What I do plan to salvage with this "re-write," however, is the larger idea that I was trying to penetrate—that is, the question of what tools the creative practitioner can use in order to be successful in the face of adversity. Over the course of the semester, I picked up on two such tools: (1) foreseeing future legal trends and becoming an expert on their subject matter, and (2) mastering oneself and one's interpersonal relations by understanding that humans have "multiple personalities." Because I feel as though (1) was discussed more in-depth than (2) in class and on the wiki, I plan to investigate (2) more fully here.

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-- By KalliopeKefallinos - 25 Feb 2010

People often refer to "multiple personalities" in everyday life, so the first step is to understand exactly what we are talking about when we say "personality." Psychologist Philip Pollock and others have explained that "healthy identity development should comprise no evidence of dissociation and smooth, integrated and flexible deployment of a range of RRPs [ie. roles] in a socially appropriate manner, with experience of oneself as continuous and coherent." It follows that psychology distinguishes between "personality"/ "identity" and "role"/ "self state." A healthy person has one personality but exhibits multiple roles. This resonates most with Eben's interpretation of the Leff piece, where he described how in social life we assign one another roles and reinforce them-- for example, in some social relations I might act as the nurturer, in others the nurtured, in still others as the rebel, and so on.

While it might initially appear counterintuitive to posit that manifesting multiple-- and often contradictory-- roles is consistent with any concept of a stable, singular personality, a closer look at what might be said to unite the various roles helps iron out the psychologists' position.

Specifically, consider philosopher H.P. Grice's account of personality as an interlocking series of "total temporary states." According to Grice, a total temporary state (TTS) "is composed of all the experiences any one person is having at a given time” such that experiences E and E′ belong to the same TTS iff they both “would, given certain conditions, be known, by memory or introspection, to be simultaneous.” For example, in the case of a hypothetical law student, assume the TTS at time tx might include as “elements” experiences and memories like attending Barrister's Ball (a), writing an email to a friend back at home (b), remembering the Chinese food he picked up last night (c), and reading Criminal Law in the library (d). Given that TTSs "may be said to occur at various times," Grice says they form a temporal series in which any TTS is linked to any other TTS insofar as it would, under certain conditions, "contain as an element a memory of some experience which is an element in [either] some previous” or some subsequent TTS, “there being no subset of members which is independent of all the rest.”

Consequently, the personality of someone at any two times tx and ty resides in there being a common element between TTS at tx and TTS at ty—for example, using the particular situation described above, if TTS at tx = a, b, c, d, then TTS at ty must contain at least: a v b v c v d, where a, b, c, and d refer to either an experience or the memory of that experience. In short, then, one’s various and even contradictory roles can be seen as ultimately forming a single personality insofar as each role is connected to some other role through some common memory or experience.

To bring the discussion thus far full circle, then, when people refer to "multiple personality" disorder, they can be said to be referring to people who lack connections, or integration, between certain recurring roles. Pollock, for example, explains how people with "identity disturbances" experience their self as fragmented due to dissociation evidenced by discontinuities in things like memory. After all, it is not that these people "show more or less multiplicity than the general population, yet their dissociative symptoms are most severe."

And so, understanding that a healthy personality is a comprised of a multiplicity of integrated roles, the challenge becomes learning how to recognize and manipulate one's roles in a non-psychopathological way in daily social life. I will now go on to suggest two tools I came across in my research which I found most useful: the Multiple Self States Model (MSSM) and the Guided Self-Reflection test.

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