Oneselves, by Louis Baldwin
Mar. 4th, 2020 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeSo, my copy of Oneselves arrived, and I finished reading it! It was exactly what I needed: brief thumbnail descriptions of a bunch of Ye Olde Multis from 1811-1981. (The book was published in 1984, so is itself a magical time capsule to before the Memory Wars.) It's also pretty exhaustive in its sources, so I can fact-check everything I read. Hooray and thank goodness! Here's a few interesting tidbits:
First, the multiple known as "Alma Z." They were around back in the 1890s, and there were three headmates, who went by "Number One" (the "original," I guess), "Twoey," and "The Boy," who may or may not have been male, it's not clear to me. Apparently all three got along famously, wanted each other to do well, were generally welcomed and liked by their family and folks around them, and it looks like their multiplicity wasn't considered a problem that needed to be solved. (Although Number One didn't have shared memory with Twoey and the Boy, they did with her, and Twoey would leave notes for Number One letting her know what'd happened and what she needed to know.) Though Oneselves isn't available online or in ebook form, you can read a decent chunk about the Almas here.
Second, seeing how the camps of multiples (though many wouldn't be considered multiple now) changed over time. You had the fugue cases like Ansel Bourne (the guys who'd basically walk off, blank out, and then come to in another town months or years later, discovering they'd been living and going about their business for a while), the spiritualists (who saw themselves as channeling spirits, had overlap with creativity, mediumship, and reincarnation), the age regressors (who returned to infancy and had to be retaught everything), and then giving way to the super-traumatized multis. It's really interesting! At least a few of the cases seem to have been related to brain damage or head injuries.
And then you have the reactions of the folks around them. There's a number of families who seem to have basically gone, "Welp, I guess this is how it is now" and just got back to business. And then you have John Kinsel, who started switching while in college, and apparently all the folks around him knew what his deal was. His classmates took to getting him to switch back by rubbing his face, and then when that stopped working, spanking him with heavy books. (Eventually that stopped working too and they gave up. John's roommate was apparently instrumental in helping them out.)
Finally, there's a multiple who I hadn't heard of but the one multi in the book who was absolutely for certain not white--"Jonah," who was black and apparently had every psych test in the book thrown at him in the 1970s. He's apparently pretty well known in academic circles, but I'd managed to just... miss him until now, I guess. So I'll be digging into the citations on that! Dude might still be alive! (If you want to Google them, Googling his headmates' names are easier, namely King Young and Usoffa Abdulla.)
Even better, Oneselves includes every single one of the multiples from the Book of Lists #2, with the exception of Anna Winsor/Old Stump. (And I GUESS Gina Rinaldi, but that's because BOL#2 totally screwed the pooch on that one and got their facts all messed up. I mention in my notes on the post that I couldn't find Rinaldi referenced anywhere, that she was the Amazing Disappearing Multi, but the reality was so much weirder. It looks like Gina Rinaldi was a subsystem of Chris Costner Sizemore! Quoting from the Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 4, number 2, in 1978: "Integral to the first part of the case report on the 'Three Faces of Eve' is the background and chronology of one of Eve's multiple personalities [headmades], Gina Rinaldi. Her intelligence and cooperation made psychogenetic material easy to obtain, and access to one of her subselves, Mary Sushine, was a significant breakthrough..." No wonder I couldn't find her, Jesus Christ!) So I can toss out the BOL#2's unsourced, mostly garbled crap and just replace it with this slim volume on my shelf.
First, the multiple known as "Alma Z." They were around back in the 1890s, and there were three headmates, who went by "Number One" (the "original," I guess), "Twoey," and "The Boy," who may or may not have been male, it's not clear to me. Apparently all three got along famously, wanted each other to do well, were generally welcomed and liked by their family and folks around them, and it looks like their multiplicity wasn't considered a problem that needed to be solved. (Although Number One didn't have shared memory with Twoey and the Boy, they did with her, and Twoey would leave notes for Number One letting her know what'd happened and what she needed to know.) Though Oneselves isn't available online or in ebook form, you can read a decent chunk about the Almas here.
Second, seeing how the camps of multiples (though many wouldn't be considered multiple now) changed over time. You had the fugue cases like Ansel Bourne (the guys who'd basically walk off, blank out, and then come to in another town months or years later, discovering they'd been living and going about their business for a while), the spiritualists (who saw themselves as channeling spirits, had overlap with creativity, mediumship, and reincarnation), the age regressors (who returned to infancy and had to be retaught everything), and then giving way to the super-traumatized multis. It's really interesting! At least a few of the cases seem to have been related to brain damage or head injuries.
