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: 2020-03-07 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