When There Is No Inner Room: A Depth-Psychological Critique of IFS and the Collapse of Interiority
Summary: IFS oversimplifies trauma by flattening psychic structure and ignoring archetypal defenses. Drawing on Kalsched, it shows how trauma splits the Self and requires symbolic containment. Without an interior structure, parts work risks literalization, false memory formation, and psychological destabilization.
In recent years, Internal Family Systems (IFS) has become highly prominent in clinical psychology, reflecting broader cultural movements toward relational softness, nonpathologizing language, and an ethos that centers on emotional validation and subjective experience.
IFS’s appeal is intuitive: it offers a clear, accessible model of internal life, a positive view of Self, and gentle, practical techniques for engaging inner conflict. For many, this approach offers welcome relief, a method for exploring the inner world that is curious and free from the diagnostic weight of older frameworks. However, it is precisely this accessibility and validation that require critical scrutiny.
I want to honor what Internal Family Systems has contributed. It has given many people:
A language for their inner experience
A way of befriending rather than battling symptoms
A sense that suffering makes sense within a coherent internal system
These are not small gifts.
Yet as a depth-oriented clinician, I am troubled by how widely IFS is applied without considering a crucial question: Does this person have the internal structure needed for this work? This oversight, I argue, is not simply technical but structural, and it sits at the center of my critique.
IFS is built upon a fundamental, often unspoken assumption: that the individual possesses a developed interiority, a firm, stable psychological space capable of supporting symbolic work. This is not always the case. When interiority is missing or compromised, as in trauma, addiction, borderline, narcissistic, or dissociative conditions, the IFS model risks further destabilizing the psyche rather than organizing it. This challenge lies at the heart of my critique.
Interiority as a Prerequisite for Inner Work
Interiority is a prerequisite for psychological transformation. By this, I mean:
An internal space distinct from external reality
An observing ego with reflective distance
Symbolic capacity, the ability to experience inner images symbolically
Affect regulation
Some relationship to what Jung called the Self
Where interiority is absent, the psyche organizes itself through dissociation, fragmentation, literalization, and defensive maneuvers that replace symbolic consciousness with concrete, often frightening, imagery. Such individuals do not relate to inner content symbolically but directly, without mediation or psychological distance. When they encounter an inner figure, they do not experience it as a representation; they experience it as a thing in itself, as real as the chair they sit in.
IFS presupposes the existence of a symbolic distance, what Winnicott refers to as potential space, Bion as container, and Jung as temenos. Without this distance, the IFS method can overwhelm the ego, activating more than an insufficiently structured psyche can contain. Recognizing this risk is both clinically and theoretically essential to my critique.
This is not a criticism of IFS clients. It is a recognition that certain forms of inner work require certain forms of inner structure. We would not ask someone to run a marathon before they can walk. Why do we assume everyone can engage in parts work before assessing whether they have a psychic place in which those parts can safely appear?
The IFS Assumption of an Intact, Compassionate Self
At the heart of IFS is a beautiful idea: that beneath all our protective strategies and wounded exiles, there exists an ever-present Self, an organizing intelligence that is inherently compassionate, curious, and capable of leading the internal system toward harmony. In IFS, the Self is always there; it simply needs to be unblended from obscuring parts.
From a depth-psychological standpoint, this is a metaphysical assumption, not a clinical observation. It may be true in an ultimate sense, but it is not clinically reliable as a starting point.
In severe trauma, early deprivation, or developmental disruption, the Self is often obscured, inaccessible, internally fractured, or constellated in dissociated states that do not readily communicate with one another. The ego cannot reliably locate or inhabit the Self. Instead, individuals may experience:
Inner vacancy
Dissociative drift
Persecutory psychic fields with no compassionate center
IFS interprets these conditions as protectors blocking access to the Self, whereas depth psychology sees evidence of disrupted Self-structure. Here, the models diverge: where IFS sees defenses, depth psychology sees a deficiency of structure.
In short, IFS presumes exactly what trauma may dismantle, a stable, accessible Self. Proceeding as if the Self is always present can retraumatize clients, who repeatedly find that when they seek an inner center, nothing is there. This contradiction is central to my argument.
Fragmentation Misread as Differentiation
IFS invites individuals to notice and speak from various “parts.” This is effective only when the psyche is cohesive enough to differentiate without disintegrating. A structured ego can observe a part with curiosity, part of me, but not all of me.
In borderline structures, however, identity diffusion and splitting are already primary. The psyche is fragmented, not differentiated. There is no stable observer. The self shifts depending on relational context and affective state.
In such systems, IFS can unintentionally solidify fragments into concrete pseudo-identities. What was fluid becomes fixed, exacerbating fragmentation rather than fostering integration. This risk is central when the model is applied without structural discernment.
What IFS interprets as “parts stepping forward” may, from a depth-psychological view, be complexes or dissociated ego-states lacking central relatedness. While therapist and client believe they are integrating, they may be amplifying dissociation.
