A long time ago, a woman who worked as some kind of therapist told me about the Integrated Self. I have forgotten who it was, and over time I may have mangled what she told me.
What I remember is this: a picture in my head of a vast room, filled with thousands of chairs to accommodate every version of a single human being: the young version and the old, the angry and calm, silent and noisy – and so on. Every version.
But you can never get the whole person, this therapist told me. You can never get the integrated self, because nobody can be angry and calm at the same time.
It really stuck in my head, that idea. You can never get a person’s integrated self. You can only gesture at it, and respect it as an idea.
It has kept coming back to me, in one form or another, over years. Here is roughly how.
***
I trained in improvisation with Keith Johnstone. In one session, Keith put me and Steve Chapman into a two-hander. Park bench. I played myself, as I was. Steve played me at sixteen, or thereabouts. Keith told him to ask me questions about the life ahead.
I felt uncomfortable doing it. It seemed self-indulgent to tell an audience: yes, I would become a writer. Yes, I would meet someone. Yes, we would marry and have a child. Yes, having a daughter would be amazing. Who could possibly want to hear that?
But we carried on, because that was what Keith had asked us to do. And because I couldn’t help myself: Steve looked so anxious about what lay ahead for him – for me.
At the end, walking off, I noticed a woman in the audience with tears in her eyes.
I guess it is just powerful to see someone being honest about their life, and perhaps to see them speaking gently to a different part of themselves.
***
Some years later I had a breakdown and ended up in psychiatric hospital. I made hundreds of pictures of myself while I was there, an attempt to understand what was happening to me. When I got home I put many of them into A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown, a book in which Little JP and Teenage JP keep turning up beside me.
The book closes with a recognition that I contain multitudes of different emotional states, each one entirely permissible:
***
Then I began to draw other people beside themselves, at another age. Four of the results hang in this show.
Ben Akers stands beside himself, aged nine or ten. The hand on the child’s shoulder in the drawing does not belong to adult Ben. It belongs to Ben’s father, in the source photograph. Ben, in the drawing, is giving his younger self the touch his father once gave him.
What Ben himself says about the picture, about his father and about his own son is in a voice message on his post. It is the whole show in one voice.
Salwa Emerson sits close to her thirteen-year-old self. The closeness is derived from a stock photograph of a mother and daughter I found online – someone Salwa has never met.
When I asked Salwa what she would actually say to that girl, she sent me a voice message back. It contains the line that could be a caption for the whole set: “I would let her talk, more than even tell her something.”
NJ’s father appears three times on one page: as a boy, as a new father holding NJ, and, a few years later, a father of young children in a moment of loss. There’s something stirring about seeing all three together, I think.
Someone told me recently that in the Elton John biopic, older Elton hugs his younger self. So the instinct is out there.
Of course it is. Long before, Saul Steinberg did something very like it. Steinberg blew up a photograph of his own boyhood, cut it out to life size, and photographed himself standing beside it, holding hands with his younger self.
My drawing of Steinberg’s photograph is one of the pieces in this show. A drawing of a photograph of an illustrator holding hands with a photograph of himself. That silly, meta, pictures-inside-pictures thing pleases me a lot.
The younger self is not somebody else. The younger self is somebody the older self carries, whether the older self wants to or not.
Not multitudes across a room. Multitudes across a life.
This is part of Contain Multitudes, my show at Burgh House, Hampstead, 18-23 August 2026.