Falconer
Article
Falconer is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 21, 2024 and May 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Falconer doesn’t give numbers”; “To hear Falconer tell it, one of psychotherapy’s big crises”; “Demons are (Falconer assures us) powerless against anyone who doesn’t fear them”. It most often appears alongside Carl Jung, IFS, Internal Family Systems.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 21, 2024
- Last seen: May 28, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Carl Jung (2 shared issues)
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- IFS (2 shared issues)
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- Internal Family Systems (2 shared issues)
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- Sabby (2 shared issues)
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- The Others Within Us (2 shared issues)
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- Australia (1 shared issues)
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- autonomous imagination (1 shared issues)
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- Bali (1 shared issues)
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- Bay Area (1 shared issues)
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- Bessel van der Kolk (1 shared issues)
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- Bob (1 shared issues)
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- Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
At least this is what I take from The Others Within Us, by Robert Falconer, a veteran IFS therapist.
Inline links: The Others Within Us
But it’s not just Falconer saying this. The book has a foreword by Richard Schwartz2, the inventor of IFS, where he basically endorses it. It has cover blurbs from some high-ranking IFS trainers. My impression is that everyone high up in IFS believed something like this - some as metaphor, other as literal reality. They avoided talking about it lest it scare away the normies, Falconer got tired of keeping quiet and wrote a book, and everyone else decided to come clean and support him instead of denying anything.
Inline links: 2
You can see signs of the political fractures throughout the book. It tries to soften the blow by replacing “demons” with the technical IFS term UBs (for “unattached burdens”) and it inconsistently calls exorcisms “unburdenings”. It flirts with the idea that maybe this is just a useful metaphor, then veers off into “no it’s literally real” (I want to stress that the literal reality is Falconer’s position, not necessarily that of mainstream IFS). It alternates between apologetic and defiant.
“Lucid-dream-like trance state” was my wording, not Falconer’s, so maybe I’m getting it wrong. Still, here’s a quote directly from the book:
But also, don’t you need something like this to be true to believe (as Falconer does) that these demons are real and important? If you’re just telling your patients “make up a neat metaphor for what’s in your head” and then your patient says “okay, I choose to represent my trauma as a demon”, then it doesn’t make sense to - as Falconer does - start freaking out and saying that demons are real and your patients have encountered them. It doesn’t make sense to start learning exorcism, any more than you would bring a bottle of bug spray to the session if your patient visualized their trauma as a giant cockroach.