Richard C. Schwartz, who goes by Dick with friends and colleagues, is an unlikely revolutionary. Modest and short-statured with a salt-and-pepper goatee, he has the gentle, close-set eyes of a slightly sleepy teddy bear. Though he is not widely known outside professional circles, those in the upper echelons of psychotherapy have been quietly spreading the word about him for some time.
Bessel van der Kolk, the world-renowned trauma guru, has written that it was through Schwartz’s work that the metaphor of the mind as an internal family “truly came to life for me and offered a systematic way to work with the split-off parts that result from trauma.”
Gabor Maté, a celebrated expert on addiction, has called IFS “a profound psychotherapy model” and directed his own followers to Schwartz’s lectures. In 2016, Schwartz was invited into dialogue with the Dalai Lama as part of Europe’s Mind & Life Conference in Brussels. Other influential figures in psychotherapy speak of Schwartz in language just shy of incantatory.
“Dick is a true visionary,” says Deany Laliotis, director of training for the EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Institute, a central hub for one of the most widely respected and empirically grounded trauma therapies. “He’s made a huge difference in the profession and in the world.”
Terrence Real, bestselling author, expert on male depression, and co-founder of Harvard’s Gender Research Project, agrees. “Dick is the St. Francis of Assisi of our generation,” he says.
The son of a renowned endocrinologist, Schwartz went into practice as a therapist in the 1980s, beginning his career as part of a burgeoning movement of “family systems” therapists who believed that mental illness arose not from individual pathology but from family dynamics. Schwartz specialized in bulimia and other eating disorders. He would ask the parents of his largely teenage clients to come to his office so he could explain the way a child could become a zone of proxy warfare, absorbing the familial pathology into themselves. When parents followed Schwartz’s directives, the emotional health of the family tended to improve, but the patient’s eating disorder would often persist.
It was based on a novel theory of the mind so profoundly at odds with the biomedical model of mental illness that, if true, called decades of clinical orthodoxy into question.
“The patients kept refusing to see that they were cured,” Schwartz dryly recalls.
It took a long time for Schwartz to break out of family systems orthodoxy and ask his patients about their interior lives. What he noticed in their responses was a surprising echo of the conflicted interpersonal relationships he had been trained for: They tended to talk colloquially about warring “parts” of them. One part of them wanted to be skinny; another part didn’t care what people thought. One part felt shy and introverted; another part liked parties. One part sometimes seized control and ate and ate in a numb haze; a colder, more punitive part then took over and made them purge.
Schwartz found that one after another of his patients were able to identify regular voices in their heads that got into repetitive arguments with each other, often just below the level of language. At first, Schwartz was alarmed. He almost wondered if he was seeing undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder. But the symptoms didn’t quite add up. For those with DID, the switch between “alters” meant a discontinuity in consciousness and memory, but switches between “parts” were usually more subtle than that. As one early patient put it, “In the course of 10 minutes I go from being a professional who has it all together, to a scared, insecure child, to a raging bitch, to an unfeeling, single-minded eating machine.” Was it possible that parts were just a normal part of conscious experience — that everyone had parts?
Schwartz spent a while looking inside himself. Sure enough, his own inner conflicts separated out into distinct perspectives which voiced coherent points of view. In stressful situations, one or another of them would often hijack his consciousness to impose its own distorted perspective on the world, a process Schwartz came to call “blending.” It seemed that Schwartz himself, like his patients, had parts. He considered coining a technical name for them, but eventually decided “parts” worked just fine.
For a while, drawing on his family systems training, Schwartz tried thinking of parts as internalized parents. The trick, he assumed, was to learn how to stand up to them, take back control. Then he had an encounter with a patient that changed his understanding forever.
