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Quick'n'Dirty Plural History... Part 1 (1811-1980ish)
Quick’N’Dirty Plural History (see also: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4)
Summary: "I may not be multiple, but I'm certainly plural! " - Jaye
Word Count: 3200 of at least 9000
Notes: This one won the Patreon vote by a landslide! This is the textual essay version of my video presentation for the Plural Positivity Conference, and sorry guys, even with the “quick and dirty” bit, it’s going to be long. Also, I can’t lie, most of my citations and sources for the early folks I only know about thanks to Baldwin’s Oneselves.
We’ve seen online plural groups rise, fall, and disappear into the ether over the years. So much of our history is so ephemeral, and those who forget are doomed to regret. When we remember our history, we learn from its successes and failures, build on its foundation, and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone. So let’s talk plural history!
We’re using “plural” as an umbrella term to describe more than one person in a body, but that covers a huge swathe of cultures, time periods, places, and pissing contests. One person could never cover them all, and our ignorance is profound. Tulpas, metaphysical multiplicity, otherkin, daemonism, religious and non-medical cultural frameworks of plurality, just about anything outside the USA… we don’t talk about them here not because they don’t exist, aren’t plural, or aren’t important, but because we ourself don’t know much about them. Our meager start is just that: a start.
Reading this essay, you will encounter folks you think don’t belong under the plural umbrella. Rather than debate who to include, focus on how people decide what plural is and how those ideas change. The umbrella is constantly changing, and it mostly exists for narrative convenience. Even when plural communities share a time, place, and identity, they often operate in parallel, ignorant of each other’s existence, reinventing the wheel and never realizing that their pet bugaboos aren’t universal. One place’s wank is another place’s “what?”
Even though it’s over-represented in discussions on plural history, this essay’s focus is going to be most on medical multi circles (Multiple Personality Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder, and the pissing contests around all of the above), followed by groups that formed in backlash to medical multi but still used it as a framework (empowered multiplicity, natural multiplicity), and soulbonding. These are the groups we were in, and they’re the ones we know; they’re not the be-all end-all of plurality by a long shot.
We can’t talk about where we are now without discussing how we got here. So let’s do a 3000 word Cliff Notes rush through it!
Pre-DSM-I Plurals
More than one person to a body is not a new thing. “One body gets one person/soul/mind/personality forever,” isn’t a scientific idea; it’s a cultural one and not universal. Different cultures have their own definitions of personhood, selfhood, souls, spirits, and what the appropriate numbers are—in Judaism, people get an extra soul on the Shabbat; the Iroquois have the gannigonr-ha and the erienta (Mann, 2004); and then there’s the citations on the “soul dualism” article on Wikipedia. Trying to define which is plural and what isn’t would take a whole other essay to cover, but we want to break this idea that plurality was invented by (or belongs to) white medical personnel and the people they treat.
So Mary Reynolds wasn’t “the first multiple”; there’s no such thing. (And she might not be considered multiple anymore herself; a childhood textbook of mine recategorized her as “conversion disorder.”) But she’s been called the first multiple (Baldwin; Wallace et al), probably because she was a white woman seen as suffering a medical problem, so let’s talk about her.
Reynolds’s case was reported in a few places from the 1830s on, and some of the details vary, but the basics (as reported in Mitchell, 1889) are: in 1811, mopey Mary Reynolds went into a very deep sleep, and woke up with no memory and a buoyant new personality who didn’t recognize Mary’s family as her own. These two states (as Mary herself referred to them) had no shared memory, always switched in her sleep, and did so for decades, until she settled permanently into her cheerful second state when she was thirty-six years old, in 1829. She died in 1854. Like many early medicalized multiples, she reported no trauma, though a century later, a therapist argued that early religious persecution in childhood qualified (Goodwin, 1987).
After Reynolds, more multiples (or people categorized as such) started cropping up among white society. While it’s risky to try and lump them into groups after the fact, there are a few types that share characteristics… and yes, a lot of them aren’t considered multiple nowadays.
For instance, there were some folks whose “switches” altered less their personality than their memory. Some of the more famous ones wandered off, “woke up” somewhere else, and got upset about it. (These wanderers are now called psychogenic/dissociative fugue cases.) Ansel Bourne was the most famous and only had the one big switch recorded, though it was apparently enough to scare the bejesus out of him (James, 1890, pg. 391-393). Following a severe head injury in World War I, “C. J. Poulting”/“John Charles Poultney” (names in quotes are pseudonyms) switched multiple times, leading to multiple stints in the British army, being mistaken for American and shipped back there, only to be taken in as the long-lost relative of Seventh Day Adventists, which he didn’t seem thrilled about (Franz, 1933). George Robertson, from 1901, seems to have been even more variable, probably not helped by multiple head injuries, and his switching led to him being arrested for desertion from the US army (Baldwin, 1984).
There were also people who didn’t wander off, and merely suffered intense (though hopefully somewhat temporary) memory loss probably due to brain damage, either from head injury like Reverend Thomas Hanna (Unknown, 1904), or gas leak, such as “Mr. S” (Dana, 1894), who Baldwin calls Peter Scott. These folks, after the whack on the head (or gas inhalation), lost access to most of their memories and had to be retaught. If they were lucky, the amnesia wore off; if they weren’t, they were stuck relearning everything, though more quickly than the first time around.
