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Rating: 
Summary: Authoritative, clear, readable, useful
Review: I am a therapist, and have studied Rowan's topic for a decade. He has done an enormous service for lay and clinical people interested in a core phenomenon that affects us all - personality splitting. His book is a credible, well organized, well researched, relatively unbiased survey of what a wide range of mental health researchers have written about splitting in the last 150 years - including Freud, Jung, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and many others. He concludes that - rather than having a single monolithic personality, most (all ?) of us have many "subpersonalities" that activate or slumber, depending on inner and outer circumstances. This confirms my own clinical and personal experience. The idea helps explain why we can "love" someone" and "hate" them at the same time - and diet in the morning, and binge in the evening. The last chapter artfully weaves ideas of several major researchers to postulate an idea of human development that includes the path we each travel toward meaningful spirituality and our "transpersonal," or Higher Self. Rowan's synthesis of earlier theories is the most lucid and credible I've read in over 35 years' research. Rowan is a well read social scientist, psychologist, and an experienced therapist. Anyone seriously interested in understanding theselves - and others - can profit by reading this intriguing book. Another, probably easier to find, is "Internal Family Systems Therapy," by Dr. Richard Schwartz.
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