Plural History part 2: The Memory Wars
Jun. 30th, 2020 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeQuick’N’Dirty Plural History, part 2 (see also: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4)
Summary: "“One case is an oddity, two is a coincidence, and three is an epidemic.” --Carol Tavris, “The Widening Scientist-Practitioner Gap,” Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology, 2003, pg. ix.
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.
Pre-Internet MPD/DIDish Community: Support Groups, Newsletters, and BBS (1980-1995ish)
In the early days, “multiple personality” was a super-vague category, covering everything from fugue to amnesia to channeling, but as the years passed, the definition narrowed, and more and more people were kicked out of the box (including many of the “classic” cases like Bourne and Reynolds). In 1981, with the DSM-III, Multiple Personality Disorder became a formal, codified diagnosis, and people diagnosed with it started building their own groups.
The first record I personally have of MPD folks getting together on purpose is a support group in Cleveland in 1980, which lasted for at least nine years (Many Voices, 1989 February, pg. 7). However, it didn’t take long for multiples to search for community without medical oversight. Speaking for Our Selves (AKA S4OS) was allegedly “the first newsletter for individuals with dissociative disorders” (The Awareness Center, “Remembering Lynn Wasnak,” 2013). It was created “at the 1985 meetings of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality [now the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation],” when “a group of multiple personality patients announced the creation of a newsletter” (Becker, 2004, pg. 24, citing Kenny, 1986, pg. 174). Its purpose: “to give people with multiple personalities a written forum for learning from each other about their experiences and to educate helping professionals about the diversity and range of experience of people who have multiple personalities. [...] It is vital that people with multiple personalities have our own forum to present our view of our experiences, fears, dreams, and hopes—to SPEAK FOR OUR SELVES” (S4OS I:4, pg. 1)The first issue, according to the U.S. Copyright Office, came out in October 1985, and it ran for nine issues before shuttering in September 1987 “due to a personal crisis in the life of the editor” with 691 subscribers (Humphrey and Dennett, 1989). Unfortunately, the archive is overwhelmingly lost; only the fourth issue has been scanned and put online, far as I know. (See citations if you want it.)
There was also a support group in Akron, Ohio that started in July 1987, another two in Cincinnati and New York City in 1988, and presumably tons more we don’t know about (ibid). Most of these support groups left no record, and since anonymity was a premium, they’ve vanished into the wind. However, the 1988 NYC group left behind a “Twelve Goals for Multiple Personalities,” clearly based off the 12-Step model, which include the goals “understand and work with our personalities instead of fighting with them,” “stop abusing our personalities,” and “encourage communication, cooperation, and assistance” (Many Voices, 1989 June, pg. 6).
One thing that may have inspired these goals of mutual cooperation and harmony is The Troops for Truddi Chase’s When Rabbit Howls, from 1987. In one sense, it’s yet another white female multi trauma memoir that, yes, got a film adaptation (a two-part miniseries in 1990). However, it did have a few things that made it notable. The Troops are the earliest source I’ve found so far of the term “frontrunner” (which later seems to have gotten reverse-engineered to “front” and “fronter”). They didn’t restrict themselves to a vessel name, had no desire to return to singlethood, and talked about a rich inner world, full of in-system power struggles, communication, and relationship dynamics—all of which the Spiritualists had done before them, but the Spiritualists were no longer considered multiple, as far as I know, and had been erased from the conversation. The Troops brought that conversation to the MPD table, and people took notice.
MPD groups had a lot of cross-pollination with other support groups: incest or abuse survivors, 12-step, women’s groups, and so on. There were also conferences, but it’s tough to differentiate multi cons for shrinks vs. cons for multiples vs. more general women’s or survivor cons. Apparently it was just as confusing and frustrating to people at the time; Many Voices devoted a whole issue to it, with one multiple named Dorothy P. advising, “don’t go to an MPD conference unless you are prepared to tune out the things you don’t like. Therapists attending the conference aren’t expecting clients [multiples] and won’t cater to our needs and vulnerabilities” (February 1991, pg. 6). Conversely, Lynn Wasnak reports that “professionals who support closed conferences [no lay multiples without special permission] are concerned about clients [multiples] who might abreact [relive abuse memories] in public; about inappropriate behavior that would force conference attendees to switch unfairly from their ‘learning mode’ to their ‘helping mode’ to resolve a crisis” (ibid, pg. 1; emphasis theirs).
You might notice I’m citing Many Voices a lot. It was a newsletter for “clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders,” created in February 1989 by multi Lynn Wasnak, allegedly in response to the shutdown of Speaking for Our Selves (The Awareness Center, 2013). Many Voices ran continuously six times a year until mid-2012, at which point Wasnak was taken down by terminal sickness, dying in 2013. In her will, she stipulated the whole archive be put up for free reading for everyone, making it an invaluable archive. Thanks to Many Voices, we have a few early records of…
• “Several Kids Inside Syndrome” or SKIS, an informal term used in one support group for folks who had several inner children needing help in therapy but didn’t see themselves as multiple (December 1990, pg. 3).