And then you have the case of Alma Z., from 1893 (as recounted in Sidis and Goodhart, 1904). The personalities of Alma—No. 1, Twoey, and No. 3, AKA “the Boy”—apparently got along not just with each other, but with their corporeal circle as well, and apparently had some measure of co-consciousness. At one point, their doctor describes taking Numbers 1 and 3 to an orchestra—Number 3 is in charge, but Number 1 especially wants to hear the music, so they switch, leading to this exchange:
“‘So No. 1 came to hear her favorite concerto?’ [No. 3 asked.]
“I replied, ‘Yes; how did you know it?’
“‘Oh, I was here and listened to it, too.’
“‘Where were you?’ I asked.
“‘I sat on the front of the box. I saw you speaking to her [No. 1]. How greatly she enjoyed the music!'”
These multiples were a variegated lot. There was a lot of overlap with sleepwalkers, amnesiacs, and what nowadays might be framed as trance states. The words used to describe their condition varied too! Plumer (1860) and Mitchell (1889) call Reynolds “a case of double consciousness,” James calls Ansel Bourne “a case of alternate personality of the ‘ambulatory’ sort” in 1890, Dana uses “double consciousness” to describe Peter Scott in 1894, while Cutten calls John Kinsel a “double personality” in 1903, and Sidis uses “multiple personality” for Hanna and “manifold personality” for Alma Z. Come 1908, Morton Prince is already complaining that “cases of this kind are commonly known as ‘double’ or ‘multiple personality,’ according to the number of persons [headmates] represented, but a more correct term is disintegrated personality, for each secondary personality is a part only of a normal whole self” (pg. 3). Good to know that bickering over multi terminology was a thing even a hundred years ago! But this was before the creation of the DSM-I in 1952, made in part to help standardize things.
Furthermore, multiplicity (or whatever you prefer to call it), had some intersections with what would now be considered religious or supernatural. John Kinsel, for instance, wasn’t just an impressive sleepwalker, but known for navigating the world perfectly with his eyes tight shut, and his “asleep” self was apparently prone to reciting endless streams of crummy poetry (Cutten, 1903). Both Bourne and Reynolds became (possibly psychosomatically) paralyzed or deaf or blind, only to then miraculously recover (Bourne, 1858; Mitchell, 1889). But none hold a candle to the spiritualists.
Covering spiritualism would be a book all on its own, and I know very little about it, so the very short version is: in 1848, the young Fox sisters started trolling their guardians by faking rapping sounds as spirit communication and created a religious movement in the process. For our purposes, the most relevant part of spiritualism was its belief that the dead (or spirits) could contact the living, bestowing helpful advice and support. The spirits could communicate in various ways, such as making rapping sounds, moving objects… or by taking over their human channels directly, through automatic writing or speaking aloud. In other words, using modern slang, the spirits could front sometimes, and since said spirits were the dead, they were adamant about being separate people, with separate life stories and experiences from their mediums.
Probably the most famous of these mediums perceived as multiple, “Hélène Smith” (real name Catherine-Elise Muller), had a book written about her; the English translation is titled From India to the Planet Mars, (Flournoy, 1900), which contains Muller’s illustrations of Martian landscapes and depictions of the Martian script, which Flournoy (a professor of psychology) broke down as French-derived. (Muller was French.) But while she was possibly the most famous and had the most unusual of other-worlds, she wasn’t the only one. Other spiritualist mediums hosted cross-ethnic and cross-gender spirits, seemingly more often than other plurals we’ve seen around this time, and they seemed more likely to emphasize worlds and experience outside the corporeal.
While plurals (or plural-ish folks) were described or noted in the USA during this time, proper explanations as to why were light on the ground. Childhood trauma or abuse was mostly unstated or ignored, though it’s not hard to at times find strong implications—Ansel Bourne, for instance, self-reports that his father died when he was seven, and that he was living in poverty and had to leave school to work in the factories from the age of thirteen on (Bourne, 1858, pg. 5). “V. L.” (who Baldwin calls Victor Laval—don’t know where he got the name from) was “born of an unmarried mother, who was ‘addicted to an open life of debauchery, and of an unknown father, he began to roam and beg on the streets as soon as he could walk” (Sidis and Goodwin, 1904, Chapter XXIII, Part III, paragraph 21), while George Robertson apparently was on bad terms with his father, to the point that he left home at fourteen and at twenty-one was dealt a heavy blow to the head while fighting with him (Baldwin, pg. 28—see Gilbert 1902 for the citation he gives, which I’ve been unable to dig up). Those are the earliest references we know about.
But abuse, even child or sexual abuse, was not an unknown political cause at this time—it was more of a black cause, wrapped into antislavery and antilynching activism (see McGuire, 2010). After all, the slavery mindset is an inherently abusive one—it makes people into things, to be used and abused at whim. If trauma does indeed cause some forms of multiplicity, then historically black frameworks of plurality just begs for discussion.
Medical multiplicity was overwhelmingly applied to white folks, but fairly gender-balanced until around the turn of the 20th century, where women started overtaking the men. Part of this may have been that spiritualist mediums tended more towards women. Though we’re less sure about this, so take it with a grain of salt, medical multiplicity also may have started becoming a “white lady” thing around the time it became a trauma thing.
The MPD Movie Machine
You know what we really have to thank for the popular conception of multiplicity today? Movies. Books were big, but movies really had the oomph.
