Astraea's Bookstore
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 Multiplicity 101 Podcast -- by multiples, for multiples!  |
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title: The Creature of Habit: A Journey author: The Troops for Truddi Chase, completed by Kari Ainsworth illustrator: The Troops for Truddi Chase publisher: ? Truddi Chase (The Troops) died of COPD on March 10, 2010 (visit link to sign memorial guestbook). This is their last book and it is NOW on sale at amazon and barnes & noble. The Creature of Habit - A Journey is about discovering one's path to emotional freedom from the trauma of abuses. Wherever our wounds have come from and however deep there is HOPE. The creature of habit's journey is brought full circle when he finally learns he has a voice -- and to "cry" is an emotion not to be denied. "Physical and emotional pain can leave tattooed scars that will never go away; but once emotions are discovered and fears that bind are overcome there is infinite possibility, there is HOPE." "It is with passion that I complete the journey that Truddi started. My HOPE is that you will embrace her life and life stories and find 'YOUR VOICE' through your journey." |
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Trauma recovery & DID resource info - click here
Bestsellers
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Sybil's Friend Nancy's website. Learn more about her friendship with Shirley and her personal life.
Naomi Rhode, Sybil's closest relative, verifies her story
Interview with Nancy Preston
Note: Just because a book appears in this list does not mean we recommend it. Most of them present multiplicity strictly in terms of multiple personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, or MPD/DID -- which is not our view.
The problem with most if not all books on MPD/DID is that if you've read one, you've read them all. In each case you've got a bewildered frontrunner, a "fascinating cast of characters", a well-meaning though often just as bewildered therapist, hundreds of pages of grueling depictions of child sex and violence (often bordering on "pornography of the victim"), and a bittersweet, Hallmark Classics ending of integration -- with few exceptions. Lemarath^Shandra has something to say about this as well.
If you would like to tell us something about any of these books, use our mailform. You can be anonymous, and you don't have to use HTML. Just write and tell us what you think.
The books are listed alphabetically by author. To find a title you're interested in, do a Control-F and type in your title.
How To Get These Books
We are back at amazon.com, at least for now. A surprising number of the books in this list, especially more recent ones, can be found there: check it out! Accompanying each book is a link which will take you (if in print) to the reference page for that particular book. You can buy it right then and there. (Amazon sells used copies of out-of-print books.) If all else fails, try ABE Books - Advanced Book Exchange.|
Title: Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder
Author: Joan Acocella Publisher: Jossey-Bass 1999 ISBN:: 0787947946 Joan Acocella has expanded the controversial article she originally wrote for The New Yorker in 1997. She describes in detail the history and origins of the MPD overdiagnosis fad of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was a serious matter, causing the breakup of families and the cultish glorification of certain "experts" who were subsequently defrocked. Ultimately the scandals led to the psychiatric industry's backpedaling. They began to claim that it was all based on a delusion of clients who only believed, or had been talked into believing, they had more than one self. This was why MPD was subsequently renamed to DID. It's an excellent book, makes excellent sense, is a powerful exposé of unethical practices in the mental health industry, and draws entirely the wrong conclusions. Acocella reassures us that no one really has multiple personalities, and that the whole thing is a crypto-misogynist myth. Of course, this is sheer nonsense, and modern psychiatry is slowly coming to terms with the fact that multiples do exist. Even so, we recommend that everyone who is in therapy (multiple or not) read this book. Read it if you have ever had questions about the way your doctor tries to dredge up questionable traumatic memories -- or if you feel like you're being pressed to accept a certain view of yourself, the people in your multiple system (if any) and your childhood that doesn't fit your truth. Many therapists did, and some apparently still do, use the tactics described in this book. Acocella's theory of multiplicity as nonexistent save as a "cultural idiom of distress" is completely wrong, but she is quite accurate about the manipulations of clients in the mental health industry. More on our Bad Psychiatry page. Lynn Crook of Treating Abuse Today says: ""Creating Hysteria" should inspire readers to seek out the author's orginal sources and compare them to her statements in this book. For example, the author mentions PBS Frontline's "The Search for Satan," a film produced by Ofra Bikel that depicts 2 retracters who filed civil suits against their therapists and who, after this film was aired in 1995, settled with their therapists' insurance carriers. I reviewed this film twice. Once in 1996 for Treating Abuse Today("Smoke and Mirrors") and again in 1998 ("The Search for Satan: Three Years Later"). In the 1996 article I documented numerous discrepancies in "The Search for Satan." In the 1998 article I compared the statements of Frontline interviewees retracter Mary Shanley, Shanley's friend Meredith Shriner and Spring Shadows Glen nurse Sally McDonald's statements in "The Search for Satan" to their testimonies under cross-examination in US v. Peterson. Under cross-examination, their claims in "The Search for Satan" were summarily impeached. Recently, PBS Frontline agreed to settle Judith Peterson's (one of the therapists named in "The Search for Satan") defamation suit against PBS Frontline for an undisclosed amount. Too often authors leave it up to the readers to make up their own minds. "Creating Hysteria" serves as a reminder that because it's "in print" it is not necessarily true. This book challenges readers to do their own investigation to determine if the written word is indeed accurate." Contact Joan Acocella through the New Yorker Choose "Other" in the subject dropdown.
read the first chapter
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Title: Diagnosis & Treatment of Dissociative Disorders
Author: Allen, Jon G. and William H. Smith Publisher: Northvale, NJ; Aronson, 1995 "This work covers the diagnosis and treatment of patients who have experienced traumas and subsequent dissociative disorders. An epidemic of these patients has caused controversy about their treatment. Clinicians from various disciplines offer specialised knowledge for effective treatments." |
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Title: Minds In Many Pieces: Revealing the Spiritual Side of Multiple Personality Disorder Author: Ralph Allison Publisher: CIE, new edition, 1999 ISBN: 0966894901 Singlet psychiatrist and former minister Ralph Allison narrates his first discovery of and work with multiple clients, his observations and clients' description of their experiences. When this book first came out in 1980 it was called Minds in Many Pieces: The Making of a Very Special Doctor. (He's got a very interesting brief summary here.) The 1999 expanded edition which is what we're selling here calls it Minds in Many Pieces: The Spiritual Side of Multiple Personality Disorder. Allison believes that all multiples are fragmented bits of an original whole person who needs to be integrated "back together" through intensive hypnotherapy. He thinks that supernatural folks in your group are thought-forms, that is, they are created by one's own mind and manifest as images inside one's aura. But he also believes in malignant "entities" who can slip in through the cracks. This is all based in rudimentary Theosophy and beliefs about the astral plane. It seems that he had one or two clients who really fit this description, and ended up believing that all multiples were like this. Allison has done a lot of work in forensic psychiatry with clients, usually violent criminals, some of whom he believes are multiple. He was also an expert witness in the trial of the Hillside Strangler in an interminable show trial that was probably the basis for the one in Sidney Sheldon's Tell Me Your Dreams. He applied the term inner self-helper to certain persons in multiple systems who fit the profile of an objective, portentous 'guide' who was not a split-off part, but came (or was 'sent') from outside. Originally this term was "inner-self helper" and referred to Christians who experienced Christ's personal guidance. Allison's final chapter includes a number of assertions for which he provides no references; we assume these were provided to him by one of his clients, who appears to have been a New Age channel revealing the true nature of the cosmos to him, Unobstructed Universe-style. Today, he is a member of the Association for Humanistic Psychology; as Ian Hacking says in Rewriting the Soul, the last thing that an emergent science wants is intimations of Helena Blavatsky, so Allison has been somewhat marginalized (to put it mildly). Our difficulty with Allison isn't his habit of taking clients' word for their experiences -- like if a client said they were possessed he would do an exorcism. That's great. What's troubling is the way he imposes his current spiritual beliefs on clients for whom that model may not fit. He did not do that in his early days of researching and working with multiples. One thing we really admire him for is the fact that he (not Cornelia Wilbur) was the first to get multiplicity accepted and taken seriously by members of his profession, and especially his his stand on use of the term 'multiple personality' as opposed to 'dissociative identity disorder'. Also he appears really to have helped a few of his clients. You can find out All About Multiple Personality and what Allison currently believes about it at his page, dissociation.com. |
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Title: Got Parts? An Insider's Guide to Managing Life Successfully with Dissociative Identity Disorder Author: ATW Publisher: New Horizons 2004 ISBN: 1932690034 Coming Soon: Review by RhymersHouse. A practical guide for trauma-split groups who experience being multiple as a disorder. Calls people in your system "parts" and "alters" but emphasizes that they will always be there and remain individuals, defining "re-integration" in terms of communication and cooperation. Shows you how to map your system and determine which of your life traumas created your selves. Groups in crisis (especially blackout groups) might use it to organize themselves. This might also be good for abuse survivors who are not multiple as there is much focus on overcoming triggers, flashbacks, body memories and other common PTSD experiences. This could be a good guide for systems in chaos to establish an operating system. |
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Title: Angel Child: The Story of Zoe Parry
Author: Jacqueline Austin with Zoe Parry
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1996
ISBN: 0671709178
Zoe Parry appeared on Geraldo back in '88, after her arrest for kidnapping a child she was supposed to be babysitting. We list it because you don't often hear about Zoe Parry.
"Fractured by a lifetime of monstrous acts of abuse and incest, Zoe Parry's mind has become a battleground, and only now can she tell her story. For years, more than 150 personalities have been at war within her, each struggling for control. Readers journey into Zoe's world, where child voices beg, seductive voices beguile, angry voices hiss threats, and the horror never ends."
buy Angel Child
Search for used
copies on Advanced Book Exchange
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Title: Oneselves (Back In Print!) Author: Louis Baldwin Publisher: Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1984 ISBN: 0899501249 The next time someone tells you multiple personality isn't real, "there were no cases before Sybil, then a zillion cases afterwards", show them this book. This is about very early case studies on what we now know as multiple personalities, hosting and soulbonding with historical persons. "This book presents 28 case histories, from the earliest identifiable case in 1811 to a widely publicized one in the 1980s. These fascinating histories illustrate a wide variety of symptoms and behavior--the very factors that make diagnosis so difficult. The cases show that the causes of multiple personality disorders can range from deep and complicated psychological traumas to a simple physical injury like a blow to the head. Associated phenomena include chronic sleepwalking, persistent time loss, epilepsy, automatic writing, hallucination and several kinds and degrees of amnesia." The Exceptional Human Experience Network has this summary: "There are 28 chapters, averaging 6 pages each, each consisting of a sketch of a case, often well known, of multiple personality. Some, such as Ansel Bourne, Helene Smith, Doris Fischer, and Patience Worth appear in the parapsychological literature. The cases date from 1811-1981 and are listed in alphabetical order. In the Foreword, the author points out that only in 1980 did the American Psychiatric Association define multiple personality as a distinct disorder, but diagnosed cases of multiple personality were already on the rise in the 1970s (50-plus cases* in that decade as opposed to 90 in the preceding century and a half). Baldwin observes that persistent time loss, chronic sleepwalking, automatic writing, and hallucinations are usually closely associated with multiple personality, and sometimes possession and mediumship abilities as well."
