How often do I notice in myself that I have conflicts going on in my own psyche? Simple examples: I want to get up and go out and do things, and yet all I do is sit around and look at YouTube on my phone; I remember that I need to call a friend and haven't spoken with her in a long time, but I don't call her; I say I'm going to practice the piano every day or maybe at least a couple of times a week, but the piano sits and I don't practice at all. How often do we notice these different aspects of ourselves, and if we do notice them, what do we generally do in reaction to them?
The reaction to the fact that we often do notice that we have decided with one part of ourselves, or, as Gurdjieff would say, one little “I” to do something, but then another “I” comes in and we do something completely contradictory to what the first little ‘I” wanted to do. The general reaction, if one notices this, is to either ignore it, justify it, say other things are more important or in general, put it off till tomorrow.
In this way, each person develops a general pattern of reacting to their own multiplicity of reactions in a sleepy and useless way. I say useless only in that if I don't notice these contradictions in myself, nor do I understand the underlying patterns of why they take place, then how can I truly understand myself, which is one major aim of the Gurdjieff Work? Of course, suppose I'm not involved in the Gurdjieff Work or a process interested in learning and understanding myself. In that case, this way of handling the contradictions in my multiplicity makes complete sense and keeps me relatively calm.
But how did this multiplicity of my psyche, or one could say the fractionalization was of it actually come about? Gurdjieff does not really address that directly. In the wonderful book of Ouspensky’s, In Search of the Miraculous, Gurdjieff does call out the fact that the human psyche doesn't have a single big “I,” but is made up of a multiplicity of many small “I”s, and the number of these “I”s can be in the hundreds or thousands. I hope that Ouspensky was quoting Mr. Gurdjieff incorrectly, because when one says hundreds or thousands, it feels like an overwhelming task to even try and understand the human psyche.
It is time to deeply understand the importance of the multiplicity of the human psyche. The psyche is not a unitary psyche and each person interested in the Work must understand this and the implications of it. In this discussion, we will explore the many aspects of this multiplicity and how one’s work is held back unless one understands it.
My own personal experience is that there aren't hundreds or thousands of different parts of myself, but there are quite a few. If I find 10 or 15 different parts, I will have greater self-understanding and more choice in my own behavior. When I recognize that there are a rather limited number of parts, then I may realize it might also be possible to understand the different patterns or characteristics of these different parts.
Throughout this discussion, I'm going to be using the word “part” to replace the word “I” because the word “part” in many ways makes more sense than saying “I” and the word implies there is a larger whole to me of which the part is just a part. The word “part” already has the notion of separation built into it, whereas the word “I” does not and implies just the opposite; “I” implies completeness. If I say that I am angry, it is clearer if I'm being honest and I'm a Gurdjieffian to say a part of me is angry because there is no big “I” implying all of me is angry. In fact, later on in the day, I realized it was just a silly little part of me that got so angry, and the rest of me didn't need to be that upset.
I'm also using the word “part” as a section of the human psyche because this discussion and exploration is going to lead to the next discussions in January and March 2026, which leads us to understanding the usefulness and importance of psychological practices from Internal Family Systems or IFS. It is good to get used to the notion of speaking about parts of oneself.
I'm noticing as I'm writing this that a part of me is a little apprehensive about how these ideas about the multiplicity of the human psyche will be received. This part of me has some concerns that people will feel that mixing psychological practices and ideas from psychotherapy with Mr. Gurdjieff’s ideas just won’t work. Many may think this is a dangerous thing to do, and I will be labeled as someone who is doing dangerous things with Work ideas. If that is so, so be it. There are those who feel that the work is set in stone and cannot change, adapt, or make use of new discoveries. I wonder how Gurdjieff would have responded to similar thoughts had he been told the Russian Orthodox Christian religion was the only way to develop an inner life and that he shouldn't bother exploring other areas of inner development. Where might we all be if he had simply stopped at his earliest experiences with the Greek Church?
What is the history of the concept of the psyche not being unitary but multiple, and where did it come from? Of course, I have mentioned Ouspensky’s written account of Gurdjieff’s talks in the early 1900. But were there others before Gurdjieff who had this idea of multiplicity? The answer is definitely yes. The concept of the multiplicity of the psyche is ancient and has been written about and also hidden. In addition, there were quite a number of individuals living at the same time as Gurdjieff who were exploring different aspects of the psyche’s multiplicity. Most of them were psychologists or at least involved in psychological study.
Although the concept of the multiplicity of the human psyche was not directly linked to a larger cosmological model similar to Gurdjieff’s, the psyche was still viewed as having many parts. Psychologists and others were trying to understand human behavior by the discrepancies they saw in people’s behavior in their thoughts, feelings and descriptions of their inner worlds. There is too much material to cover here to give a complete history of how multiplicity has been evident in the human psyche for thousands of years, but I will give a couple of examples.