In 1886, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came out, and like it or not, became an indelible part of America’s cultural narrative about multiplicity. Just about every well-known multiple gets compared to them sooner or later, even as early as 1904 (Unknown, 1904), and this was only the start of a longstanding tradition blurring fiction and reality.
In 1954, Shirley Jackson wrote The Bird’s Nest. It was a twisted family drama involving a system of five, and in April 1957, it came out in movie form, called Lizzie. In the movie version, the titular multiple is only a system of three—a shy retiring woman, the bad girl who likes sleeping around, and the well-adjusted woman who becomes the last headmate standing. If it sounds familiar to the characterization of Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane in The Three Faces of Eve, it’s because that book and movie were also made in 1957; according to the US Copyright Office, the book was copyrighted January 15th, a few months before Lizzie, and the movie came out in September, less than six months after. Who was riding whose coat-tails?
Chris Costner Sizemore, by the way, the actual Eve, later went public in saying that the Three Faces of Eve was never accurate—her headmates came in rotating rosters of three, but there were over twenty of them. She ended up writing three of her own memoirs to try and correct the misconceptions (Strangers In My Mind, I’m Eve, and A Mind of My Own) but when the movie rights came up, Fox said they owned the film rights to her life story, past, present, and future (Brozan, 1989). One of Sizemore’s headmates (no longer in existence) had signed over the rights to their therapist in the 1950s, and though they settled out of court, the possible movie future was tanked. So not only was the Three Faces of Eve fictionalized, but that fiction trumped the real life of the multiple in question! Get used to these creepy interactions between patient and therapist and salesman, not just fiction and reality, because it’ll be a theme, oh yes.
This was in the time of the DSM-I, where multiple personality (or “dissociated personality”) was considered a subtype of “dissociative reaction.” In 1968, the DSM-II came out and renamed it “hysterical neurosis: dissociative type,” which shows its genderedness; hysteria was (and is) traditionally applied to women. From here on out, male multiples are exceptions to the rule.
In 1973, Sybil comes out, and it gets its own very popular movie in 1976. The book is the first place we’ve seen people using “multiple” as a stand-alone noun; Sybil herself uses it in a joke about her cat. Until a better citation comes up, we’ll credit her with the coinage. It spreads out into more common use from there on out (such as in Newman, 1977). Though Sybil notes a black male multiple named Jonah (with headmates King Young, Usoffa Abdulla, Sammy, and Jusky), who was studied thoroughly, there was no movie or pop cultural depiction, and they fell into comparative obscurity (Brandsma and Ludwig, 1974). This too will become an ongoing theme, of white multiples being given disparate prominence, to the point that it becomes considered “a white woman’s affliction” (Young, 2017).
In June 1977, “Henry Hawksworth’s” The Five of Me comes out, possibly riding the coattails of Sybil. Hawksworth was a violent rapist (Newman, 1977, paragraph 2) and used multiplicity in his defense against a drunk driving charge, claiming that since his drunk-driving headmate no longer existed, he couldn’t be charged. It too got a made-for-TV movie (with the same title) in 1981, which is the same year as the release of…
The Minds of Billy Milligan, by Daniel Keyes. At least it didn’t get a movie. (Though it’s in production hell and has been for over a decade. Apparently Joel Schumacher was set to direct it!) Milligan robbed and raped three women in October 1977, got caught, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity due to being multiple, and ended up acquitted (though hospitalized). We’re not sure whether Hawksworth’s book influenced Milligan’s defense or whether Milligan’s arrest spurred public interest and got Hawksworth’s movie made, but the stories are similar enough to each other (a male multiple rapist who uses multiplicity in a legal defense) that it seems unlikely to be pure coincidence.
It’s around this time, in 1980, that the DSM III gets made, along with the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder, reflecting how the condition is coming more and more into the public eye. Cross-gender and cross-ethnic alters are noted in this edition of the DSM, and it also states outright that mostly women get MPD… despite the earlier gender parity. (Race is downplayed.)
1980 is also when Michelle Remembers gets published. Though not a multi book itself, it follows a lot of the same tropes: a bestseller about gruesome child abuse where the patient develops an enmeshed relationship with a saintly therapist who’s involved in writing the book (and in this case, marries the patient/other author). It’s debunked and doesn’t get made into a movie, apparently due to Michelle’s father threatening to sue (Allen and Midwinter, 1990, paragraph 15). This coins the term “ritual abuse,” which becomes its own thread of the medical multiplicity narrative.
But that narrative is becoming its own beast. It’s based on profit and the dramatic rules of fiction, not reality as told by the multiples themselves. Pop cultural multi books and movies become their own genre with their own rules and conventions (the therapeutic journey, the return to singlethood as happy ending), their own stock character types—the saintly therapist, the evil alter, the hapless suffering host, the well-adjusted final product. It’s no coincidence that Chris Costner Sizemore’s books aren’t as well known as the Three Faces of Eve, or Jonah as well known as Sybil; they don’t fit the narrative, and the money doesn’t get thrown behind them.
