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Page 1 THE
BASIC ELEMENTS
Of
VOICE DIALOGUE, RELATIONSHIP AND
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELVES
THEIR ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT
By
HAL STONE, Ph.D. AND SIDRA STONE, Ph.D.
The story changes depending upon who tells it. And, as the journey
goes on, we view our lives from different vantage points and through
different eyes as we integrate more and more selves. What seemed
important at one time seems less important later. What seemed less
important can assume greater importance as time goes on.
At this point in our lives - as we reach our 70th and 80th years
- we have decided that it is time to look back and to tell the
story of the origins and development of Voice Dialogue and the
Psychology of Selves the way we see it. We wish to honor those
we know have directly contributed to our work, to clarify some
misconceptions that are common, and to tell - to the best of our
ability - the stories of those moments when some new element was
added or our thinking has changed.
Let us begin with our view of the creative process. We find that
outer and inner influences blend indistinguishably. We have lived
rich, complex - and jointly examined - lives. From the outer world,
there have been teachers and information from many disparate sources.
We have had many powerful experiences with others, both professional
and personal. From the world within, we have had our individual
dreams, transpersonal experiences, and moments of sudden clarity
that seem to be gifts from sources outside of our personal experience.
All these are digested by each of us, providing us with the raw
material from which we create. When an idea or a concept emerges,
we are never quite sure of where it comes from.
In the past, people's first reactions to Voice Dialogue were usually: "That's
a Gestalt technique" or "It's psychosynthesis." Interestingly
enough, Hal's actual work in Gestalt started only after Voice Dialogue
was definitively established in our lives and although Sidra had
some contact with very early Gestalt work, her experience of it
was extremely limited. As for psycho-synthesis, we were both fascinated
with its use of imagery, but neither of us had delved deeply enough
into it to know about its concepts of the different selves. Nor
were we particularly influenced by psychodrama or TA, having only
a passing acquaintance with both of these through the popular press.
We have always honored these various approaches as having some
relationship to Voice Dialogue since they were clearly a part of
the general psychological culture in the early 70's. At the same
time, we recognized that our own creative process was based upon
a very different, and unique, set of experiences. The roots of
our work go far deeper than our exposure to these newer schools
of thought. We came from two contrasting, one might even say conflicting,
backgrounds.
THE EARLIEST INFLUENCES
- HAL’S EXPERIENCES
I was trained as a Jungian analyst, eventually becoming the president
of the Society for Analytical Psychology in Los Angeles in 1968.
I studied at the Jung Institute for several months in 1957 and
actually had the opportunity to meet with Jung himself for an individual
session. These experiences went deep into my being and have, to
some extent, informed my work throughout my life.
My experiences with the Jungian community and my early training
gave me the gifts of a deep understanding of dreams, myths, fairytales,
and depth psychology. On the other hand I knew that something was
missing. I didn’t feel like a grownup. I go into these matters
in greater detail in the 5 CD series I made last year. The outcome
of all this was that I left the Jungian community - and the traditional
practice of analytical psychology – in 1970. This was two
years before Sidra and I met. My experience of all of this was
the end of my personal and professional life as I had known it
and the beginning of a new life that was as yet totally undefined
and unknown to me.
Though I found it necessary to separate from the professional
organization in 1970, I realize now that I would have had to separate
from anything that I was a part of. I needed to float free and
not be tied to any kind of outer professional form. Only in this
way could I begin to move into an entirely new kind of creative
process that has led me to where I am today. I shall be eternally
grateful for the remarkable opportunity I had to discover Jungian
Psychology, to the colleagues I had, to the clients I worked with
and to the innovative spirit of Jung himself. From my very first
analytic session my unconscious opened and with it the life of
spirit and a most remarkable dream process that has always helped
to maintain some kind of objective clarity. From that first session
I had come home to the symbolic life of spirit and I was able to
separate from the arid desert of my rational mind.
My first encounter with Voice Dialogue, or the idea of talking
to selves, came some time in the late sixties. The story I am about
to tell you is not about Voice Dialogue directly. It is concerned
about a clinical experience that led me to a different place professionally
and that is intertwined in my mind with the early origins of the
work.
In the late sixties a couple came to see me in regard to their
son who we will call Jimmie. The couple lived in Southern California
and their son had spent the past year at a special residential
treatment center on the east coast for acting out or disturbed
children. In particular Jimmie was acting out in school and it
was felt that he couldn’t function in a regular academic
setting.
Jimmie was eleven years of age when his parents first came to
me and they were very upset. They had just received a letter from
the school informing them that they had done a complete psychological
evaluation on the boy because of his disturbed behavior, that he
was being diagnosed as schizophrenic and that they were strongly
recommending he be placed in a special setting run by a psychoanalytic
group in the area. Since they felt that he was schizophrenic they
felt that he needed a special facility for this level of mental
impairment.
