We became interested in multiple personalities years ago, and wrote to a man who had written a big paper about it. He invited us to come and meet one named Helen. She had about twenty personalities, but the cover name for everyone was Helen. And the fascinating thing was that all of her multiple personalities were more interesting than she was.

Her therapist had a very elaborate model of her personalities. She had an organization part: a part that was very organized and did secretarial work and all kinds of stuff like that. So I said "Well, get that one for me." The therapist had this great non-verbal analogue: he stood up and shouted "JOYCE! COME OUT, JOYCE! "and he hit her on the forehead, Bwamm! and she went through all these changes. Brrnnnggnhhh! It was right out of the movies; it was really spooky. This guy does exorcisms on the helicopter pad at a Catholic college, and he's considered to be a respectable psychiatrist by people who think we are weird! In some ways he's very effective because he is so expressive, but I don't think he understands the full ramifications of what he is doing. He has anywhere from sixteen to twenty-two multiple personalities in his practice at any time, and he can't understand why the rest of the therapeutic community doesn't recognize the epidemic of multiple personalities that he has discovered!

So the organization part of this woman came out, and I introduced myself. Then I said "Most of these parts have amnesia for what goes on in this person's life. Being the organization part, I figure you would have kept pretty good track of it all." "Oh, yes, of course I kept good track of it." I said "Well, how did you end up with so many personalities?" And she said to me "It's as if there were a whole bunch of different parts and there was a round peg that went through the middle. And when I met Dr. So-and-so, he took the peg and pulled it out." That is almost verbatim what she said to me, and this is a woman who does not have a high school education.

She didn't think that this was bad, by the way. Her description was that he pulled the peg out so that they all became more apparent as separate personalities, and now they were going to go back through and make them all into one again. The tragic thing is that when he succeeded in integrating her, she had total amnesia for her entire life, and was a drip as far as I could tell. She had these great parts. She had a sexy part that was just rrrnnnhhh! Another part told jokes and was really corny. Another part was very shy and coy. But when he "cured" her, she had amnesia for her entire life and she had none of the resources of any of those parts. She was just dull.

Now I don't think that you can wipe out parts. So I kept mentioning the names of the parts that I liked, and I got really great unconscious responses from her. They were still there, but they weren't fully available to her.

To do a good job with a multiple personality, I think you need to know the model of the therapist that created it. Some therapists' model of multiple personality is that you have all these parts and an unconscious that runs the program. That's one model, a very common one. The way you'd integrate that one is totally different than you would some other model. This guy's model was that there were three parts here and they had their own unconscious, and then there were two parts over here and they had an unconscious, and then there was an unconscious for these two unconsciouses, and so on. It was really stacked in levels. When you integrated, you would always have to integrate at the same logical level. My guess is that he didn't do that, and that is how he got so much amnesia.

You can use what we call the "visual squash" with multiple personalities. The visual squash is a visual method of integration using visual anchors. You hold out your hands and see yourself as one part here on your left, and as another part here on your right, and you watch them and listen to them. Then you slowly pull the two images together, and visually watch them merge together and then notice how that image is different. If you like it, then you do the same thing again kinesthetically, and squash the two images together with your hands. Then you pull the integrated image into your body.

We just stumbled across this. At first it sounded kind of weird, until we studied a little bit about neurology. It's a good metaphor for what goes on in the metaphor called "neurology." And if you don't think neurology is a metaphor, you are naive, I want to tell you! But anyway, their metaphor and our metaphor were very similar. And if you try it, it's very dramatic. It's a very powerful method.

I once cured a multiple personality with only that. I went through all the levels one by one and squashed all the personalities together.

I once had a therapist call me on the telephone from the Midwest. He said he'd read my book and there was nothing in it about multiple personalities, and he didn't even believe in them, but one had just come into his office and what should he do? I went through the instructions on the phone with him for forty minutes and cured his patient over the telephone. "OK, now tell her to hold out both hands. Tell her to visualize Jane in her right hand and visualize Mary in her left hand. Just take two of them and collapse them together into one image. And then tell her to pull it into her body and integrate it. Then tell her to get the integrated image that she just had, and put it together with another one." So you do them one at a time.

Most people don't really ask multiple personalities any questions. But I really questioned the ones that I've been around, to find out how they functioned. The experience of being multiple for one may be very different than it is for another.

One of the women that I worked with described every single one of her parts as part of the same process. She was really, really visual; she had a picture of them all. There was a couch backstage, in the back of her mind, and all these women sat back there on the couch doing their nails and chatting. Every once in a while, one of them would hop up and walk through the curtains. When it walked through, it would step into her body. Some of them knew about what the other ones did, because they would go and peek out through the curtains. I hypnotized her and went backstage with her and did the visual squash technique and put them all together.

That visual squash method is a very powerful way of integrating sequential incongruities by making them simultaneous in a dissociated state. If you have a sequential incongruity, you can never represent both parts simultaneously in any system other than the visual, as far as I can tell. It takes a very complex auditory representation to have two voices going on at the same time—as opposed to alternating—and people can't pull it off kinesthetically. But you can take sequential incongruities and make them simultaneous by visual/kinesthetic dissociation, and then integrate them by pulling the hands together, and then get the integration in the other two systems.

I don't understand the significance of moving the arms when you do the visual squash, but if you do it without the arms it doesn't work. And I have no idea why. I've tried it both ways; if people don't actually hold out their hands in front of them like this and pull the images together, it doesn't work. People don't have to hold out their hands to get cured of phobias, but apparently with multiple personalities they have to. That doesn't make any sense to me logically, but it happens to be the case. If I were to make a generalization, I would make the reverse one. But I have found out that's the case in experience.

We are a lot more willing to experiment against our intuitions than most people. When most people have a strong intuition, they'll follow it. A lot of times when we have a strong intuition, we'll violate it to find out what will happen—especially when we have clients that we have ongoing contact with, and can be sure of being able to deal with the consequences. That kind of experimentation has resulted in many useful patterns and discoveries.