Absence of anger in other parts of personality
Although not originally listed as one of the components
of the definition of SPs, their anger and aggressiveness is accompanied by a lack of them in the host and other
main parts of personality. As it was adeptly described by one of my clients who
already depicted her own SP, parts of personality seen among patients with DID
do not know how to express, or even feel angry and frustrated. The appearance
of SPs is typically warranted in a situation where aggressive attempt at
breaking off of any insult and intrusiveness exhibited by others. It is not
necessarily a host personality in a critical situation who intentionally “summons”
or “invites” SP into the scene. The host simply becomes at a loss and an SP
might set in motion. The whole process occurs rather automatically. As will be
discussed later, this automatism is a key in understanding the mechanism of
dissociative switching among parts of personality, and appearance of SP might
be hard to resist once a situation becomes difficult for the host to manage.
It is enticing to imagine that the host can “be angry but
unconsciously” in these critical situations, but this would get us back to the
starting point more than a century ago when Freud expressed his opinion against
Breuer’s formulation about “hypnoid state.” In the Studies of Hysteria (1895).