Roxanne (name changed for privacy) was a deeply traumatized young woman who had been sexually abused as a girl and now cut her forearms with razor blades. For most of an hour-long session, Schwartz demanded that Roxanne’s cutting part agree not to cut Roxanne’s arms this week. He was firm, insistent, scolding — all the qualities he believed Roxanne needed to learn in order to control this part of herself. At last, looking beleaguered and exhausted, Roxanne relented and said she wouldn’t cut her arms.
The next week, she walked into Schwartz’s office with a long gash down her face.
“I just collapsed,” Schwartz recalls. “I come from this ‘first, do no harm’ background with my medical father and family, and I could just see that I was doing harm to her, and that was a horrible feeling for me. A part of me literally wanted to give up, and I said that to her: ‘I give up. I can’t beat you at this.’”
It was an extraordinary admission from a therapist, puncturing the conventional patriarchal frame of the relationship. In an instant, the combative tension of the previous week drained out of the room. Roxanne looked at Schwartz curiously and said, “I don’t want to beat you.”
With that, her cutting part began to open up. As Schwartz listened with growing astonishment, it explained that it felt it needed to cut Roxanne to distract her from surges of rage and fear that it believed would be terribly dangerous to succumb to, a strategy it had first learned while she was being abused.
“The story made more and more sense to me,” Schwartz says. “I could, in my own mind, shift my view of the part from some kind of enemy or antagonist to a hero. It was a hero in her life, but it was also stuck in time.”
It was the beginning of Schwartz’s years-long investigation into the strange, often phantasmagoric world of parts. He soon learned that, like Roxanne’s cutting part, parts tended to be trapped in desperate situations they had encountered years before, using strategies to cope which had long since ceased to be adaptive. Schwartz got to know anxious achiever parts and depressed caregiver parts, super-efficient manager parts and flirtatious social butterfly parts, five-year-old parts which covered up pain with temper tantrums and 40-year-old parts which covered it up with drinking, parts which had never gotten over a small playground slight from a friend and parts which were trapped in horrifying scenes of child abuse or of war.
In IFS, mental health symptoms like anxiety, depression, paranoia, and even psychosis were regarded not as impassive biochemical phenomena but as emotional events under the control of unconscious “parts” of the patient.
It would have been tempting to fit all this into a baroque theoretical framework, but Schwartz took his humbling experience with Roxanne to heart. Rather than impose his own ideas, he tried to approach parts with open curiosity, asking them to explain their roles and relationships with each other in their own words. To this day, when a young therapist attending one of Schwartz’s workshops comes up to the mic to ask whether a suicidal part is just seeking attention or a comedic part is covering for shame, the answer Schwartz generally gives is, “You’d have to ask it,” invariably provoking a wave of nervous laughter from the room at his failure yet again to act like a guru.
Eventually, Schwartz did come up with names for the most common roles he saw parts taking on in their relationships with each other. Parts that he called protectors used a vast array of coping strategies, sometimes very extreme ones, to manage the emotional pain of deeply buried parts that Schwartz called exiles. Exiles were often very young and lived in a nightmarish limbo, interpreting even minor adult pain through the lens of the childhood memories they were trapped in. Because they were so vulnerable, exiles were hard to access. You had to go through protectors to get to them, and protectors could be tough customers. To speak to a seven-year-old exile carrying the pain of a father’s abusive criticism, for example, you might have to reckon with a blustering 40-year-old protector of a different exile who thought the seven-year-old was just as much of a pussy as his father used to call him — and that you were too, for taking his concerns seriously.
Luckily, it turned out there was an easier way of negotiating with protectors than having patients blend with them. If a patient simply closed their eyes and asked a part to “step back” a pace, they could often get enough emotional distance from it to speak for the part rather than from the part: “My defensive part is jumping up and down with rage that you would say something like that,” rather than “fuck you.” In this unblended state, the patient could ask questions of the part, listen to it, even bargain with it. If the part felt that its concerns were being taken seriously, it was often willing to step aside completely for a while, entering a visualized “waiting room” with the door closed behind it so that the patient could begin work on whatever part came up next.
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