Human beings commonly experience themselves both as whole persons and as partial, or even fragmented, selves. From Plato's dramatic myth of the Charioteer straining to control the troublesome dark horse in tandem with its light partner, to Freud's concept of the necessary civilising battle of super-ego and ego to subdue the id, which he too likened to 'a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse' and 'if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go' (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983: 73), the self-reflective mind has known itself to be divided. But even before the publication of Freud's The Ego and the Id in 1923, which laid out his structural model, the more deeply split and troubled psyche of his colleague Carl Jung had affixed the first scientific label on the psychic structures that are part selves with his definition of the complex.

Today there are a number of fully developed theories of psychic structure and part selves available for the psychotherapist's use. I choose to write on this topic because for me the issue is not merely theoretical. I am now able to recognise that for most of my life I existed as a severely fragmented schizoid individual, holding within a rigidly controlling, professionally successful, false self (Guntrip, 1968) a multitude of what I choose to call ego-fragments living many compulsive inner dramas that kept me socially withdrawn and isolated. On my journey towards becoming the relatively well-integrated and solid self, the competent psychotherapist, that I now experience myself to be, I received help and guidance from several theories and in this, the first of two essays on Part Selves, I shall explore the meaning and value of these theoretical approaches in relation to my own process.

Until I reached the age of forty mine was not a self-reflective mind. Although I lived as a participant-observer of the tumultuous histories of a variety of internal (conscious) fantasy worlds, I remained oblivious to the reality that all the dramatis personae were parts of me. A stressful work crisis and a serious health problem opened me up to the issues of personal and spiritual growth and healing.

From that time my learnings in the fields of faith and of psychotherapy have progressed in harmony. My return to the religion of my childhood meant also a return to my core identity, named by me before I was seven, as a scientist, and though this is an essay principally on humanistic psychologies, part of an Arts degree, it is as a scientist that I write it. Science, like religion, is founded on faith, faith in the value and integrity of the natural world, and like the world of which it is a part, the human being also, so the Judeo-Christian word proclaims, has an absolute inherent value and integrity. 'Elohim saw all that he had made. Here! It was very good.' (Korsak, 1992).

From my earliest experience in wartime London as the infant of a volatile immigrant mother, often shouting at me in the Central European language I was not permitted to understand, I had to find ways of making sense of the world and myself, and believe in some unconscious way in the face of conflictual evidence, that this was possible. The fantasy worlds were my psyche's solution. When I made the decision to train as a counsellor and, therefore, to go into therapy myself, I was internally engaged with my second Athenian fantasy, much influenced by Mary Renault's works, and the long running science fiction saga that began while I was in primary school and retained all the trappings of juvenile space-opera. These were the worlds that I took, tentatively, to my first therapist who was psychosynthesis trained. Reading What We May Be to find out what that meant, phrases '... other planets enter your field of view; bright Venus, red Mars, massive Jupiter' (Ferrucci, 1982: 215) leapt out at me to confirm my choice. For psychosynthesis and my therapist fantasy and image work were the stock my choice. For psychosynthesis and my therapist fantasy and image work were the stock in trade of the psychotherapeutic process so that he could be accepting and, even more importantly, affirming of what I shared with him. He was delighted when he identified the different species of my science fiction galactic drama as my sub-personalities.

Psychosynthesis theory takes it as given that each person has a plethora of 'selves' and that recognising, understanding and integrating these is an essential part of the therapeutic endeavour. Ferrucci (1982) puts the starting point of these sub-personalities at the adoption of different models of the world at different times according to circumstances. Each world-view evokes a corresponding way of being with associated feelings, behaviours, habits, attitudes, etc. and each set of such characteristics can be designated a sub-personality. Each sub-personality will have its own needs and motivations which are likely to bring it into conflict with other sub-personalities. So, for example, a client's internal struggle over a major career choice could be interpreted as a clash between sub-personalities.

This, the first explanation that I came across, made no impression and my therapist's identification referred to above had no impact. The model came alive for me through a training exercise on my diploma course designed to allow students to experience the reality that a sub-personality grows from a behaviour pattern developed by a child to meet a basic need. I had already recognised that my needs for physical contact had not been met in early life and it was a revelation to find that it required barely thirty seconds of acting dumb and incapable to induce my partner to touch me. Having identified 'clumsy child' it was an easy, though painful, step to acknowledge 'Daddy's clever little girl.' She was the one who learned to survive on approval earned by achievement in place of love. I made my own first correspondence between theory and internal world when I matched this sub-personality with the orphaned young poet of Athens II, the f?ted darling of the city's intellectual elite.