• Multiples who claimed no history of family abuse or trauma (June 1992, pg. 4).
• Nonhuman headmates, including a “white lioness” named Sangei (June 1992, pg. 1), and Starflower, who was kinda a cross between a starfish and an octopus (pg. 2).
• This is also the first place I’ve seen multiples self-declaring as “systems” (August 1992, pg. 10), though it was used for years prior by medical personnel (see Kluft, 1988), usually in the specific phrasing “system of alters.”
• Romantic and sexual relationships between headmates (October 1993, pg. 2 and 8), including queer, kinky, and non-monogamous relationships. Though we’d bet our left arm that such relationships existed long before this, it’s the first record we’ve been able to find of anyone talking about it, and even though it’s the Love and Sex issue of a multi newsletter, people still seem hush-hush and anxious about it.
• Merchandise, nonprofits, and groups made by and for multiples, including a nonprofit called the MPD Consortium that was hoping to provide housing and rehab service for up to eight multis. No clue what became of them. (June 1993, pg. 18)
Many Voices also gives record of possibly the earliest form of computer-accessed multi community: BBS! (AKA Bulletin Board Services, kinda proto-forums or very slow-motion chat rooms, accessed via modem.) The first one we have record of is one from December 1991 called Mars Station, which was a US board for sexual abuse survivors (Many Voices, December 1991, pg. 6). Apparently it may have run until 2004 too (760 Area Code BBSes Through History, n.d.)! But take that with a grain of salt, the records are poor.
Other BBSes with multis that we’ve heard of (but have scant records of) include the Love Galaxy (private correspondence, 1992), Maxie’s Toy which may have run from 1989-1998 (private correspondence, 1992; 209 Area Code BBSes Through History, n.d.), Fire Chat (private correspondence, ‘92-’94; 804 Area Code BBSes Through History, n.d.), M_P_D (EchoList, December 1995), and SIP_MPD (ibid). Some were new age health BBS, others were specifically for MPD, while others might’ve been general purpose and multiples just happened to congregate there.
It’s in these old BBS that I first find the use of the word “singlet,” which was apparently coined by Astraea’s ex-husband, “B.C.”, (private correspondence, October 1992). The word spreads through Astraea and their later online glossary to all sorts of places, such as alt.support.dissociation, Dark Personalities, and so on. We’ve also seen “singleton” but apparently by the late ‘90s some folks found it derogatory, leading to a short-lived more “politically correct” version, “singletype” (Dark Personalities, 2001 May 19).
So MPD (and MPD-ish) multiples are starting to come together as an identity, with their own jargon, ways of relating to each other, and cottage industries. But they aren’t the only ones building community at this time. So is the backlash.
The Memory Wars (1984-2000s)
There have been (long, soul-crushing) books written about the memory wars. It’s hard to distill into something quick and simple, but we can’t talk MPD/DID history without it, so hold your nose, pull on your shit-wading boots, and get ready to dive. (And if you want more in-depth stuff, read Elizabeth Loftus’s Witness for the Defense, Margaret Thaler Singer’s Crazy Therapies, and Ross Cheit’s the Witch-Hunt Narrative. Enjoy that thousand pages of suffering!)
So, as popular awareness of MPD grew, more and more people were getting diagnosed. Since MPD was supposed to be the rarest thing ever, and was becoming increasingly associated with extreme child abuse, this put therapeutic institutions in a bind: had there really been so many multiples running around unnoticed? If not, where were they all coming from? And what to do about it?
The legal system and law enforcement also weren’t prepared for the special problems of dealing with young children in abuse cases. By its nature, abuse is a private, hidden thing; often the only people who can say it happened are the victim (in this case a child) and the abuser (usually an adult, usually in better mental condition). If the abuse happened early enough, the statute of limitations would run out before the victim reached adulthood—or even puberty. Some of these kids were too young to speak; others were hindered by lack of vocabulary or understanding. All were small, fragile, and at the mercy of the adults around them. How to respond to these children? How seriously to take them? Emotions and stakes were high, and inevitably, as the euphemism goes, mistakes were made.
Probably the most infamous of these cases (and arguably the one that started it all) was the McMartin preschool trial. It started simply enough in 1983, when a mother called her son’s doctor concerned that he may have been raped. An investigation started, involving more and more children (culminating at forty-one complainants, with hundreds more interviews) and more and more aggressors (seven defendants, with apparently over fifty suspects). When the news leaked out a few months later, everyone wanted a piece of it, and a seven year circus commenced, ending with zero convictions and a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. General opinion afterward was that the whole thing was a shitshow.
Ross Cheit goes through the case in laborious, agonizing detail (The Witch-Hunt Narrative, chapter 2). He probably gives the most credence to any of the McMartin claims that I’ve seen since the trial ended in 1990, and even so, he makes it clear there were problems of overdiagnosis in medical evidence, interviewer bias, and parental interference. It was a mess, and it proved the perfect hook for the backlash.