And then you have the reactions of the folks around them. There's a number of families who seem to have basically gone, "Welp, I guess this is how it is now" and just got back to business. And then you have John Kinsel, who started switching while in college, and apparently all the folks around him knew what his deal was. His classmates took to getting him to switch back by rubbing his face, and then when that stopped working, spanking him with heavy books. (Eventually that stopped working too and they gave up. John's roommate was apparently instrumental in helping them out.)
Finally, there's a multiple who I hadn't heard of but the one multi in the book who was absolutely for certain not white--"Jonah," who was black and apparently had every psych test in the book thrown at him in the 1970s. He's apparently pretty well known in academic circles, but I'd managed to just... miss him until now, I guess. So I'll be digging into the citations on that! Dude might still be alive! (If you want to Google them, Googling his headmates' names are easier, namely King Young and Usoffa Abdulla.)
Even better, Oneselves includes every single one of the multiples from the Book of Lists #2, with the exception of Anna Winsor/Old Stump. (And I GUESS Gina Rinaldi, but that's because BOL#2 totally screwed the pooch on that one and got their facts all messed up. I mention in my notes on the post that I couldn't find Rinaldi referenced anywhere, that she was the Amazing Disappearing Multi, but the reality was so much weirder. It looks like Gina Rinaldi was a subsystem of Chris Costner Sizemore! Quoting from the Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 4, number 2, in 1978: "Integral to the first part of the case report on the 'Three Faces of Eve' is the background and chronology of one of Eve's multiple personalities [headmades], Gina Rinaldi. Her intelligence and cooperation made psychogenetic material easy to obtain, and access to one of her subselves, Mary Sushine, was a significant breakthrough..." No wonder I couldn't find her, Jesus Christ!) So I can toss out the BOL#2's unsourced, mostly garbled crap and just replace it with this slim volume on my shelf.
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Date: 2020-03-05 01:34 am (UTC)I had to reread this several times to make sure that I was still in this world and not, in fact, reading some bizarre StarCraft II supplementary article.
Hooray for more reliable sources! Man, hearing about how the folks around them treated them REALLY makes me wonder just how much the big MPD/DID push changed not only systems' perceptions of themselves, but the perception of people around them. Like without all of these clinical ideas, what kind of environment would we exist in today?
The cynical part of me wants to say that we'd still be marginalized and considered insane, but... even though I have a feeling that'd be partly true just because society's set up to marginalize anyone who doesn't fit a convenient, productive model of normal, I've also been looking at all these multi-souled traditions across culture and scratching my head. How much of this is really inevitable and how much of it just feels inevitable because it's all we've ever known?
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Date: 2020-03-05 01:55 am (UTC)I mean, one thing about the "how folks treated them"... I think a lot depends on just the people around, and the culture around them. Like, I didn't make it FAR into the disabled history reader, but I got the impression that Back In Ye Olden Day, there just weren't enough resources or people to really make throwing someone out as Too Crazy To Function workable, unless it was completely unavoidable... especially in the really small towns where you only have so many workers to go around.
You can't handle being around people? Well, we still got cows that need milking, and corn that needs planting. You're not up to physical labor and believe you're being badgered by demons half the time? Well, you still manage to keep it together enough to teach school, and this is before we had a strict school schedule.
Like, the author of Oneselves seems boggled at how weirdly tolerant folks were of John Kinsel, but it was 1903, before antibiotics! There were probably a lot more people with various health problems around, and the idea of doing things to help them out may have been more of an ingrained social norm. (Kinsel also had SEVERE vision problems; his roommate had to do a lot of the reading for him. He probably wasn't the only person with cataracts, so spanking him with books may not have seemed that weird!)
Of course, it also relied a LOT on what folks were around you. There are other folks in the book who clearly fell through the cracks, just like today, and spent their lives in institutions or jails.
--Mori
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Date: 2020-03-06 09:47 pm (UTC)This definitely fits with what we've read about how autistic people got along before universal schooling and demands to make them "indistinguishable from their peers." If you could lean to milk cows, harvest crops, cut wood, etc, there was a place for you. The crops/milk/wood were far more valuable, in terms of the family's survival, than the person who produced them being able to act "normal" at all times. Even well into the 20th century, institutionalization was only for those who could afford to ship their children off to institutions for years on end. In our father's mostly working-class family, there were a LOT of neurodiverse people, including at least one who went through a long nonverbal phase, that the family found ways to accomodate because they didn't have the money to send them away and pretend they didn't exist. All of them eventually went on to live independent lives, or independent lives supported by relatives or close friends/roommates.
There were probably a lot more people with various health problems around, and the idea of doing things to help them out may have been more of an ingrained social norm.