Assagioli (1975) the founder of psychosynthesis, gives only minimal space to the issue of sub-personalities. In place of a definition he provides an explanation through the idea of roles, that a person shows a different 'self' as a parent, employee, spouse or sports club member. He prefers the term role to function, though this seems to be basically what he means, as less confusing. But this explanatory route begs the question of how consistently a person acts within any one role. As an employee, for example, I am now well aware that I displayed 'very different and often quite antagonistic traits' (Assagioli, 1975: 75) in the same role. Because Assagioli was more interested in the observing self and the Higher Self than in sub-personalities his explanation broadens to include multiple personality disorder and even the paranormal. I can see now on re-visiting his book that during my training the scientist in me simply blocked these threatening digressions from consciousness.

The semantic confusion Assagioli wanted to avoid is, I think, endemic in psychosynthesis through what Wilbur (1980) identified as the pre/trans fallacy. This is the tendency to confuse what properly belongs to the pre-personal infantile stage of human development with that which belongs to the mature psyche (and vice versa). This is clearly seen in Hardy's pronouncement that 'In the psychosynthesis view each subpersonality ... springs from a transpersonal quality.' (Hardy, 1989; 34). She gives as a hypothetical example sensitivity in a small child being environmentally distorted into fear, so that a 'frightened child' subpersonality may emerge suddenly in adult life. I would maintain that the admirable quality labelled sensitivity is the product of the developmental process and a sign of maturity, not a pre-existent given, pace Plato. The muddle deepens as Hardy goes on to advert to Ferrucci's concept of subpersonalities as 'exiled gods - caricatures, degraded specimens of the original luminous archetypes' (Ferrucci, 1982: 55) and pace Jung.

Whitmore's concise definition of subpersonalities as 'autonomous configurations within the personality as a whole' (Whitmore, 1991: 78) having all the attributes that taken together, make up an identity, is much more to my taste and she affirms the origination I learned in training. Eventually however she also, in talking of the qualities at the heart of a subpersonality, suggests that repression can distort love into dependency, rather than recognising that dependency can be prevented from growing up into love.

It is perhaps because of these internal contradictions within my chosen orientation that this model was not the most effective for my process but I will close this section with a personal example of the potentially most effective aspect of this model, that it acknowledges that a subpersonality can come  BOOKMARK  into existence at any point in life.

A few years into my life of self-employment the character I will call the young Captain, in Athens II, whom I had identified as representing my present persona, acquired a wife. He deliberately chose a dowry-less woman in her twenties, well past the marriageable age for a girl in that culture who had long accepted that she would grow old as an unneeded adjunct to her brother's family. Her intense delight in all the mundane domestic work and management of her own household and in providing a secure base from which her husband could go forth to pursue his rising military and political career suddenly broke through into my external reality with the realisation that I had grown a new sub-personality. The need to maintain my home in a state welcoming to clients, and myself without costly conveniences like dry-cleaning, had forced her into existence. The burden that my mother, self-perceived as a martyr to housework, had taught me to carry, was gone.

But I have moved ahead of my story. In my first year of training it was a different humanistic model that produced the major enlightenment in my process.

The fundamental concept that I assimilated from my first encounter with Transactional Analysis in 'I'm OK - You're OK' (Harris, 1973) is that in each person there exist three ways of being, three ego states, the Child, the Adult and the Parent. This stems from the findings of Penfield that a person's experiences are recorded indelibly in memory and may be re-played at any time when triggered by circumstances. So that an interaction with an authority figure could re-create in an adult the feelings and behaviour of the child they once were facing a disapproving parent. Or, confronted with a disruptive subordinate, the same adult might respond from the ego state formed by memories of their own critical parent. But the Adult also normally develops in its own right as a rational data-processing ego state well capable of resolving the issues of its current reality.

This basic structural pattern resonated in my mind with my science fiction drama, in particular with the images of the great multitude of Earthlings, Martians and Jovians decanted into the desert on the Central Planet, to which they had been transported in a mass abduction as a preliminary step in a projected conquest of this solar system. Three species, three ego states, my mind pushed at this threeness until understanding came.