Now, the backlash was going to happen, because it always does. Norms and tech may change, but the tactics remain reliable and predictable: denial (“it didn’t happen”), minimalization (“it only sort of happened”), and justification (“it happened, but it’s okay”), with a good side helping of attacking the victim and claiming them the true persecutor (“this jerk is trying to ruin my life!”). There’s even an acronym for it: DARVO (for Denial, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender). And what’s stood out to me in my research is how consistent it’s been over the past century, even with the demographics of victims and attackers changing! McGuire describes the same tactics from white men raping black women in the 1940s as Scully and Marola describe from black and white incarcerated rapists in the 1980s. Racism or misogyny may justify the violence, but they’re just swapped in and out as needed to bolster the tactic, which remains the same. Different poisons, same glass.
In this case, the poisons in the glass were ableism and the thingification of children. If the victim in the case was still a child, then they were lying, misled, or misunderstood; overly seductive or sexually aggressive; or otherwise an acceptable target. (It is no coincidence that one of these backlash organizations, The National Center for Reason and Justice, focuses on freeing convicted child molesters from prison, even undeniable, exhaustively documented cases like Father Shanley. If children are things, to be used at whim by adults, then it’s easy to argue that the sexual exploitation of children isn’t a serious concern.)
If the victim was an adult, then by necessity they were reporting abuse that happened years or decades prior—and sometimes that abuse had been forgotten during those years. The backlash’s most original move was taking the old standby of denial and putting a new spin on it: “it didn’t happen; the memories of abuse have been fabricated.” Thus the term Memory Wars.
Not all of these adults reporting their abusers were multiple, not all multiples reported abuse, and neither group necessarily lost a traumatic memory only to remember it later, but all were often lumped in together, because it was convenient. It fed into existing cultural stereotypes of hysterical women, attention-seekers, lunatics so ill that they could not be trusted to state their experience. At times, the backlash could even feign concern for the helpless dears: “it didn’t happen… because this person has been manipulated or brainwashed by an unscrupulous therapist into remembering it like it did.”
And this was not a totally baseless claim! It’s not at all hard to find multiples or their therapists self-reporting super dubious, creepy behavior! (For instance, Joan Frances Casey’s autobiographical the Flock discusses “reparenting” therapy by Casey’s therapist and her husband, who treated the Flock as their own child and spent hours every day with them. Therapist Ralph Allison self-reports exorcising his multi patients—see his paper, “If In Doubt, Cast It Out?” And if you really want to go down a rabbit hole, Google Colin Ross’s malpractice lawsuits.)
However. The backlash organizations that formed didn’t actually care about therapeutic overreach and abuse. The proof is in their actions. None of them, far as I know, ever attempted to regulate therapeutic behavior—indeed, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s Elizabeth Loftus served on the advisory board until it closed December 31, 2019 (False Memory Syndrome Foundation, n.d.), two decades after she resigned from the APA to avoid an ethics investigation and four years since the report on it came to light (Hoffman, 2015, pg. 484, footnote 2350). The ethics investigation was based around complaints filed by lawyer Jennifer Hoult, who stated that Loftus had misrepresented the details of her legal case against her sexually abusive father, in the interest of forwarding the False Memory Syndrome narrative, and that upon receiving the ethics complaints, Loftus then informed Mr. Hoult about them, who then sued Ms. Hoult for libel, and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation added their own harassment campaign (Hoult, 2005 and 2014). If the False Memory Syndrome Foundation were truly so concerned about therapeutic misbehavior, they never would’ve tolerated it from their own.
Instead, their actions focused on legal protection of the accused and harassment of accusers or their therapists—sometimes to the point of restraining orders (Calof, 1998). The False Memory Syndrome Foundation never gave criteria for the syndrome it claimed was scourging the country, but it still spun itself as a scientific organization super-effectively; Peter and Pamela Freyd created it in 1992 after their grown daughter privately accused Peter of abuse, to which they responded by trying to sabotage her career (Dallam, 2002). The Witch Hunt Information Center… well, it’s there in the name (Harris, 1997). The National Center for Reason and Justice’s focus has already been discussed.
As scientific organizations, these people were failures. The only one I know of who did any substantial research on the memories they disavowed was Elizabeth Loftus. But these orgs were fantastic at spin. Their debunkers tended to be academics, writing for academic publications, while they themselves focused on more popular mainstream venues. Perversely, they made themselves popular in skeptics’ groups because they played to bias, despite their lack of scientific rigor, and from the ‘90s up through the mid-’00s, it was damn near impossible to read anything about MPD/DID without having to also dig through False Memory Syndrome talking points. It cast a long shadow on medicalized multiples from this time, including ourself, and just about every trauma-influenced multiple of a certain generation has a story about it affecting them.
All of this is a bit ironic, since traumatic amnesia was studied in combat veterans back in the ‘40s (as quoted in Freyd 1998), apparently without controversy. Going through all the research is beyond the scope of this essay, but the very basics are: traumatic amnesia exists, false memories exist, and so do “recovered memories.” Have you ever forgotten where you put your keys, searched everywhere in despair, only to suddenly remember? Congratulations: you’ve recovered a memory. It’s apparently impossible to prove the difference between false and real memories without outside corroboration, but some traumatized, later-remembered memories have apparently been corroborated in a legal court (see Cheit’s Recovered Memory Project). Our brains are squishy, fallible chunks of electrified meat and at the end of the day, we have to make our peace with that.
