IFS: Fakir Lalon Meets Modern Psychotherapy

Tomar ghore bash korey kara, o mon jano na. Tomar ghore boshot kore koijona. 

Fakir Lalon Shah is known by all Bengalis as a spiritual mystic, sage, poet, and a prominent proponent of the philosophy of humanism. The song above by Fakir Lalon originally dates back to the late 17th century. However, sometime in the late 90's this song received a vivacious revival by a local band in Dhaka. I remember vividly the buzz it stirred up for me and my teenage peers back then. The song was catchy, fun to sing along, the lyrics simple, the words learnable and the music familiar. Pretty soon, we were singing it everywhere - at lakeside concerts, cultural festivals, house parties and rooftop hangouts. It became the anthem that reaffirmed our Bengali identity. 

20 years went by and the song became archived in our memories. All that time, I was under the comfortable impression that I understood what the song was saying. I had settled for a very literal interpretation of the words on the surface. However, I came to realize there was always a deeper meaning that had eluded me for a better part of two decades. A meaning that only became clear to me recently, when I happened to learn about the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy framework. 

The link between a 17th century Bengali folk song and a modern Western psychotherapeutic technique sounds as absurd as it is unlikely. There is no reasonable conjecture, no educated guess, not even the most fringe academic interest that is likely to result in anyone linking these two together. Yet, there it was, a link so unusual, yet undeniable, such that when I finally made sense of the connection, it felt as if it had always been there, right in front me. 

Lalon outlines a model of the human mind in the song, upon introspecting into the nature of his own being. He describes his own inner psychic universe, as occupied by various "residents" who live within the "home of his heart". He identifies numerous psychic personalities within himself, each with its own particular trait - some creative, some destructive, some playful, some mischievous, some childlike, some managerial. These personalities interact with each other within his inner world, but also engage in behaviours perceivable in the external world. Ultimately mesmerized by this truth, and recognizing the existence of an entire family of psychic personalities within his being, Lalon asks the question - "Oh my heart, do you even know how many are living within your home?"

The IFS model views the human mind in much the same way, as being made up of multiple psychic personalities or Parts, that revolve around a central Self. IFS embraces the idea that multiplicity within the human psychic structure is a natural state of being. It identifies two broad categories of psychic parts, namely exiles and protectors, each arising as a result of specific life experiences. These parts also have distinct personalities, often determined by the nature of the experiences that created them. Together, these parts form the internal family that exists within an individual's psychic structure (thus the name "Internal Family Systems"). Much of the therapeutic approach used by IFS involves getting to know this family of parts, understanding their dynamics, identifying their behavioral manifestations and negotiating a balanced relationship between them. 

As is apparent, the similarity between the mental models presented by these vastly different frameworks is uncanny. Yet, the question remains, how did this come to be? How did these two constructs, separated by great distances and ample time, produce such similar models. IFS is a relatively new technique, created by Dr. Richard Schwartz in the early 1980s. As far as I can tell, from attending training courses at the IFS Institute, neither Dr. Schwartz's nor any of his peers had any knowledge of this song or of Fakir Lalon. The only plausible point of convergence lies in the fact that IFS takes much of its foundational principles from Eastern Buddhist traditions. Similarly, Lalon's ideas were also influenced by parallel eastern traditions, including Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, Jainism and Hinduism. This can explain some of the commonalities between Lalon's philosophy and IFS (for instance, the central Self in IFS and Lalon's concept of "Moner Manush", the simple being, both emerge from the idea that the core essence of being arises from a silent, objective witness of all phenomenon, i.e. pure, egoless consciousness). Yet, the specific detail of the multiplicity of the human psychic structure, does not appear to be exactly spelled out in the same way within these philosophical traditions. 

As such, for me, the link between this song and IFS still remains a mystery. But if you happen to figure it out, please let me know.

 - a small cross-section of urbanized, English educated, upper middle class, teenagers. We occupied the penumbra between imported Western culture and the reality of a Bangladeshi upbringing, and thus felt like misfits in our own homeland. 

This foundational principle of IFS, however, makes it deviate from most other traditional psychotherapeutic approaches, many of which see personality as a unitary construct, and often treat any inclinations towards multiplicity as pathological. 

But then, here was this Bangla song that we all loved. 

In Bangladesh, the songs of Fakir Lalon are in the very air we breathe, impossible to avoid. As a child, I heard many of Lalon's tunes at festivals, on TV, at concerts or in the voice of the many rickshaw drivers who took me around Dhaka. As such, Lalon

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is a psychotherapeutic practice, that is gaining a large following around the world in the last decade. It is based on a model of the human mind that is drawn from eastern philosophical and spiritual traditions. Consequently, IFS diverges from most orthodox therapeutic models practiced today. However, it is for this very reason, IFS converges with the ideas and teachings of Fakir Lalon Shah. 

Throughout human history, a range of knowledge systems philosophers to mystics to   the crux of the matter is the basic question, what is the nature of the human mind? While one may be tempted to look for an answer in the field of academic psychology, it is prudent to note that no single individual or field can claim authority over the definition of the human psyche, or what it means to be a human being.  It is one of those questions whose answer does not lend itself to being monopolized, much like the questions "What is the meaning of life?" or "What is the nature of God?".  And although there have been, and always will be, attempts to "own" their answers by various institutions, these questions, in essence, exist as living mysteries in the world. As such, the subject of the human condition,  consciousness and psyche, always remain open for exploration. 