==== Click here for lots more early case histories and stories of multiplicity You might also like William James on Exceptional Mental States. |
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Title: Four and Twenty Blackbirds: Personae Theory and the Understanding of our Multiple Selves Author: Peter A. Baldwin, Ph.D. Publisher: Norton 1997 ISBN:1883647061 Ericksonian hypnotherapist Baldwin believes everyone has different conscious and nonconscious selves. Don't know how useful this is. |
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Title: Unity and multiplicity: multilevel consciousness of self in hypnosis, psychiatric disorder, and mental health Author: Beahrs, John O. Publisher:New York : Brunner/Mazel, c1982. ISBN: 0876302835 |
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Title: Katherine, It's Time Author: Stephen Bechtel with Kit Castle Publisher: Harper & Row, 1989 ISBN:006015926X Like Three Faces of Eve and Sybil, this so-called "true life story" is actually a novel purporting to document the life history, psychiatric treatment, and ultimate integration of one of those fascinating multiples, complete with detailed and sometimes unlikely accounts of parental abuse. Bechtel confessed that he'd invented characters and incidents, some of them veering into Shirley MacLaine territory. He also inserts a lot of "great, doomed drama" (he said it, not me!), and provides a sugary integration=death ending that is one of the most depressing things we've ever read. Some of us call it Katherine, It's Prime Time. See what you think of it.
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Title: Hidden Selves Author: Edited by Moira Walker and Jenifer Black Publisher: Open University Press 1999 ISBN: 0335202004 Another novel "based upon the story of a survivor of abuse who tells of her experiences with multiple personality and its impact on her life." Note "based on"... so again, you can't trust that it isn't taking off at right angles from what really happened. Everybody's trying to be William Peter Blatty. |
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Title: Multiple Personality, Allied Disorders, and Hypnosis Author: Eugene L. Bliss (singlet) Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1986 ISBN: 0195036581 Alibris.com says:"Since the time of Mesmer, in the late eighteenth century, spectacular feats of hypnosis have been documented by respected scientific researchers, yet hypnosis has remained divorced from the main body of science. In this groundbreaking work, Dr. Eugene Bliss shows that the hypnotic capability of the mind is important to the theory and practice of psychiatry, and suggests that it deserves much more attention and research. "In Multiple Personality, Allied Disorders and Hypnosis, Bliss explores both the nature of multiple personality and hypnosis, and discusses how an understanding of the latter can provide insight into the nature of certain psychiatric disorders. For instance, he views multiple personality as a form of self-hypnosis, an instance of learned schizophrenia rather than an organic disorder, as is generally thought. He outlines the trace elements involved in multiple personality and other psychiatric disorders, provides a fascinating history of the origins and current ideas about hypnosis, and gives a detailed account of the use of hypnosis in the treatment of multiple personality. "Based on thirty years of clinical experience, and filled with insightful personal observations, Multiple Personality, Allied Disorders and Hypnosis is an informative, fascinating book for psychiatrists, psychologists, and anyone intrigued by hypnosis and its possible beneficial use." Singlet Dr. Eugene Bliss is the co-author of Prism: Andrea's World, see below. |  |
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Title: Prism: Andrea's World Author: J. and E. Bliss Publisher: New York: Stein & Day, 1985 Another novel along the lines of Sybil. Singlet Dr. Eugene Bliss' treatment of a multiple client with a lengthy, graphically depicted abuse history. Talk about "the horror never ends," this is one of the worst. Came in for a scalding review by one of our readers, who pointed out the racism inherent in blaming the violent abuse in Andrea Biaggi's family on "normal" behavior for Sicilian and Corsican families. The novel really took off at right angles with the discourse on omertà, and one had a feeling at that point that it really was a novel. Our impression was that Bliss, or whoever he was working with, had been watching too many reruns of The Godfather. |
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Title: Assessment and Treatment of Multiple Personality and Dissociative Disorders. Author: J.P. Bloch (singlet) Publisher: Sarasota: Professional Resource Press, 1991 Professional Resource Press says this book "Focuses on dissociative disorders (post-traumatic stress disorder, psychogenic amnesia, depersonalization disorder, etc.) and the dissociative nature of behaviors such as child abuse. Defines the characteristics, etiology, and differential diagnosis of dissociative, multiple personality, and ego state disorders. Advises on interview techniques and strategies, testing adaptations, special treatment problems, and child treatment issues." For what it's worth, singlet Dr. Richard Kluft says: "Dr. Bloch has succeeded in crafting an excellent introduction to multiple personality disorder and allied conditions. The strengths of his contribution are the breadth of the issues that he addresses and his ability to achieve a synthesis of newly-emerging findings in the dissociative disorders with traditional psychotherapeutic observations. This book is an excellent bridge by which the traditionally-trained psychotherapist can come to an understanding of the major concerns of the dissociative disorders literature."
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Title: Multiple Personality Disorders in the Netherlands:
A Study on Reliability and Vaildity of the Diagnosis
Author: Suzette Boon and Nel Draijer
Publisher: Taylor and Francis 1993
ISBN: 9026513615
Order Multiple Personality in the Netherlands now
Title: First Person Plural : Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind
Author: Stephen E. Braude Publisher: Routledge 1995 ISBN: 0847679969 Braude is a plain-language philosopher; you will be able to understand what he says. Wastes no time debating whether or not multiplicity is real. He knows it is; all he wants is to talk about what it implies as far as why we think there should only be one person or "self", etc. This is a revised edition where he talks about the overdiagnosis scandals and lawsuits of the 1980s and 90s. If you want a scholarly, intelligent refutation of the "false memory syndrome" crap, read this book. Highly recommended. |
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Title: The Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (Clinical Insights Monograph) Author: Edited by Bennett G. Braun M.D. (disbarred, singlet) Publisher: Rittenhouse Book Dist (American Psychiatric Press Inc) 1986 ISBN:0880480963 Singlet, founder of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation (now the ISSD/ISSTD) and head of Rush Presbyterian Hospital's Dissociative Disorders Unit, Bennett Braun was the defendant in a number of civil actions in the late 1990s concerning his treatment of clients whom he had diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and identified as victims of Satanic ritual abuse. The facts are revealed in some detail in Acocella's Creating Hysteria. Some of these clients may have been multiple; others were not; all were abused and exploited. Here's a summary of his story. You might also want to read this. |
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Title: The Family Inside: Working With The Multiple Author: Doris Bryant, Judy Kessler and Linda Shirar Publisher: Norton 1992 ISBN: 0393701425 Claims to demystify multiple personality by "redefining" it as "a creative and sensible way of surviving a childhood of extreme trauma and absolute powerlessness." It does have the advantage of Judy Kessler onboard. If you really think you are suffering with a disorder and are looking for integration as healing, it's a safe bet you will get something helpful from Kessler. |
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Title: Beyond Integration, One Multiple's Story Author: Doris Bryant and Judy Kessler Publisher: Norton 1995 ISBN: 0393702065 Every once in a while someone asks us what we know about integration. Answer: not much! However, one thing we do know is that there are not enough books on what happens after integration.. Most of the books, including the ones on this list, don't talk much about that, but seem to regard integration as the happy end of the story, the ultimate healing. In practical life, according to the bits we've heard from therapists willing to talk about it, integration is actually the middle step in a complex process of re-education and re-training designed to change the multiple's thinking processes and conditioned reflexes. The objective, of course, is to learn how to respond to daily life with a single, consistent perspective, instead of each person having his or her own unique response. This book talks about that process and how it works from both the clinician's and the client's point of view. While we haven't read it, we used to know Judy Kessler on line and were impressed with her calm, well-balanced writing. So this is probably a good book if you are thinking about integration, for learning more about not just the integration process, but what it is like to live everyday as one person. Another book on what happens after integration is Mending Ourselves, which we have read and recommend if you are thinking about integration.
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Title: Multiple Personality and Dissociation:
Understanding Incest, Abuse, and MPD
Author: David L. Calof and Mary Leloo
Publisher: Hazelden Foundation/Parkside 1993
ISBN: 0942421515
The late Cat W. of Geode@chatlink.com gives us this review: "[Hazelden is] not a christian publicist, a 12 step publicist, big, big difference. He defines a few things simply not covered in your other texts and very well worth reading. No caveat necessary. Read it."
David Calof is also a singlet, a hypnotherapist and a believer in satanic ritual abuse, for what that's worth, and seems to have used (at least in the past) the same dubious methods described in Creating Hysteria for diagnosing and treating MPD. Like most MPD therapists he is a singlet who has no personal experience of multiplicity.