The royal blue Jovians, mightily be-toothed, powerful predators, immensely creative and uncontrollable by their captors, represented my Child, connecting back to the omnipotent orally aggressive infant (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983). The red Martians, technically advanced and united under an hereditary ruler with the mandate 'Love me and do as I say and I will make you happy' were the Parent. The Earthlings, practically knowledgeable about resistance in war, cooperation and communication, were the Adult with a vital mediating role as the telepathic non-lingual Jovians could not recognise the non-psychic Martians as living beings. During the desperate trek across the sands it was the Martian ruler who ordered his people, well adapted to such an environment, to cease drinking so that all the water carried could go to the earth people, but it was the heavy gravity physical strength and undeflectable purpose of the Jovians that carried all to survival. Now I have clinical experience of clients whose childhood deprivation evokes imagery of barren wastelands or feelings of having been aliens from outer space in their own families.

Almost immediately a second threesome shadowed this one. The Beasts, massive eight foot high brown-furred carnivores, not averse when hungry to killing and eating individuals of the less advanced captive species; the Lesser Purples - very unpleasant, insufferably arrogant, feeling themselves to be contaminated by contact with despised inferiors; and the spindly Greens, whose planet, of a cultural diversity reminiscent of earth, had been severely depleted by long subjection. It was easy to name these as bad Parent, bad Child and suffering Adult, and there is not space to recount the flood of insights and subsequent behavioural changes that followed.

The theory of Transactional Analysis encompasses all the ramifications of the basic structure outlined above. It recognises that parents are at different times nurturing or critical, protective or authoritarian, so that my Parent ego state contains both my benevolently but absolutely controlling father and my devouringly invasive and rejecting mother, given to flamboyant displays of emotion as the Beasts inside me stamped and roared their dominance displays. Likewise the Child ego state contains both Natural Child and Adapted Child (James and Jongeward, 1978) and here I must refer to others of the enslaved species, the pterodactyl-like Venusians who had enhanced their capabilities over many generations by genetic engineering, and the timid Bells, a froglike people of small stature whose voices chimed with natural joyful melody.

Each ego state can be further analysed into second and third order structures (Berne, 1975). At age nine when my science fiction world came into being, my personality already had Child, Adult and Parent ego-states, and that nine-year-old's Child, perhaps the six-year-old who existed before the hospitalisation trauma that set the fantasy in motion, would have contained the even more archaic Child, Adult and Parent of the pre-school toddler. All I can recollect of the earliest story line is that I was organising a great hospital on Jupiter for the victims of the conflict and promoting cooperative resistance among the species. Berne (1975) gives clinical examples of the traumatic fixation of whole personality structures from one time period within a client's Child.

The Parent also can be further analysed. I can now perceive that the Lesser Purples, Bad Child, contained material from my mother's rejected and therefore rejecting Child. But this perception brings me up against the undeniable fact that, productive as this application of Transactional Analysis to my inner world proved to be, it was incorrect. On this one point, my mother's Child should form part of my Parent ego state as would her Parent and Adult, and also my father's three ego states. But to label the Lesser Purples as Parent, although I can now recognise the relations between the Beasts and Purples as reflecting my perceptions of the conflictual alliance between my real parents, would then have sabotaged the therapeutic effect.

This application of Transactional Analysis to imaginative imagery is essentially antithetical to a theory which is firmly reality-based, linking the analysis of inter-personal behaviour with intra-psychic dynamics in an eminently rational comprehensible manner. 'Parent, Adult, and Child represent real people who now exist or once existed' (Berne, 1975: 32). Self-evidently this cannot be said of my inner people. And yet it still seems to me an essentially Transactional world; shouting, quarrelling, brawling, interbreeding, caring but above all endlessly communicating the alliance of species overthrew the despots and achieved liberty. And externally, through the misapplication of the Transactional Analysis model, I began to acquire the ability not to respond as bad or good Parent to staff or clients, or from bad, good, adapted or any other Child state towards authority figures.

This model made no impact on my process. Freud came late in his researches to a structural model for the psyche (Guntrip, 1961) and his designation of the most fundamental part of the person, that which 'contains everything that is present at birth, that is fixed in the constitution' (in Rycroft, 1972: 66) as the 'it' encapsulates all that humanistic psychotherapies reject. And yet I did at one point find an image of 'it'ness in my fantasy world.

The vanquishing of the galactic slave-masters allowed the Beasts and the Purples to resume their own expansionist aggression. There came a time when their opposing space fleets circled beyond Pluto, poised to strike at Mars with the aim of capturing the mysterious source of power developed aeons before to run the great pump that still sent water from the North Polar ice-cap surging through the canal system of the war devastated planet. In my second year of training I suddenly recognised this configuration as Bad Parent and Bad Child balanced in a power stand-off aimed at my heart. The impasse preserved my existence at the expense of my humanity. Though I did not understand it so clearly then the recognition brought psychic relief.

