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Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are by James Fadiman, Jordan Gruber
clivemeister's review against another edition
4.0
The core thesis of this book is that each of us is not, as much in Western culture would assert, a single, unified, individual. Instead, we are composed of multiple "selves", each with potentially quite distinct preferences, traits, and even some physiological attributes (blood pressure, pulse rates, even allergies in extreme cases). The most extreme version of this is "multiple personality disorder", nowadays called dissociative identity disorder (DID), but, the authors assert, we are all actually like this.
There is reasonable evidence for this, at some level, in our everyday lives: even if we're in the middle of a highly emotional event, if we receive a phone call from our boss we can switch very quickly to a different state, or self, that's appropriate to that context. So, at some level at least, one could interpret this book as being about switching between those different states.
However, the authors want to argue for a much stronger version of this: these are really, genuinely, different "selves", with different goals and drives. This strong version has a lot of appeal, as again we can see times when we have different, even opposing, goals at different times. The authors produce a lot of historical examples of people talking about the "self" in this way - from great literature to religions to the early psychologists.
The rest of the book presents a good case for how useful this view is, especially we can use it to reduce internal conflict, or to bring the right member of our "crew" to the fore, to handle a particular situation. Indeed, several modern schools of psychiatry are based on these kinds of techniques, such as Internal Family Systems. We are even starting to see some neuroscience to back this theory up - one early example is "split brain" experiments, where people whose corpus callosum has been cut (a treatment for severe epilepsy in the 1960s and '70s) can appear to manifest two simultaneous personalities with different goals.
The strengths of the book are the in-depth presentation of the material, although perhaps it went on a little long for my taste in the list of antecedents. For me the book was weaker on the (for me more interesting) suggestions as to how to work with our multiple selves - to integrate them, or to trigger switching from one to another. It does have some material on this, but the balance for me was the wrong way round on history vs practice.
Of course this all leaves open very many interesting questions, such as: do these selves update themselves when "offline"? do they in turn have sub-selves? how are they formed in an individual?
Overall a very interesting book, and, speaking for myselves(!), I'm sure they are correct in their core thesis.
There is reasonable evidence for this, at some level, in our everyday lives: even if we're in the middle of a highly emotional event, if we receive a phone call from our boss we can switch very quickly to a different state, or self, that's appropriate to that context. So, at some level at least, one could interpret this book as being about switching between those different states.
However, the authors want to argue for a much stronger version of this: these are really, genuinely, different "selves", with different goals and drives. This strong version has a lot of appeal, as again we can see times when we have different, even opposing, goals at different times. The authors produce a lot of historical examples of people talking about the "self" in this way - from great literature to religions to the early psychologists.
The rest of the book presents a good case for how useful this view is, especially we can use it to reduce internal conflict, or to bring the right member of our "crew" to the fore, to handle a particular situation. Indeed, several modern schools of psychiatry are based on these kinds of techniques, such as Internal Family Systems. We are even starting to see some neuroscience to back this theory up - one early example is "split brain" experiments, where people whose corpus callosum has been cut (a treatment for severe epilepsy in the 1960s and '70s) can appear to manifest two simultaneous personalities with different goals.
The strengths of the book are the in-depth presentation of the material, although perhaps it went on a little long for my taste in the list of antecedents. For me the book was weaker on the (for me more interesting) suggestions as to how to work with our multiple selves - to integrate them, or to trigger switching from one to another. It does have some material on this, but the balance for me was the wrong way round on history vs practice.
Of course this all leaves open very many interesting questions, such as: do these selves update themselves when "offline"? do they in turn have sub-selves? how are they formed in an individual?
Overall a very interesting book, and, speaking for myselves(!), I'm sure they are correct in their core thesis.
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