buy Multiple Personality and Dissociation
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Title: They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal Author: Paula J. Caplan Publisher: Perseus, 1995 ISBN: 0201407582 Amazon.Com Review: In a disturbing insider's look at how the mental health establishment decides who is normal and who is "sick," [Caplan] charges that the DSM board's decision-making process, dominated by a handful of conservative white male psychiatrists, is arbitrary, condescending, profit-driven and riddled with personal biases and political consideration. Facile labeling of personality problems, she shows, can cause personal suffering as well as material harm because DSM categories figure prominently in who wins child custody, who gets hospitalized against their will and whose psychotherapy is covered by insurance. Why did DSM-5 team members have to sign a "vow of silence" non-disclosure agreement? Read a New York Times article about the DSM-5 coverup. |
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Title: Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality, Identity, and the Self Author: Rita Carter Publisher: Little, Brown and Co. 2008 ISBN: 031611538X We were sent a review copy of this. It's another "everyone is multiple" book, but with a twist. The best description of our impression of this book would be well-intentioned, but annoying. In addition to an assortment of almost What the Bleep-like assertions about what "the mind" can do, and what "science now knows" is possible -- most of which are wildly inaccurate -- the author provides us with the same old rationales of hypnosis and dissociation. Is everybody drinking the ISSD kool-aid around here? Even psychiatrists using those concepts in a well-meaning way are basically asserting that multiples are sleepwalking through life and living in a fantasy world they think is real, trying to escape unpleasant reality. Carter actually believes that true multiplicity, at root, consists of naming parts of your own individual consciousness and pretending they are separate persons (the link will show you a quote from the singlet mental health professional who came up with that one). This is what forms the basis of the second half of the book, which is a how-to section. That's right -- something for the people who write to us asking how they can become multiple. It's the kind of thing that might work, temporarily. Write to us if you've successfully created whole, independent people and a functional government/ operating system this way. Mood shifts and variations in thought and attitude are not separate persons. Ask anyone who's been unfortunate enough to be in therapy with one of those overenthusiastic types who thinks it's a "new personality" every time the client wears a different cologne or has a new sweater. We know this book has been well received by some groups, and maybe we're just ornery old coots who lack a sense of humor. There are some interesting ideas in this book, and she does provide a referral to our website (for which we thank her), but in our opinion she should go back and do her homework and put out a second edition. Returned for regrooving. |
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Title: The Flock: the Autobiography of a Multiple Personality Author: Joan Frances Casey Publisher: Fawcett, 1992 ISBN: 0449907325 Another novel from the heyday of MPD popularity. Blackout multiple wakes up on high ledge because another is about to jump, grueling therapy follows, memories of nightmarish abuse (fortunately not covered in detail), journey to wholeness, etc., etc. What might prove interesting is the willingness of the group's therapist to listen to them about themselves and how their operating system worked. It's also a look at typical practices of the time -- the (singlet) doctor jumps from realizing the client has "dissociative periods" to instantly diagnosing her with MPD, when even at that time there were a variety of dissociative conditions other than MPD recognized. You can also get some idea of the kind of therapist-client enmeshment routine in MPD treatment -- the decision to "reparent" various group members, for instance. |
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Title: When Rabbit Howls Author: The Troops for Truddi Chase Publisher: Dutton, 1987. Still in print from Berkeley, Jove Books (paperback), 1990. ISBN: 0515103292 This is a memoir written in novel form, and has the distinction of having been written by the client&, rather than the (singlet) therapist, although he seems to have had considerable input. It was not, as is popularly believed, the first ever book written by a multiple about their experience: that honor goes to Nellie Parsons Bean's My Life as a Dissociated Personality (full text online), written in 1908. Chris Costner-Sizemore (Eve) wrote two books also. Nor is it the first account of child sexual abuse to be written by a survivor; that would have been Kiss Daddy Goodnight by Louise Armstrong.
Parallel storylines might be confusing at first, but are an excellent example of the way a multiple's minds can run on several tracks at once. Upside: The narrative provides extremely vivid, clear descriptions of the group's childhood and what it was really like not only to be sexually abused, but to be psychologically abused and manipulated by both parents. The Troops were the first to describe co-running and co-presence, [although those words are not used]. The group strongly rejects integration. They demonstrate that multiples, and survivors of even the most violent abuse, can be self-employed and successful in the business world. The writing conveys a deep natural sensuality, a determination to live life to the fullest, and clear pictures of the Troops as individuals, not just "lesser personalities" or "fragments". One very interesting remark is made about midway through the book by the fictitious "Dr. Marshall Fielding", the Troops' personification of their own research: "there is a very small percentage of multiples who never were abused as children." There's no followup on this in the book, but it appears to have been based in a study by Frank Putnam. Downside: The reader might come away with the impression that only the most extreme abuse can lead to multiplicity. Due to the group's personal experience, the narrative repeatedly implies that all multiples have extreme psychic ability and that there are amazing secrets known to therapists who have worked with multiples, but which they are afraid to reveal publicly. This may not have been their original intention. Looking at what ophelia@asarian.org (below) says, it may be that Truddi&'s actual story is more complex and realistic than what we read in When Rabbit Howls, but that it's been sensationalised. A different view from ophelia@asarian.org [circa 1996]: "truly a hideous book. fractured tales and nonsensical editing done to a woman who is being exploited by a therp. her therp, btw, has become rich off truddi, and is now her 'manager', promoting tv and personal appearances for $. truddi, on the other hand, continues to live in pain." If someone could provide us with more details regarding what Ophelia said, we would very much appreciate it! "When Rabbit Howls", with its descriptions of co-running and co-presence and a subjective world, told our frontrunners we were really multiple and not crazy or making up our own experiences, so if there's a scandal here, we want solid evidence of it. Plus we would have liked to have seen the Troops get real help if they had not been. All we knew was that by the time the book came out they were living in Dallas with a man friend and were planning to get back into art and write another book, about Ireland. Truddi Chase died March 10, 2010. Their daughter Kari has completed their final book The Creature of Habit (below) and is now preparing it for publication. You can contribute to Fidos for Freedom in their memory.
Interview with Truddi& on KABC's Eyewitness News, probably in 1987 or 88.
Visit the home page of Dr. Robert A. Phillips, Truddi's Therapist And leave him some email or sign his guestbook while you're at it.
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Look through the used books being sold -- you may be able to find the nice hardcover edition. |
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Coming Soon...
title: The Creature of Habit: A Journey
Truddi Chase (The Troops) died of COPD on March 10, 2010. This is their last book.
"The Creature of Habit - A Journey is about discovering one's path to emotional freedom from the trauma of abuses. Wherever our wounds have come from and however deep there is HOPE. The creature of habit's journey is brought full circle when he finally learns he has a voice -- and to "cry" is an emotion not to be denied.
"Physical and emotional pain can leave tattooed scars that will never go away; but once emotions are discovered and fears that bind are overcome there is infinite possibility, there is HOPE."
"It is with passion that I complete the journey that Truddi started. My HOPE is that you will embrace her life and life stories and find 'YOUR VOICE' through your journey." |
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Author: Deborah Churchman
Publisher: Ariadne 1996
ISBN: 091805608X
A "weird" family moves to a small town and impinges on the life of the local grocer. Everyone in the family has some kind of cute eccentricity, and the female romantic lead -- one of a pair of twins -- is multiple and of course the carrier of the "dark family secret". The town grocer, who lost a twin brother himself years ago, immediately falls in love with her.
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Title: All Around the Town Author: Mary Higgins Clark Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1992
Tamsin of Amorpha says: |
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Title: Shatter
Author: Nancy Hughes Clark
Publisher: Bantam, 1986
ISBN: 0553255436
Another Sybil-takeoff novel. Stereotypical depiction of dysfunctional MPD, fragmented, dissociation, blah blah blah, ending in the usual integration/happy ending/courageous healing. What disturbed us about this story was that instead of working with the group to establish cooperation and a working operating system, the very fact of Kathy Roth's multiplicity was considered to be what was wrong with her. It wasn't a question of trauma or violent abuse, she hadn't had any! In her case it was "an environment deprived of emotional support, nurturing and guidance". There have been some studies indicating that emotional neglect in childhood is actually more damaging than sexual abuse. That's one we believe.
But the theme of this book is:
multiple personality ... is not something that needs curing like a disease; it's something that needs understanding and experiencing, and finally it integrates and you become yourself. [....whut.]
This is the book where Dr. Matthew Caldwell, the kindly (singlet) therapist to the rescue, tells her that "multiple" and "manipulate" are related, and that the answer to all her problems is "don't dissociate."
Title: More Than One: An Inside Look at Multiple Personality Disorder
Author: Terri Clark
Publisher: Nashville: Thomas Nelson 1993
ISBN: 0-8407-9140-2
Thomas Nelson is a Christian Right Publisher. It's likely that any book on MP which is published by Thomas Nelson will have a Christian Right perspective.
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Title: Three Faces of Eve Author: Cleckley, Hervey M. and Corbett Thigpen (singlets) Publisher: Fawcett 1957 ISBN: 0911238514 Library of Congress #: 56-012526 Fifty years after it was published, this piece of felonious nonsense was still being referred to as the latest thinking on multiplicity. Two supposedly outstanding psychologists (both singlets) called it "The most delightful treatise of psychopathological literature of the mid-twentieth century." It's the book that set the standard for multiple-personality narratives. And according to the woman it's supposedly about, it is a complete fabrication. She was multiple, but she had many more than three people, and her therapy was actually completed with different doctors. Thigpen embellished and fictionized and outright lied throughout this book, hoping to land a lucrative movie deal (he got it) and never guessing that the woman he took advantage of would someday haul Twentieth-Century Fox into court over the rights to her life story which he had signed away (she got'em back). This is the 1992 revised edition. And we're also selling the Three Faces of Eve film with Joanne Woodward. Remember, this is crap. The real story of the "three faces of Eve" is in Chris Costner-Sizemore's own books and interviews.
learn more about the real Three Faces of Eve |  |
 Deluxe edition of the DVD. Commentary track by director Nunally Johnson. |
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Title: Silencing the Voices Author: Jean Darby Cline Publisher: Berkley 1997 ISBN: 0425156931 "A deeply personal account of one woman's battle with multiple-personality disorder describes the childhood horrors and abuse at the hands of her father that led to a fragmentation into three separate entities and discusses her long battle to overcome de6cx 591\mg 2[; p ;p ;p NO CARRIER" And the horror never ends. |
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Title: Multiple Personality Disorder from the Inside Out Author: Edited by Barry M. Cohen (singlet), with Esther Giller and Lynn Wasnak& Publisher: Sidran, 1991 ISBN: 0962916404 This was the book that told us things had to change. Under the auspices of Many Voices and the ISSMPD (now ISSTD), essays and notes by abuse survivors and trauma-split multiples. According to the publisher's description, we are to be reassured that the writers are "guided by therapists", as if they couldn't write independently. They could and did, and each unique voice in the text is clear. The way this worked, readers of Many Voices and members of the ISSMPD were asked to write essays in response to three questions: 1) What do you wish you'd known when you were first diagnosed with MPD? 2) What would you like therapists to know about MPD? 3) What do you wish your loved ones to know about MPD? Family members were asked: What would you like to tell other friends and family members about MPD? The responses are arranged in chapters according to experience; diagnosis, pain, skeptics, hope and (of course) unification. MPD and severe childhood trauma are portrayed as being the same thing. Many of the writers describe extreme dependence on therapists; in most cases the therapists were the only ones they could be openly themselves with. A set of guidelines for clients included "be ready to sell your home, car, or even go bankrupt to pay for therapy". Most of the essays were by "the host" or "the main person", rather than by other group members. There are one or two skeptical voices. One woman described being in an incest survivors' support group where the facilitator handed out copies of Sybil and When Rabbit Howls and had people keep journals of their "parts". There are a number of astute observations about psychotherapy. Many express suspicion of the paradigm, and especially about integration as a necessary part of the healing process. In the 1980s and 90s, this was as close as multiples could get to speaking for themselves. The cultural identity called "multiple personality" was completely bound to the world of psychiatry. People who felt they were sharing their bodies with others could not talk about it without attempting to fit themselves into the established profile. And if they didn't, the people they told about it certainly would! Multiplicity was always seen as a mental disorder, a form of extreme dissociation, caused by a certain kind or severity of abuse or trauma in childhood. And adult multiples never knew that they were until given the diagnosis by that noble (singlet) therapist, who proceeded to light the path of their courageous healing, which always culminated in integration. In those days, few had ever heard of living multiple; outside of a relative handful of therapists who practiced family therapy with multiple clients to help them build a working operating system instead of integration. This of course skews the editors' choice of client descriptions of what it's like to be multiple, or more specifically, what it's like to have multiple personality disorder. Text and art were all carefully selected to present a near-uniform picture of suffering, fear and pain. Obviously this was done to show readers that if they were experiencing similar feelings, they were not alone. However, it excludes those who are multiple but do not fit this particular profile. We wondered about the material that didn't make the cut. This was why we read the book and felt that things needed to change. If you feel you really have classic MPD or DID, you could not do better than to read this book. It must be an amazingly validating feeling, to know that others have gone through the same thing you are going through. Unlike most of the popular accounts, this book has no extensively grueling descriptions of sexual or other trauma that are supposed to cause MPD, only an acknowledgement that those things exist and that healing and recovery are possible. Review of Multiple Personality from the Inside Out at everything2.com
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Title: Telling without talking: art as a window into the world of multiple personality Author: Barry M. Cohen (singlet) Publisher: W.W. Norton, 1995 ISBN: 0-393-70196-4
We have heard this highly recommended by several net friends. |
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Title:: Alter Egos: Multiple Personalities
Author:: David Cohen
Publisher: London: Constable, 1996
ISBN: 0094740704
Starts out skeptical about the existence of multiplicity, but through his research comes to believe in it. He thinks that many psychiatrists are overeager to condemn MP as something induced by therapists onto suggestible patients.