Oh, and in the midst of all this bullshit, the DSM changes Multiple Personality Disorder to Dissociative Identity Disorder in 1994, hoping that will calm things down. It doesn’t really work; the “multi trauma memoir” does fall from popularity, but that’s probably due to rigid genre norms and the fad running its course, and the Memory Wars continue for roughly another decade. (The NCRJ still exists today, and the FMSF only shut their doors at the end of 2019.)
But even as the war rages, plurals keep making community anyway. Enter the Internet.
(A Brief Aside: the 1994 DSM IV and the MPD/DID Change
A lot of multiples had passionate opinions on the diagnosis change from MPD to DID—just check out the Many Voices or alt.support.dissociation arguments from 1994 to see what I mean. Some felt that DID was a euphemism, a way to say, “oh, you’re not even another personality, you’re just one dissociated one.” Others saw DID as a less sensational term and hoped it might make people less scared of them.
Personally, we think that the name of the diagnosis is less interesting than how important it was to people. Even by this point, people were equating their diagnosis with identity. They were taking these diagnostic changes not just as a bureaucratic change, but a personal rejection of who they were. Even though, if you ask me, doctors shouldn’t be given that kind of power in the first place.
Continue to Part 3!
Sources and Recommended Reading:
(n.d.) 209 Area Code BBSes Through History (80's Version). Retrieved from http://bbslist.textfiles.com/209/oldschool.html
(n.d.) 760 Area Code BBSes Throughout History. Retrieved from http://bbslist.textfiles.com/760/
(n.d.) 804 Area Code BBSes Through History. Retrieved from http://bbslist.textfiles.com/804/
Calof, David L. (1998). Notes from a practice under siege: Harassment, defamation, and intimidation in the name of science. Ethics and Behavior, 8(2) pp. 161-187.
The Awareness Center. (2013). In Memory of Lynn Wasnak. Blog post. Retrieved from https://theawarenesscenter.blogspot.com/2013/04/honoring-lynn-wasnak.html
Becker, Judith. (2004). Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Casey, Joan Frances. (1991). The Flock: the Autobiography of a Multiple Personality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Books.
Chase, the Troops for Truddi. (1987). When Rabbit Howls. New York: Jove Books.
Cheit, Ross E. (2010-2020). Recovered Memory Project [website]. Retrieved from https://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/
Cheit, Ross E. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dallam, S.J. (2002). “Crisis or Creation: A systematic examination of false memory syndrome.” Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 9(3/4), 9/36. Retrieved from www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/res/dallam/6.html
Dark Personalities. (2001, May 19). Terminology [web page]. http://www.darkpersonalities.com/terminology.htm Internet Archive. Retrieved 2019/03/14 from https://web.archive.org/web/20010519115202/http://darkpersonalities.com/terminology.htm
ECHOLIST. (December 1995). ECHOLIST The EchoMail Conference List MASTER REPORT. Retrieved from http://www.textfiles.com/fidonet-on-the-internet/e1995/elist512.txt
False Memory Syndrome Foundation. (n.d.) Advisory Board Profiles. Retrieved from http://www.fmsfonline.org/?about=AdvisoryBoardProfiles#elizabethloftus
Freyd, Jennifer J. (1998) Science in the Memory Debate, Ethics &Behavior, 8:2, pg. 101-113. Retrieve online from http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327019eb0802_1
Harris, Jonathan G. (1997 May 19). WITCH HUNT INFORMATION CENTER. http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/harris/witchhunt.html Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/19970519144556/http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/harris/witchhunt.html
Hoffman, David H. (2015). REPORT TO THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: INDEPENDENT REVIEW RELATING TO APA ETHICS GUIDELINES, NATIONAL SECURITY INTERROGATIONS, AND TORTURE. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/independent-review/revised-report.pdf
Hoult, Jennifer. (2005 & 2014). "Remembering Dangerously" & Hoult v. Hoult: The Myth of Repressed Memory that Elizabeth Loftus Created. Retrieved from http://www.rememberingdangerously.com
Humphrey, N. and Dennett, D. (1989). Speaking for our selves: an assessment of multiple personality disorder. Raritan, 9:1, 68-98. Retrieved from https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/810/1/s4os.htm
Kenny, Michael G. (1986). The Passion of Ansel Bourne: Multiple Personality in American Culture. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.
Kluft, Richard. (1988). The Phenomenology And Treatment Of Extremely Complex Multiple Personality Disorder. Dissociation, Vol. 1, No. 4. Retrieved from https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/1396/Diss_1_4_8_OCR_rev.pdf?sequence=4
Loftus, Elizabeth, and Katherine Ketchum. (1991). Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial. New York: St. Martin’s Books.