Anthropologists report that many indigenous cultures have for centuries been aware of an inner psychological world within people where they encounter parts of themselves and also spiritual entities. Anthropologists use the term polypsychism for the belief that the mind is made up of several parts and have found that this concept is widespread. For example, the Fijians, Algonquins and Karen's believe that people have two souls, while many North Asian people believe in three souls.
In the most ancient shamanic healing rituals, we see that the healing modality is based on the belief that people are made up of parts that can be split off and that reconnection with these parts is the path to health. In the book Shamanism, Michael Winkelman argues that similar shamanic practices appear all over the world in many diverse and remote areas. It is possible that a knowledge of working with parts in an inner world is likely to have a biological basis and therefore an expression of innate of an innate human capacity.
Socrates, who is the father of Western rationalism, heard voices his entire life. He considered a voice speaking to him as a great gift. His inner oracle guided his life, and he unquestionably obeyed it. He called this voice his Daimon, a name coming from the Greek word for wise. A Daimon was a being ranking somewhere between humans and gods. Socrates also believed the mind is multiple. Glaucon is a prominent character in Plato's Republic, where he is one of Socrates' main dialogue partners and a significant interlocutor. He is Plato's brother and plays a key role in the discussions about justice and the ideal society. In Plato's Republic, Socrates has a conversation with his student Glaucon in which Socrates proves that the mind is at least two Socrates. He believed that the unified mind could never want and not want at the same time, and therefore, the mind must be at least dual.
In Plato's Republic, we also find Plato's famous tripartite theory of the soul. Plato’s metaphor of the human soul is also multiple. In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato presented the image of a human as two horses yoked to a chariot driven by a charioteer, where one horse is white, upright, and honorable; the other is dark, crooked and impulsive.
One of the great difficulties of understanding the human mind as being multiple rather than being a unitary entity is that from the early 1900s on, the description by either individuals, shamans and older civilizations, or people speaking about voices in their head, all began to be considered pathological or a sign of sickness. Some of the earliest psychologists considered these occurrences of multiplicity in people's minds to be a sign of abnormality and pathology.
One of the earliest attempts to pathologize or medicalize the notion of parts of the psyche was St. Teresa of Avila, 1515 to 1582, who saw a visions in her interior voices. She was attacked by those she was trying to help, and this was the time of the Spanish Inquisition. She introduced a new possibility that this was not the devil speaking through people, but that these states might be an illness. At this time in 1572, the word hallucination first appeared in the English language. Up until the 1700s, the idea of spirits was the explanation of choice for the phenomena in which people seemed suddenly to be gripped by a different personality.
Pierre Janet, a French psychologist in the early 1900s, was the first to systematically study the psychological state called dissociation, describing it as a psychological response to trauma where a person's experiences become compartmentalized. This compartmentalization leads to symptoms like amnesia and depersonalization. Janet's theory proposed that traumatic memories could become "fixed ideas," forming separate "spheres of consciousness" and preventing integration with the rest of the personality. This concept of dissociation as a lack of integration of psychological functions remains relevant to understanding dissociative orders to this day. However, what Janet did not realize is that this multiple nature of the mind might in fact not be pathology but a natural state of the mind. In some ways, Gurdjieff heads in the same direction when he says that we don't have a single master “I” which is us, but rather many “I”s. Although he does not say that having many “I”s is pathological, he implies that this is an abnormality and that men and women are not aware of their psychological situation.
Gurdjieff’s description of the multiplicity of the human psyche may have meant to many students that this multiplicity was abnormal. This may be the root of the reason his students have not wanted to investigate their own multiplicity. It took from the early 1900s to the present time in psychology for a more enlightened view of the multiple nature of the human mind to arise. A new paradigm of the multiplicity of the human psyche is providing a changing glimpse into human behavior and psychological healing. A number of different psychological theories have made use of multiplicity to experientially help individuals over the last 60 years. Recently, Internal Family Systems (IFS) has become one of the more dominant methods being successfully used throughout the world.
Why might it be useful to study the psyche as being a multiplicity versus a unitary entity? The first reason is that if it is true, and we view the psyche as being composed of parts, it can give us a better understanding of ourselves. One of the things that becomes very evident is that it might be possible to actually learn to distinguish these different parts one from another within us and maybe even communicate with them.
One system that developed around parts of the psyche as a result of Gurdjieff’s work is the psychological inventory of personality developed based on the Enneagram. Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo developed the Enneagram types, and to a large extent, the Enneagram typing system is an intellectual compilation used to understand people. Many people believe the Enneagram typology provides a real understanding of people. However, in many ways, the Enneagram types can simply be seen as another conceptual “parts” lens through which to view people. A clear argument against this Enneagram typology is that, rather than opening greater understanding for a therapist working with an individual is that it narrows the therapist’s understanding of the person as they see them in ways that only correspond to a particular Enneagram type.