Unlike physics or chemistry, which decidedly enumerate on the materialistic universe, the exploration of mind cannot be confined within the same rational scientific superstructures.  

Nonetheless, this has not stopped modern psychology to present its own model of mind and parade it as truth (in true scientific fashion). But the story of the evolution of the field of psychology is essentially a tragic one. It is a story of the desire, rejection and betrayal. Psychology, since it's inception, was not only trying to shine light on the nature of mind, but was also driven by a desire to be accepted within the other sciences. In its evolution as a field, it faced constant ridicule and rejection from the scientific establishment of the time. And in its drive to fit into a purely scientific rational paradigm, certain aspects of the nature of mind and reality were betrayed and exiled away. What remained was a reductionist model of the theory of mind, stripped bare, so as to be palatable for the materialistic rationalistic scientific worldview. 

However, the origins of the filed of psychology stumbled upon the entirety of mind, in some sense, through the combined work of Freud and Jung. While Freud explored mind like a machine, with formulaic approaches, rationally outlined by cause and effect measures, Jung's view of mind was more like a poem, touching upon the infinite nature of consciousness and the subconscious, breaking out of what was the rational bias of the time. While Freud saw dreams as day residue, rationally explainable by past ocurrings in the subjec'ts waking state, memories and suppressed desires of the individual, to Jung the dream realm was not confined to the inidividual psyche but resonated with some superspace of the collective psyche of the human species, inifinite and boundless, and as such scarecely rational or logical. In that sense, these pioneering titans of modern psychology collectively presented a more holistic picture of mind and reality, each appriaching from a starkly different angle. Unfortunately, howeever, Jung's musings on the unconcious, on collective consciousness, on the dark recesses of the mind, his openness to the mystical and spiritual, viewing mind as the nexus between our benign material existence in the physical plain with the infinite fantastic realms of the metaphysical - all of this was not palatable for the academic tastes of the 19th century intellectual elites. Psycholigy was under a lot of pressure to prove itself to be a "science" akin to physics, constantly being ridiculed by other disciplines for its seemingly flimsy relatinship with materialism and rationalism. This science envy is what eventually led the field to decide to completely do away all that did not fit with the scientific estabslishments delicate taste. Freud's cojectures and hypotehsis survived to be enshrined as what would come to constitute modern psycholigy. WHile Jung, not quite banished completely, remains like a relic of the past, of gentle musing, but not to be taken seriously, under the pretense that his ideas were not anchored in "evidence". 

And so, as modern psychology stands today, the only model of mind that it has been able to erect is not one that has taken into account the full extent of what constitues mind, but largely determined by the boundaries of scientific frameworks, keeping only things that fit with it. In this way, the possible existence of multiplicity within a human being could not be accomodated, as the rational scientific approach that sees an individual as only that, an individual, could ony imagine the mind of an individual to be only that as well, individualistic. That is to say, mind is seen to be unitary, homogenous and singular, mimicking what is seemingly the case of our physical existence. It is is easy to see why a rational bias can lead to such a conslusion. Meanwhile, the idea of multiplicity of mind, or the possibility of the existence of many aspects of selves within one individual could not be wiped away, but has been successfully pathologized to be seen as deviant, abnormal and something to be fixed. 

In fact, some of the most enlightening models of the human psyche and mind that I have come across do not come from academic psychologists at all, but are instead emergent from the musigs of poets, artists, spiritual teachers and the likes. 

 to being  Most orthodox psychologists will present a unitary model of the mind, and define a healthy individual as one who demonstrates a unified, singular personality or psychic presence, experiencing their whole mental life as only that. This idea is, however, is a sad reflection of the history of modern psychology, as the ridiculed and rejected bastard child of materialistic science. 

 As such, the very idea of multiplicity of the human mind, or the assertion that a human psyche can be made of many different and differing psychic parts, is seen as anathema indeed. In fact, a staunch proponent of the classical models of psychic function, upon which most contemporary psychotherapeutic interventions are based, would find multiplicity of the personality to be at best an anamoly and at worst pathology. 

Yet, This is especially true given the very newness of the field as a whole, along with its very dubious position within the academic arena, making every effort to look like a rationalistic science, but in reality dealing with a subject matter that is as much rational as it is irrational, i.e. the human mind. 

It is for this very reason, 

Fakir Lalon was often surrounded by various stories about how he had somehow deep and detailed knowledge about the world, but had never physically left the village where he lived. While this particular trick seemed hard to understdand, Lalon;s deep insights about the human being and the m=human mind, is not a surprise at all. Because he did infact soend a lifetime introspecting within himself to arrive upon some of the most profound idea s and knowledge about the human condition. It is no accident therefore that he is one of the primary prophets of the philisohpy of humanism. Yet, I had never expected that I would learn about a modern psychther

iFS is to modern psychology what Quantum mechanics is to physics. They both emerge from within these sciences, but ultimately challenge the preexisting paradigms upon which they rest. 

Therein lies