Loftus, Elizabeth, and Melvin Guyer. (2002). Who Abused Jane Doe? The Hazards of the Single Case History: Part I. Retrieved from https://staff.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/JaneDoe.htm
Many Voices Press. (1989, February). Many Voices: Words of Hope for Clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders. Vol. 1, No. 1. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1989_02.pdf
Many Voices Press. (1989, June). Many Voices: Words of Hope for Clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders. Vol. 1, No. 3. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1989_06.pdf
Many Voices Press. (1990, December). Many Voices: Words of Hope for Clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders. Vol. 2, No. 6. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1990_12.pdf
Many Voices Press. (1991, February). Many Voices: Words of Hope for Clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders. Vol. 3, No. 1. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1991_02.pdf
Many Voices Press. (1991, December). Many Voices: Words of Hope for Clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders. Vol. 3, No. 6. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1991_12.pdf
Many Voices Press. (1992, June). Many Voices: Words of Hope for Clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders. Vol. 4, No. 3. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1992_06.pdf
Many Voices Press. (1992, August). Many Voices: Words of Hope for Clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders. Vol. 4, No. 4. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1992_08.pdf
Many Voices Press. (1993, June). Many Voices: Words of Hope for Clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders. Vol. 5, No. 3. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1993_06.pdf
Many Voices Press. (1993, October). Many Voices: Words of Hope for Clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders. Vol. 5, No. 5. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1993_10.pdf
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.
Olafson, Edna. (2014). A Review and Correction of the Errors in Loftus and Guyer on Jane Doe. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Vol. 29 (18) pg. 3245-3259. Retrieved from Sci-Hub.
Scully, Diana, and Joseph Marolla. (1984) “Convicted Rapists’ Vocabulary of Motive: Excuses and Justifications.” Social Problems 31.5: 530-544. Web.
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
Sikorski, Tina. (1995). NO CARRIER. [Usenet message] Retrieved from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/alt.sexual.abuse.recovery/Discord%7Csort:relevance/alt.sexual.abuse.recovery/za2IrgMl18Y/BgiJkRuQSDEJ
Singer, Margaret Thaler, and Janja Lalich. (1996). Crazy Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work? Hoboken: Jossey-Bass.
Speaking for Our Selves. (1986, June). Speaking for Our Selves. Vol. I, no. 4. Long Beach: self-published. Retrieved from https://www.arttherapy.org/ARCHIVES/Publications/Newsletters/Speaking%20for%20Ourselves%20Vol.%201%20No.%204%201986.06.pdf
Summary: "“One case is an oddity, two is a coincidence, and three is an epidemic.” --Carol Tavris, “The Widening Scientist-Practitioner Gap,” Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology, 2003, pg. ix.
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.
Pre-Internet MPD/DIDish Community: Support Groups, Newsletters, and BBS (1980-1995ish)
In the early days, “multiple personality” was a super-vague category, covering everything from fugue to amnesia to channeling, but as the years passed, the definition narrowed, and more and more people were kicked out of the box (including many of the “classic” cases like Bourne and Reynolds). In 1981, with the DSM-III, Multiple Personality Disorder became a formal, codified diagnosis, and people diagnosed with it started building their own groups.
The first record I personally have of MPD folks getting together on purpose is a support group in Cleveland in 1980, which lasted for at least nine years (Many Voices, 1989 February, pg. 7). However, it didn’t take long for multiples to search for community without medical oversight. Speaking for Our Selves (AKA S4OS) was allegedly “the first newsletter for individuals with dissociative disorders” (The Awareness Center, “Remembering Lynn Wasnak,” 2013). It was created “at the 1985 meetings of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality [now the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation],” when “a group of multiple personality patients announced the creation of a newsletter” (Becker, 2004, pg. 24, citing Kenny, 1986, pg. 174). Its purpose: “to give people with multiple personalities a written forum for learning from each other about their experiences and to educate helping professionals about the diversity and range of experience of people who have multiple personalities. [...] It is vital that people with multiple personalities have our own forum to present our view of our experiences, fears, dreams, and hopes—to SPEAK FOR OUR SELVES” (S4OS I:4, pg. 1)The first issue, according to the U.S. Copyright Office, came out in October 1985, and it ran for nine issues before shuttering in September 1987 “due to a personal crisis in the life of the editor” with 691 subscribers (Humphrey and Dennett, 1989). Unfortunately, the archive is overwhelmingly lost; only the fourth issue has been scanned and put online, far as I know. (See citations if you want it.)
There was also a support group in Akron, Ohio that started in July 1987, another two in Cincinnati and New York City in 1988, and presumably tons more we don’t know about (ibid). Most of these support groups left no record, and since anonymity was a premium, they’ve vanished into the wind. However, the 1988 NYC group left behind a “Twelve Goals for Multiple Personalities,” clearly based off the 12-Step model, which include the goals “understand and work with our personalities instead of fighting with them,” “stop abusing our personalities,” and “encourage communication, cooperation, and assistance” (Many Voices, 1989 June, pg. 6).
