Exactly the same question comes up when we ask about how people relate to traumatic memories. Even when memories are terrible, we seem to want to hang on to them. They are parts of our selves, even if they are aspects that we can only look upon with horror. But therapy can help people cope with them in a more constructive way, reprocessing the events so that they become less intrusive, disruptive and distorted. When I was researching my book on the topic, I talked to a lorry driver, Colin, who had had his horrific and distorted memories of a road traffic accident reshaped by a method called EMDR. During the worst phase of his post-traumatic stress disorder, he would have given anything to make the memories go away, but now, after therapy, he accepts them as part of himself. I would say the same thing about a couple of highly distressing memories that I myself have. They’re horrible, but they are mine. Isn’t this precisely what some people say about their voices?

Dillon agrees that the experience of distressing voices is not something that can be best dealt with by banishing them. If we can reshape our memories into a more palatable form, perhaps voice hearers can also mould their own pieces of remembered experience into a story that is not quite as shattering to their sense of who they are. This chimes with Dillon’s intuitions as a voice-hearer. “I suppose I would see those as aspects of a person’s self, and the analogy I would often use is family therapy… it’s a dysfunctional family. I would see them as fragments of a self, and those aspects make up a person.”

And we are all fragmented. There is no unitary self. We are all in pieces, struggling to create the illusion of a coherent ‘me’ from moment to moment. We are all more or less dissociated. Our selves are constantly constructed and reconstructed in ways that often work well, but often break down. Stuff happens, and the centre cannot hold. Some of us have more fragmentation going on, because of those things that have happened; those people face a tougher challenge of pulling it all together. But no one ever slots in the last piece and makes it whole. As human beings we seem to want that illusion of a completed, unitary self, but getting there is hard work. And anyway, we never get there.

In the meantime, people like Dillon are left with the voices. Joking with her at the cafe at the Barbican, I can tell she’s happy with the company. “Most of the time they make me laugh,” she said later in an interview. “They’re insightful, they’re loving, they’re comforting, and they help me to feel less alone. They know me better than anybody else and they’re always there for me.”

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Charles Fernyhough is an author and psychologist at Durham University in the UK. This is an edited extract from his new book The Voices Within. Photography by Olivia Howitt (@oliviahowitt); the images are purely conceptual, and are not portraits of any of the people interviewed for the article.

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