The parents had moved out West the year before and they were looking
forward to his joining them in their new home. They were very upset
by this letter and their question was whether I could help them
in this situation. I told them I would be willing to see Jimmie
if they brought him to L.A. and I would do an independent evaluation.
I would need all of the medical records that were available before
I saw him. I couldn’t promise them more than that.
Two to three weeks later Jimmie walked into my office. He was
a very curious child, interested in everything he saw. On my desk
I had a pile of psychological and psychiatric reports four or five
inches high containing notes, test materials and psychiatric evaluations.
All of them concurred in the diagnosis of schizophrenia. They described
how what had begun as acting out behavior had, over the past year,
developed into an increasingly disturbed state. As I sat with Jimmie
I was experiencing a huge conflict because my experience of him
was very different. It was very positive. I liked him very much
and I thought he had a wonderful spirit. On the other hand, I had
these reports from a very fine school and very qualified health
care practitioners all making the same diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Jimmie was easy to talk to and he told me about his school and
about its philosophy. Basically, their management style was to
never let children be alone but to always keep them busy doing
things. It was felt that being alone allowed them to collapse into
their own imagination and fantasy and that this would be damaging
to them. It was becoming clear to me that Jimmie was a very imaginative
youngster and that the school routine might not have been the best
kind of experience for him.
In the course of our discussion I asked Jimmie if he ever remembered
any dreams. He told me that he had one just last evening. This
was the dream:
“I am sitting in a wheelchair in the lobby of my school.
My parents are visiting me before they go back to California. I
am crying and begging them not to go. They feel they have no choice
however and they get up to leave and I wake up sobbing that they
are leaving me here.”
The dream was totally stunning to me. He was in a wheel chair.
Why was he there? Did this mean that he was indeed crippled in
the way the reports on him indicated was the case? Why else would
he be in the wheel chair? Yet every instinct in me felt a core
of health in him that was incompatible with the diagnosis.
I asked him to close his eyes and go back into the dream and be
in the wheel chair. He did this easily, just as I expected, and
after a half-minute or so I asked him why he was in the wheel chair.
What was wrong with him? Could he tell me anything about how he
felt sitting there?
Jimmie then said a remarkable thing to me. “What I feel
is that there is a magnet in the back of the wheel chair and that
this magnet is holding me in the chair.” I said before that
I was stunned when I heard his dream. Hearing his response to my
questioning was being stunned to tenth power. Suddenly it was all
so simple. Everything made sense and the excitement I had been
feeling began to lessen and I really felt very happy with things.
I realized then that Jimmie was a highly creative, highly gifted,
highly imaginative child who had been misplaced in this school.
I’m sure the theory worked for many of their children, but
for a youngster like this one it was totally counter-productive.
He was a magical child and the world of imagination was essential
to him. It had literally driven him into schizophrenic behavior
because he had nowhere else to go. It was an artificially induced
state and this I felt could be changed.
I then said to him that if he was being held in the chair by this
magnet it seemed to me that he could do something to break the
power of the magnet. We did this together. First he broke the power
in his imagination and then he actually got up from his chair in
my office (as though it were the wheelchair) and walked around
the room. All of this was done using simple methods of active imagination.
After five or ten minutes we then went into my art studio where
he began to work with sand play and painting. I saw him for about
12 sessions. He was now ready to stop our work together and he
began public school near his home in Southern California. I saw
him for two sessions when he was in High School and he just wanted
to talk over some of the issues he was dealing with in high school.
Through other sources I can tell you that Jimmie ultimately went
into the film business where he has led a successful professional
life.
It was a month later that I received a call from Dr. Hedda Bolgar
from Mt. Sinai hospital. Hedda was a lovely woman, a gifted therapist
and analyst; she was the director of psychology at Mt. Sinai hospital
in Los Angeles. Hedda was also affiliated with the psychoanalytic
group that was in charge of the school that Jimmie attended. Apparently
they were very upset because Jimmie was now in public school and
they couldn’t imagine how this could happen. They contacted
Hedda and asked her to talk with me and find out what had happened.
I told her that it was a long story and maybe it was best for us
to meet in person over lunch and I would share with her what had
happened.
Hedda has always been a remarkable woman. She has always been
open to new ideas and new possibilities. When we met and I gave
her the whole background on what had happened with Jimmie, she
really understood what had happened at a very deep level. Shortly
after our meeting, she called and invited me to become a consultant
to the department of psychology at Mt. Sinai and then to become
a consultant to the department of psychiatry, also at Mt. Sinai.
This was the beginning of a wonderful few years working with Hedda
and other staff members and students in training in this dual capacity.