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Title: Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism Author: Paul Collins Publisher: Bloomsbury USA 2004 ISBN: 1582343675 This book by the father of a child who may or may not be on the "spectrum" is unique among parental accounts because of its lack of tragedy. Instead of seeing his son as a victim of a horrible devastating illness, Collins refused to buy into the pronouncements of alleged experts. He saw his son's unique reading and mathematical abilities and his love of computers over people as part of what was right about the kid. His own scholarly gifts and interests in historical trivia lead him to go back in time to find individuals who may or may not have been autistic, some of them now well known like Henry Darger, some all but forgotten. Even after Collins finally lets himself get talked into believing that his son needs some kind of help to improve the social side of things, he repeatedly gives us the message that it's a mistake to try to force we autistics into so called normality. Parents of other autistic kids tell Collins about how their kid went through the pink monkey routine when they were mainstreamed, but did fine in an autistic school where they're allowed to communicate in their own way. Simply letting autistic people be autistic is such a revolutionary idea! But it may well be the future. A review of Not Even Wrong, by Jay Young If you are interested in books by autistic authors, try Amanda Baggs' Autistic Authors Booklist.
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Title: The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders Author: Peter Conrad Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press 2007 ISBN: 080188585X A scholarly examination of how the psychiatric industry, in cooperation with the mass media, furthered the notion of ordinary life problems as mental diseases that require lifelong medication. "Building on more than three decades of research, Peter Conrad explores the changing forces behind this trend with case studies of short stature, social anxiety, "male menopause," erectile dysfunction, adult ADHD, and sexual orientation. He examines the emergence of and changes in medicalization, the consequences of the expanding medical domain, and the implications for health and society. He finds in recent developments—such as the growing number of possible diagnoses and biomedical enhancements—the future direction of medicalization. "Conrad contends that the impact of medical professionals on medicalization has diminished. Instead, the pharmaceutical and biotechnical industries, insurance companies and HMOs, and the patient as consumer have become the major forces promoting medicalization. This thought-provoking study offers valuable insight into not only how medicalization got to this point but also how it may continue to evolve." |
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Title:Braided Selves: Collected Essays on Multiplicity, God, and Persons Author: Pamela Cooper-White Publisher: Wipf & Stock 2011 ISBN: 1606086685 Nearly every pastoral counselor who has written to us over the years describes "family therapy" with multiples to communicate and cooperate instead of integration. Here is a book that exemplifies this attitude. This is not a feel-good book nor is it simple or simplistic. It combines philosophy with scholarship to explore what different psychological disciplines have said about multiplicity of identity down through history. It should be read in the spirit in which you read Braude's First Person Plural, Taylor's William James on Exceptional Mental States or Hacking's Rewriting the Soul. Multiplicity in this sense is viewed from a postmodern and often feminist perspective. The author examines the ideas of Freud and Jung, but also Winnicott, Kohut, Klein, Rogers and many others. She interrogates and debunks the idea of "one body, one soul" or "The One" that has dominated psychiatric, philosophical and religious thought for centuries. She is out to replace the existing paradigm of "multiples are those who are born whole but broken by circumstances" with a model of cooperating selves which occur naturally in everyone. She does not discuss the completely independent minds you and we are familiar with. This is about the "humans are all multiple selves" perspective, insisting each of these selves must be treated with respect. (Perhaps the attitude can best be compared to Elif Shafak's humorous, sensitive treatment of her "finger women" in Black Milk.) This is not about healthy multiplicity or multiple personality as you and we think of it. But doctors who read this may be more willing to accept the idea of multiplicity as non-disordered, dismiss integration as a solution, and seek understanding rather than medication when their clients self-disclose as multiple. |
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Title: Multiple Man Author: Adam Crabtree Publisher: Praeger, 1985 ISBN: 0275900797 The Author makes a compelling case for multiplicity being a natural state of humanity. At times scholarly, at times chatty; goes to a bit of extremes on the supposed paranormal connection. See also The Inner Mind: Multiple Personality Before Eve by this author.
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Title: Trance Zero Author: Adam Crabtree Publisher: Somerville, 1997 The book is worth reading by all who are concerned about social perception and the media, whether related to multiplicity, or to anything else, owing to the discussion of on cultural trance and group minds. Less impressive is his presentation of trance states as something everyone experiences constantly, and which detracts from a so-called maximum state. The idea that people go around in a trance, dissociated from reality, is based in the philosophy of occultist G.I. Gurdjieff, and is reflected today in the idea of a dissociation epidemic. There may be such a thing as a maximum state, similar to satori, which is impermanent by definition: beware of anyone who tries to persuade you that such a state can be made permanent with enough mental discipline. There is a book out called Snapping which explains how many religious and spiritual groups have used this tactic to attract and keep followers.
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Title: Ending the Battle Within: How to Create a Harmonious Life by Working with Your Sub-Personalities Author: Verlaine Crawford Publisher: High Castle 1994 ISBN: 0964185407 And now for something completely different. This little book is by a positive-thinking, motivational speaker. She teaches that one of the things impeding our path to permanent health, wealth and success is the chaos and chatter created by our "subpersonalities". You can read a bit more about this at her website. Be sure to have some Alka-Seltzer handy. |
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Title: Can I Look Now? Author: Rachel Downing Publisher: Educational Recovery Communications 1992 ISBN: 0963391305 Sidran sez: "This wonderful little book is unlike any other available on this subject. It is a very simple, direct, and extremely powerful look into the basic therapy process for treatment of MPD. The stick-figure drawings and economic text combine to provide very focused "food for thought," accessible to recovering individuals who may be easily distracted and to the youngest child alters. "The author/illustrator describes herself as an integrated recovering multiple, social worker, mother, sister, and friend. One of her purposes for this book is to provide hope that abuse, need not overpower the natural drive for healing and wholeness. "Themes include diagnosis, trust, respect for the mind, acceptance, pacing, fears, becoming whole, recovery, and more." |  |
Title: The Fractured Mirror: Healing Multiple Personality Disorder
Author: C.W. Duncan
Publisher: Health Communications 1994
ISBN: 1558742751
Michelle Wilson recommended this book because it addresses many questions which multiples often have, but which are usually not covered in texts on multiplicity.
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Title: From India to Mars Author: Theodore Flournoy Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1900, reprinted 1994 ISBN: 0691034079 Helene Smith was a Spiritualist medium who described astral journeys to Mars. The book is by a psychology professor who attended her seances. In spite of his patronizing, often sneering tone describing this mere working-class female and her aspirations to a higher class, the story is intriguing. We think he is right about one thing; this is more about worldbuilding and constructed languages than it is about being multiple. |
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Title: Spiritual and Clinical Dimensions of Multiple Personality
Disorder
Author: Loreda Fox
Publisher: Sangre de Cristo 1992
Buy this book through:
Books of Sangre de Cristo
PO Box 963
Salida, CO 81201
Write to us if you have any more
information about this book. We'd like a brief review.
Write to Jim Leftwich, who
first informed us of the existence of this book when he posted a message to Usenet. He's looking for a copy.
Or look for it on Advanced Book Exchange
Title: : Persons one and three; a study in multiple personalities
Author: : Shepherd I. Franz
Publisher: : New York and London: Whittlesey house, McGraw-Hill 1933.
ISBN: 1430499303
"Stories of dual or of multiple personalities, which technically are called continued amnesias, have been interesting both to the novelist and to the psychologist. They have attracted the attention of the former because of their spectacular character, and of the latter because of their speculative possibilities. To some of the latter it may be unimportant to read an account of an individual with loss of memory without a new, or without a confirmation of an old, explanation. The tale to be spun here is, however, unaccompanied by hypothesis. To the writer it seems more valuable at this time to recount the facts, whether they be behavioristic or introspectional, than to attempt to conceal them with gauzy guesses about neurograms* or synaptic retractions, or to clothe them with the fashionable garments of unconscious mechanisms and levels of consciousness.
From the Intl. Journal of Psychoanalysis: "This is a narrative report of an excellent example of secondary personality (Person Three) in a British ex-soldier of the World War. The change is attributed to a severe physical trauma sustained prior to 1915 from which date onward a fairly constant retrograde amnesia existed until he was found in a confused state in California in December, 1929. Certain intermediary states between Persons One and Three are recorded, and during the entire period of Personality Three the patient had a vague consciousness of the existence of his lost identity. This feeling may account for his constant wanderings and possibly fugues as Person Three. The only psycho-analytic point of interest in the account is the fact that when the patient was found he was definitely adopted by a woman and her daughter as their long-lost son and brother who had disappeared about 1915 -- evidently an identification based upon wish fulfilment."