Through these pop cultural depictions (along with a renewed social awareness and interest in child abuse), more and more people are hearing about MPD, and more and more people are diagnosing it. This leads to an “epidemic” of MPD diagnoses in the 1980s (leading into the ‘90s); even as early as 1984, people were noticing the increase (Baldwin, x). The trauma histories being reported in said pop cultural depictions are also getting more and more gruesome—what probably started as a sales concern of “if it bleeds, it leads” required stiffer doses of horror to make an impression on jaded audiences. Sizemore, in the 1950s, “just” reported deaths in her family. Sybil, The Five of Me, and The Minds of Billy Milligan go to physical abuse, with Milligan reporting being buried alive. By the 1980s, intense child abuse is a given, preferably sexual; it’s hard to find an MPD memoir without gruesome detail.
The backlash is also thunderclouds on the horizon. Medical multiplicity, as “white lady thing,” is also becoming a second wave feminist thing, associated with the (latest) rise in popular awareness of rape and child abuse, and the opposition is bound to show up. There are plenty of easy targets, what with the codependent patient/therapist relationships and the racism—perversely, the erasure of the multiples of color who do exist make it easier for critics to pretend that they don’t exist at all and medical multiplicity is just “bored white housewife syndrome.”
It’s in the eye of this building fecal hurricane that medical multiples start finding each other, building community, and that’s when the real fun begins.
Continue to Part 2!
Sources and Recommended Reading
Allen, Denna and Janet Midwinter. (1990). Michelle Remembers: The Debunking of a Myth. http://xeper.org/pub/lib/xp_lib_wh_DebunkingOfAMyth.htm Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20040511131253/http://xeper.org/pub/lib/xp_lib_wh_DebunkingOfAMyth.htm
Baldwin, Louis. (1984). Oneselves: multiple personalities, 1811-1981. Jefferson: McFarland.
A short digest of a bunch of old multiples of yore that’s out of print. Read this instead of Wallace et al; it does about the same job, but more thoroughly and with citations, and they mention a lot of the same people, making us suspect that they had similar inspirations.
Bourne, Ansel. (1858). Wonderful Works of God: A Narrative of the Wonderful Facts in the Case of Ansel Bourne of Westerly, Rhode Island, Who, In The Midst of Opposition to the Christian Religion Was Suddenly Struck Blind, Dumb, and Deaf, and After Eighteen Days Was Suddenly and Completely Restored In the Presence of Hundreds of Persons, in the Christian Chapel At Westerly, on the 15th of November, 1857. Irvington, N.J: Moses Cummings, Office of the Christian Messenger.
Brandsma, Jeffrey M., and Arnold M. Ludwig. (1974). A case of multiple personality: Diagnosis and therapy. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Retrieved from https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/00207147408413001
Brozan, Nadine. (1989). The Real ‘Eve’ Sues to Film the Rest of Her Story. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/07/movies/the-real-eve-sues-to-film-the-rest-of-her-story.html
Dana, Charles L. (1894). The study of a case of amnesia or 'double consciousness'. Psychological Review. Retrieved from https://sci-hub.tw/10.1037/h0065762
Boring as hell and finding this stupid article took me forever.
Flournoy, Théodore (translator: Daniel B. Vermilye). (1900). From India to the Planet Mars. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Franz, Shepherd Ivory. (1933). Persons, One and Three: A Study in Multiple Personalities. New York: Whittlesey house. Retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002704081&view=1up&seq=15
Hard to find, but surprisingly readable. While digging for this stupid thing, I found someone applauding Franz for doing so much incredibly boring-ass work, and this is accurate. A lot of this book is him trying to piece things together and be as thorough as possible.
Gilbert, J. A. (1902). X. New York Medical Record, pg. 207-11.
Goodwin, J. (1987). Mary Reynolds: a post-traumatic reinterpretation of a classic case of multiple personality disorder. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3308663
James, William. (1890). The Principles of Psychotherapy. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin10.htm
Keyes, Daniel. (1981). The Minds of Billy Milligan. New York: Random House.
Mann, B. A. (2004). Iroquoian women: The gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang. (326-329)
You can read the transcription Polyfrazzlemented sent us here: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1094585.html#cutid1
McGuire, Danielle L. (2010). At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Vintage Books.
Mitchell, S. Weir (1889). Mary Reynolds: A Case of Double Consciousness. Philadelphia: Wm. J. Dornan. Retrieved from https://memory.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd0001/2012/20120723003ma/20120723003ma.pdf
Newman, Donna Joy (1973, June 23). Tempo: ‘I led five lives’ – the incredible story of Henry Hawksworth.’ Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1977/06/23/page/15/article/tempo
Plumer, William S. (1860). Mary Reynolds: A case of double consciousness. Harper’s Magazine. Retrieved from https://harpers.org/archive/1860/05/mary-reynolds/
Prince, Morton. (1908). The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Schreiber, Flora Rheta (1973). Sybil. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co.
Sidis, Boris and Simon P. Goodhart (1905). Multiple Personality: An Experimental Investigation into the Nature of Human Individuality. New York: Appleton. Retrieved from https://www.sidis.net/mpchap23c.htm
Unknown. (1904, December 3). “Two Men In One: Dr. Sidis Considers the Strange Case of T. C. Hanna as an Instance of Multiple Personality.” New York Times. Retrieved from https://sidis.net/nytime19.jpg
Wallace, Wallechinsky, Wallace, and Wallace (1980). The Book of Lists #2. Bantam. (377-380)
Outdated, unsourced, often incorrect pop culture article on multiples of yore. You can read our transcription here: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/873671.html
Young, Kevin. (2017) Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
Summary: "I may not be multiple, but I'm certainly plural! " - Jaye
Word Count: 3200 of at least 9000
Notes: This one won the Patreon vote by a landslide! This is the textual essay version of my video presentation for the Plural Positivity Conference, and sorry guys, even with the “quick and dirty” bit, it’s going to be long. Also, I can’t lie, most of my citations and sources for the early folks I only know about thanks to Baldwin’s Oneselves.
