"For about three years in the early 1970s I was exploring, in a rather on-and-off manner, my own subpersonalities. It started off from two or three experiences in Gestalt therapy, and some research work I was doing on roles, reference groups, situations, and social frames. And my first step was to write down, over a period of two or three months, all the seperate aspects of myself I could discover. For example, No. 1 was 'Enthusiastic project-doer; intense absorption for short period. Very sensitive in this phase, but very selectively.'

After a certain point, I didn't seem to be adding any more. And one day it suddenly occured to me that these were aspects, rather than personalities. At first I grouped them together into five personalities, and then one of them seemed to split more naturally into two, to make six in all. I gave each one of them a name, which at first was quite arbitrary, having to do with how they had appeared; but later I gave each one a more explicit name, making it clearer to me what function it was performing.

Then I took an LSD trip (perhaps more common then than now, but in any case something familiar to me -- I regarded myself as something of an astronaut of inner space), with the explicit object of getting into each of these personalities in turn, and asking the same eleven questions of each of them. This was an extremely useful exercise, which made anumber of things very much clearer to me, and made me feel that here was something quite powerful, which could be pushed quite a long way interms of self-understaing and self-acceptance.

The next step was to ask the question, if this works for me, does it work for anyone else? So in 1974 I got together fourteen people who wanted to explore this thing with me, and we held six meetings (for evenings and two whole days) for the purpose..."

"Subpersonalities: the people inside us" by John Rowan