One thing that may have inspired these goals of mutual cooperation and harmony is The Troops for Truddi Chase’s When Rabbit Howls, from 1987. In one sense, it’s yet another white female multi trauma memoir that, yes, got a film adaptation (a two-part miniseries in 1990). However, it did have a few things that made it notable. The Troops are the earliest source I’ve found so far of the term “frontrunner” (which later seems to have gotten reverse-engineered to “front” and “fronter”). They didn’t restrict themselves to a vessel name, had no desire to return to singlethood, and talked about a rich inner world, full of in-system power struggles, communication, and relationship dynamics—all of which the Spiritualists had done before them, but the Spiritualists were no longer considered multiple, as far as I know, and had been erased from the conversation. The Troops brought that conversation to the MPD table, and people took notice.
MPD groups had a lot of cross-pollination with other support groups: incest or abuse survivors, 12-step, women’s groups, and so on. There were also conferences, but it’s tough to differentiate multi cons for shrinks vs. cons for multiples vs. more general women’s or survivor cons. Apparently it was just as confusing and frustrating to people at the time; Many Voices devoted a whole issue to it, with one multiple named Dorothy P. advising, “don’t go to an MPD conference unless you are prepared to tune out the things you don’t like. Therapists attending the conference aren’t expecting clients [multiples] and won’t cater to our needs and vulnerabilities” (February 1991, pg. 6). Conversely, Lynn Wasnak reports that “professionals who support closed conferences [no lay multiples without special permission] are concerned about clients [multiples] who might abreact [relive abuse memories] in public; about inappropriate behavior that would force conference attendees to switch unfairly from their ‘learning mode’ to their ‘helping mode’ to resolve a crisis” (ibid, pg. 1; emphasis theirs).
You might notice I’m citing Many Voices a lot. It was a newsletter for “clients with MPD and Dissociative Disorders,” created in February 1989 by multi Lynn Wasnak, allegedly in response to the shutdown of Speaking for Our Selves (The Awareness Center, 2013). Many Voices ran continuously six times a year until mid-2012, at which point Wasnak was taken down by terminal sickness, dying in 2013. In her will, she stipulated the whole archive be put up for free reading for everyone, making it an invaluable archive. Thanks to Many Voices, we have a few early records of…
• “Several Kids Inside Syndrome” or SKIS, an informal term used in one support group for folks who had several inner children needing help in therapy but didn’t see themselves as multiple (December 1990, pg. 3).
• Multiples who claimed no history of family abuse or trauma (June 1992, pg. 4).
• Nonhuman headmates, including a “white lioness” named Sangei (June 1992, pg. 1), and Starflower, who was kinda a cross between a starfish and an octopus (pg. 2).
• This is also the first place I’ve seen multiples self-declaring as “systems” (August 1992, pg. 10), though it was used for years prior by medical personnel (see Kluft, 1988), usually in the specific phrasing “system of alters.”
• Romantic and sexual relationships between headmates (October 1993, pg. 2 and 8), including queer, kinky, and non-monogamous relationships. Though we’d bet our left arm that such relationships existed long before this, it’s the first record we’ve been able to find of anyone talking about it, and even though it’s the Love and Sex issue of a multi newsletter, people still seem hush-hush and anxious about it.
• Merchandise, nonprofits, and groups made by and for multiples, including a nonprofit called the MPD Consortium that was hoping to provide housing and rehab service for up to eight multis. No clue what became of them. (June 1993, pg. 18)
Many Voices also gives record of possibly the earliest form of computer-accessed multi community: BBS! (AKA Bulletin Board Services, kinda proto-forums or very slow-motion chat rooms, accessed via modem.) The first one we have record of is one from December 1991 called Mars Station, which was a US board for sexual abuse survivors (Many Voices, December 1991, pg. 6). Apparently it may have run until 2004 too (760 Area Code BBSes Through History, n.d.)! But take that with a grain of salt, the records are poor.
Other BBSes with multis that we’ve heard of (but have scant records of) include the Love Galaxy (private correspondence, 1992), Maxie’s Toy which may have run from 1989-1998 (private correspondence, 1992; 209 Area Code BBSes Through History, n.d.), Fire Chat (private correspondence, ‘92-’94; 804 Area Code BBSes Through History, n.d.), M_P_D (EchoList, December 1995), and SIP_MPD (ibid). Some were new age health BBS, others were specifically for MPD, while others might’ve been general purpose and multiples just happened to congregate there.
It’s in these old BBS that I first find the use of the word “singlet,” which was apparently coined by Astraea’s ex-husband, “B.C.”, (private correspondence, October 1992). The word spreads through Astraea and their later online glossary to all sorts of places, such as alt.support.dissociation, Dark Personalities, and so on. We’ve also seen “singleton” but apparently by the late ‘90s some folks found it derogatory, leading to a short-lived more “politically correct” version, “singletype” (Dark Personalities, 2001 May 19).
So MPD (and MPD-ish) multiples are starting to come together as an identity, with their own jargon, ways of relating to each other, and cottage industries. But they aren’t the only ones building community at this time. So is the backlash.
