Oneselves, by Louis Baldwin

[lb_lee]

So, 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.

 

Comments

[hungryghosts]

"Her intelligence and cooperation made psychogenetic material easy to obtain"

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?

[talewisefellowship]

This stuff is super interesting! Do you think the Book of Lists mainly used Oneselves as a source?

--Hikaru

[dreamer_marie]

(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.)

That's so cute! Especially when in contrast with Sybil...

[lithophiles]

You know, I could swear that Jonah and his system were mentioned at the tail end of Sybil, where they discuss a few other multiples that Cornelia Wilbur treated. I don't remember much else about them except that I recognize those names. I really, really don't want to read Sybil again, though, so I'll try digging into Google for more information about them.

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