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lb_leeReminder that our fire sale of originals is ongoing! We're over halfway to our goal, which is amazing, since it helps staunch the financial bleeding of having to leave in a hurry.
In other news,frameacloud graciously took some of Ye Olde Multi Book scans we did and fed them through OCR, meaning they're now decently screenreadable and searchable! Here are the new links:
We are already super glad I got my mitts on Goettman, Greaves, and Coons's monster slab of citations, even though we've barely cracked into it. But since Orion made it screenreadable (and thus SEARCHABLE), I wanted to find their 1791 citation... because that predates Mary Reynolds, who in the English-speaking world, at least, tends to get credited as "the first multiple." Who was this mysterious 1791 multi who predated her? We had to know!
Turns out it's from a German publication: Gmelin, E. (1791). Materialen fur die antbropologie (pp. 3-89). Tubingen, Germany: Cotta. And, Orion discovered, that monster has been digitized on GoogleBooks!
I can't read German. However, according to Orion, Google translate is surprisingly clear, and furthermore, Goettman et al added to their citation the parenthetical aside, "Also precised in H. Ellenberger, The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry (pp. 127). New York: Basic Books, 1970." Which, it turns out, is on LibraryGenesis!
Ellenberger summarizes almost 80 pages of German into the following paragraphs:
Rogan: I admit, for years now I've been increasingly dubious of Mary Reynolds as "the first multiple." At best, she was the first MEDICALIZED multiple; spirit possession has been around way longer. I admit a bit of sour satisfaction to have proof that she wasn't even that! The most you can say about her is that she was maybe the first medicalized multiple to have made it into the historical record in the English-speaking world that I know about. I will update my plural history posts accordingly... but not right now. (Googling this case, I discover that Pluralpedia apparently already knew about this, but they didn't cite a source, so at least I can add that to the pile.)
Mori: We also used Goettman et al. to dig into that one Billy Joel cultiple, and the story is long and harrowing. (CW: violence, murder, rape, and torture of children. Seriously, it's really bad.) It is, however, also pretty textbook cultiple: Marie Moore didn't use the word "channeling" exactly, but she claimed she'd been given special drugs by the Mafia that allowed Billy Joel to take over her body, and he was supposedly gifted with supernatural powers and given total power over everyone in the house because he was supposedly a dangerous Mafia man. Same shit, different wrapper.
However, unlike the smaller fish we dealt with, Marie had a captive audience of 12-14-year-olds, one of whom was her child and at least two others of whom lived with her for months at a time. So... yeah, you got the fandom figure who becomes a headmate with supernatural powers, which is used as justification to harm those beneath him. And apparently Moore was "being Billy" since 1975, and she also did this for years without the Internet, which proves that this isn't a new thing. People have probably been pulling variations of this since time immemorial, just tailored for the culture and victims of the time.
In other news,
frameacloud graciously took some of Ye Olde Multi Book scans we did and fed them through OCR, meaning they're now decently screenreadable and searchable! Here are the new links:- Goettman, Greaves, and Coons's Multiple Personality and Dissociation, 1791-1992: A Complete Bibliography.
- Eliana Gil's United We Stand.
- Phoenix J. Hocking's Someone I Know Has Multiple Personalities.
- Phoenix J. Hocking's Living With Your Selves.
- Alan Marshall's People in Pieces: Multiple Personality in Milder Forms & Greater Numbers.
- Luh Ketut Suryani and Jensen, Trance and Possession in Bali: A Window on Western Multiple Personality Disorder, Possession Disorder, and Suicide, 1993. Now only 50MB instead of a hundred!
We are already super glad I got my mitts on Goettman, Greaves, and Coons's monster slab of citations, even though we've barely cracked into it. But since Orion made it screenreadable (and thus SEARCHABLE), I wanted to find their 1791 citation... because that predates Mary Reynolds, who in the English-speaking world, at least, tends to get credited as "the first multiple." Who was this mysterious 1791 multi who predated her? We had to know!
Turns out it's from a German publication: Gmelin, E. (1791). Materialen fur die antbropologie (pp. 3-89). Tubingen, Germany: Cotta. And, Orion discovered, that monster has been digitized on GoogleBooks!
I can't read German. However, according to Orion, Google translate is surprisingly clear, and furthermore, Goettman et al added to their citation the parenthetical aside, "Also precised in H. Ellenberger, The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry (pp. 127). New York: Basic Books, 1970." Which, it turns out, is on LibraryGenesis!
Ellenberger summarizes almost 80 pages of German into the following paragraphs:
As early as 1791, Eberhardt Gmelin published a case of umgetauschte Personlichkeit (exchanged personality):
In 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution. aristocratic refugees arrived in Stuttgart. Impressed by their sight. a twenty-year-old German young woman suddenly "exchanged" her own personality for the manners and ways of a French-born lady, imitating her and speaking French perfectly and German as would a French woman. These "French" states repeated themselves. In her French personality, the subject had complete memory of all that she had said and done during her previous French states. As a German, she knew nothing of her French personality. With a motion of his hand, Gmelin was easily able to make her shift from one personality to the other.
In 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution. aristocratic refugees arrived in Stuttgart. Impressed by their sight. a twenty-year-old German young woman suddenly "exchanged" her own personality for the manners and ways of a French-born lady, imitating her and speaking French perfectly and German as would a French woman. These "French" states repeated themselves. In her French personality, the subject had complete memory of all that she had said and done during her previous French states. As a German, she knew nothing of her French personality. With a motion of his hand, Gmelin was easily able to make her shift from one personality to the other.
Rogan: I admit, for years now I've been increasingly dubious of Mary Reynolds as "the first multiple." At best, she was the first MEDICALIZED multiple; spirit possession has been around way longer. I admit a bit of sour satisfaction to have proof that she wasn't even that! The most you can say about her is that she was maybe the first medicalized multiple to have made it into the historical record in the English-speaking world that I know about. I will update my plural history posts accordingly... but not right now. (Googling this case, I discover that Pluralpedia apparently already knew about this, but they didn't cite a source, so at least I can add that to the pile.)
Mori: We also used Goettman et al. to dig into that one Billy Joel cultiple, and the story is long and harrowing. (CW: violence, murder, rape, and torture of children. Seriously, it's really bad.) It is, however, also pretty textbook cultiple: Marie Moore didn't use the word "channeling" exactly, but she claimed she'd been given special drugs by the Mafia that allowed Billy Joel to take over her body, and he was supposedly gifted with supernatural powers and given total power over everyone in the house because he was supposedly a dangerous Mafia man. Same shit, different wrapper.
However, unlike the smaller fish we dealt with, Marie had a captive audience of 12-14-year-olds, one of whom was her child and at least two others of whom lived with her for months at a time. So... yeah, you got the fandom figure who becomes a headmate with supernatural powers, which is used as justification to harm those beneath him. And apparently Moore was "being Billy" since 1975, and she also did this for years without the Internet, which proves that this isn't a new thing. People have probably been pulling variations of this since time immemorial, just tailored for the culture and victims of the time.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-27 03:45 pm (UTC)