The Memory Wars (1984-2000s)
There have been (long, soul-crushing) books written about the memory wars. It’s hard to distill into something quick and simple, but we can’t talk MPD/DID history without it, so hold your nose, pull on your shit-wading boots, and get ready to dive. (And if you want more in-depth stuff, read Elizabeth Loftus’s Witness for the Defense, Margaret Thaler Singer’s Crazy Therapies, and Ross Cheit’s the Witch-Hunt Narrative. Enjoy that thousand pages of suffering!)
So, as popular awareness of MPD grew, more and more people were getting diagnosed. Since MPD was supposed to be the rarest thing ever, and was becoming increasingly associated with extreme child abuse, this put therapeutic institutions in a bind: had there really been so many multiples running around unnoticed? If not, where were they all coming from? And what to do about it?
The legal system and law enforcement also weren’t prepared for the special problems of dealing with young children in abuse cases. By its nature, abuse is a private, hidden thing; often the only people who can say it happened are the victim (in this case a child) and the abuser (usually an adult, usually in better mental condition). If the abuse happened early enough, the statute of limitations would run out before the victim reached adulthood—or even puberty. Some of these kids were too young to speak; others were hindered by lack of vocabulary or understanding. All were small, fragile, and at the mercy of the adults around them. How to respond to these children? How seriously to take them? Emotions and stakes were high, and inevitably, as the euphemism goes, mistakes were made.
Probably the most infamous of these cases (and arguably the one that started it all) was the McMartin preschool trial. It started simply enough in 1983, when a mother called her son’s doctor concerned that he may have been raped. An investigation started, involving more and more children (culminating at forty-one complainants, with hundreds more interviews) and more and more aggressors (seven defendants, with apparently over fifty suspects). When the news leaked out a few months later, everyone wanted a piece of it, and a seven year circus commenced, ending with zero convictions and a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. General opinion afterward was that the whole thing was a shitshow.
Ross Cheit goes through the case in laborious, agonizing detail (The Witch-Hunt Narrative, chapter 2). He probably gives the most credence to any of the McMartin claims that I’ve seen since the trial ended in 1990, and even so, he makes it clear there were problems of overdiagnosis in medical evidence, interviewer bias, and parental interference. It was a mess, and it proved the perfect hook for the backlash.
Now, the backlash was going to happen, because it always does. Norms and tech may change, but the tactics remain reliable and predictable: denial (“it didn’t happen”), minimalization (“it only sort of happened”), and justification (“it happened, but it’s okay”), with a good side helping of attacking the victim and claiming them the true persecutor (“this jerk is trying to ruin my life!”). There’s even an acronym for it: DARVO (for Denial, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender). And what’s stood out to me in my research is how consistent it’s been over the past century, even with the demographics of victims and attackers changing! McGuire describes the same tactics from white men raping black women in the 1940s as Scully and Marola describe from black and white incarcerated rapists in the 1980s. Racism or misogyny may justify the violence, but they’re just swapped in and out as needed to bolster the tactic, which remains the same. Different poisons, same glass.
In this case, the poisons in the glass were ableism and the thingification of children. If the victim in the case was still a child, then they were lying, misled, or misunderstood; overly seductive or sexually aggressive; or otherwise an acceptable target. (It is no coincidence that one of these backlash organizations, The National Center for Reason and Justice, focuses on freeing convicted child molesters from prison, even undeniable, exhaustively documented cases like Father Shanley. If children are things, to be used at whim by adults, then it’s easy to argue that the sexual exploitation of children isn’t a serious concern.)
If the victim was an adult, then by necessity they were reporting abuse that happened years or decades prior—and sometimes that abuse had been forgotten during those years. The backlash’s most original move was taking the old standby of denial and putting a new spin on it: “it didn’t happen; the memories of abuse have been fabricated.” Thus the term Memory Wars.
Not all of these adults reporting their abusers were multiple, not all multiples reported abuse, and neither group necessarily lost a traumatic memory only to remember it later, but all were often lumped in together, because it was convenient. It fed into existing cultural stereotypes of hysterical women, attention-seekers, lunatics so ill that they could not be trusted to state their experience. At times, the backlash could even feign concern for the helpless dears: “it didn’t happen… because this person has been manipulated or brainwashed by an unscrupulous therapist into remembering it like it did.”
And this was not a totally baseless claim! It’s not at all hard to find multiples or their therapists self-reporting super dubious, creepy behavior! (For instance, Joan Frances Casey’s autobiographical the Flock discusses “reparenting” therapy by Casey’s therapist and her husband, who treated the Flock as their own child and spent hours every day with them. Therapist Ralph Allison self-reports exorcising his multi patients—see his paper, “If In Doubt, Cast It Out?” And if you really want to go down a rabbit hole, Google Colin Ross’s malpractice lawsuits.)