This is not a client deficit. It is a limitation of the model when applied indiscriminately.
The Archetypal Core of Complexes and the Limits of the Parts Paradigm
One of the central oversights of IFS is conflating complexes with parts. Jungian theory views complexes as semi-autonomous psychic formations with:
A personal traumatic nucleus
An archetypal core
An energetic field that can overpower the ego
This represents a fundamental divergence between the models.
Complexes cannot be reduced to managers or exiles. They manifest as archetypal events, possessions that require symbolic containment, not dialogue. Treating them as wounded parts risks identification rather than transformation.
IFS tends to treat powerful complexes as confused or wounded parts that simply need compassion and curiosity. This minimizes their archetypal dimension and may provoke what depth psychology calls identification with the complex: the individual does not observe the complex but becomes it, loses themselves in it, speaks from within it without any capacity for reflective distance.
Depth psychology insists that symbolic attitude, not conversation, is what transforms complexes. The complex must be recognized as a psychic phenomenon, not identified as a literal truth. Without this symbolic attitude, the complex becomes literalized, often producing false narratives, pseudo-memories, or overwhelming affective states that feel absolutely real and absolutely true.
Kalsched and the Splitting of the Self in Trauma
Donald Kalsched’s work offers an essential counterpoint. Severe trauma does not merely create protectors; it splits the Self into archetypal poles:
The Innocent Soul-Child: The vulnerable, authentic core of the personality that was overwhelmed by trauma and went into hiding
The Protector-Persecutor: An archetypal force that is simultaneously guardian and aggressor.
This split represents a structural reorganization of the psyche rather than the emergence of discrete, cooperative parts.
Its purpose is to protect the traumatized core of the Self by preventing any new relational intimacy or psychological opening that might risk retraumatization.
This Protector-Persecutor is not a "protector" in the IFS sense, a well-meaning part that simply needs reassurance. It is an archetypal defense with ferocious intelligence. It does not soften when approached with compassion. It attacks compassion. It attacks the therapeutic alliance. It attacks anything that threatens to reach the frozen trauma at the center of the system.
Internal Family Systems does not account for the archetypal ferocity of trauma defenses, the way they can flip therapeutic progress into crisis and transform healing attempts into new threats. This lack of conceptual space for the anti-Self phenomenon sharply limits IFS’s clinical utility and is a critical focus of my argument against its uncritical application.
This leads to clinical misinterpretation. Therapeutic rupture is understood as "parts becoming activated" rather than as the Protector-Persecutor attacking the bond. Annihilating shame is heard as "an exile speaking" rather than as archetypal persecution from within. Destructive relapse is framed as "firefighters" rather than as the system's desperate attempt to prevent a dangerous opening. Sudden hostility toward the therapist is labeled "blending" rather than recognized as the archetypal defense doing exactly what it was designed to do.
A Kalsched-oriented lens recognizes a defensive intelligence operating at the archetypal level, not misbehaving inner children.
Structural Depth vs. the Flattening of the Psyche
Another difficulty lies in the way IFS reduces complex psychodynamic structures into a flat taxonomy of parts. Depth psychology, both classical psychoanalysis and Jungian theory, recognizes a multi-layered psyche, including:
ego
unconscious
defenses
internalized mother and father imagos
superego structures
complexes
archetypal fields
drives
relational templates
These layers interact in complex ways. They have developmental histories. They operate according to different logics.
IFS, by contrast, collapses all psychic functioning into managers, exiles, firefighters, and the Self. Four categories to contain the entire inner world.
This flattening eliminates developmental sequencing, the recognition that defenses emerge at different stages and serve different functions. It erases the conflict between instinctual and moral imperatives that psychoanalysis places at the center of neurotic suffering. It loses the symbolic function entirely.
It cannot account for the dynamics of the superego, that internalized voice of prohibition and judgment that is far more than a "critical manager." And it strips the internalized parental imagos of their multi-valent nature, their ambivalence, their mythic dimensions.
A mother complex, in-depth psychology, contains archetypal and personal layers, ambivalent affects, mythic imagery, and symbolic meaning. It is not one thing. It is a field of psychic energy with multiple dimensions.
IFS reduces this to a single "inner critic" or "protector," stripping the complex of its depth and relational history.
Similarly, defenses such as splitting, projection, projective identification, and reaction formation are not "parts." They are functions of the ego attempting to manage overwhelming affect or internal conflict.
When defensive functions are reified as parts, structural understanding is lost.
Collapsing them into parts erases the psyche's structural complexity and misrepresents the nature of the symptoms.
Literalization, False Memories, and the Collapse of the Symbolic Function
When symbolic capacity is weak, the psyche cannot distinguish between psychic imagery and factual memory.
IFS, which encourages vivid internal encounters with parts, can inadvertently foster literalization in clients who lack this capacity.