Freud's formulation of an adaptive ego that grows, under the pressures of external reality, from the unstructured chaos of instinctual passions that is the id (Rycroft, 1972), and of a repressive super-ego encompassing both ego-ideal and paternal introject (Guntrip, 1961), were too diffuse and too impersonal to apply to my inner realities. Nevertheless it was Freud's work which led directly to the development of the model that I most value.

The Fairbairn/Guntrip model of the human person postulates an original unitary dynamic ego and this pristine infant ego is, from birth, object-seeking. I will summarise Guntrip's (1968) description of the configuration within the psyche that results from the experiencing by an infant of a severely negative environment in the first months of life. It consists firstly of what Fairbairn named the central ego, a much depleted portion of the psyche that remains in conscious  BOOKMARK  contact with the external world. The principal portion of the ego withdraws from the bad experiences into an unconscious world, but as this only contains the internalised bad experiences it is split again into libidinal ego and anti-libidinal ego and the former, under the persecution of the latter, splits a final time to leave a depleted libidinal ego struggling to survive in the phantasy world while the regressed ego retreats to a deeper level of the unconscious, perhaps into a recreation of the womb to await re-birth. The configuration is a fourfold one. Guntrip's (1968) examples ofdreams showing two people one severely depleted, the other hostile, which he interprets as representation of libidinal and anti-libidinal egos facilitated my recognition of the applicability of this model to the great reconciliation that took place in Athens II over a period of about a year in real time.

The principal figures involved were the Old Commander and the General. This latter character was an intellectual of the first order, of a noble oligarch family, who had fled to a military career to escape the domination of a wholly evil elder brother. The Old Commander was the son of an army whore who had made his way up through the ranks, by means of the hidden support of the common soldiers and his own cunning. A committed democrat, he had nevertheless always protected the younger man and desired his understanding and friendship. But he had never broken through the habitual contempt of the aristocrat for the peasant. In my third year of training the storyline had shown the General nearly succumbing to a direct assassination attempt by his brother and, always of an effete and enervated appearance, much in contrast to the crude vigour of the Old Commander, was being imaged most usually reclining in a state of wounded exhaustion.

A new character had been developing in the drama, I think as a result of my training, an Allied Commander from another Greek city state. He it was who eventually told the General a few home truths about the relationship as he could see it between the two. The reconciliation happened in three stages. The first took a day of real time when I sat immobile while the Old Commander and the General replayed in endless variation a few moments of conversation, until around 9 o'clock, one final variation led to the Commander rising with a forgiving word, clasping the General's arm for a moment and leaving.

A few months later, real time, the forgiveness of the General by the Old Commander was followed, this time a process lasting about three days, by a mutual declaration of love and handclasp. This was accompanied by the physical sensation of something closing up in my chest. A month or two on and the final part of this reconciliation was a confession by the General to the Old Commander of guilt for neglect, abandonment, denigration and unwitting collusion with persecuting forces.

Perhaps the need to understand these internal events, which produced a sudden startling increase in confidence and competence externally, drove me to find Guntrip's book. At once I could identify the General and his brother as depleted libidinal and persecuting anti-libidinal egos and my observing self as central ego. The clue to complete elucidation lay in the stubborn life-long refusal of the Old Commander to learn to read. The storyline reflected the split that had occurred at about age eight under parental pressure to achieve. The fourfold configuration places the Old Commander as the regressed ego, but this ego of my six-year-old pre-literate self was originally the split off libidinal ego in relation to the depleted central ego of the nine-year-old star-winning bright child imaged as the General.

Athens II began in a real dream in which the Old Commander and young Poet first met. It was love at first sight and the older man clasped hold of the youth. Compelled by the powerful feelings I held on to the images until they began to live out a drama in a conscious fantasy world. In contrast to the science fiction fantasy, this was a world of subfusc colouring in which the absence of communication dominated. The impossible disaster laden love affair of the initial plot was between the lonely man, who looked too dumb and ugly to be taken seriously as a threat to their power by the ruling oligarchs, and the orphaned poet; sub-personality 'Daddy's clever little girl' longing to be worthy of the sub-personality 'Stupid child' - the pre-literate self who chose the appearance of incomprehension as a first defence.