However. The backlash organizations that formed didn’t actually care about therapeutic overreach and abuse. The proof is in their actions. None of them, far as I know, ever attempted to regulate therapeutic behavior—indeed, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s Elizabeth Loftus served on the advisory board until it closed December 31, 2019 (False Memory Syndrome Foundation, n.d.), two decades after she resigned from the APA to avoid an ethics investigation and four years since the report on it came to light (Hoffman, 2015, pg. 484, footnote 2350). The ethics investigation was based around complaints filed by lawyer Jennifer Hoult, who stated that Loftus had misrepresented the details of her legal case against her sexually abusive father, in the interest of forwarding the False Memory Syndrome narrative, and that upon receiving the ethics complaints, Loftus then informed Mr. Hoult about them, who then sued Ms. Hoult for libel, and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation added their own harassment campaign (Hoult, 2005 and 2014). If the False Memory Syndrome Foundation were truly so concerned about therapeutic misbehavior, they never would’ve tolerated it from their own.
Instead, their actions focused on legal protection of the accused and harassment of accusers or their therapists—sometimes to the point of restraining orders (Calof, 1998). The False Memory Syndrome Foundation never gave criteria for the syndrome it claimed was scourging the country, but it still spun itself as a scientific organization super-effectively; Peter and Pamela Freyd created it in 1992 after their grown daughter privately accused Peter of abuse, to which they responded by trying to sabotage her career (Dallam, 2002). The Witch Hunt Information Center… well, it’s there in the name (Harris, 1997). The National Center for Reason and Justice’s focus has already been discussed.
As scientific organizations, these people were failures. The only one I know of who did any substantial research on the memories they disavowed was Elizabeth Loftus. But these orgs were fantastic at spin. Their debunkers tended to be academics, writing for academic publications, while they themselves focused on more popular mainstream venues. Perversely, they made themselves popular in skeptics’ groups because they played to bias, despite their lack of scientific rigor, and from the ‘90s up through the mid-’00s, it was damn near impossible to read anything about MPD/DID without having to also dig through False Memory Syndrome talking points. It cast a long shadow on medicalized multiples from this time, including ourself, and just about every trauma-influenced multiple of a certain generation has a story about it affecting them.
All of this is a bit ironic, since traumatic amnesia was studied in combat veterans back in the ‘40s (as quoted in Freyd 1998), apparently without controversy. Going through all the research is beyond the scope of this essay, but the very basics are: traumatic amnesia exists, false memories exist, and so do “recovered memories.” Have you ever forgotten where you put your keys, searched everywhere in despair, only to suddenly remember? Congratulations: you’ve recovered a memory. It’s apparently impossible to prove the difference between false and real memories without outside corroboration, but some traumatized, later-remembered memories have apparently been corroborated in a legal court (see Cheit’s Recovered Memory Project). Our brains are squishy, fallible chunks of electrified meat and at the end of the day, we have to make our peace with that.
Oh, and in the midst of all this bullshit, the DSM changes Multiple Personality Disorder to Dissociative Identity Disorder in 1994, hoping that will calm things down. It doesn’t really work; the “multi trauma memoir” does fall from popularity, but that’s probably due to rigid genre norms and the fad running its course, and the Memory Wars continue for roughly another decade. (The NCRJ still exists today, and the FMSF only shut their doors at the end of 2019.)
But even as the war rages, plurals keep making community anyway. Enter the Internet.
(A Brief Aside: the 1994 DSM IV and the MPD/DID Change
A lot of multiples had passionate opinions on the diagnosis change from MPD to DID—just check out the Many Voices or alt.support.dissociation arguments from 1994 to see what I mean. Some felt that DID was a euphemism, a way to say, “oh, you’re not even another personality, you’re just one dissociated one.” Others saw DID as a less sensational term and hoped it might make people less scared of them.
Personally, we think that the name of the diagnosis is less interesting than how important it was to people. Even by this point, people were equating their diagnosis with identity. They were taking these diagnostic changes not just as a bureaucratic change, but a personal rejection of who they were. Even though, if you ask me, doctors shouldn’t be given that kind of power in the first place.
Continue to Part 3!
Sources and Recommended Reading:
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(n.d.) 760 Area Code BBSes Throughout History. Retrieved from http://bbslist.textfiles.com/760/
(n.d.) 804 Area Code BBSes Through History. Retrieved from http://bbslist.textfiles.com/804/
Calof, David L. (1998). Notes from a practice under siege: Harassment, defamation, and intimidation in the name of science. Ethics and Behavior, 8(2) pp. 161-187.
The Awareness Center. (2013). In Memory of Lynn Wasnak. Blog post. Retrieved from https://theawarenesscenter.blogspot.com/2013/04/honoring-lynn-wasnak.html
Becker, Judith. (2004). Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Chase, the Troops for Truddi. (1987). When Rabbit Howls. New York: Jove Books.
Cheit, Ross E. (2010-2020). Recovered Memory Project [website]. Retrieved from https://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/
Cheit, Ross E. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dallam, S.J. (2002). “Crisis or Creation: A systematic examination of false memory syndrome.” Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 9(3/4), 9/36. Retrieved from www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/res/dallam/6.html
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