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*neurogram: a modification in nerve structure associated with memory.
look for this book on amazon.com
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Title: Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Child Abuse Author: Jennifer Freyd Publisher: Harvard University Press 1998 ISBN: 0674068068 Jennifer Freyd, the woman whose genuine recovered memories of childhood sexual harrassment inspired her parents to create the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to cover up their guilt, presents a very professional discussion of why some people suppress memories of trauma. |
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Title: This Alien Shore Author: C.S. Friedman Publisher: DAW 1999 ISBN: 0886777992
"Where you see only illness, a curse to be corrected, we see the untapped potential of humanity... God save us from an earth in which all men are the same!" The first work of fiction we have seen to present multiplicity and other neurological idiosyncracies as vital, positive qualities. Friedman tells of societies of mutants, descendants of abandoned Earth colonies, who have developed unique mental and physical characteristics, revel in their outrageous differences, and build viable societies and guilds around them. We were particularly impressed with her description of iru, who are clearly meant to be autistic. The young heroine must come to terms with the fact that she's been the victim of a cruel commercial experiment designed to give her multiple personalities. Far from crippling her, her selves are important to her survival, and there is no stupid integration happy solution at the end.
A biotech Internet and its attendant hackers and viruses are here, in a
subplot of mystery and intrigue. Echoes of James H. Schmitz, Frank Herbert and good ol'Cordwainer Smith (whom she has the courtesy to credit!). Highly
recommended. |
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Title: Uncovering the Mystery of MPD: Its Shocking Origins, Its Surprising Cure Author: Rev. James Friesen Publisher: Wipf & Stock 1997 ISBN: 1579100627 Friesen, a singlet, Fundamentalist preacher, appears to take up where Ralph Allison and D. Scott Rogo left off. That is, he believes that childhood misfortunes not only make people multiple, but open them to demonic possession. (We're not exactly wild about his notion that nearly all psychiatric clients have "alters", and he is a proponent of "it has to get worse before it gets better.") He does recognize that selves often portray themselves as demons without actually being them, and he does not believe in exorcising everyone who comes out. However, at least in Uncovering the Mystery of MPD, he has no awareness of the ancient experience of being otherkin. He does not apparently recognize that members of a multiple system can be animals, or creatures usually considered mythological, or shapeshifters -- he says these are invariably demons. He's written some more books since then -- maybe he revises that. Friesen's methods have been adopted by other preachers who have used them (I think I should say misused) against countless women and children, some multiple, some not. A typical modern exorcism ceremony involving a multiple. I think this so-called deliverance activity owes as much to M. Scott Peck (author of People of the Lie) as it does to Friesen. Someone in a self-aware system we correspond with told us they liked Friesen's book. They read it independently -- it was not pushed at them by a therapist or minister. They found it helpful because according to his list of standards, they came to understand they were genuinely multiple and not possessed or insane. |
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Title: Ann's Multiple World of Personality: Regular, No Cream, No Sugar Author: Ann Garvey& Publisher: Friesen Press 2010 ISBN: 1770672222 "Ann M. Garvey, the author, writes a daily non-traumatizing journal about her day to day world as someone with multiple personality disorder. The story takes place between August, 2003 and August, 2004 as Ms. Garvey again restarts her full-time work responsibilities after a two-month hospitalization for depression and acting out suicide idealizations. Journalism/blogging in an online community becomes an imaginative outcome in communicating with external others and acting as a reference point for her many selves. Ms. Garvey's world is not about integration; it is about communication, trust and understanding. Life isn't always smooth, but runs effectively with effort."
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Title: United We Stand: A Book for People with Multiple Personalities. Author: Eliana Gil 1990 Publisher: Launch ISBN: 0961320591 Again, even though this book takes the angle that multiplicity is caused by child abuse, it is pretty good when it comes to reassuring multiples that they don't have to live as basket cases. This might be a good book for people who were newly diagnosed in therapy. Eliana Gil is involved with ChildHelp, which many survivors have found useful. |
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"Guard? I want to see my ambassador." "Easily done-- he's in the next cell." Title: Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World Author: James M. Glass Publisher: Cornell University Press 1993 ISBN: 0801428092 Began as a series of interviews exploring multiple personality in an attempt to relate it to postmodern views of what personality and identity really are, Glass found himself entrapped in the midst of the SRA / mind control witchhunt that swept through the Dissociative Disorders Unit of Shepard-Pratt Hospital in the late 1980s. Extreme, suffocating isolation and an overworked sense of suspension of disbelief created a genuine nightmare. An excerpt from the book is found at Soul's Self-Help Central. Shepard-Pratt was not the only place this happened. No wonder so many DDUs were closed. |
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Title: Two Souls in One Body?:
a Case of Dual Personality; a Study of a Remarkable Case:
Its Significance for Education
and for the Mental Hygiene of Childhood
Author: H.H. Goddard
Publisher: London: Rider, 1927
ASIN: B000NWZ78U
Title: Multiple Personality & Dissociation, 1791-1992:
A Complete Bibliography
Author: Goettman, Carole, Greaves, George B., & Coons, Philip M.,
eds.
Publisher: Sidran, Lutherville MD
ISBN: 0962916455
Or buy a copy from amazon.com here.
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Title: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden Author: Joanne Greenberg (as Hannah Green) Publisher: New American Library 1964, latest version Holt 2009 ISBN: 0451160312 For many years, young Deborah has withstood the cruelty of the earth world through her gift of access to the Kingdom of Yr, a mysterious dimension whose deities have made her queen among them. Now, at sixteen, the very people upon whom she's relied for help have turned against her. But she fears there is no place for her on Earth. The story tells of her battles in both the ancient kingdom where she is captive and victim, and on Earth, where her body is living in a mental hospital. This is based on the personal experiences of Joanne Greenberg, although she took plenty of artistic license with her own story. The important message of the book, according to the author, is that there is no link between creativity and insanity. Insane people are not more creative than non-insane people, and creativity does not lead to insanity. In her experience, her creativity flourished in the insane asylum despite, not because of, her mental problems. Creative people and geniuses might be more likely to go crackers because of societal and financial pressures. Budding from a Garden of Reality A young woman's brief analysis of Yr and Yri suggests that they are real even though non-material. In 2001, Eyada.com had an interview with Joanne Greenberg and Gail Hornstein, who had just written a biography of Freida Fromm-Reichmann, "Dr. Clara Fried" from Rose Garden. Unfortunately, as of 17:00 hours on July 10th, www.eyada.com went the way of many dot.coms; i.e, bankrupt and closed their doors. We are still trying to get a downloaded copy of the interview for you, and we will. Another, more recent interview covers a lot of the same issues: click here for an audio stream of Joanne's interview from prx.org. (This site requires that you register but it is free.) Listen carefully -- what Greenberg says may surprise you.
Biography of Hornstein from Mt. Holyoke University |
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Title: Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Science of Memory Author: Ian Hacking Publisher: Princeton University Press 1995 (reprint) ISBN: 069105908X This controversial book explores multiplicity as an aspect of changing scientific and religious views about memory. These views were almost immediately politicised when rationalist science tried to replace belief in an immortal soul with belief in memory. Many who feel that multiplicity is a dissociative disorder arising from buried trauma think of Hacking as someone who denies their truth. This may have been, at least in part, a case of timing (note publication date) and the fact that he has a couple of good things to say about the despicable False Memory Syndrome Foundation -- one hopes that he's since become better informed about them. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons we like this book is the way he illustrates the child abuse awareness political agenda behind the upswing in MPD/DID diagnoses in the 1970s and 1980s, but does NOT conclude that multiplicity is simply a therapist-created fantasy. However, since the book was not a support guide to hope and healing for courageous survivors, it was guaranteed to draw flak. It seems that it was the very fact that Hacking strives for neutrality, refusing to get into the debate over the literal truth of recovered memories and daring to explore the history of what people believed about what we now think of as multiplicity, which led to this misunderstanding. The book is very subtly written, and he is careful to state many times that he wishes not to draw any conclusion. |
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Title: Out of the darkness into the light: a journey with two
multiples
Author: Edie Hand
Publisher: Birmingham, Ala.: Front Row Productions ; 1990 (Recording)
Format 1 sound recording (45 min.) : analog, mono.
With Patricia Eggleston and Chris Costner Sizemore. Edie Hand is best known for her books of recipes, inspirational material, and Elvis Presley.
Out of Print: Search for this recording through Advanced Book Exchange
Title: The five of me
Author: Henry Hawksworth
Publisher: Chicago: Regency, 1977
ISBN: 0809278693
Truddi Chase& mention this book and the 1981 film version with David Birney in When Rabbit Howls. It's a bit hard to find the book these days and the film is never shown any more. Hawksworth was a client of Ralph Allison, who believed him to have psychic powers including the ability to read auras. Perhaps by taking Hawksworth seriously about this, Allison seems to have actually helped him.
buy The Five of Me.
Also, check
CDUniverse for The Five of Me on VHS starring David Birney.
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Title: Living With Your Selves Author: Sandra J. Hocking Publisher: Launch Press ISBN: 1877872067 A brief, classic manual for people who feel they are suffering with a disorder, this book features an introduction by Colin Ross, a singlet and self-styled "expert" on multiplicity. The text covers things like how to look for a competent therapist, and a "contract for survival" in which people in the group agree to refrain from harming the body and to contact a support person (as if self-harm were a requirement of being multiple). However, some reviewers complain that it has no trigger warnings and doesn't talk about medication and hospitalization, so it may be worth checking out. |
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Title: Someone I Know Has Multiple Personalities: A Book for Significant Others -- Friends, Family, and Caring Professionals Author: Sandra J. Hocking Publisher: Launch, 1994 ISBN: 1877872083 Even though this book approaches multiplicity strictly from the angle of dissociative disorder caused by child abuse, it's said to be excellent for giving the singlets around you a clue, that being multiple doesn't make you a basket case. |
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Title:: Body Scripture: A Therapist's Journal of Recovery from Multiple Personality Author: Barbara Hope Publisher: Wyndham Hall 2000 ISBN: 1556052979 "This book is a personal account of recovery from multiple personality disorder. I describe a ten year therapy process during which dozens of alternate selves emerged and slowly disclosed their trauma" etc. Her story is no different from anything you've read in countless other books. Barbara came from a working-class Catholic background and beginning at a very early age was raped by numerous men including her father, a family friend, and a priest. She later entered an abusive marriage and had four children. When she initially tried to go in for psychotherapy, the (female) therapist tried to seduce her. She's had other therapists, who don't always seem to maintain ethical professional boundaries. Obviously multiple, with a team of about forty, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1998 (during the backlash and retrenching of the mental health industry). She tries to rationalize this by thinking of schizophrenia and multiplicity as overlapping and that she developed a "thought disorder" when her "dissociative defenses" (persons in her team) were hurt. Barbara Hope is a therapist herself today.