Yeah, I feel like this is something that's been lost in larger US culture. When you had no hospitals, no specialized caretakers, and everyone was used to dealing with chamberpots anyway, cleaning someone who was too ill to leave their bed for months on end was just something you did, because there was no one else to do it for you. I mean, I'm not suggesting going back to that specific way of life, but... Well, it's always struck us how in a lot of non-Western rural cultures, modern Western anthropologists tend to be amazed at families actually loving and caring for severely disabled people, as if the only reaction they expected was for them to be thrown off a cliff or something. I mean, we've met people who are amazed when we mention evidence that prehistoric people cared for their elderly and disabled, because of this modern notion that "primitive people" only care for the "survival of the fittest."
-Amaranth and Istevia
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Date: 2020-03-07 12:23 am (UTC)When you had no hospitals, no specialized caretakers, and everyone was used to dealing with chamberpots anyway, cleaning someone who was too ill to leave their bed for months on end was just something you did, because there was no one else to do it for you.
Yup! Home funerals were the norm in the US till around the Civil War; there was a regular contact with death that we generally don't have now. A lot of people are HORRIFIED at the idea now, but that's because... well, they don't know what dead bodies are like and are so unfamiliar with them that the idea of keeping one IN YOUR HOUSE for a few days and then wrapping 'em up in the sheets and cleaning them up just sounds like a horror movie scenario, instead of just... what you do. (And believe you me, if we COULD have that simple, cost-effective "visit LB in their own bed at home and say bye, toss them in a hole in the yard," we WOULD. Now you just plain can't do that unless you live out in the boonies.)
The thing about severely disabled folks is... a lot of us can still do SOMETHING, even if it's not something businesses value. But that doesn't mean it's worthless! I have a friend who can't really do a lot, but their guidance and sense and kind listening have been a huge boon, and they don't seem to realize how much that means to me! And that's not even getting into the respected roles that the elderly have in a bunch of societies.
Obviously, each society has valued different abilities in different ways, and probably every single one of them had a kind of disability they just Would Not Accept. But social Darwinism had to be invented; it's not a cosmic truth.
--Rogan
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Date: 2020-03-05 05:28 am (UTC)--Hikaru
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Date: 2020-03-05 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-05 08:28 am (UTC)That's so cute! Especially when in contrast with Sybil...
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Date: 2020-03-05 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-05 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-06 09:32 pm (UTC)I think William James wrote at one point about Anna Winsor/Old Stump? Boris Sidis might have mentioned them too, but James got away with discussing a lot of unorthodox stuff because he was so widely respected in the field of English-speaking psychology, and was interested in multiplicity on and off throughout his career.
The brain damage and head injuries stuff is something we've always wondered about in conjunction with the stuff you don't see much any more, like the fugue cases or the ones who regressed into a state where they had to relearn everything from scratch. Nowadays, if someone lapsed into a coma and didn't wake up for five days, the family would probably seek medical attention right away, but back then, all that some people could do, especially in rural areas, was to cross their fingers and hope or pray that they'd wake up. Boris Sidis was especially interested in brain trauma as a cause of multiplicity. It would be interesting to see if that sort of plurality is still seen in areas of the world where the vast majority of people don't have access to hospitals or modern medical treatment. (...it's also something we've wondered/angsted about for ourselves a bit, since we had a TBI in early childhood that wasn't properly treated, but we have to accept there are some things we may never have answers for.)
I've also wondered if the medicine given to the patients ever played any role. IIRC Mary Reynolds was given a lot of "purgatives"-- stuff to make them throw up, basically-- and a lot of other things used as medicine had more of a toxic than beneficial effect. It was common well into the 19th century for patients to be given medicine containing mercury as "treatment" for syphilis, and a lot of people had occupational or household exposure to lead. Both of those are very potent neurotoxins, and we've always wondered if some cases of "hysterical blindness/deafness/paralysis" might have been connected to mercury, since it's known to cause those things. Lead poisoning tends to cause paranoia, erratic behavior, and hallucinations (there's quite a lot of detail on its effects if you read about factory workers who were exposed to it in the early 20th century, when people began to raise concerns about its safety).
-Amaranth
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Date: 2020-03-07 12:08 am (UTC)And you're right, James did write up Anna Winsor/Old Stump. I'd like to read up on them more, just... so much to do, so little time, heh.
I mean, I dunno that it counts as a TBI, but we gave ourselves a heck of a concussion sometime in middle school... and huh, come to think of it, that was around the time we went plural. (Probably a little later, though, not that we can know for sure.) We didn't get treatment for it either, we didn't realize until adulthood that concussions are apparently kind of a big deal?