If we look at the possibility that each person may have many different parts to their actual psychological makeup, rather than trying to categorize them, we may find out about the very nature of their parts. What can become evident in understanding the multiplicity of the psyche is that each of our parts is similar to a subpersonality that has specific thoughts, feelings and bodily postures associated with it. Using a “parts” system to view a person makes it possible to understand these parts as distinct personalities with characteristics that have a history and reason for their existence. This is quite different than pathologizing the parts and the person, which has been the dominant stance of psychotherapy, the medical profession and the pharmaceutical world.
For example, in relation to behaviors such as the fears that many people suffer from, if a person could understand that a specific part of them is afraid and that part does not represent than all of he person, then a new direction becomes possible. Rather than attempting to sedate the part that is anxious and afraid, it might be possible to actually fathom out the reasons for their fear by talking to this part and finding out about its history of the part. Where did the fear begin for the part, what was happening around it, etc? In this way, one facilitates a transformational state of understanding. All real transformation that is not induced through drug use or other artificial means is a function of practice, effort and understanding.
In studying a particular part of me that is afraid, it is possible to understand when and where that part of me came into being. From my personal experience and working with clients, it is possible to speak to that part and have the part actually tell one its history. When we look at in parts work or IFS, we will see that we have many parts that we use to manage our daily lives (these parts are called managers), there are parts that are very protective of us—in IFS, these parts are called “protectors.” A great deal of our anxiety is due to protector parts that are very vigilant due to painful past experiences. Even though our current experiences may be different in our present life, these protective parts can easily be triggered and step in with various behaviors that may or may not be useful for the particular situation we are in. A new understanding of these fearful, protective parts can open up possibilities for choosing how we respond to both inner and outer situations in our lives.
Why would a part of us not want to look at our multiplicity? There can be a number of reasons. It is a major paradigm shift to begin to see oneself as having many parts. It can be confusing or one may feel that this is somehow not healthy. Automatically, we may feel we shouldn't be this way. All these types of thoughts can make one very afraid of seeing their different parts.
One of the true miracles of coming to know your parts and being able to understand them is that you develop greater compassion and understanding of yourself. The result of greater understanding and compassion toward oneself actually creates greater understanding of other people and of their behavior. Our automatic criticalness, fear and hatred of others can actually be transformed to caring for others. This does not mean that we may not find behaviors of various parts harmful. These harmful behaviors occur for reasons; a part has a history and negative behavior can best be addressed through understanding where the behavior comes from.
When I have a friend or an acquaintance who has a particular behavior that drives me crazy, my automatic way of reacting to them is I say I really don't like them because they behave a certain way. I then resent or dislike them and carry that resentment around with me. This is an example of what Gurdjieff is talking about when he points out in All and Everything that we hate each other, and this hate is a function of our egoism. The latter happens because it is a natural function of the mind to be discerning and critical, to notice differences between others and ourselves. It is very easy to fall into the trap of criticalness and negativity about the way other people are versus the way I am. However, this tendency toward fear and hatred of others is transformed with a greater understanding of my own parts. As I develop compassion toward my parts and understanding where and when they came into being, my relationship to others becomes more harmonious. I can learn how, in many cases, a part of me, other another person that I dislike, was simply a survival strategy that created that part, and this understanding moves me toward both self-compassion and compassion for others. In a wonderful reciprocal manner, my own increased understanding of myself cannot help but cause me to develop compassion toward others who I am close to, or even develop compassion to other people I come into contact with and have difficulty with. Therefore, my increased self-understanding of the multiplicity of my psyche leads directly toward greater compassion, inner calmness, appreciation, and caring for others.
Now, why would increased understanding and compassion for oneself and others be problematic for people? One reason is that it is a totally new direction and we are not used to it—it is a new world. Such increased caring for others does occur from time to time when people drink alcohol or smoke cannabis and feel, for moments at a time greater connection. These substances open up more positive aspects of people, and they can even have deeper discussions when under the influence of drugs or special circumstances. The same thing can occur for a married couple when they get away on a vacation, where there is more time to have more openness toward each other. Intimacy, in many ways, is scary for people because there's the possibility of greater sensitivity to each other. It may very well be that the intimacy that couples are craving may be a function of greater acceptance of the other person and the various parts of which they're multiplicity is made.
Mr. Bennett spoke of the possibility of making a new world. This new world is a function of the inner lives of people. Moving toward greater caring and kindness between people directly affects the egoistic relationships that have automatically taken hold of humanity for thousands of years. Small changes among small groups of people who develop a greater understanding of the multiplicity of their own and others’ diverse psychological parts can create a new vibration of understanding that is needed for all of us.