Scribbles and Bits

When I made my plural histories, I said, “thank fuck that’s over, never doing THAT again!” It was a lot of work, and a lot more agonizing about what I didn’t know, what I should and shouldn’t include, what “plural” even meant. I was thrilled when it was done. Wash my hands of the business!

But then I got a printer. And then I tried a tiny print run of those essays in zine format, and people started buying them at cons. And I went, “I know so much more about demoniacs and possession now... I have Coons and Greaves and their godforsaken bibliography and Silverwolf and Ida Craddock and what if I made a real book about this?”

Clearly I have learned nothing.

( Read more... )

EDIT: well dick, Rosen put it all up on his website already! Silly me.

While on a bookstore adventure with nevanna , we splurged on a half dozen books, including Michael A. Rosen's self-published Sexual Portraits: Photographs of Radical Sexuality (from 1990). Mr. Rosen is still alive today, and has magnaminously put the book (among others) up for free download as a PDF! (You can also buy his books or prints from him; support your fellow artists!)

I bought the book for fun. What I didn't expect is for a very many-selved interview (and photoset) to appear in it! (There's also another, briefer interview, which I'm skipping.) A couple, named William and Sybil (yes really) discuss their personas' relationships to themselves and each other in detail, and the photoset shows different personas together. I am transcribing the interview here and also uploading the photoset for posterity.

Note: this photoset and interview involves ageplay, Master/Slave and goddess play, and pre-K headmates in adult vessels having kinky relationships with each other. Anyone who tries to start shit about child molestation here will be banned and have their comments deleted.

( Photoset and interview behind the cut! )

Sneak: healthymultiplicity.com's filehosting started working again finally, so I have uploaded Papierfliegerfalter's translation of a 1791 German medical multi case! As far as I know, this is the first time it's been translated into English, rather than just summarized, and papierfliegerfalter have graciously granted permission for it to be spread publicly!

We also book-scanned Baldwin's Oneselves: Multiple Personalities, 1811-1981, which has never been digitized, as far as I know, and Orion Scribner fixed it up and made it screenreadable! It's now uploaded too, hooray! It's a bunch of thumbnail sketches of various multi cases from the time period in the title.

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 found a 1791 record that predates Mary Reynolds in the medical multiplicity realm. )

( Aaaaand more on that Billy Joel cultiple. No grim details behind the cut, but we link to the legal case which DOES have grim details. )

Sneak: While Mori was digging through old soulbonding pages for Madgic #4, we stumbled on the origin of "outsourcing"!

Coined By: Laura Gilkey (AKA Half-Esper Laura)
What it Means: It describes a soulbond (a fictional character that someone forms a relationship with) that comes from media created by an outside party.
Time Used: May 2002-?
Locations Used: Soulbonding arenas (websites, soulbonding Livejournal groups); seems to have fallen out of favor with the newer generations where soulbonding kinda got assimilated into the greater plural arena.

( Origin of the term 'outsourcing,' plus 2002-era discussions of soulbonding, plurality, and multiplicity as a greater spectrum )

Mori: finished the Magic Daughter. It was good! Recommended for anyone interested in a MPD integration memoir.

In the same book sweep, I got D. Scott Rogo's "The Infinite Boundary: a psychic look at Spirit Possession, Madness, and Multiple Personality," which I do not recommend. It's too credulous for me, and the whole prologue is about a trans woman being made cis and straight through exorcism. Ech!

But go figure, it has the first medical multi citation of headmate sex I know of! And of course, it comes from Ralph fuckin' Allison.

Allison was considered one of THE multi shrinks, back in the day. He coined the term "Inner Self-Helper," cured Henry Dana Hawksworth, but by 1980 he was already drinking his own Koolaid and turned into a crank convinced that multiples had psychic powers and called to demonic entities to possess them. Dude started exorcising his patients and wrote about it in his 1980 book, Minds In Many Pieces, which is where Rogo pulls the following story: while treating a female multi, "an unfamiliar entity, who called himself 'Dennis,' suddenly popped forth. He stated that he was possessing Elise because of his sexual attraction toward 'Shannon,' an important secondary personality of the patient's! (...) The inexplicable appearance of Dennis confused Dr. Allison, who had never heard of one secondary personality falling in love with another. (...) The therapist asked 'Dennis' just how he expected to consummate his love for Shannon. 'Dennis's' response was (...) That he could possess anyone Elise dated. 'Shannon' was called forth (...) And she corroborated 'Dennis's' story." (261-262)

Of course, Elise's ISH says that Dennis "had taken control of Elise because of her experiments with witchcraft, which had opened her to ge evil," (262) and they end up exorcising him very dramatically.

Ugh. I can't believe the earliest citation I have for this now is THAT book, which I reeeeeaaally don't want to read! Even the selections of Rogo I pounded through were a drag!

Big old linkdump someone's created of Ye Olde Multi Sites: https://scrapes-and-bruises.neocities.org/plural Blessings on Neocities, and hungryghosts for telling us about this!

Internet still very spotty, probably will be at least another week.

"It doesn't matter what the professionals think; we don't think we're a multiple." (S4OS I:4, pg. 14)

(many thanks tosobqjmv_sphinx for linking me about this!)

Running for 9 issues from 1985-1987, Speaking for Our Selves (or S4OS) was possibly the first newsletter for people with MPD. It not only predated Many Voices by a couple years; it may have been the inspiration: "After a group called Speaking For Ourselves closed (which was the first newsletter for individuals with dissociative disorders) –– Lynn Wasnak picked up where they left off and she founded the organization 'Many Voices'" (The Awareness Center, "Remembering Lynn Wasnak," 2013). It was based out of Long Beach, California, and the subscription rate for six issues was $6 for multiples, $12 for all others (S4OS I:4, pg. 22).

Unfortunately, the only digital copy of any of the issues I have been able to find is the one sobqjmv_sphinx linked me, Vol. 1 no. 4 from June 1986. (Not screenreadable.) Nevertheless, here's the data I've managed to dig up:

( This is the earliest firsthand record I have of medical multi community! So excited. )

While at the public library (visiting our new best friend, the book scanner), we scanned the in-library-use-only copy of Sandra J. Hocking and Company's Living With Your Selves: a survival manual for people with multiple personalities. From 1992, it's the earliest medical-multi self-help book that I know of. (EDIT: incorrect! Jackyln Pia's Multiple Personality Gift, from 1991, predates it and has been posted online.) (Also, EDIT 9/25/23: I have replaced the link with the complete scan of the book I made later. No material is missing from this new file!)

Hocking and Company are unusual in that she/they are/were one of the few publicly out medical-multis who managed to publish more than one book in their lifetime! (I'm going to flail at names and pronouns because integration plus multiple names means I'm not sure what the proper way to refer to Hocking is.) Hocking's full bibliography that I know of is:( Bibliography! )

( The cultural context of Hocking and Company )
( Language and terminology notes )
( Various Quotes and Bits )
( Hocking's Contract for Survival, which I think is the best part of this book and which we plan to adapt for our own use! )

( Conclusion )

( Ciiiiitationnnnnns! )

( Footnote about Colin Ross. UGH. )

It appears that Oneselves: Multiple Personalities, 1811–1981, by Louis Baldwin, is still in print, though in a different edition (and softcover only, it seems)! If you want a quick crash-course in old medical multi cases, this book is really good. Totally worth picking up!

Also, Rings System is compiling a page of supportive scientific research of plurality and multiplicity. This also seems relevant to folks' interests; Rings are doing great work!