The second plot, working on the relationship between the Old Commander and the General, revealed deeper layers of suffering incomprehension and I could trace the history of the retreat of my academic intellect, carried by the General, into ever increasing inaccessibility under the pressures of my teenage years as school work began to defeat me, until only the fragile immature shell of the 'clever little girl' was left on the surface to fail my first year university examinations. Experiential knowledge accumulated round the 'Old Commander' ego fragment and, though operational at some level, remained equally unreachable to consciousness. The slow growth of a more effective central ego was detailed internally in the career of the Young Captain, a rather conservative narrow minded youth recognised as his potential successor by the Old Commander and blossoming under the loving tutelage of the General to become the Young Commander and a wise leader of the city.

In my final year of training I recognised the semi-autonomous ego-fragments in my fantasy worlds as milder variants on the road to full scale MPD, and the common origin of both conditions in early sexual abuse (Schreiber, 1974). I decoded some of my deeply sexualised early fantasy fragments to understand that my mother had used my infant body as an aid to masturbation. In the years before I commenced this M.A. the devotion and constancy of the Young Commander served to heal the aged General's deep self-disgust and sense of worthlessness, and his chronic fear of abandonment. And as his healed so did mine.

To sum up, the way I came to understand my process as depicted in Athens II was of a repeated splitting of my psyche under developmental pressures following the basic fourfold template laid down in early infancy as defined in the Fairbairn/Guntrip model. Each split created a new central ego and buried previously formed part egos in ever deeper levels of the unconscious. Simultaneously sub-personalities associated with particular part egos were left, as it were, stranded and functionless at the more superficial level. So the bright nine-year-old had a depleted central ego that was General and Poet in one, intellect attached to and supported by approval seeking behaviour, until the teenage split created a new central ego defended by narrow-minded rigid conventionality and burdened with eruptions of clever little girl, stupid child, clumsy child and paralysed baby behaviours. Apparent confusions in this seriously limited account will be further elucidated in the second essay on working with part selves.

The work of Jung, in relation to my own process, is essentially also more relevant to the issue of working with part selves. Jung was the first to fully recognise that all parts of, or structures in, the psyche are as personal as the whole, and could be treated therapeutically as such. The designation of a complex as a dynamic cluster of feeling-toned ideas and memories gathered round a nodal point in the psyche (Stevens, 1996) is again too diffuse and all-embracing to act as an interpretive tool for my inner work. Though Jung endeavoured to keep separate the idea of the Archetype, the phylogenetically determined structural pattern or form, which always forms the nucleus of a complex (Stevens, 1996) but remains itself unknowable, and the culturally and experientially created ideational and affective content of an archetypal image, an unbiased observer must surely say that he failed.

To examine the Jungian model through an example I will take the shadow, a term often used interchangeably of archetype and complex, though Stevens (1996) tells us that the archetype at the heart of the shadow complex is the enemy. Von Franz (1974) suggests that the shadow is 'the dark, unlived, and repressed side of the ego complex' (p5) but immediately quotes Jung as saying in discussion that the shadow is the unconscious in toto. In general usage the shadow is often taken to incorporate all the negative, unpleasant, inferior and actually evil traits that a person wishes to deny they possess (Samuels, 1985) though Jung made it clear that there is always much positive potential in this complex (Stevens, 1996).

As all the principal characters of my fantasies described above were male they are disqualified by definition (Stevens, 1996) from being considered aspects of my shadow. I can however make a link between a minor character, the beautiful sexy wife of the Martian ruler, a devoted and prolifically fertile mother, and an image that surfaced during a psychosynthesis (Jungian) type exercise I conducted on my own. I had been haunted by the image of a starving aged African woman from a charity advertisement. When I confronted her and asked what she wanted, she transformed into the sexy black beauty posing in a current Bond film poster. For days I feared to speak to any male tutor on my course because of the seductive impulses I felt unleashed within. This was an example of partial possession by an aspect of the shadow, but only the unrealised positive potential in the complex was allowed into my inner worlds. At the heart of the  BOOKMARK  complex carrying my blackened, condemned and starved sexuality was indeed the archetype of the enemy, constellated by my infantile experience of my seductive, abusive and rejecting mother. Through her was constellated also the collective shadow projected on to the poor, the black, and the female.

