Screenreadable Multi Books, 1791's umgetauschte Personlichkeit, and Billy Joel cultiple

[lb_lee]

Reminder 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:

• 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!
  

Please rehost and spread these files all over the place, so they won't be lost and forgotten! I have made them their own webpage on healthymultiplicity.com so they don't get buried. Sneak's also taken the opportunity to debug some of the site, but that's a task still ongoing.)

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.

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.

Comments

[frameacloud]

Hey, I just found German Wikipedia has a really good biography article about Eberhard Gmelin's plural patient from 1791! There's even a painting of her! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Heigelin The article doesn't machine-translate into English very well at all, but it gives context to Gmelin's book. How sad, it says everyone involved died very shortly after the book was written.

When I was looking for info about Gmelin just now, I also found this English-language article that gives a longer summary of that book (pp. 1-2). It tells about another, unrelated plural case from 1791 (p. 3)! It says:

"There was another case also reported in 1791. It concerned a young man of eighteen who lived in Springfield, Massachusetts. Benjamin Rush discussed it in his lecture to the medical students at the University of Pennsylvania and concluded his two personalities occurred '. . . as if they depended upon two minds.' Rush did not mention hypnosis in relation to this unusual state but his attempted explanation sounded very much like Gmelin, even though it is almost certain he did not know of Gmelin’s account."

Carlson E. T. (1989). Multiple personality and hypnosis: the first one hundred years. Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 25(4), 315–322. https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6696(198910)25:4<315::aid-jhbs2300250402>3.0.co;2-h Full text via Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.st/10.1002/1520-6696(198910)25:4%3C315::aid-jhbs2300250402%3E3.0.co;2-h

Which, in turn, was citing this, which fortunately happens to be available to us to read in the Internet Archive:

Patricia Noel, Benjamin Rush’s Lectures on the Mind (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981), pp. 668-672. Full text: https://archive.org/details/benjaminrushslec0144rush/page/668/mode/2up?q=668

[frameacloud]

Continuing down this research hole, I checked out Patricia Noel's Benjamin Rush’s Lectures on the Mind. For context, the book says Benjamin Rush has been called "the father of American psychiatry." The anecdote in question was part of Rush's regular scripted lectures on psychology that he gave his students from 1791 to 1811, expanding it over the years, and publishing them as books. Patricia Noel's book is Rush's lectures with annotations. The 18-year-old was not Rush's own patient, but one he'd heard about. He brought it up in a part of his lecture about somnambulism, which usually means sleepwalking, but he's using it for altered states like this too. This is the part of Rush's lecture where he brings up that anecdote:

"I [should] have been much puzzled to find out the cause of this curious phenomenon [somnambulism and lack of memory of it] in the operation of the mind, had I not met with the following history of a case in Connecticut in a letter from Dr. [Joseph] Lathrop of Springfield [Massachusetts, not Connecticut], to the late Dr. [Ezra] Stiles, President of Yale College in New Haven. [...] The letter is dated July 18, 1791.

" 'A young man in this town [...] some years since, was in consequence of bathing water, visited with a peculiar kind of disorder, which operated by paroxisms [sic]. When a fit seized him he would at first fall down; but in a moment or two rise, possessed of an agility far superior to what was natural. In two or three hours, and sometimes sooner, the fit would pass off and leave him in his usual state, and, to appearance, in health. But what was most remarkable in his case, was the state of his mind. While he was in a fit, he perfectly remembered things which had occured [sic] in the preceding fits, but nothing which had happened in the intervals, or in the time prior to his disorder. In the intervals, all his fits, and everything which had passed in them, were totally obliterated; but he could distinctly recollect the occurrences of the former intervals. The time of his fits appeared to him in continuity, as did also his healthful periods--when one was perfect the other was lost. If in the time of a fit, he took up any business, he would drop it when the fit ceased, without any recollection of the matter; and when the fit returned he would resume the business without any idea of his having discontinued it. The case was the same, if he undertook anything in the intervals of his disorder. In short, he seemed to have two distinct minds which acted by turns independently of each other. In the space, I think, of about two years, in the use of a particular remedy, his fits left him, and he was reduced to a simple consciousness. The remedy which cured him, or deprived him of one of his souls, I have not been able to learn, the family having lost the recipe.

" 'The above account I received from his father, and from others of his family.' [A footnote here says that this quotation of the letter from Dr. Lathrop had been "clipped from an unidentified newspaper."]

"I shall hereafter mention the case of a lady, nearly similar to the one I have read, induced by derangement. [...] The Countess of Laval, a French lady, was ill of a fever attended by delirium, in which she spoke a language with great fluency, which none of her attendants understood. An old Welch [sic] woman who had nursed her when she was a child, was sent for to see her. She understood every word she said. It was the Welch language, which she had learned when a child, but of which she could not speak a word before nor after her recovery. [Footnote: James Burnett (1714-1799), Lord Monboddo, Ancient Metaphysics (London, 1782), II pp. 217-224. Non, RC. Communicated to Monboddo in a letter from Hans Stanley (?1720-1780). Stanley was a British politician who served in Paris. The Countess is unidentified.]

"During my residence in Edinburgh, I conducted a fellow student who was much too intoxicated to walk alone, to his lodgings [...] On our way, my fellow student spoke to me only in the French language. The next morning, [...] I mentioned to him his uncommon fluency in speaking French. He was much surprised at this information, for although he had learned to speak French when a boy, he had entirely forgotten it for many years.

" [...] madmen frequently remember nothing of what passed when they were deranged; but when they relapse, they distinctly remember the former subjects of their derangement. We had an insane sailor in our hospital some years ago, who believed himself an admiral, and assumed the authority and consequence connected with that rank in a navy. This man recovered, but relapsed some time afterwards, and was again brought in the hospital when he resumed the conversation and manners of his former paroxysm of insanity." (pp. 668-672)

I was hoping to track down some more information about the 18-year-old American case, but it looks like that will be harder to find. We still don't know his name, and now there's some confusion about whether he was located in Massachusetts or Connecticut, or how many years previous to 1791 his case had happened. Even if we did find the unidentified newspaper that the story had originally appeared in, it seems unlikely to shed any more light on it.

[frameacloud]

Worse, I just noticed that although Carlson summarized the American case as being about an 18 year old, the source Carlson cited doesn't say that. That came out of nowhere.

Luckily we know a lot more about the German case.