We’ve seen online plural groups rise, fall, and disappear into the ether over the years. So much of our history is so ephemeral, and those who forget are doomed to regret. When we remember our history, we learn from its successes and failures, build on its foundation, and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone. So let’s talk plural history!
We’re using “plural” as an umbrella term to describe more than one person in a body, but that covers a huge swathe of cultures, time periods, places, and pissing contests. One person could never cover them all, and our ignorance is profound. Tulpas, metaphysical multiplicity, otherkin, daemonism, religious and non-medical cultural frameworks of plurality, just about anything outside the USA… we don’t talk about them here not because they don’t exist, aren’t plural, or aren’t important, but because we ourself don’t know much about them. Our meager start is just that: a start.
Reading this essay, you will encounter folks you think don’t belong under the plural umbrella. Rather than debate who to include, focus on how people decide what plural is and how those ideas change. The umbrella is constantly changing, and it mostly exists for narrative convenience. Even when plural communities share a time, place, and identity, they often operate in parallel, ignorant of each other’s existence, reinventing the wheel and never realizing that their pet bugaboos aren’t universal. One place’s wank is another place’s “what?”
Even though it’s over-represented in discussions on plural history, this essay’s focus is going to be most on medical multi circles (Multiple Personality Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder, and the pissing contests around all of the above), followed by groups that formed in backlash to medical multi but still used it as a framework (empowered multiplicity, natural multiplicity), and soulbonding. These are the groups we were in, and they’re the ones we know; they’re not the be-all end-all of plurality by a long shot.
We can’t talk about where we are now without discussing how we got here. So let’s do a 3000 word Cliff Notes rush through it!
Pre-DSM-I Plurals
More than one person to a body is not a new thing. “One body gets one person/soul/mind/personality forever,” isn’t a scientific idea; it’s a cultural one and not universal. Different cultures have their own definitions of personhood, selfhood, souls, spirits, and what the appropriate numbers are—in Judaism, people get an extra soul on the Shabbat; the Iroquois have the gannigonr-ha and the erienta (Mann, 2004); and then there’s the citations on the “soul dualism” article on Wikipedia. Trying to define which is plural and what isn’t would take a whole other essay to cover, but we want to break this idea that plurality was invented by (or belongs to) white medical personnel and the people they treat.
So Mary Reynolds wasn’t “the first multiple”; there’s no such thing. (And she might not be considered multiple anymore herself; a childhood textbook of mine recategorized her as “conversion disorder.”) But she’s been called the first multiple (Baldwin; Wallace et al), probably because she was a white woman seen as suffering a medical problem, so let’s talk about her.
Reynolds’s case was reported in a few places from the 1830s on, and some of the details vary, but the basics (as reported in Mitchell, 1889) are: in 1811, mopey Mary Reynolds went into a very deep sleep, and woke up with no memory and a buoyant new personality who didn’t recognize Mary’s family as her own. These two states (as Mary herself referred to them) had no shared memory, always switched in her sleep, and did so for decades, until she settled permanently into her cheerful second state when she was thirty-six years old, in 1829. She died in 1854. Like many early medicalized multiples, she reported no trauma, though a century later, a therapist argued that early religious persecution in childhood qualified (Goodwin, 1987).
After Reynolds, more multiples (or people categorized as such) started cropping up among white society. While it’s risky to try and lump them into groups after the fact, there are a few types that share characteristics… and yes, a lot of them aren’t considered multiple nowadays.
For instance, there were some folks whose “switches” altered less their personality than their memory. Some of the more famous ones wandered off, “woke up” somewhere else, and got upset about it. (These wanderers are now called psychogenic/dissociative fugue cases.) Ansel Bourne was the most famous and only had the one big switch recorded, though it was apparently enough to scare the bejesus out of him (James, 1890, pg. 391-393). Following a severe head injury in World War I, “C. J. Poulting”/“John Charles Poultney” (names in quotes are pseudonyms) switched multiple times, leading to multiple stints in the British army, being mistaken for American and shipped back there, only to be taken in as the long-lost relative of Seventh Day Adventists, which he didn’t seem thrilled about (Franz, 1933). George Robertson, from 1901, seems to have been even more variable, probably not helped by multiple head injuries, and his switching led to him being arrested for desertion from the US army (Baldwin, 1984).
There were also people who didn’t wander off, and merely suffered intense (though hopefully somewhat temporary) memory loss probably due to brain damage, either from head injury like Reverend Thomas Hanna (Unknown, 1904), or gas leak, such as “Mr. S” (Dana, 1894), who Baldwin calls Peter Scott. These folks, after the whack on the head (or gas inhalation), lost access to most of their memories and had to be retaught. If they were lucky, the amnesia wore off; if they weren’t, they were stuck relearning everything, though more quickly than the first time around.