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Title: To Redeem One Person Is To Redeem The World: A Biography of Freida Fromm-Reichmann Author: Dr. Gail Hornstein Publisher: Free Press 2000 ISBN:0684827921 A biography of Dr. Freida Fromm-Reichmann, "Dr. Clara Fried" in I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. Seems a bit thrown together, but provides an indepth look at how Chestnut Lodge was founded. Therapists at the Lodge believed that some schizophrenics and psychotics could be helped with ordinary psychotherapy. Joanne Greenberg was only one (and the most famous) example, and not the sole success story. We learn a bit more about Miss Greenberg's situation, about Yr (its actual name was Iria), and some accidental insights into her family, and her decision to write Rose Garden. There is an entire chapter on public response. New York Times review, very good
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Title: Dissociation: ISSD Journal Archive, 1988-1997. Publisher: International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) Entire Journal Archive Online For Free The official journal of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), published between 1988 and 1997. Digitization project by Jennifer Freyd, PhD (singlet); Frank Putnam, MD (singlet); Richard Kluft, MD (singlet); Catherine Fine, PhD (singlet); Ruth Blizard, PhD (singlet); and ISSD (a lot of singlets). This way, you can see what they were saying about us and how they defined, described and perceived our experiences.
A print copy of this journal is available through the UO Libraries under the call number: KNIGHT RC553.D5 D57 Thanks to the University of Oregon for this. See also the Univ. of Oregon Dissociation & Trauma Archive with articles on multiple personality dating back to 1831.
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Title: Enough Author: Cassidy Hutchinson Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2023 ISBN: 1250780861 Kindle Edition Here Audiobook Here Just about here you should sit back, relax, have a nice cup of tea or coffee or something, and look at something intriguing that doesn't have the least thing to do with multiple personalities. If you've read this far you've earned it, so go ahead, have one, indulge yourself and blame it on us.
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Title: The Birds' Nest Author: Shirley Jackson Publisher: Arbor House, 1986 ISBN: 0317277278 Originally written in 1954. Shirley Jackson researched this one as carefully as she could at the time. She was certainly capable of thinking of herself as multiple, with some justification. Read Bird's Nest with this in mind: it was published three years before Three Faces of Eve. It is amazing to us that feisty Shirley did not hit Corbett Thigpen with a lawsuit. Both Three Faces of Eve and Sybil contain many elements from this novel. In 1957, Bird's Nest was made into Lizzie, a fair-to-middling movie (Johnny Mathis' songs are worth it though). Shirley didn't like Lizzie -- she said it was too camped up. Almost no one remembers Lizzie today. It is not available on DVD or videocassette. If you stay up late you might catch it on Turner channels. Shirley said: Practically the only lines of mine they left in are the ones for Joan Blondell, who is the old aunt; she sits there with a fifth of bourbon and babbles. They must have used up twenty cases of bourbon in the movie; there are shots of people carrying out bushel baskets of empty bottles. [Shirley's husband] Stanley says it is because in Hollywood they don't know anything about drinking because they all take dope. They don't know much about psychology either.
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Title: The Passion of Ansel Bourne:
Multiple Personality in American Culture
Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry Vol. 5
Author: Michael Kenny (singlet)
Publisher: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1986
ISBN: 0874745721
Show this to the next person who tells you that multiple personality was invented in the 1970s and that "there were no cases before Sybil". Kenny goes into depth about 19th century studies of multiples -- not just Ansel, but Mary Reynolds, Sally Beauchamp, Nellie Parsons Bean and many others. Recommended because Kenny is not sympathetic to the traditional psychiatric model for multiplicity. He also describes the multiplicity/Spiritualist connection, and is a good deal more pragmatic about it than Crabtree, Rogo et al.
Exceptional Human Experience Network says: "A social anthropologist familiar with the phenomenon of possession in primitive cultures writes about multiple personality, which he views as a cultural variant of possession.
The first chapter tells the story of a pioneer case of multiple personality, Mary Babcock. The case of Ansel Bourne is described in the second chapter. In the next chapter Kenny examines spiritism (mediumship), which he views as an important aspect of multiple personality as it was expressed in the 1890s. He discusses the impact Spiritualism had on nineteenth-century psychology, and deals with a specific case; that of Mrs. Piper and her communicating spirit, G.P. In Chapter 4 he deals with the work of Morton Prince with 'Miss Beauchamp' [Sally or Christine Beauchamp, real name Clara Norton Fowler] and B.C.A. [Nellie Parsons Bean]."
In a concluding chapter he writes about the current wave of interest in multiple personality, in which many multiple selves are manifested. Throughout the book Kenny attempts to show how the expression of the multiple personality syndrome was influenced by and served as an expression of cultural factors. Just as in non-Western societies, spirit possession occurs in individuals in difficult, contradictory, or traditional situations, so he observed that in Western society multiple personality appears to be "a complex metaphorical response" to cultural and personal situations of stress and transition.
buy a hardcover edition of Passion of Ansel Bourne now
buy a paperback edition of Passion of Ansel Bourne now
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Title: The Minds of Billy Milligan Author: Daniel Keyes Publisher: Random House, 1981 ISBN: 0553263811 The life story of a multiple who was convicted of armed robbery and rape. (There were NO serial killers in this group, as many have reported). Not as bleak as you might think. Keyes, author of Flowers for Algernon (Charly), conveys their experience well. Yay! Back in print! Billy Milligan & group died December 12, 2014. On April 13, 2010, Billy (himself) told us he was arranging to self-publish his book The Milligan Wars, about his struggle with the mental health system, online as a free e-book. We do not know if the family will continue to work on this.
What Is Billy Milligan Doing Now? By Daniel Keyes. |
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Title: The Fifth Sally Author: Daniel Keyes Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1980 ISBN: 0395294495 One would have hoped that his years of interviews with Billy Milligan would have given him a better idea of multiple experience, rather than just trotting out the same old stereotypical jazz. Maybe he explains this in his autobiography. |
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Title: Expressive and Functional Therapies in the Treatment of
Multiple Personality Disorder
Author: Estelle Kluft, ed. (singlet)
Publisher: Charles C. Thomas 1993
ISBN: 0398058261
"It is difficult to overstate how useful art, movement, music, poetry, and occupational therapy can be with DID patients. Often stymied in their verbal expression, these modalities may provide a forum for the expression of what cannot be said and acknowledged in words. Since many DID patients are very creative, they often are able to use these modalities with great ease. A discussion of the roles of these modalities is available in Estelle Kluft's text."
More here buy Expressive and Functional Therapies
Title: Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder
Author: Richard P. Kluft (singlet) & Catherine G. Fine (singlet) eds.
Publisher: American Psychiatric Press 1993
ISBN: 0-88048-365-2
buy Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality
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Title: Making Us Crazy: DSM The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders Author: Herb Kutchins Publisher: Free Press, 1997 ISBN: 0684822806 Much like L.J. Davis' wonderful Encyclopedia of Insanity, this book contains cogent information on the creation of the DSM as a political tool, mostly for the benefit of insurance companies. Again, you can read about the controversies in the creation of DSM-5. |
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Title: Evaluation of criminal responsibility in multiple personality
and the related dissociative disorders : a psychoanalytic consideration
Author: Richard Lasky
Publisher: Springfield, Ill., U.S.A. : Thomas, 1982.
ISBN: 0398046735
buy Evaluation of Criminal Responsibility in Multiple Personality now
Title: Psychology of Multiple Personality Disorders
Author: Richard Lasky
Publisher: Jason Aronson, 1999
ISBN: 1568210612
buy Psychology of Multiple Personality now
Title: Voices
Author: Trula M. LaCalle, Ph.D.
Publisher: Dodd Mead, 1988
ISBN: 0396089747
A doctor's experience of working with a group whose chief presenting self was a young gay man, in the days when being gay was listed as a mental disorder, multiplicity was not listed at all, and the doctor herself was considered borderline psychotic for believing there was such a thing as multiplicity. Ends with a look at the early phase of the AIDS epidemic and how it affected the gay community.
Trula LaCalle's Website
buy Voices now
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Title: Shyness -- How Normal Behavior Became A Sickness Author: Christopher Lane Publisher: Yale 2007 ISBN: 0300124465 Remember the outcry when the cute little cartoons advertising Zoloft, an antidepressant, were retooled to promote Zoloft's use as a medicine for social anxiety disorder? Or the Prozac commercial that magically changed the nametags at a cocktail party? First you invent the pill, right, then you invent the illness for which the pill is the cure -- you know that one. Using as his sources letters and memos written by mental health professionals, Lane builds a very convincing case for another instance of mental health industry fraud in which shy persons are told they have a mental disease. He also demonstrates how the public was fooled into thinking that these pills had been sufficiently tested and were relatively harmless. At this point, I just have to include this.
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Title: City of Illusions Author: Ursula K. Le Guin Publisher: Ace, 1967 ISBN: 0-8240-1422-7 Gabriel writes: I always forget about this one. Auntie Ursula, may Her name be praised, started out to write a story about a man with two minds. There really is a man with two minds in this story, although you have to read to the end to find out about it. It's the third volume of a long series so it ends in a kind of to-be-continued way. Ursula talks about this book in The Language of the Night, which is one of the best collections of essays on fantasy writing I have ever read.
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Title: Triad Author: Mary Leader Publisher: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan (1973) ISBN: 069810496X This book received a great deal of publicity among fans of singer Stevie Nicks when she revealed that it was her source for the name "Rhiannon". Nicks simply used the name, leaving the book behind, and it's well that she did so. Triad was an apparent attempt to cash in on the Exorcist fad and includes all The Usual -- an ordinary housewife whose life starts going to pieces, missing time, losing things, stuff moving around, and all the boring rest of it, soon after losing her child to crib death and subsequently moving to a mysterious old house. (If that sounds like the beginning of Lawrence Block's terrific 1981 Ariel, it's probably because it is. The elements are virtually the same -- it's what Block decided to do with them that makes his book a classic.) Believing she is possessed by the spirit of her long-dead cousin Rhiannon, whose spun-sugar exterior had masked a sociopathic evil, she turns for help not to the church but to a doctor. Sure enough she has "another personality", but then there's a surprise twist, of course. And on, and on, and on. And the horror never ends. Sigh. |
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Title: The Psychiatric Clinics of North America:
Multiple Personality Disorder
Guest Editor: Richard J. Loewenstein, The Psychiatric Clinics of North America
Vol 14, No 3, Sept 1991
Publisher: W.B. Saunders Co
Wildfire says: "Very technical but extremely informative book. Excellent section on diagnosis and treatment of children, which, as a DID Mom, I found helpful in forcing psychiatrist to address possibility of DID in my child."
Title: The Surprising Case of Rachel Baker,
Who Prays and Preaches in Her Sleep:
With Specimens of her Extraordinary Performances
Taken Down Accurately in Short Hand at the Time.
