Dr. Avraham Cohen’s Field Notes
for Therapists and Their Clients
February 1, 2025
Avraham Cohen, PhD, RCC-ACS, CCC
THE STRANGE CASE
OF US
ALL
https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1601099
Avraham interviewed by Wynne Lacey on her Podcast: Soulganize:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu-A-AOeNzI&t=14s
Co-authored article (Avraham & Heesoon), in the BCACC Newsletter, TRAUMA, ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, AND BECOMING MORE WHOLE (p. 13): https://bcacc.ca/insights-magazine/
This month’s Field Note is the creation of Dr. Heesoon Bai. Heesoon is a therapist in private practice and can be reached at
studio99lives@protonmail.com
She is also a full professor at Simon Fraser University in the lower mainland area of Vancouver BC, Canada. And In the interests of full disclosure, Heesoon is my wife of many years and my companion in many things. She is also a mother, grandmother, author, scholar, and on and on…
Please check out the links above for my interview on the podcast, Soulganize hosted by Wynne Lacey, and also check out the link to the article, co-authored by Heesoon and I in Insights, the BCACC News Magazine.
And now the Field Note by Heesoon:
FIELD NOTE by Heesoon Bai
Field Note Audio Version
The meeting of two personalities [within one person] is like the contact of two chemical substances: if the is any reaction, both are transformed.
—Carl Jung
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an 1886 Gothic Horror novella written by the celebrated British author, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894). Doctor Henry Jekyll is a well-respected scientist who harbours a sinister side of himself, named Edward Hyde. In this Field Note, I will use the dramatic story of Jekyll and Hyde to illustrate a certain psychological phenomenon that, likely, you can relate to in yourself.
Jekyll and Hyde are two different identities of the same person that are so diametrically opposite as to be perceived by others to be two different people: one an upstanding citizen and scientist; the other, an evil criminal. A point of interest in this story for psychotherapists and clients is making sense of one and the same person having two different identities. How does such come about? And do we all harbour different selves, even if not so horrifyingly and extremely opposed as in this story?
Indeed, if we note and attend to how we feel about ourselves and how we come across to others on a given day, or over several days, we may discover that it is as though we have many different selves or personal identities. For example (I invite you to personally reflect here), at one point in time, you may be very happy, and, in this state of mind, you look at the world and find it full of good, likeable, and hopeful people. In these moments, you appear to be, to yourself and to others, a positive and kind person. Your dog comes over, wagging his tail happily and wants you to pat him. On the same day, at another point in time, you become very angry about some events that are disturbing to you. When such happens, the world appears to you to be troublesome and filled with untrustworthy and hurtful people. At that moment, you become a negative and angry person. You even find yourself shouting at your dog and shoving him out of your way. We all have experienced, daily, some variations on this theme. Some variations, although thankfully rare, can be intense and horrid as in the case of Jekyll and Hyde; some, not so intense, and can be just shrugged off: “Oh well, she is just having a bad day.”
What we can learn from these examples is that how the world appears to one is very much dependent on one’s perception. And we may also learn that, instead of owning the perceptions that we have, we are unconsciously prone to outwardly project them onto the world and to be convinced that the world is as we see it. But here comes the central question: where do these varied perceptions come from? Or, asked differently, what affects, shapes, and controls one’s perceptions? With these questions, we are entering the terrain of depth psychology. (However, in this short Field Note, we would not be able to go deep: just deep enough to get a sense of the phenomenon we are studying here.)
Suppose a child is “taught”—”conditioned” would be a more accurate word—from the earliest days to loathe, fear, and feel ashamed about, for example, being weak, physically, mentally, emotionally, etc. Note that a human newborn does not walk for almost a year; often does not talk for more than a year; and does not have control over their bladder or bowel for the first few years of their life, and so on. Being small and weak, clumsy, largely defenceless, and extremely dependent on the care-giving adults for survival, the child, subject to the adults seeing them as weak and deficient, would all too readily and unconsciously take on the caregivers’ perception as their emerging identity. But it is not the alleged weakness or lack per se that is the problem, but how others, especially those who matter the most to the young child, such as mother and father, perceive these so-called weaknesses or lacks.
Again, I invite my reader to reflect personally here. If you were frequently dismissed, invalidated, derided, and even punished for being weak or lacking, by caregivers, such as mom and dad, you would have no choice but to hide, as much as is possible, what is perceived negatively by them as weaknesses and lacks. For, such hiding is a matter of survival to the child.