It was about a year after I started my consulting work that Hedda
told me about a clinical demonstration that she had witnessed that
was facilitated by a professor at U.C. Santa Barbara. She had watched
him working with a client using a number of chairs for the different
selves of the subject. I was fascinated by her description of what
had taken place in this session. I contacted the professor and
asked him about the demonstration and he told me at that time that
he had no real interest in this work and he didn’t mind at
all if anyone wished to explore it more deeply. Whatever he was
doing had no name though it certainly seemed like the way a Gestalt
therapist would work even though the professor had no connection
to Gestalt work
I then began to play with the idea at home using my daughter Judith
and my son Joshua (now deceased) and my then wife, Thea, as subjects.
We facilitated each other and it was fun, and sometimes seemed
important, but it never went any further and within a year or so
it seemed to have died a natural death. The resurrection did not
happen for another two years or so when Sidra and I first met.
THE EARLIEST INFLUENCES - SIDRA'S EXPERIENCES
My earliest psychological influences date back to the early 1950's
at Barnard College. At that time I was a committed behaviorist
and basically a "Skinner groupie." My friends and I were
fascinated by the early operant conditioning work as an explanation
of human behavior and we would go to hear Skinner whenever he came
to New York to speak. Our favorite psychology instructor arranged
for a special seminar for four of us who showed particular interest
in this work. There we investigated the possible interface of the
(Freudian) psychoanalytical thinking of the time and operant conditioning.
I was intrigued by the idea that a psychologist could break down
complex behavior into its component parts and see how everything
worked in an ultimately sensible and predictable fashion. This
was only one area of fascination with how things worked. Along
these same lines, I had seriously considered becoming a physicist.
I still see this early Skinnerian influence in the way I look
at the development of primary selves - at how they emerged, at
least in part, as a result of operant conditioning. I was always
looking for ways in which they were adaptive and how, as selves,
they did their best to protect us and to earn us love. So, as an
old-time Skinnerian, I deeply honor a primary self.
The other major influences that I brought with me from earlier
times were the writers Hermann Hesse and Nikos Kazantzakis. As
a woman of the 1950's, I was uncomfortable with the psychological
and psychiatric establishments as they related to women. At the
time, I didn't know what it was that didn't feel right, but I felt
it was important - and somehow safer - to keep my teachers more
impersonal and at a distance.
Hesse and Kazantzakis were men whose lives were deeply committed
to the evolution of consciousness and whose writings contained
- for me - a glimpse of universal truths. All of their books explored
the struggle between opposing forces within each one of us, what
Hal and I now call "the tension of opposites". Each had
his own passionate polarities. Hesse worked primarily between the
mind (the intellectual) and the feelings (the romantic) while Kazantzakis'
interest was the tension between the earthy and the spiritual.
Both men were influenced by Henri Bergson and based their worldviews
on the existence of an "élan vital", a creative
or evolutionary impulse within each of us, a powerful force that
moves us towards continual evolution and greater consciousness.
That concept felt like a deep truth and became a part of my life
view. I recognize echoes of this in what we now call "the
inner intelligence" or "the intelligence of the universe".
Hesse's Steppenwolf was the most impactful book I ever read. It
was my introduction to the many selves and to the "Magic Theater" in
which I began to view my own tumultuous inner cast of characters.
Once I peeked into my own Magic Theater through the doors opened
by this book, my view of life and of people was unalterably changed.
I could no longer look at any of us as single entities. From that
moment on, I was fascinated by the many selves that I could see
in myself and in those around me. I loved it! This following quote
sums it all up:
"Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of
two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between
two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner,
but between thousands and thousands. Every ego, so far from being
a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated
heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances
and potentialities. As a body everyone is single, as a soul, never." From Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Interestingly, Hesse was deeply influenced by Jung and this, I
feel, provided much of the crossover between Hal's Jungian background
and my own thinking. Kazantzakis, on the other hand, was a Cretan
by birth and Greek to the core. His thoughts, much like those of
the Jungians, were never far from the ancient gods and goddesses.
He knew the importance of honoring all the gods and goddesses -
and I always felt that as an underpinning in his writings. His
greatest book, The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel, was like a Bible to
me in my own intellectual and spiritual wanderings.
My own journey was an outer journey in these early years. I traveled
extensively and was particularly interested in ancient cultures.
I visited the sacred sites in Greece and honored the gods and goddesses
by visiting their shrines. Hal visited Jung, I paid my respects
at the grave of my teacher, Nikos Kazantzakis, in Crete.
And so it was that from these disparate backgrounds - these opposites
as carried by each of us - that something new came to be born.
Now let us look at the basic elements of our work and see how each
evolved.
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Contents
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