Author: C. Mais
Publisher: New York: Whiting and Watson, 1814
This is about a trance speaker. Trance speakers were very common in the nineteenth century and were a little like New Age channels of today, but not as silly: they spoke about spiritual and practical matters and political issues. Many of the early spokespersons for women's rights were trance speakers. Many women activists and speechmakers were assumed to be trance speakers because it was widely believed that women, on their own, without supernatural aid, were incapable of public speaking or of even having many of the thoughts and ideas presented in their addresses.
There is no clear way to tell if these ladies (and some gentlemen) were spirit mediums or if they were multiple or both. Dual personality (it was often called that even when there were more than two selves) was a known and accepted thing in those times. They key was thought to be, not child abuse, but a sensitive nature, open to feelings and emotions.
Entire text of Rachel Baker now online!
To learn more about trance speakers, you might want to read Anne Braude's wonderful book Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in 19th Century America, and Barbara Goldsmith's Other Powers: The Life of Victoria Woodhull.
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Title: The Watcher's Mask Author: Laurie J. Marks Publisher: DAW, 1992 ISBN: 0886775108 Echoes of Ursula K. LeGuin and Elizabeth Hand resonate through this compelling tale of a society in which some children are born multiple, and their places in both traditional and urban societies. |
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Title: People in Pieces: Multiple Personality in Milder Forms and Greater Numbers Author: Alan Marshall Publisher: Rainbow Books 1993 ISBN: 0-935834-94-x Approaching multiplicity as the usual dissociative disorder, really nothing new here except that he covers the idea of a "dissociative continuum" meaning that it might be useful to people who feel they are "not quite multiple" or somewhere in between, as a midcontinuum or median experience. |
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Title: Amongst Ourselves Author: Karen Marshall with Tracy Alderman Publisher: New Harbinger 1998 ISBN: 1572241225 Moral of this story: There's plenty of help out there if you're an abuse survivor, but the therapist who can help you with household management issues is rare and precious. Most therapists only understand multiple personalities from an abuse-survivorship perspective. This book gives the lie to the old assumption that as persons in the system evidence to the front and relate memories of abuse, they will then disappear and be integrated into a whole person. Although this book is really for abuse survivors who happen to be multiple, it does have some good qualities, notably its plain language. The Rhymers have this review: "Amongst Ourselves is drivel. First of all, the authors assume that 'alters' don't know how to control themselves; for instance, that all 'the littles' are interested in is finding candy. Nonhuman system members are supposed to occur when the host, while being abused, wishes they could fly away from abuse or burrow into a hole. The book also features a bullshit opinion that multiple systems are not anchored in the body and have to be taught how to live in the body. Because obviously when we sit on a chair for five minutes we cease to feel the chair under our rears and feel like we're instead floating on a cloud. Stinks very much of 'be here now' thinking. "The main body of the reading is a bit dry, but there are activities that'll help you get to know each other. And the authors don't insist that you have to integrate. But they do assume that the host is in charge and must give love and care to her various alters and treat them like her little family. Imagine if you will, Jaclyn Pia's Multiple Personality Gift, only minus the integration assumptions and activities and you've got it. It has that same sort of condescending tone, despite having been written by a multiple." |
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Title: Multiple Personality Disorder:
An Hispanic Psychological Perspective
Author: Alfonso Martinez-Taboas. Translated by Carlos S. Alvarado and
Nancy L. Zingrone. Contributions by Richard Kluft.
Publisher: Puente
ISBN: 0-9634501-0-7
buy Multiple Personality: A Hispanic Perspective now
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Title: Against Therapy Author: Jeffrey Masson Publisher: Common Courage 1993 ISBN: 1567510221 Please read this before opting for any kind of mainstream psychotherapy. You owe it to yourself and to your people, if any.
Also by Jeffrey Masson: |
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Title: The Assault on Truth : Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory Author: Jeffrey Masson Publisher: Pocket ISBN: 0671025716 This is the book on the subject. Some of it will look very familiar to you if you've been abused in any way and then attempted to tell someone about it, only to be accused of false memory syndrome. |
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Title: A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality, and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century Author: Jeffrey Masson Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux 1988 ISBN: 0374521239 Want to know the atmosphere and belief system in which modern psychiatry began? "Here translated for the first time are a series of shocking texts from the 19th century German psychiatric literature which, while almost completely unknown to modern readers, have had a devastating influence on attitudes toward women and children in the 20th century. The articles on the sexual "lies" and sexual "fantasies" of children were seminal, brutal and still resonate in today's literature, having taken a terrible toll on the intellectual ideas of modern psychiatry." |
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Title: Welcome Home Stranger: An Account of Multiple Personalities
Author: Daniel Matthews Publisher: Random House NZ 1998 A New Zealand correspondent says this was written by a frontrunner in a group, who is gay. Looks like the same old stuff to us. "Multiple personality disorder is rare and little understood. Matthew Daniels had no idea at first what was wrong with him when he started suffering from terrible headaches, exhaustion, and blackouts that could last for days. But what was he doing during the time he blacked out? What were all these voices in his head? The author recreates his experiences with multiple personality disorder in this book. His personalities include old and young, men and women. They were obnoxious, innocent, literary, ignorant, frightening, frightened. They were all him. "Matthew Daniels is now in control of his multiple personalties. In this compelling and beautifully written book, he recreates his experiences."
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Title: Through Divided Minds, Probing the Mysteries of Multiple Personalities: A Doctor's Story Author: Robert Mayer, Ph.D. Publisher: Doubleday, 1988 ISBN: 0380719207 Singlet Mayer meant well, but allowed his gender bias to undermine whatever good he might have done in helping multiples in crisis develop stable operating systems. Like many who approach multiplicity through the hypnosis angle, he seems to have held a certain amount of contempt for his clients. He played God with hundreds of lives, imposing integration as the only possible answer, insisting that group members die, while admitting he didn't know what he was doing. |
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Title: Satan's Children Author: Robert Mayer, Ph.D. Publisher: Putnam, 1991 ISBN: 0399136274 In this follow-up to Through Divided Minds, Mayer delves into the world of Satanic ritual abuse survivorship, outrageous claims and the usual fascinating cast of characters. Wisely, he tries to remain neutral on whether or not his clients really went through the schlock horror movie roles that they say they did. |
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Title: : Mindsplit: The Psychology of Multiple Personality
and the Dissociated Self
Author: Peter McKellar
Publisher: London: Dent (arthur dent), 1979
ISBN: 046004348X
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Title: Skye Sparkler Author: Kim Metzger Publisher: Xlibris 2001 ISBN: 0738853275 This doesn't have anything to do with plurality either, but it's a fun read. A young woman accidentally turns herself into a super-powered heroine -- who, to all appearances, is just twelve years old -- and she can't change back! How does tiny blue-haired Skye convince people she's the same person as ordinary thirtyish Marcy? What happens as a consequence of her instinct to help people with her amazing powers? Identity and responsibility are the themes here, with liberty, large fries and a coffee to go. |
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Title: Women From Another Planet,
Our Lives in the Universe of Autism Author: Jean Kearns Miller Publisher: Authorhouse 2003 ISBN: 1410734315 Amazon's Roguealleycat sez: "Wow. A look at our real, whole lives for once... meant as a crossroads between feminism and the neurodiversity movement, and a discussion of life as autistic women." If you are interested in more books by autistic authors, try Amanda Baggs' Autistic Authors Booklist.
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Title: For Your Own Good:
Hidden Brutality in Child-Rearing, and the Roots of Violence Author: Dr. Alice Miller Publisher: Noonday 1990 ISBN: 0374522693 If you think you were never abused, read this book. Most people do suffer some form of physical, emotional or intellectual brutality in childhood. People who are acknowledged by society to have been abused tell horrific battle stories. Those of us who were "merely" slapped, spanked, and bullied as children are thus inclined to overlook our experiences as trivial. Most child abuse goes under the sobriquet of parental discipline. It affects our thoughts and feelings in later life, often in subtle ways we don't even notice. "It made me stronger" often simply means "it made me numb". This is not a whiny book, nor is it a Bradshaw feel-good hugfest. Child abuse exists and chances are you've been through it. Don't revisit it on your kids. And the next time someone says "You think you had it tough" and starts talking about some publicized extreme case, show them this book. What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Weaker Modern psychiatry is finally starting to get some sense about this. |
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This book is now available in its entirety on line. read For Your Own Good in free e-text.
Title: Brilliant Diamond: A Triumphant Journey from Multiplicity to Oneness Author: Jenna Rai Miller Publisher: CreateSpace, 2011 ISBN: 1466298499 "Jenna Rai Miller presents a successful healing of her own excruciating struggles with dissociative identity disorder through an insightful, hopeful, faith-filled story," etc. Classic DID experience marked by her determination to "embrace oneness". Nice cover. |
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Title: Multiple Selves, Multiple Voices: Working with Trauma, Violation and Dissociation Author: Phil Mollon (singlet) Publisher: Wiley, 1996 ISBN: 0471963305 Another in the long line of books presenting the trauma/dissociation model for multiplicity (note the publication date). Mollon believes multiplicity is a matter of "trauma and pretense". Might be worth a few laughs. |
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Title: These Stolen Flowers A Rape Awareness Book: Poetry and Ideas For Avoiding and Overcoming Rape. Author: Patty Moskos Publisher: AuthorHouse 2010 ISBN: 1452010404 Artist Moskos wrote this after a conference in New Mexico describing the difficult experiences of rape victimization. The book includes space for the reader to write in their own thoughts and ideas, a self-help section on rape avoidance, and advice on overcoming rape experiences. Even though this is really for adult women, it might be useful to victims of child sexual abuse.