In this process, the child has two different senses of the self: the debased and invalidated self; and the self that has been approved and accepted by those who matter the most persons, such as mother and father. Now, what tends to happen is that the child would align with the parents’ perceptions and internalize their way of seeing and treating the two different selves. Consequently, the validated “good” child-self disowns the invalidated “bad” child-self. And the debased and disowned self does not just hide here and there, or now and then, as in playing hide-and-seek, but is forced to go into hiding, seemingly permanently: for, it is not safe to be out and seen with the self that is acceptable and accepted by significant others.
The phenomenon explained thus far is known as a vertical split in ego psychology, meaning that the self is split into the acceptable (the avowed) and the unacceptable (the disavowed), whereby the avowed remains on the surface (the conscious) and in the light, whereas the disavowed goes into hiding in the darkness of the unconscious.
The learning mechanism involved in the phenomenology of a split self is loathing and fearing what has been identified as not good. And as one grows up, the tendency to practice the same disapproval, even abuse and persecution, on oneself and on others will very likely become part of the person’s way of being. Please look around and observe how prevalent this phenomenon is.
However, it is not as though the unconscious is dead or ‘not there’ at all. On the contrary, it is very much alive and active, and it comes out when and where the avowed (the acceptable) self is not sufficiently conscious. When events occur in the world that are reminders of the old experiences of disavowal, the content of this disavowal, including especially sensations and feelings, is, as Carl Gustav Jung termed it, activated. The activation could, for example, take the forms of sneakily passive-aggressive comments, or explosion of vile rage as in the case of Hyde.
Jekyll is the avowed part of the person, whereas Hyde is the disavowed part of the self. To the extent the two parts are split apart and separated, thus becoming fragmented selves, to that extent, they act as independent entities. When this happens, as in the story of Jekyll and Hyde, there are two separate identities living in the same person and body. When this fragmentation and separation is severe, the parts or selves do not even know about each other: they are strangers to each other. As the story illustrates, horror and tragedies are associated with this psychological phenomenon. Strange Case of Dr Jykell and Mr Hyde is, in the way I am looking at and analyzing for the purpose of this Field Note, not a moral tale based on a horror story. Rather I am analyzing and understanding it as a psychological dramatization of what humans have been perpetrating, century after century, millennium after millennium, upon each other and themselves: a civilizational trauma story to the extent that cultures set and enforce the practice of disavowal in the name of what is normal, good, decent, and civilized.
As the guest writer of this Field Note, I wish to invite you readers to see if this psychology of the disavowal has not touched your own life, in some manner and to whatever degree: possibly deeply or just lightly. Well, if you say that you haven’t been touched at all, I am prepared to argue with you. Of course, there is a rare possibility that you grew up in a radically accepting and understanding, warm, nurturing, and encouraging family environment, and consequently you grew up integrated, whole, and very alive. That would be incredible and inspiring.
Like so many people that I have encountered, taught, and worked with over many decades, I see that I, too, was subjected to the vertical split, through growing up in a highly survivalist environment that delineated, at times severely, what was acceptable and what was not acceptable. Over the years, I have become increasingly aware of the consequences of this vertical split that was inflicted on me. In the last decade or so, I have been in the process of penetrating the surface and descending into the depth of my experiences and memories to see what there is in the shadowy depth of my being. Some stuff that I encountered there were rather sad to see, which must be why we tend to avoid looking deeply. But, as you would know, this avoidance tactic neither prevents, nor heals, our hurts and suffering.
In my studied view, understanding how the phenomenon of fragmented identities and disintegrated selves comes about offers a good chance of its prevention and healing. The key is befriending and reintegration, rather than avoiding or trying to eliminate, the disavowed self. As Carl Gustav Jung, Arnold Mindell, and many others remind us, the disavowed self, hiding in the darkness of our Shadow, holds great potential for self-transformation.
I know that with this Field Note, I have just scratched the surface of this crucial topic, but I should stop here before it turns into an essay. Perhaps, in a future Field Note, I can, or Dr. Cohen can—or perhaps together we can—offer some ideas and practices beyond what is being offered in this Field Note about the prevention of, and healing from, the disavowed self.
I thank you, my readers, for reading my guest Field Note. I also thank Avraham (aka Dr. Cohen) for inviting me to write a Field Note of my own. With many thanks to Avraham for all the discussions and consultations (taking place at the breakfast table, dinner table, coffee/tea dates, walks, etc.) pertaining to the topic of this guest Field Note, I look forward to further study and dialogue.
Yours in metta (lovingkindness),
Heesoon