And then you have the case of Alma Z., from 1893 (as recounted in Sidis and Goodhart, 1904). The personalities of Alma—No. 1, Twoey, and No. 3, AKA “the Boy”—apparently got along not just with each other, but with their corporeal circle as well, and apparently had some measure of co-consciousness. At one point, their doctor describes taking Numbers 1 and 3 to an orchestra—Number 3 is in charge, but Number 1 especially wants to hear the music, so they switch, leading to this exchange:
“‘So No. 1 came to hear her favorite concerto?’ [No. 3 asked.]
“I replied, ‘Yes; how did you know it?’
“‘Oh, I was here and listened to it, too.’
“‘Where were you?’ I asked.
“‘I sat on the front of the box. I saw you speaking to her [No. 1]. How greatly she enjoyed the music!'”
These multiples were a variegated lot. There was a lot of overlap with sleepwalkers, amnesiacs, and what nowadays might be framed as trance states. The words used to describe their condition varied too! Plumer (1860) and Mitchell (1889) call Reynolds “a case of double consciousness,” James calls Ansel Bourne “a case of alternate personality of the ‘ambulatory’ sort” in 1890, Dana uses “double consciousness” to describe Peter Scott in 1894, while Cutten calls John Kinsel a “double personality” in 1903, and Sidis uses “multiple personality” for Hanna and “manifold personality” for Alma Z. Come 1908, Morton Prince is already complaining that “cases of this kind are commonly known as ‘double’ or ‘multiple personality,’ according to the number of persons [headmates] represented, but a more correct term is disintegrated personality, for each secondary personality is a part only of a normal whole self” (pg. 3). Good to know that bickering over multi terminology was a thing even a hundred years ago! But this was before the creation of the DSM-I in 1952, made in part to help standardize things.
Furthermore, multiplicity (or whatever you prefer to call it), had some intersections with what would now be considered religious or supernatural. John Kinsel, for instance, wasn’t just an impressive sleepwalker, but known for navigating the world perfectly with his eyes tight shut, and his “asleep” self was apparently prone to reciting endless streams of crummy poetry (Cutten, 1903). Both Bourne and Reynolds became (possibly psychosomatically) paralyzed or deaf or blind, only to then miraculously recover (Bourne, 1858; Mitchell, 1889). But none hold a candle to the spiritualists.
Covering spiritualism would be a book all on its own, and I know very little about it, so the very short version is: in 1848, the young Fox sisters started trolling their guardians by faking rapping sounds as spirit communication and created a religious movement in the process. For our purposes, the most relevant part of spiritualism was its belief that the dead (or spirits) could contact the living, bestowing helpful advice and support. The spirits could communicate in various ways, such as making rapping sounds, moving objects… or by taking over their human channels directly, through automatic writing or speaking aloud. In other words, using modern slang, the spirits could front sometimes, and since said spirits were the dead, they were adamant about being separate people, with separate life stories and experiences from their mediums.
Probably the most famous of these mediums perceived as multiple, “Hélène Smith” (real name Catherine-Elise Muller), had a book written about her; the English translation is titled From India to the Planet Mars, (Flournoy, 1900), which contains Muller’s illustrations of Martian landscapes and depictions of the Martian script, which Flournoy (a professor of psychology) broke down as French-derived. (Muller was French.) But while she was possibly the most famous and had the most unusual of other-worlds, she wasn’t the only one. Other spiritualist mediums hosted cross-ethnic and cross-gender spirits, seemingly more often than other plurals we’ve seen around this time, and they seemed more likely to emphasize worlds and experience outside the corporeal.
While plurals (or plural-ish folks) were described or noted in the USA during this time, proper explanations as to why were light on the ground. Childhood trauma or abuse was mostly unstated or ignored, though it’s not hard to at times find strong implications—Ansel Bourne, for instance, self-reports that his father died when he was seven, and that he was living in poverty and had to leave school to work in the factories from the age of thirteen on (Bourne, 1858, pg. 5). “V. L.” (who Baldwin calls Victor Laval—don’t know where he got the name from) was “born of an unmarried mother, who was ‘addicted to an open life of debauchery, and of an unknown father, he began to roam and beg on the streets as soon as he could walk” (Sidis and Goodwin, 1904, Chapter XXIII, Part III, paragraph 21), while George Robertson apparently was on bad terms with his father, to the point that he left home at fourteen and at twenty-one was dealt a heavy blow to the head while fighting with him (Baldwin, pg. 28—see Gilbert 1902 for the citation he gives, which I’ve been unable to dig up). Those are the earliest references we know about.
But abuse, even child or sexual abuse, was not an unknown political cause at this time—it was more of a black cause, wrapped into antislavery and antilynching activism (see McGuire, 2010). After all, the slavery mindset is an inherently abusive one—it makes people into things, to be used and abused at whim. If trauma does indeed cause some forms of multiplicity, then historically black frameworks of plurality just begs for discussion.
Medical multiplicity was overwhelmingly applied to white folks, but fairly gender-balanced until around the turn of the 20th century, where women started overtaking the men. Part of this may have been that spiritualist mediums tended more towards women. Though we’re less sure about this, so take it with a grain of salt, medical multiplicity also may have started becoming a “white lady” thing around the time it became a trauma thing.
The MPD Movie Machine
You know what we really have to thank for the popular conception of multiplicity today? Movies. Books were big, but movies really had the oomph.
In 1886, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came out, and like it or not, became an indelible part of America’s cultural narrative about multiplicity. Just about every well-known multiple gets compared to them sooner or later, even as early as 1904 (Unknown, 1904), and this was only the start of a longstanding tradition blurring fiction and reality.
