According to Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten, who is a practicing psychiatrist, the hot new psychotherapy is something called “Internal Family Systems.” The name sounds pretty innocuous, but it quickly takes a turn for the weird. As Alexander described it in a recent edition of his newsletter, which is mostly a book review of The Others Within Us by Robert Falconer:
What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self – a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses – and various Parts – little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.
You might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it – maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby – maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain.
One of the core assumptions in Internal Family Systems, Alexander says, is that “everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good.” You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile entity, ruining your relationships with people you love, but she’s actually part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence. According to IFS, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. The secret is that no, actually some of these things are literal demons.
It tries to soften the blow by replacing “demons” with the technical IFS term UBs (for “unattached burdens”) and it inconsistently calls exorcisms “unburdenings”. It flirts with the idea that maybe this is just a useful metaphor, then veers off into “no it’s literally real”. It alternates between defiant and apologetic. But the underlying narrative is a consistent one. The IFS community was a bunch of normal, respectable therapists, trying to practice normal therapy. But every so often, one of their patients’ Parts would admit, unprompted, to being a demon.
The first few times they ran into this kind of thing, Alexander says, the IFS therapists thought this was some traumatized part of the patient’s unconscious, which had spun some crazy metaphorical story and needed to be bargained with and brought back to the Self. But it kept happening. The demons’ stories were surprisingly consistent. Finally, some of the IFS therapists would tell their therapist friends – look, this sounds crazy, but sometimes it seems like some of our patients have demons. And the therapist friends would answer: “Oh, you too?” Falconer says that “Many therapists know that this is part of their work. They know this stuff is real, but they hide it.”
So if you’re having psychological problems, maybe you need an exorcism — or rather, a therapy session in which someone uses Internal Family Systems to identify the part that is an “unattached burden,” and then have someone trained in IFS help you exorcise… er, unburden yourself of it.
Well this gets even more interesting when you consider the psychiatric condition Dissociative Identity Disorder, which used to be known as Multiple Personality Disorder, and in which these “parts” can, uh, take on a life of their own and become visible to other people. I used to think this was not real after reading a skeptical article by a psychologist on the subject, and then listening to a skeptical podcast episode on the subject which viewed with skepticism some TikTokers who claimed to have “developed” DID and to be able to “control” which DID personality appeared on demand. However, having met a person who really did seem to have multiple personalities, one of which seemed to be rather, uh, “demonic”, I am more of a believer. (It is very possible that the TikToks are a case of mass hysteria or contagion and they don’t really have DID, whereas some other people really do have DID.)
The key DSM diagnostic criteria for DID which distinguishes it from mere mood swings is as follows:
“Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting.”
That is, if someone markedly changes their behaviour, attitudes, perceptions etc. from day to day – and these changes are correlated with forgetting certain things and then remembering them again on another day – you may be witnessing someone experiencing dissociative identity disorder.
That said, taking drugs such as cocaine can cause people to become temporarily “demonic” in a very mild sense – or even in a literal sense in the case of the drug PCP (I recommend not Googling this if you are of a sensitive disposition) – so it could have been that what I was actually witnessing was just the effects of regular drug use on certain days of the week? But, given the temporary memory loss, I kind of doubt that it was just cocaine. While apparently cocaine can impair short-term memory, it doesn’t sound like it’s the same kind of memory loss that I saw, such as forgetting the existence of an (alleged) son, or forgetting that one had said something an hour earlier!