Jung's concept of the archetype as organising pattern became usable as the healing process manifest in my fantasy worlds neared completion. I began to make links across the worlds. The same archetypal events (Stevens, 1996) appeared in very different stories. An example was the dangerous effortful birth of a son, birth on the edge of death. To describe one variant, the General's father ordered the exposure of his sickly second son, a blow aimed principally at the wife he eventually tormented to an early death. She, in anticipation of the move, had procured a girl baby to give in place of her own infant to the slave delegated to perform the task, a representation of the 'killing' of my female true self by the parental wish for a son. In turn the birth of his eldest daughter, his first child, revealed to the General that his manhood had survived his abusive childhood. This birth of a life-confirming female infant also repeated in other fantasies and the powerful experience of linking these events facilitated the gradual emergence of the feminine in my psyche. As wives, mothers and daughters became active and prominent on my inner stage so externally my previously animus-ridden (Stevens, 1996) career life was transformed into the more tranquil, feeling, person-centred life-style of the therapist.

In the above outline it will be seen that only one theoretical model, Freud's, failed to make a contribution to my self-healing process. My inner knowledge, drawn from my fantasy worlds, confirms for me the humanistic belief in the essential trustworthiness of the human psyche, its drive towards growth, wholeness, self-actualisation and relationship (Dryden, 1990). The 'itness' that I recognised in one image is that which results from the infant being perceived, or used as an it, by the parental environment as was clarified for me by the Fairbairn/Guntrip model. This object relations theory, though classified as part of the psycho-analytic field, is in my view quite indisputably a humanistic psychodynamic theory. I will quote Guntrip (1968: 423).

And again, in discussing the seemingly intractable problems of fear and aggression that plague the human race:

(Guntrip, 1968: 424/5)

This deeply felt optimism about the human psyche and the reality of love in the world did not prevent Guntrip from also feeling that '"Object-Relations" theory is the nearest we have got yet to a true psychodynamic science.' (Guntrip, 1968: 384).

My reaction as a scientist to my elucidation of my own process was to seek comparative phenomena and attempt a classification. In 1990 for my qualifying case study of a schizoid client Jane, I suggested similarities with so called 'past life' experiences as well as with Multiple Personality Disorder. Jane wrote stories as a child to maintain herself, and to date I have worked with two clients who lived with inner fantasy worlds. June (1995) for a while, in childhood, ruled an inner town from a fantasy castle and wrote in 1900 when working on his dissertation on the occult, another source for comparative materials, to the author of the best published example I have yet located (McLynn, 1996). Flourney's subject was a medium who claimed past lives as Marie-Antoinette, an Indian princess, and a Martian. He was able to find all the books that, read in childhood, had influenced her 'romances of the subliminal imagination' (in McLynn, 1996: 50) and demonstrate that her past lives were in reality younger ages, related to her life at age sixteen, age twelve and her early childhood. The Martian language she spoke fluently was a distortion of her father's central European language of origin. From my perspective Flourney had mapped Helen Smith's major splits.

Classification however has not been assisted by further research. Rowan (1988), for example, provides as the fruit of his research, a list of six irreducible sources of sub-selves or sub-personalities. Under his third heading of the Personal Unconscious he lumps together the ideas of Freud, Jung, Guntrip, Perls and Berne and goes on to put 'Conflicts or Problems' as a fourth category as if previously mentioned theorists had made no links between consciously perceived conflicts and unconscious structures.

Abandoning labels supplied by the literature, it seems to me that the issue of relationship gives some foundation for classification. The principal figures in my Greek worlds defined by deeply felt anguished failures in communication I see as the structures formed by the absence of effective emotional relating in the environment, as described by the Fairbairn/Guntrip model, part-ego structures formed at each developmental pressure point which was not appropriately supported externally. The dramatically different, colourful, extrovert-style science-fiction world revealed the structures formed by interactional and verbal relating with the parental environment, which is why the TA model worked, though the psychodynamic concept of identification with the object gives a better explanation of the mechanism of formation of my 'parent' species. Stern's (1988) idea of a verbal self speaks to this world, as does Jung's theory of compensation (Samuels, 1985) since this was the fantasy that supplied the excitement, joy and warmth missing from my isolationist reality. Using Assagioli's (1975) model of the psyche, it is this world with its light, colour, and cosmic theme that tends towards the higher unconscious. The darker Greek worlds reveal the repressed pain in the lower unconscious. The lesson my worlds have taught for the practice of psychotherapy will be the subject of the second essay.

The conclusion that this essay based on my inner therapeutic journey must uphold is that there is indeed nothing so practical as a good theory. I can now perceive how earlier resolutions of fantasy dramas during my life led to only minor or temporary changes in my external way of being because they had no meaning for me. The understanding provided by each successive theory as outlined above consolidated the healing achieved and facilitated the movement towards the resolution of deeper, primary conflicts. The more rigorous the theory, the more illuminating it proved to be. So I remain a humanistic psychotherapist, but a scientist first.