A man alone is always in good company.
(G. Gaber, “I soli”, in Il Teatro Canzone, 1992)
For those who had an imaginary friend as children: don’t you ever miss that buddy you used to spend your days with?
You used to have fun together, give each other advice, tell each other your hopes and fears. Such imaginary friendship – as you probably already knew back then – was nothing but a mental game; yet it helped you to find your way into the complex world of grown-ups; and maybe it was also useful to unload some frustration, or to ease some loneliness.
Of course, now that you are adults, you learnt that there must be just one voice inside your head. If grown-ups keeps talking with an imaginary friend, well, it means they are crazy.
Yet, let’s admit it: sometimes we wish we could evoke someone to get some advice, someone we could confess a secret to and know it will never be revealed...
Some people don’t give up.
Since 2010 there is a small online community, made by people practicing the so-called “tulpamancy”. Tulpamancy is the creation of secondary identities or, in a manner of speaking, imaginary friends. Such entities are called “tulpa”, and they are generated by using some techniques on the edge between Eastern meditation and psychology: a tulpamancer, i.e. anyone trying to develop a tulpa, makes it consciously and is fully aware of the fictitious nature of the character he has created. At the same time, though, they can give this character a unique and independent identity, and they can hear its voice and perceive it also in the real world – through visual, hearing, tactile, and olfactory deliberate hallucinations.
Tulpas can be very different from their creators, thus allowing different perspectives; they sometimes speak different languages or have an exotic accent; they can be vague figures or extremely detailed characters with their own clothing and accessories; they have their own personality, tastes and skills.
They can help their tulpamancer in the most various ways: it could be a simple chat, or sometimes something more.
For example, one of the most detailed research on this subject (S. Veissière, Varieties of Tulpa Experiences: Sentient Imaginary Friends, Embodied Joint Attention, and Hypnotic Sociality in a Wired World, 2015), reports the experience of a girl who one day was particularly cold: her tulpa put an imaginary blanket on her shoulders, and almost magically she felt really warm. There are even some techniques that allow tulpas to temporarily take control of the “host” body, which therefore finds itself performing tasks it wouldn’t be able to accomplish alone.
At first glance, it can look crazy to create a multiple personality on purpose: the dissociative identity disorder is a serious pathology (some years ago I interviewed for my blog a woman hosting in her mind 27 alter egos, and her life wasn’t easy at all).
The crucial difference resides in the intention of this act, which allows to manage it: since it was created intentionally, a tulpa is a projection of the mind whose purpose is only positive, productive, supportive. Thus, tulpamancy can’t be considered as a pathology, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the functionality of the person. On the contrary, people devoted to this practice report it generated significant improvements in the quality of their lives, and even in social interactions. Many of them report they found an effective method to escape from loneliness and fight anxiety. Some of them even have sentimental or sexual relationships with their tulpas (although the community frowns upon this point, which is still controversial).
Despite being a very limited underground phenomenon, tulpamancy immediately caught the attention of anthropologists and psychologists. The method for the creation of new personalities could be indeed extremely interesting for cognitive sciences, ethnology, ethnobiology, linguistic anthropology, neurosciences, and hypnosis social studies.
“There must be just one voice inside your head”, we were saying. Our culture pushes us to believe that our identity is unique, indivisible. Nevertheless, in the last twenty years of psychological research, the hypothesis of a multiple, liquid identity has become more and more plausible. According to some scholars, people could be divided into two main groups: those who keep a diachronic vision of their life, as if it was the autobiography of a well-defined first-person narrator, and those who perceive their existence like a series of episodes, and that see their past as made of different moments and evolution steps when their personality was totally different from the current one.
In other words: our interior narrations, the way we “narrate ourselves” to ourselves, are complex, and the famous theory of “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” by Pirandello is maybe closer to the truth than we think.
So, as tulpamancers say, why don’t transform all this material into a true resource, by nurturing imaginary friendships?
We would all be a little crazier, but also happier.