De-Alienating the Othered Selves of an Impaired One: The Use of Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) to Treat Autoimmunity in the UK

• In Event: STS and the Subject

Abstract

In my paper, I aim to report on the use and impact of IFS to treat autoimmunity in the UK as a case study, and as part of my broader anthropological study on the development, circulation and regulation of immunostimulant therapies to treat autoimmunity.
My presentation is based on unstructured interviews conducted between Mid-December 2018 and Mid-February 2019 with IFS-practitioners who are members of the British IFS-community. Analytically, I discuss my findings in light of studies that, in recent decades, have pointed out causal relations between emotional stress during childhood, psychological wounds and autoimmunity. Inspired by somatic approaches, many health professionals now tend to perceive autoimmune responses less as predisposed by genetic dysfunctions than as part of intergenerational stories that unfold cyclically. That points to the construction of the person as a process that embodies and reinvents multiple elements of the entwined healthy and ‘toxic’ environments through and between which one moves and grows (family, education system, neighborhood etc. ). One of the key premises of IFS is that every individual is made up of further sub-personalities. That supports an ongoing reconceptualization of the body-mind dichotomy as multiplicities of the self.
My hypothesis is that stimulating therapies seem to provide means that enable their users to validate and recommit specific parts that co-constitute themselves, instead of suppressing them as conventional therapies do. Through it, IFS-practitioners seek to re-organize the internal script that ‘rules’ their own lives. Finally, I seek to understand whether and how IFS integrates the so-called ‘regenerative medicine’.

Author

• Márcio Vilar, Goethe University Frankfurt & University of Sussex