You can know what a character wants and still discover that one familiar part of you keeps playing every scene. The reliable one takes charge. The pleasing one softens every disagreement. The critic comments while you speak. Hal and Sidra Stone's work offers a language for investigating these patterns without mistaking any one of them for the whole person.
Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D., developed Voice Dialogue, the Psychology of Selves, their account of bonding patterns, and the Aware Ego Process. Their work grew through an extended personal and professional collaboration. The articles below tell that story in their own words. You can read their complete authorized texts here on JBAS and follow each article's source link to Voice Dialogue International.
Many selves, more room to choose
In the Psychology of Selves, a primary self is a familiar way of organizing and protecting your life. It may be responsible, ambitious, accommodating, skeptical, self-sufficient or something quite different. It becomes primary because it has a useful history. A disowned self represents qualities that this familiar organization excludes, distrusts or leaves undeveloped.
The task is not to shame your reliable self or promote its opposite to permanent command. An actor who has survived by working hard need not become careless to explore spontaneity. An accommodating actor need not reject kindness to find anger or authority. The inquiry concerns identification: when does a useful part of you become the only position from which you can act?
Voice Dialogue is the Stones' facilitated method of meeting and experiencing selves. Their account of the Aware Ego Process concerns an ongoing capacity to experience differing selves and carry the tension between them. Awareness witnesses; an Aware Ego Process involves how you live and choose while remaining in contact with those differences. The Stones repeatedly develop this distinction in their writing.
Relationship and bonding patterns
The Stones use bonding patterns to describe recurring interactions among the selves of two people. In their model, a capable, responsible position in one person can meet a dependent position in another, and the arrangement can reverse or become hostile. The pattern gives you something more specific to investigate than a verdict about who is the good person.
For an actor, that is a useful line of inquiry into a scene. Who is caring for whom? Who is asking for protection? Who feels entitled to decide? What happens when the person who usually accepts care refuses it? Those are questions for your reading and rehearsal. They become dramatically useful through what the characters actually say, do, conceal, demand and risk.
Voice, selves and acting craft
Jason Bennett’s training includes three advanced professional trainings with Hal and Sidra Stone and two foundational trainings with Judith Tamar Stone. The training places the freeing of the human instrument before the application of acting craft: free the human, cultivate awareness, and cultivate the Aware Ego Process.
In JBAS Archetype Work, voice, sound, movement and imagination help you explore modes of being that ordinary self-description may leave out. Roy Hart voice work, acting traditions and the Stones' Psychology of Selves contribute distinct resources to Jason Bennett's synthesis. They are related in his practice without becoming interchangeable systems.
On a role, you still need circumstances, objectives, obstacles, actions, relationship and specificity. Selves and archetypes can expand what you are available to embody; they do not replace the demands of the script. An insight about your own familiar self may help you recognize a limit in your rehearsal choices. The next question is what you can actually explore in the scene.
Participation is voluntary. You can decline an exercise or a personal disclosure. Acting training develops performance capacity and independent creative judgment. It does not turn a rehearsal into psychotherapy or establish a diagnosis.
Distinctions that matter
A self in the Stones' framework is not automatically the same thing as a Jungian archetype, an IFS part, a social role or a scripted character. Each tradition asks different questions and uses its terms differently. An inner critic can be discussed across several approaches, but the meaning of Self in IFS and the Aware Ego Process in the Stones' work should not be silently merged.
The authors also write about dreams, spiritual experience, energetics, aging and the development of consciousness. Those passages express their theoretical, experiential and spiritual perspectives. Read each argument in its own context. The presence of an account in this library preserves access to the author's work; it does not make every claim an established scientific finding.
The full article library
Begin with Embracing All Our Selves for an introduction, The Psychology of the Aware Ego for the consciousness model, or The Basic Elements for the development of the whole body of work. Read further according to the question you are exploring.
The Basic Elements Of Voice Dialogue, Relationship, And The Psychology Of Selves: Their Origins And Development by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Voice Dialogue: Discovering Our Selves by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
The Psychology of the Aware Ego: Back to Basics by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Embracing All Our Selves by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Voice Dialogue: An Introduction to the Use of Voice Dialogue by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Making Relationships Work for You by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
The Dance of The Selves in Relationship by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Some Thoughts on Energetic Connection by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
About Vulnerability by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Judgment and What to Do with It by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Some Down-to-Earth Suggestions for Keeping Your Relationship Alive by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
The Inner Critic by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
How Strong is Your Inner Critic by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
The Top 12 Traits of the Inner Critic by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Dreams as a Window to Your Inner Selves by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
It Was Only a Dream: Learning to Honor The Creative Imagination in Children by Hal Stone, Ph.D.
The Disowned Instinctual Energies and the Dream Process by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
The First Letter A Personal Journey 9/11 by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Continuing the Journey (after 9/11) The Second Letter by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
An Open Letter to President George W. Bush by Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Beware of the Cave of LOVE by Hal Stone, Ph.D.
Authenticity by Hal Stone, Ph.D.
What I Know Now by Hal Stone, Ph.D.
Notes From My Journey by Hal Stone, Ph.D.
From Enlightenment to the Aware Ego Process to Source Energy by Hal Stone, Ph.D.
Some Thoughts About Prophecies by Hal Stone, Ph.D.
Illness as Teacher by Hal Stone, Ph.D.
In These Uncertain Times by Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
The Snow Queen & The Psychology of Selves by Bonnie L. Pfeiffer, in collaboration with Sidra L. Stone
In Celebration of Fifty Years of Voice Dialogue by Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
The Inner Patriarchy and Politics by Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
The Next Part of the Journey by Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
One Secret of Graceful Aging: Separating From Primary Selves by Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Continue into your practice
Explore Archetype Work, Imaging, Script and Character Analysis, and the Encyclopedia of Acting. Bring a particular question from a role, a rehearsal or your expressive range. Your reading becomes useful when it gives you more precise choices and more room to discover.
Original authors and resources: Hal and Sidra Stone's Reading Room at Voice Dialogue International.