Oh man, the toxin case for the hysterical blind/deaf/paralysis would explain a lot, I was always kinda perplexed by that, since it was written as so common, especially in the early cases, but not quite so much now? (I mean, we got some probably-psychosomatic mobility impairment and leg weakness during the homeless year... but the stress level was INTENSE. Thankfully that hasn't been a thing for us the past few years, it SUUUUUCKED.)
--Rogan
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Date: 2020-03-11 03:57 am (UTC)We sort of imprinted on it in high school because we were covertly thinking of it as How To Plural. We can still recite whole passages of it that we would really like to be able to forget. x_x The Jonah reference, though, wasn't something we consciously thought about much. It just got triggered back into consciousness when we read the names, apparently.
William James is someone we would... recommend reading only in excerpts if you don't have a lot of time and patience, because his writing is very, very sloggy to wade through, and we've only gotten through excerpts. I mean, it's MEANINGFUL slog, not like the Bad Translations From French Is How To Write Queer Theory school (he could read Janet et al in the original French, so he didn't need bad translations), but it's slog nonetheless.
We didn't get treatment for it either, we didn't realize until adulthood that concussions are apparently kind of a big deal?
Concussions and TBIs can be really tricky business, which is acknowledged even by doctors who deal with them. Two people can get the exact same head injury and one will recover while the other develops impairments, and there's still no good way to predict who will go in which direction. Some people also have no "typical" concussion symptoms and think they're fine, only to find themselves struggling with cognitive impairments of some kind later.
It sounds for you guys, though, like the line from trauma to plurality was a lot more straightforward. I mean, only you're the ones who can judge for sure, but. We've also come across a few writings on Ye Olde Multiples in which vague terminology like "struck on the head" seemed to be a euphemism for abuse that extended far beyond that one incident. Doris Fischer, one of the other systems who's not talked about much any more, was alleged to have become multiple when she was "thrown roughly to the floor" by her father, and I was like..... yeeeaaah, I'm not quite buying that. (Also can't remember if it was Michael Kenny or Ian Hacking who said this, but whoever it was said that in one of Morton Prince's writeups about "B C A," he seemed to be skirting around saying that being raped by her husband was the trigger for them becoming plural.)
-Amaranth
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Date: 2020-03-11 04:40 pm (UTC)Two people can get the exact same head injury and one will recover while the other develops impairments, and there's still no good way to predict who will go in which direction.
Yeah, and also, getting asphyxiated a lot probably could've done the job too. We definitely sometimes have trouble doing things, but who knows whether it's psychological or neurological at this point, and we've never been tested so will probably never know.
Oh man, ha, yeah, Doris Fischer was totally from an abusive home from what I read.
At the same time though, I feel a little... I dunno if dubious is right, since we're clearly a multiple whose multiplicity is influenced by trauma, but I also feel like... I dunno. I see how the concept of medical multi evolves over time, and how the abuse like gets worse and worse over the years as "acceptable" or the "norm" involving MPD/DID, and it still bothers me a little. Especially with how it ties into a lot of people's terror that their trauma "isn't bad enough" and how it's used to be a dick to people. And also because I still want there to be room for multiples who HAVEN'T experienced that. (Plus, can't lie, racism is still a big part of why I kinda go hmm. Because black women were fighting against institutionalized rape and child abuse in antilynching and antislavery activism, but medical multiplicity is STILL seen as such a "white lady" thing. It's like, were there tons of black women multiples that just fell through the cracks en masse because of racism? Is medical multiplicity in some ways a white culture-bound syndrome and other cultures have their own ways of dealing? How is it we have this history of anti-rape campaigns and yet medical multiplicity, which is SO associated with sexual violence now, be completely absent in discussion of this portion of history?)
--Rogan
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Date: 2020-03-13 11:26 am (UTC)"Overt"/"florid" DID is rare, and in our experience usually manifests once the system is relatively physically safe (which is less likely to happen to a system experiencing severe systematic oppression). Or else "overt" DID manifests during a crisis as dissociative psychosis (paper written by Turkish doctors), which is easy to misdiagnose as a primary psychotic disorder. This happened to our brother, on our watch, and we're now kicking ourselves for letting it happen. We had no idea what was going on then.
There's a lot of evidence that trauma -> dissociation -> multiplicity is not a culture-bound syndrome; but the way it manifests, if it manifests "overtly," is very culturally influenced.
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Date: 2020-03-13 12:14 pm (UTC)Also, gotta love the paper saying that none of the patients reported sexual violence, but one of them talked about it extensively while in an agitated state they read as psychotic (dissociatively or otherwise). All the doctors our brother saw did that to him too, and allowed our mother free access to him even though he reported things she'd done to him. Including when he was over 18 and asked not to have any contact with her; they violated HIPAA and told her everything he said.