Polyphrenia

Definition

Psychologist Jean Houston coined the phrase "polyphrenia" to describe a high-functioning, multi-levelled consciousness that is well-organised and synergistic within its levels. As one writer using the term puts it: "At my best I am a community of awarenesses, each patiently (and urgently) waiting for its turn to express something."

Description

The term is constructed from Greek poly- (many) and phren (mind), deliberately parallel to "schizophrenia" (schizein, to split) and deliberately opposed to it in meaning. Where the clinical term names a disorder, polyphrenia names a capacity: not a self that has fractured but a self that has been cultivated into multiple coordinated modes, each available when it is useful.

It is important to distinguish it from dissociative identity disorder, which involves discontinuity of memory and identity and considerable distress. Polyphrenia as Houston uses it describes the opposite condition — the parts are aware of each other, share a memory, and cooperate. The claim is that the unified, singular self is a cultural ideal rather than a psychological fact, and that treating oneself as a working committee rather than a soloist is both accurate and useful.

The idea has substantial company in psychology. Internal Family Systems therapy works explicitly with a plurality of internal parts. Hubert Hermans's dialogical self theory describes the self as a set of "I-positions" in ongoing conversation. Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind (1986) makes a structurally similar argument from artificial intelligence: mind as a large collection of small agents, none of which is intelligent alone. What these share is a rejection of the homunculus — the single occupant at the centre who decides.

Networked Polyphrenia

Networked life exteriorises this. A person routinely maintains several presentations at once — a professional account, a personal one, a pseudonymous one, a group chat with old friends, a work channel — each with its own register, social dialect, audience and history, and each requiring the person to be a somewhat different self.

Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen (1995) documented this early and read it optimistically, arguing that multiple online identities allowed a healthy cycling through aspects of the self that offline life did not accommodate. Her later Alone Together (2011) is considerably more cautious about the same behaviour, and the shift between the two books is itself a useful record of how the practice changed as the venues became commercial and permanent.

The distinguishing feature of the networked version is that the multiplicity is recorded. Each self leaves an archive, each archive is potentially visible to the audiences of the others, and the labour of keeping them appropriately separate is continuous. Context collapse — the presentation of one utterance to every audience simultaneously — is the failure state, and it is a failure of polyphrenia specifically: not a person caught lying, but a person caught being several people.

Related Reading

• Extended Avatar
• Social dialect
• Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation
• Sherry Turkle
• Status