The idea of internal multiplicity is at least as old as Plato, who argued in The Republic that just like a city is divided into different social classes, the soul too is divided into parts with different characters, thriving only when justice and harmony reign among them. Many evolutionary psychologists subscribe to the “modularity of mind” hypothesis, which holds that the mind is built up of semi-independent evolutionary modules with different functions and goals. Famed neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga discovered in a series of landmark experiments beginning in the 1960s that “split-brain” patients who have had their brain hemispheres surgically disconnected possess, in effect, two minds in one body. Gazzaniga posited that even fully connected brains were best understood as communities of semiautonomous agents.
It remains a significant conceptual leap from theories like these to the clinical phenomenon of “parts,” but Schwartz is not the first to have stumbled upon it. The Italian Freudian analyst Roberto Assagioli called them “subpersonalities” and developed a psychoanalytic school of thought known as psychosynthesis at the beginning of the 20th century that sought to integrate them into a harmonious whole. Half a century later, husband-and-wife team John and Helen Watkins developed ego-state therapy in the United States with different terminology but much the same goal.
The idea of internal multiplicity is at least as old as Plato, who argued in The Republic that just like a city is divided into different social classes, the soul too is divided into parts.
What sets IFS apart is the radically open and de-pathologizing stance it takes toward even the most extreme parts, which are presumed by default to be protecting exiles, and the calm, compassionate Self that seems to emerge in response. Schwartz credits the value so many have found in IFS’s map of internal multiplicity to the fact that, as a family therapist, he was largely ignorant of what had come before.
“I was forced to come to the phenomenon without any presumptions or preconceptions,” Schwartz says. “There’s no map that’s an exact replica of the territory, but I think [IFS] is closer than many others simply because I was so much in what the Buddhists call the beginner’s mind — total naive openness.”
Through the 1980s and ’90s, Schwartz managed to build a devoted cult following and earn a few high-profile champions, most notably trauma pioneer Bessel van der Kolk, who would first introduce many readers to IFS in his bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score. But initially, Schwartz failed to reach a larger audience. He attributes the upswing in IFS’s fortunes that followed in part to using IFS on himself: His crusading, moralizing attacks on mental health orthodoxy had come, he realized, from a protective part, defending against his fear of presenting such radical ideas. Schwartz came to the view that IFS was not a replacement for but a complement to other modalities. Different parts responded best to different kinds of treatment — including, in some cases, medication. For therapists with broad training, IFS could serve as a kind of umbrella framework that gave patients a simple conceptual language for tracking their issues. For instance, a patient might have a suicidal part, a self-harming part, a bingeing part, and a socially anxious part, each requiring different kinds of care.
Slowly the tide began to turn. The increasing popularity of mindfulness meditation brought wider openness to the idea that we all might have inside us a compassionate state of mind like the one that Schwartz calls Self. The 2015 Pixar hit Inside Out offered perhaps the first positive view of internal multiplicity ever to hit the big screen, depicting five endearingly personified emotions wrestling for control inside an ordinary 11-year-old girl’s head. According to Schwartz, from barely a few hundred IFS-trained therapists throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the rapidly expanding IFS Institute (formerly the Center for Self Leadership) has now trained nearly 10,000 in 20 countries. Between 2016 and 2019, new Level 1 trainings more than doubled, from 14 courses per year to 35. Even with these much-expanded offerings, the Institute is struggling to keep up with demand, with long waitlists in many regions.
“So many people I know are in IFS therapy,” says Rich Simon, editor in chief for 40 years of Psychotherapy Networker, one of the field’s most widely read trade publications. “A lot of senior therapists who have been exposed to all kinds of other different models have found this very helpful. They themselves have availed themselves of IFS therapy.”
Some of the demand comes from mental health professionals disillusioned with mainstream mental health treatment in America, with its relentless focus on diagnosis and medication. In IFS they have found what they see as a desperately needed alternative.
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