In such cases:
Symbolic images may be interpreted as historical events
Protective forces may be understood biographically
Internal persecutors may be viewed as real abusers
Trauma imagery may be misinterpreted as recovered memories of actual events
The issue is not malicious intent. It is structural.
FS activates archetypal material without providing a symbolic context. The psyche produces mythic imagery; the model interprets it psychologically; the client experiences it concretely.
This is the mechanism by which symbolic collapse becomes clinical crisis.
I have seen this happen. A client doing parts work encounters a terrifying inner figure and, with the therapist's unwitting encouragement, concludes that this figure represents a real perpetrator, someone who actually did something that may or may not have happened.
The image was real. The interpretation was literal. The consequences were devastating.
The psyche speaks in symbols. When we lack symbolic literacy and when we use a model that treats all internal content as meaningful and trustworthy without teaching clients how to hold imagery symbolically, we risk producing false narratives that feel absolutely true.
Such narratives can destroy relationships, rewrite histories, and deepen suffering rather than relieve it.
Building Interiority Before Activating Complexes
IFS can be effective in systems with intact interiority.
The difficulty lies in mistaking the presence of affectively charged imagery for the presence of an internal container capable of working with it.
Just because someone can visualize an inner part does not mean they have the structure to relate to it safely.
Before engaging in parts work, the psyche must develop:
somatic grounding
emotional regulation
an observing ego
symbolic capacity
differentiation between metaphor and memory
a relational container capable of withstanding transference and projection
These prerequisites are not optional. They are structural requirements for safe engagement with inner material.
Parts work is advanced inner work, not an introductory intervention.
It must not be the first intervention in systems with compromised interiority.
It must not be the first intervention in systems with compromised interiority.
The question is not "Can this client do parts work?"
The question is "Does this client have a psychic room in which parts can safely appear?"
When the answer is no, our task is not to proceed with the model anyway.
Our task is to help build the room.
Conclusion: Returning Depth to the Therapeutic Encounter
IFS has contributed meaningfully to the field by offering a compassionate language for inner conflict. It has helped countless people feel less alone with their suffering and more curious about their inner lives. These contributions are real and should not be dismissed.
However, IFS's theoretical oversimplifications and its neglect of structural, developmental, and archetypal dimensions render it insufficient, and potentially destabilizing, for many of the clients who are most drawn to it.
Notably, those who resonate most strongly with parts language are often those whose psychic structure is least able to support the work.
The contemporary therapeutic landscape is marked by a cultural collapse of interiority. In such an environment, any model that assumes a robust Self and symbolic capacity is already operating at a disadvantage.
IFS does not cause this collapse, but without depth, symbolic literacy, or structural theory, it may inadvertently accelerate it.
A depth-psychological orientation holds that before we negotiate with inner figures, we must ensure the psyche has a place where those figures can appear. When interiority is absent, the first task is not dialogical exploration but the creation of a vessel strong enough to hold the psyche's archetypal life.
This work is slow, unglamorous, and structurally essential.
It involves sitting with someone in their confusion, helping them find ground beneath their feet, and building the most basic capacities for self-observation and affect regulation.
It is the work of creating an inner room before we invite anything to enter it.
Without such a vessel, inner work becomes overwhelming, literalized, and potentially harmful. With it, the psyche can begin the slow work of integration, differentiation, and transformation that Internal Family Systems, in its most thoughtful applications, hopes to facilitate.
The model is not the problem. The problem is applying the model without first asking the structural question.
Is there an interior here?
Is there a room?
When there is no inner room, we must build one first.
Dr. Bren Hudson is a Jungian-oriented analyst in private practice. This essay is part of an ongoing series on the intersection of depth psychology and contemporary therapeutic culture.
About the Author, Dr Bren:
Dr. Bren Hudson is a holistic psychotherapist, life coach, and couples counselor specializing in Jungian depth psychology and spiritual transformation. With a PhD in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, she integrates Jungian analysis, Psychosynthesis, and somatic practices to help clients uncover unconscious patterns, heal trauma, and foster authentic self-expression. Her extensive training includes certifications in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), HeartMath, Reiki, and the Enneagram, as well as studies in archetypal astrology and the Gene Keys. Formerly a corporate consultant, Dr. Bren now offers online sessions to individuals and couples worldwide, guiding them through personalized journeys of healing and self-discovery.
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FAQ's
1. How does Kalsched’s trauma model differ from IFS?
Kalsched describes a split of the Self into archetypal forces, not cooperative protective parts.
2. What is the Protector-Persecutor?
An archetypal defense that guards trauma by attacking intimacy, compassion, and therapeutic closeness.
3. Why is flattening the psyche a problem?
It erases developmental, symbolic, and structural complexity essential for understanding symptoms.
4. How can IFS lead to false memories?
By activating symbolic imagery without teaching how to hold it symbolically rather than literally.
5. When is parts work unsafe?
When interiority, symbolic capacity, and emotional regulation are not yet established.
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