Onno van der Hart developed the Theory of Structural Dissociation of the Personality (TSDP) in The Haunted Self. This theory functions in some respects as a direct counterpart to the schizoanalytic framework, and in others as an implicit endorsement of it. According to TSDP, humans are born psychologically multiple. Multiple threads of experience and identity, termed personality-states, constitute the consciousness of the infant. These personality-states merge over the course of normal development, or may isolate and remain split in the event of chronic trauma and/or disorganised attachment — a relational style involving both insecure and avoidant attachment.
This division of personality-states forms the basis for dissociative disorders, particularly Dissociative Identity Disorder, which develops in early childhood, as well as conditions such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder, which develop later in life. TSDP can be read as a psychiatric antithesis to schizoanalysis: the diverse self is Oedipalised to fit a clinical framework, despite multiplicity often conferring more benefit than detriment. Dissociative Identity Disorder, for instance, functions more as a coping mechanism than a disorder — personality-states provide the support, stability, and functionality that a child's guardians failed to provide, activated by the brain as a defence against psychological destruction under the weight of severe trauma.
I. Integration and Conjunctive Synthesis
TSDP proposes two treatment paths for dissociative disorders: integration and fusion. The former has been increasingly favoured in recent years, as it allows personality-states to coexist rather than forcing unification — corresponding structurally to D&G's conjunctive synthesis. The latter, which involves an eventual merge into a unified self, is the recording surface forced into a single subject; the inverse of conjunctive synthesis.
For D&G, the subject is the residuum of flows at the point of conjunctive synthesis, never intended to be reduced to a fixed self.
This structural parallel lends support to integration as a treatment goal: closed-off, rigid personality-states obstruct schizophrenic flow and risk producing molecular fascism where they replicate existing structures, functioning as miniature despots.
II. Non-Traumagenic Multiplicity
Tulpamancy, the practice of cultivating a Tulpa — an imagined entity that may become a personality-state — presents a further relevant case. As an act of active construction rather than reactive defence, it aligns more closely with the schizoanalytic framework than does the untreated dissociative disorder.
III. Oedipalisation
The treatment process for dissociative disorders remains theoretically inconsistent in several respects. TSDP is founded on the premise that humans are born multiple, yet unification continues to be treated as the universal treatment goal — a forcibly imposed normal. Certain psychiatric frameworks treat familial sexual trauma as the universal, transcendent explanation for dissociative disorders, folding this complex neurological process into the Oedipal triangle.
IV. ANPs, EPs, and Schizoanalytic Machines
TSDP classifies personality-states into two broad categories: Apparently Normal Parts (ANPs), which carry out daily functioning and appear normal, and Emotional Parts (EPs), which carry traumatic memories and manifest as intrusions or flashbacks. ANPs may be understood as the paranoiac machine: they restrain emotion, conduct labour, repress the EPs, and are frequently directed by psychiatric intervention toward their elimination. EPs may be understood as the schizophrenic machine: originating at a point of deterritorialisation — a major traumatic event — their trauma-centred nature, often marked by fixation on the past and a persistent sense that it is still occurring, resists Oedipalisation.
Psychiatry and capitalism target the EP specifically, as EPs represent what capitalism's miraculations and captures must suppress; they prevent ANPs from performing their required labour. Psychiatry's primary function, on D&G's account, is to capture and arrest the schizophrenic process, converting a threat to the socius into a manageable, billable diagnosis. The ANP itself constitutes a miraculated formation rather than a natural baseline — its coherence and productivity present themselves as the healthy default, yet this is an effect of miraculation: the ANP represents the functional, unified subject capitalism requires, a need retroactively presented as normalcy. EP intrusions threaten not only the ANP's labour capacity but potentially its deterritorialisation altogether, exposing that its normalcy was never a given but a maintained illusion.
V. Labels
Personality-states are also classified according to role, most notably as protectors and persecutors — defenders of the psyche and its adversaries. While the emergence of protagonistic and antagonistic parts is a genuine developmental phenomenon, this classificatory reduction may prove detrimental to treatment. The protector/persecutor binary is the Oedipal triangle in miniature: the persecutor stands in for the abusive parent, the protector for the rescuing parent, the vulnerable part for the child. The entire cartography of the system is reduced to a nuclear family drama, and any part that does not fit this triangulation is rendered invisible.
Labels also force personality-states to be treated as entities to be contained or managed rather than as productive desiring-machines in their own right. The labels become prescriptive rather than descriptive, shifting from functional description toward dramaturgical casting — mirroring Freud's reduction of Schreber's cosmology to the Oedipal triangle and desire for the father, personality-states that exceed this Karpman triangle correspondingly erased. Whether integration in TSDP-informed therapy reopens connective synthesis between EPs and ANPs, restoring schizophrenic flow, or performs an Oedipal capture by producing a singular, more labour-efficient subject free from intrusion, remains an open question.