Now this made me curious. I thought «If you can have a part hanging around that's not doing much, and you can give it some other job, you can probably build a part from scratch!» When I thought about it, I realized that's what Transactional Analysis does. TA goes through a rather laborious procedure to build three parts—parent, adult, and child. The Michigan TA people build nine parts. If you can build nine, you can probably build any number. If you can build a «critical parent» to torture you all the time, you ought to be able to build just about anything.

When you start thinking about it, most therapies teach you how to have your parts organized. Gestalt builds a topdog and an underdog. Psychosynthesis is a little bit more creative about it: They've got a big circle, and you get to have a whole bunch of parts inside. However, they all have to be famous people; there are no unknown parts.

Most of the time when parts are described, they are described not in terms of what they do—their function—but in terms of how they do it—their behavior. If you have studied the psychosynthesis model or the TA model, you know that people usually describe, isolate, and create parts in terms of how the parts behave. So for example, if you go through a Satir parts party, you might have a «stupid» part—a part that makes you act stupid. At the end of the party, rather than being a «stupid» part, it would become your «ability to learn at your own rate» or your «ability to ask questions» or some other positive behavior. The behavior goes from being something negative to being something positive. However, it is still a behavior that is not clearly tied to an outcome. This is a very important difference. We build parts to achieve outcomes. The parts that are created through the random processes that people use in therapy usually achieve behaviors rather than outcomes.

Every therapy I've ever studied has within it some way of building parts. Some people don't have an unconscious mind until they go into hypnosis. If you believe that the «unconscious mind» exists a priori, then one day you're going to hypnotize somebody and when her conscious mind is gone, you're going to be all alone! That has happened to me. You can't assume that everything is there. Sometimes a person has all her marbles in her conscious mind. Sometimes a person doesn't have much going on in her conscious mind, but has a very well–developed unconscious entity that is a single organized unit. Sometimes that has happened through therapy and sometimes through experience.

No matter how parts are created, people have a tendency to describe how a part behaves, rather than to describe the behavior in relationship to outcomes—what that behavior does for them. At one of my first workshops for TA people, I said I believed that every part of every person is a valuable resource. One woman said «That's the stupidest thing I ever heard!»

«Well, I didn't say it was true. I said if you believe that as a therapist, you'll get a lot farther.»

«Well, that's totally ridiculous.»

«What leads you to believe that that's ridiculous?»

«I've got parts that are totally useless. All they do is get in my way.»

«Well, name one that's useless.»

«No matter what I decide to do, I have a part that tells me that I can't ever do it, and that I'm going to fail. It makes everything twice as hard as it needs to be.»

«I'd like to speak to that part directly.» That always gets a TA person, by the way. Talking directly to a part isn't in the TA model. Then if you look over her left shoulder while you talk to that part, it really drives her nuts. It's also a very effective anchoring mechanism. From that time on, every time you look over her left shoulder, that part knows you're speaking to it.

So I said «I know that that part of you does something very important and is very sneaky about how it does it. And even if you don't appreciate it, I do. Now, I'd like to tell that part that if it were willing to inform your conscious mind about what it's doing for you, then perhaps it could get some of the appreciation that it deserves.» Then I had her go inside and ask that part what it does for her that is positive. It came right out and said «I was motivating you.» When she told me that, she added «I think that's weird.» So I said «Well, you know, I don't think it would be possible for you, right now at this moment, to come up here and work in front of this entire group.» She immediately stood up defiantly, walked up to the front of the room and sat down.

Those of you who have studied strategies know that this was a demonstration of the phenomenon that we call a «polarity response.» This part of her was simply a Neuro–Linguistic Programmer who understood utilization. It knew that if it said «Aw, you can go to college; you can do it," she'd respond «No, I can't do it.» However, if it said to her «You're not going to be able to cut the grade," then she would say «Oh, yeah?!» and she would go out and do it.

I began to discover that no matter how you organize yourself, or what parts you build, if the model that you use to think of parts is tied to how they behave, then 1) You don't do them justice, and 2) You might be right, which would be dangerous. If you really had a part that didn't have a positive function—it was just critical or destructive— then what can you do? Exorcism?

There is a guy in Santa Cruz who exorcises parts. The exorcism is terrible; it takes a long, long time, and has some unfortunate consequences. This man has «discovered» an epidemic of multiple personalities in this country that no one else has noticed! He doesn't even begin to suspect that he is creating them.

I wouldn't recommend exorcism as an approach. I would rather tie parts to outcomes, whether or not they were tied together originally. If you act as if they are, they will be. Once you have an outcome, you no longer need to exorcise a part. You simply give it new behaviors.

If someone doesn't have a part to do something, you can create one, but you need to be sure that the part is designed to achieve a specific outcome. If you are not able to open doors, you can create a part that opens doors. It sounds simple; it's actually somewhat complicated. However, it's something that you do all the time. All of you have parts which you managed to make somehow or other. All the things we do explicitly with parts and reframing are things that people do anyway. These are all naturally occurring processes.

I think there's a tendency for human beings to organize themselves in terms of outcomes that are contextual. A man behaves differently with his wife than with his colleagues at work; he has an entirely different set of analogue behaviors in order to get different outcomes. That used to be called «role theory," and I think role theory was on the right track in some ways. However, therapists got stuck trying to prove that that's all there was.

Many of B. F. Skinner's students have gotten stuck in the same way. They said that since Skinner didn't look in the «black box," there wasn't anything in there anyway. Skinner didn't say «There's nothing in the black box»; he said «I'm not going to open it.» Those are two very different statements. Skinner's students took the connotations of his statement to mean there was nothing in there anyway. That is not the case, and I do not think, from reading his writing, that Skinner intended that. However, we all know how some people are: if they don't see something, it doesn't exist.

In order to build a part to achieve a specific outcome, the first consideration is to identify a «need.»

Woman: Could you distinguish need from outcome? I don't understand what you mean by need in this context.

Well, that's why I put it in quotes. What you're going to do is find an outcome. What your client is going to tell you is that she has a «need.»