In 1954, Shirley Jackson wrote The Bird’s Nest. It was a twisted family drama involving a system of five, and in April 1957, it came out in movie form, called Lizzie. In the movie version, the titular multiple is only a system of three—a shy retiring woman, the bad girl who likes sleeping around, and the well-adjusted woman who becomes the last headmate standing. If it sounds familiar to the characterization of Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane in The Three Faces of Eve, it’s because that book and movie were also made in 1957; according to the US Copyright Office, the book was copyrighted January 15th, a few months before Lizzie, and the movie came out in September, less than six months after. Who was riding whose coat-tails?
Chris Costner Sizemore, by the way, the actual Eve, later went public in saying that the Three Faces of Eve was never accurate—her headmates came in rotating rosters of three, but there were over twenty of them. She ended up writing three of her own memoirs to try and correct the misconceptions (Strangers In My Mind, I’m Eve, and A Mind of My Own) but when the movie rights came up, Fox said they owned the film rights to her life story, past, present, and future (Brozan, 1989). One of Sizemore’s headmates (no longer in existence) had signed over the rights to their therapist in the 1950s, and though they settled out of court, the possible movie future was tanked. So not only was the Three Faces of Eve fictionalized, but that fiction trumped the real life of the multiple in question! Get used to these creepy interactions between patient and therapist and salesman, not just fiction and reality, because it’ll be a theme, oh yes.
This was in the time of the DSM-I, where multiple personality (or “dissociated personality”) was considered a subtype of “dissociative reaction.” In 1968, the DSM-II came out and renamed it “hysterical neurosis: dissociative type,” which shows its genderedness; hysteria was (and is) traditionally applied to women. From here on out, male multiples are exceptions to the rule.
In 1973, Sybil comes out, and it gets its own very popular movie in 1976. The book is the first place we’ve seen people using “multiple” as a stand-alone noun; Sybil herself uses it in a joke about her cat. Until a better citation comes up, we’ll credit her with the coinage. It spreads out into more common use from there on out (such as in Newman, 1977). Though Sybil notes a black male multiple named Jonah (with headmates King Young, Usoffa Abdulla, Sammy, and Jusky), who was studied thoroughly, there was no movie or pop cultural depiction, and they fell into comparative obscurity (Brandsma and Ludwig, 1974). This too will become an ongoing theme, of white multiples being given disparate prominence, to the point that it becomes considered “a white woman’s affliction” (Young, 2017).
In June 1977, “Henry Hawksworth’s” The Five of Me comes out, possibly riding the coattails of Sybil. Hawksworth was a violent rapist (Newman, 1977, paragraph 2) and used multiplicity in his defense against a drunk driving charge, claiming that since his drunk-driving headmate no longer existed, he couldn’t be charged. It too got a made-for-TV movie (with the same title) in 1981, which is the same year as the release of…
The Minds of Billy Milligan, by Daniel Keyes. At least it didn’t get a movie. (Though it’s in production hell and has been for over a decade. Apparently Joel Schumacher was set to direct it!) Milligan robbed and raped three women in October 1977, got caught, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity due to being multiple, and ended up acquitted (though hospitalized). We’re not sure whether Hawksworth’s book influenced Milligan’s defense or whether Milligan’s arrest spurred public interest and got Hawksworth’s movie made, but the stories are similar enough to each other (a male multiple rapist who uses multiplicity in a legal defense) that it seems unlikely to be pure coincidence.
It’s around this time, in 1980, that the DSM III gets made, along with the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder, reflecting how the condition is coming more and more into the public eye. Cross-gender and cross-ethnic alters are noted in this edition of the DSM, and it also states outright that mostly women get MPD… despite the earlier gender parity. (Race is downplayed.)
1980 is also when Michelle Remembers gets published. Though not a multi book itself, it follows a lot of the same tropes: a bestseller about gruesome child abuse where the patient develops an enmeshed relationship with a saintly therapist who’s involved in writing the book (and in this case, marries the patient/other author). It’s debunked and doesn’t get made into a movie, apparently due to Michelle’s father threatening to sue (Allen and Midwinter, 1990, paragraph 15). This coins the term “ritual abuse,” which becomes its own thread of the medical multiplicity narrative.
But that narrative is becoming its own beast. It’s based on profit and the dramatic rules of fiction, not reality as told by the multiples themselves. Pop cultural multi books and movies become their own genre with their own rules and conventions (the therapeutic journey, the return to singlethood as happy ending), their own stock character types—the saintly therapist, the evil alter, the hapless suffering host, the well-adjusted final product. It’s no coincidence that Chris Costner Sizemore’s books aren’t as well known as the Three Faces of Eve, or Jonah as well known as Sybil; they don’t fit the narrative, and the money doesn’t get thrown behind them.
Through these pop cultural depictions (along with a renewed social awareness and interest in child abuse), more and more people are hearing about MPD, and more and more people are diagnosing it. This leads to an “epidemic” of MPD diagnoses in the 1980s (leading into the ‘90s); even as early as 1984, people were noticing the increase (Baldwin, x). The trauma histories being reported in said pop cultural depictions are also getting more and more gruesome—what probably started as a sales concern of “if it bleeds, it leads” required stiffer doses of horror to make an impression on jaded audiences. Sizemore, in the 1950s, “just” reported deaths in her family. Sybil, The Five of Me, and The Minds of Billy Milligan go to physical abuse, with Milligan reporting being buried alive. By the 1980s, intense child abuse is a given, preferably sexual; it’s hard to find an MPD memoir without gruesome detail.
