idea of personification becomes particularly useful at this point.

If an internal experience is described only as anxiety, anger or resistance, it is known at a very broad level. If further attention reveals a recurring perspective – perhaps one that expects abandonment, one that protests boundary violation or one that continually evaluates social danger – the psychological event has become more differentiated.

Hillman allows that differentiation to proceed through the imaginative process. Psychological material may acquire voice, character, image or mythic identity. His aim is not simply to turn abstract feelings into fictional characters; personification gives differing psychic perspectives enough particularity for relationship and enquiry rather than immediate reduction (Hillman, 1983, pp. 51–53). (Scribd)

The present thesis will later propose a more specific information architecture for how such interfaces might arise. That explanation should not be imported backwards into Hillman. At this stage, his methodological contribution is sufficient.

An image can be approached without assuming that its first appearance constitutes a final diagnosis of what it is.

A figure experienced as a Warrior, Judge, Child or Guide might carry useful information about the psychological territory being encountered. It might also prove to be an incomplete representation of a much richer domain. The proper response is therefore investigation rather than instant classification.

This fits the broader systems argument surprisingly well. The visible behaviour of one level of a complex system does not necessarily reveal all of the organisation beneath it. Simon’s hierarchical analysis reminds us that higher-level descriptions compress lower-level detail, while the biological examples demonstrate that apparently unified functions may be produced through distributed and differentiated processes (Simon, 1962, pp. 468–470, 473–478). (Brandeis University Computer Science)

Hillman’s refusal to reduce the first image too quickly can therefore be read as a psychological version of the same epistemic caution:

do not mistake the interface you can currently see for the complete architecture that produced it.

The mechanism behind that proposition will become important later.

Cooperative multiplicity as the working hypothesis

The argument of this chapter can now be stated without requiring either biological reductionism or metaphysical commitment.

Nature repeatedly produces organised systems in which higher-order unity coexists with lower-order differentiation. In some evolutionary transitions, integration becomes so extensive that formerly independent units participate in a new biological individual; in modular organisms such as corals, degrees of physiological integration can vary across a continuum; and in animal collectives, coordinated group-level behaviour can emerge while the constituent animals remain clearly separate individuals. (ResearchGate)

These examples are different. Their differences matter.

What they share is a systems principle:

the many can remain many while also contributing to a meaningful one.

Psychology gives us independent reason to investigate whether the human psyche contains differentiated organisation. IFS explicitly treats multiplicity as normal, Jungian complexes provide a precedent for relative psychological autonomy, and Hillman’s polytheistic psychology asks us not to presume that psychic plurality represents a failed attempt at monotheistic unity. (sppc.org.pt)

Human Multiplicity Theory therefore proposes a distinction that will govern the rest of this thesis:

Multiplicity describes differentiation. Fragmentation describes a failure of sufficiently functional relationship among differentiated elements.

From this follows a second proposition:

Integration need not require fusion. It can consist of sufficiently accurate communication, coordination and cooperation among elements that retain useful differences.

These are theoretical proposals. The biological literature does not prove them psychologically, and Hillman’s work does not provide their biological mechanism. Their strength comes from the convergence of several levels of enquiry.

Systems theory shows that complex wholes can be hierarchical and partially decomposable.

Evolutionary biology shows lower-level units becoming integrated through cooperation, specialisation, communication and conflict regulation.

Colonial biology shows that integration itself can vary in degree.

Collective-behaviour research shows that meaningful higher-order coordination does not always require the lower-order individuals to lose their individuality.

Parts psychology shows that a clinical model can treat internal multiplicity as normal rather than inherently pathological.

Hillman asks what psychology looks like when that multiplicity is granted psychological dignity rather than treated as an error awaiting reduction.

The remaining problem is mechanistic.

If psychological multiplicity is organised rather than accidental, what creates the differentiation?

Why should one psychological process possess information that another does not?

How can specialised processes share one organism while retaining different functions?

How can information remain active within the organism without being continuously available to awareness?

And how can several differentiated systems coordinate without requiring one conscious centre to administer every operation?

Those questions bring us to the next stage of the thesis.

The wider natural world has shown that specialisation is compatible with unity. We can now ask how specialisation and devolved function might operate within the human psychological organism.

References

Couzin, I. D. (2009). Collective cognition in animal groups. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(1), 36–43. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.002. (PubMed)

Feinerman, O., & Korman, A. (2017). Individual versus collective cognition in social insects. Journal of Experimental Biology, 220, 73–82. doi:10.1242/jeb.143891. (PubMed Central (PMC))

Hillman, J. (1983). Archetypal psychology: A brief account. Spring Publications. Particularly pp. 32–35 and 51–53. (Scribd)

Michod, R. E. (2007). Evolution of individuality during the transition from unicellular to multicellular life. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(Suppl. 1), 8613–8618. doi:10.1073/pnas.0701489104. Particularly pp. 8613–8615. (ResearchGate)

Rosen, B. R. (1986). Modular growth and form of corals: A matter of metamers? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 313(1159), 115–142. doi:10.1098/rstb.1986.0029. Particularly pp. 115–118. (JSTOR)

Schwartz, R. C. (2013). Moving from acceptance toward transformation with Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(8), 805–816. doi:10.1002/jclp.22016. Particularly pp. 807–808 and 811–816. (sppc.org.pt)

Simon, H. A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106(6), 467–482. Particularly pp. 467–470, 473–478 and 482. (Brandeis University Computer Science)

Swain, T. D., Bold, E. C., Osborn, P. C., Baird, A. H., Westneat, M. W., Backman, V., & Marcelino, L. A. (2018). Physiological integration of coral colonies is correlated with bleaching resistance. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 586, 1–10. doi:10.3354/meps12445. Particularly pp. 1–2 and 5–8. (physicalgenomics.northwestern.edu)

West, S. A., Fisher, R. M., Gardner, A., & Kiers, E. T. (2015). Major evolutionary transitions in individuality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(33), 10112–10119. doi:10.1073/pnas.1421402112. Particularly pp. 10112–10113. (ResearchGate)