The backlash is also thunderclouds on the horizon. Medical multiplicity, as “white lady thing,” is also becoming a second wave feminist thing, associated with the (latest) rise in popular awareness of rape and child abuse, and the opposition is bound to show up. There are plenty of easy targets, what with the codependent patient/therapist relationships and the racism—perversely, the erasure of the multiples of color who do exist make it easier for critics to pretend that they don’t exist at all and medical multiplicity is just “bored white housewife syndrome.”
It’s in the eye of this building fecal hurricane that medical multiples start finding each other, building community, and that’s when the real fun begins.
Continue to Part 2!
Sources and Recommended Reading
Allen, Denna and Janet Midwinter. (1990). Michelle Remembers: The Debunking of a Myth. http://xeper.org/pub/lib/xp_lib_wh_DebunkingOfAMyth.htm Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20040511131253/http://xeper.org/pub/lib/xp_lib_wh_DebunkingOfAMyth.htm
Baldwin, Louis. (1984). Oneselves: multiple personalities, 1811-1981. Jefferson: McFarland.
A short digest of a bunch of old multiples of yore that’s out of print. Read this instead of Wallace et al; it does about the same job, but more thoroughly and with citations, and they mention a lot of the same people, making us suspect that they had similar inspirations.
Bourne, Ansel. (1858). Wonderful Works of God: A Narrative of the Wonderful Facts in the Case of Ansel Bourne of Westerly, Rhode Island, Who, In The Midst of Opposition to the Christian Religion Was Suddenly Struck Blind, Dumb, and Deaf, and After Eighteen Days Was Suddenly and Completely Restored In the Presence of Hundreds of Persons, in the Christian Chapel At Westerly, on the 15th of November, 1857. Irvington, N.J: Moses Cummings, Office of the Christian Messenger.
Brandsma, Jeffrey M., and Arnold M. Ludwig. (1974). A case of multiple personality: Diagnosis and therapy. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Retrieved from https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/00207147408413001
Brozan, Nadine. (1989). The Real ‘Eve’ Sues to Film the Rest of Her Story. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/07/movies/the-real-eve-sues-to-film-the-rest-of-her-story.html
Dana, Charles L. (1894). The study of a case of amnesia or 'double consciousness'. Psychological Review. Retrieved from https://sci-hub.tw/10.1037/h0065762
Boring as hell and finding this stupid article took me forever.
Flournoy, Théodore (translator: Daniel B. Vermilye). (1900). From India to the Planet Mars. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Franz, Shepherd Ivory. (1933). Persons, One and Three: A Study in Multiple Personalities. New York: Whittlesey house. Retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002704081&view=1up&seq=15
Hard to find, but surprisingly readable. While digging for this stupid thing, I found someone applauding Franz for doing so much incredibly boring-ass work, and this is accurate. A lot of this book is him trying to piece things together and be as thorough as possible.
Gilbert, J. A. (1902). X. New York Medical Record, pg. 207-11.
Goodwin, J. (1987). Mary Reynolds: a post-traumatic reinterpretation of a classic case of multiple personality disorder. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3308663
James, William. (1890). The Principles of Psychotherapy. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin10.htm
Keyes, Daniel. (1981). The Minds of Billy Milligan. New York: Random House.
Mann, B. A. (2004). Iroquoian women: The gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang. (326-329)
You can read the transcription Polyfrazzlemented sent us here: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1094585.html#cutid1
McGuire, Danielle L. (2010). At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Vintage Books.
Mitchell, S. Weir (1889). Mary Reynolds: A Case of Double Consciousness. Philadelphia: Wm. J. Dornan. Retrieved from https://memory.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd0001/2012/20120723003ma/20120723003ma.pdf
Newman, Donna Joy (1973, June 23). Tempo: ‘I led five lives’ – the incredible story of Henry Hawksworth.’ Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1977/06/23/page/15/article/tempo
Plumer, William S. (1860). Mary Reynolds: A case of double consciousness. Harper’s Magazine. Retrieved from https://harpers.org/archive/1860/05/mary-reynolds/
Prince, Morton. (1908). The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Schreiber, Flora Rheta (1973). Sybil. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co.
Sidis, Boris and Simon P. Goodhart (1905). Multiple Personality: An Experimental Investigation into the Nature of Human Individuality. New York: Appleton. Retrieved from https://www.sidis.net/mpchap23c.htm
Unknown. (1904, December 3). “Two Men In One: Dr. Sidis Considers the Strange Case of T. C. Hanna as an Instance of Multiple Personality.” New York Times. Retrieved from https://sidis.net/nytime19.jpg
Wallace, Wallechinsky, Wallace, and Wallace (1980). The Book of Lists #2. Bantam. (377-380)
Outdated, unsourced, often incorrect pop culture article on multiples of yore. You can read our transcription here: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/873671.html
Young, Kevin. (2017) Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
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(Y'all mind if I post an excerpt + link on a Tumblr blog post?)
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(Anonymous) 2020-05-29 05:57 pm (UTC)(link)LB, not logged in
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The definitions are constantly changing.