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Title: Sorority of survival : memoirs of a multiple Author: Katherine A. Newman& Publisher: New York : Kroshka Books, 1996 ISBN: 1560723467 This is out of print but the authors are working on an updated version. |
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Title: Multiple Personalities, Multiple Disorders: Psychiatric Classification and Media Influence Author: Carol S. North Publisher: Oxford University Press 1993 ISBN: 0195080955 Yes, this is by the Carol S. North, the author of Welcome Silence who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but actually had something that was driving her insane but could be cured by dialysis. Dialysis. So instead of suggesting that multiple personality might have some kind of similar physical source to whatever she actually had, she decides that there are no real multiples at all, just people who saw something on TV and decided to do a little play-acting to get attention. What if people had thought that about her when she tried to get help? No sympathy or insight whatsoever into her own condition or anyone else's. |
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Title: Moira Author: Martin Obler Publisher: New Horizon Press 1993 ISBN: 0882821202 We've never actually read this one but have seen two reviews. One said that this is a badly written novel ("the "adding or altering of scenes when necessary" -- yeesh!) with an inexplicably horrible ending. Another said that it fairly well described classical MPD and might be a good introduction for clinical psychology interns. It's probably the same old stuff. Worth it? Read it and tell us what you think. |
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Title: Through the Eyes of Aliens Author: Jasmine Lee O'Neill Publisher: Jessica Kingsley 1998 ISBN: 1853027103 Like multiplicity, autism is not a disorder and need not be dysfunctional. The brains of autistic people are simply hardwired differently. This book explores autism's benefits and beauties for the first time, and explains what may look like bizarre, stereotyped behavior. Like multiples, autistics need to be accepted as they are, not forced to behave in an allegedly normal fashion. That is the basic theme of this book, the author providing examples from her own life. By and large, we agreed with and enjoyed her explanations. However, we had problems with a few of her assertions. Many autistics are not nearly as able to interact in mainstream society as Miss O'Neill. It's too overwhelming and requires the processing of a lot of sensory input that a lot of autistics simply can't handle no matter how intelligent they may be otherwise. This book runs the risk of romanticising autism even as it seeks to demystify it, especially the old myth of a connection between genius and autism. Having worked with severe classic-style autistics who are also (at least apparently) mentally retarded, I cannot agree with her claim that all autism is a beautiful form of genius. That is a really misleading statement. Autism is not about intelligence, it has to do with sensory perception and processing. It's more like being nearsighted than like being a genius. Autistics are just as likely as multiples to display a range of intelligences. Like multiples, autistics will not be served by being universally classed as geniuses. Intelligence is a slippery concept anyway. After my experience growing up with autism which I thought at first was "Asperger" simply because I had no speech delays -- I wasn't diagnosed until I was almost thirty --and working with profoundly affected "classic" or "Kanner" autistic teens, I think we need educational programs that will take the unique qualities and deficits of autistic people into account, and teach basic self-care in a way that can be understood and adapted to the individual's strengths and comprehensions, without brutalisation or an insistence on completely "normal" behavior. - Bluejay Another book explaining autism in more pragmatic terms is Demystifying the Autistic Experience. Roguealleycat@amazon sez: "The first book I read portraying autism as a good thing. I disagree with the author on a few points, but that perspective about autism is rare and vital in a hostile world." A Note on Autism by an anonymous, autistic reader
Review from the Ontario Adult Autism Network If you are interested in more books by autistic authors, try the Autistic Authors Booklist.
Balance this book by reading A Child Called Noah |
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Title: Becoming One Author: Sarah Olson Publisher:LPC/Trilogy 1997 ISBN: 0962387983 We have trouble not calling this book "How we all got squished together" or, "How I squished everybody together" or something. Another one of those rambling accounts of abuse and courageous healing that became popular after When Rabbit Howls became a bestseller. We got a review copy of this one in the mail. Totally unasked for. |
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Title: Criminal Responsibility and Multiple Personality Defendants
Edited by Sabra Owens
Publisher: ABA, July 1997
ISBN: 1570734607
Exploration and analysis of the use of multiple personality disorder defenses in the crinimal justice system; with table of cases.
Click here to buy Criminal Responsibility & Multiple Personality Defendants
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Title: A Fractured Mind Author: Robert Oxnam& Publisher:Hyperion 2006 ISBN: 1401302270 I notice that most of the amazon.com reviews do not believe Oxnam was multiple and that he& is faking it to get publicity or bolster a sagging career in middle age. I think this may be because he& was such a highly visible public figure, such a familiar face on Nightline and The MacNeill-Lehrer News Hour, and spoke so rationally and competently about China, that he& does not fit most people's preconceived notion of who a multiple is. That's of course providing they even believe that multiplicity exists. It seems that today if you say the words MPD or multiple personality, the majority of people in this culture automatically translate in their minds to "excuses made by a loser with weak character". In other words, we're exactly where we started fifty years ago. If classic MPD is supposed to be a coping strategy to allow normal or higher levels of daily functioning while putting aside abuse or other unpleasant experiences instead of taking time to process them, then the majority of MPD clients should be like Oxnam& -- or Chase&, with their real estate business. MPD should enable success, not failure. Difficulties with continuity, as well as the intrusion of unwanted images or ideas which may or may not be early memories, take place as an MPD operating system begins to change or fall apart. Such clients are still told, as Oxnam was, that the multiplicity is the problem, when what they may need is help putting together a different operating system that will allow them to return to their previous level of functioning. - A. Temple Review of A Fractured Mind at Pavilion, by an anonymous contributor |
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Title: From Multiplicity to Oneness
Author: Sasha Pedersen, Marilyn Picard
Publisher: Published by the authors in 1996
This book is currently not available except by writing to the authors: Sasha Pedersen, Box 162, Gananoque, Ontario, Canada, K7G 2T7 or for more information, E-mail : . Please include a cheque or money order (Payable to Sasha Pedersen) for $22.00 plus $3.00 for shipping ($16 U.S. plus $4 for shipping) for each copy.
Here's the press release sent to us regarding "From Multiplicity to Oneness".
Check abebooks.com for this title.
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Title: Nightmare: Uncovering the Strange 56 Personalities of Nancy Lynn Gooch Author: Emily Peterson Publisher: Richardson, Steirman & Black 1988 ISBN:0931933544
My life as a teenage multiple.
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Title: The Magic Daughter Author: Jane Phillips Publisher: Penguin 1996 ISBN: 0140244557 Don't get your hopes up. - Gabe This would make a good don't-let-this-happen-to-you book. It is about a very, very badly managed group with practically no communication. Unlike most books on so-called MPD/DID, Phillips concentrates not on childhood horror stories (though of course there are some) but on everyday life with a group whose operating system becomes so out of whack they often can't even get it together enough to accomplish routine tasks. This makes things pretty rough on them, as they are (under their actual name) an award-winning author and professor of French language and literature. You find out how this happened as she researches her own memories. She didn't seem to have repressed anything, just put things she already knew into place. Because of her failure to measure up to bizarre familial expectations, she was being medicated at the age of three, for Christ's sake, and was on Librium by 15. These things can affect the way a person's mind develops -- it's no wonder she has huge memory gaps. She finds evidence that she was multiple long before any sexual abuse occurred (she was seven when that started), but her doctor doesn't listen; he is one of those who believed multiplicity originates only with sexual abuse. In fact, this lady looks to have been emotionally and physically abused by her parents because she was multiple, before the sexual attacks by her brother started. She may even have been born naturally multiple (she even brings this up), and had her operating system destroyed by the abuse and by the drugs. How often does this happen and professionals just assume it's the other way around? It was exhausting just to read this book and experience the grind of psychotherapy with a less than competent doctor. Jordan and Jay |
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Title: Healing the Divided Self: Clinical and Ericksonian Hypnotherapy for Post-Traumatic and Dissociative Conditions Author: Maggie Phillips and C. Frederick Publisher: New York: W.W. Norton, 1995 ISBN: 0393701840 Claire Frederick of the ISSD says this book is a good resource. There is a ton of info about it here. |
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Title: Household Management [alternate: Multiple Personality Gift]
Author: Jaclyn Pia&
Publisher: R&E Publishers, PO Box 2008, Saratoga, CA 95070, 1991
Phone: (408) 866-6303 Fax: (408) 866-0825
ISBN: 0-88247-890-7
A system of organization for multiples in chaos. Simplistic at times, but probably good for situations of extreme stress.
buy Household Management
Read
the complete text on line
Title: Managing Our Selves: Building a Community of Caring
Author: Elizabeth Power
Publisher: E. Power & Assoc. 1992
ISBN: 1-883307-01-5
Friday, April 16, 2010: At present, the Managing Our Selves books are available only through Sidran. These include Building A Community of Caring and God in Our Midst which looks at abuse from a "when bad things happen to good people" perspective without all the crap about ritual abuse, demons, etc.
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Title: Victims of Memory Author: Mark Pendergrast Publisher: Upper Access Book Publishers ISBN: 0942679180 (revised edition, 1997) Pendergrast is out to set the record straight on the recovery movement, pro and con (mostly con). Written by a scholar whose own daughters have accused him of molesting them, apparently based only on recovered memories. Like Joan Acocella (who drew heavily on Victims of Memory for her research) Pendergrast exposes the mental health racket that grew out of the recovery movement, labeling people as victims and multiples whether they were or not. He has also got a lot to say about the use of Reid police questioning technique on young children to pressure them into "admitting" they were sexually abused -- whether they were or not. You may not agree with Pendergrast at all. Most of his research consists of anecdotal interviews and personal stories rather than scientific research. He has little or nothing on studies of actual repressed and recovered memories, and he does not believe that multiplicity exists. But his findings should be considered in light of your own therapy. Have you been asked to dredge up questionable traumatic memories? Do you feel pressed to accept a certain view of yourself, the people in your multiple system (if any) and your childhood that doesn't fit your truth? Read this, then make your own decisions. Here's a (somewhat graphic) excerpt so you can see what we're talking about. It is about the worst of the Satanic ritual abuse scare. Much more here. We were never able to convince Mr. Pendergrast that multiplicity is not just a set of outrageous fantasies dreamed up by exploitive doctors. You can contact Mark Pendergrast through his blog.
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Title: After Sybil... From the Letters of Shirley Mason
Author: Shirley Mason, Nancy Preston Publisher: Infinity, 2013 ISBN:: 0741482886 “I’m Sybil.” Thus, Shirley Mason shared her secret identity with Nancy Preston, her former student. That disclosure cemented an enduring twenty-eight year friendship between the two via phone calls, visits, and letters. From Shirley’s first letter to her last phone call to Nancy, After Sybil is a revealing glimpse into the daily life of the woman whose sixteen personalities were merged into the one Nancy knew and loved. Letters, photos, and quotes offer insight to Shirley’s view of her parents, her therapist, and the bestselling book and subsequent movies about her. Interspersed are examples of Shirley’s art, including a self portrait.
Shirley A. Mason... The Woman I Knew Nancy reminisces about her friend and shares her view of multiplicity.
Color Edition Illustrations in full color, including many of Shirley's paintings. |
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Title: Divided Minds and Successive Selves: Ethical Issues in Disorders of Identity and Personality Author: Jennifer Radden Publisher: MIT Press 1996 ISBN: 0262181754
Learn more
about Divided Minds & Successive Selves: statement by the Author |
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Title: Infinite Boundary: A Psychic Look at Spirit Possession, Madness, and Multiple Personality Author: D. Scott Rogo Publisher: New York: Dodd Mead, 1987 ISBN:0396089682
Published just three months after When Rabbit Howls, this book
purports to explore the comparative history of mediumship, possession
and multiplicity. After kind of a shaky beginning in which we learn that
gender dysphoria and transsexuality can be cured through exorcism, he
continues with a look at the famous case of Frederic Thompson, the
jeweler who was apparently possessed (quite beneficially) by the
departed spirit of painter R. Swain Gifford, takes a half-turn at
Spiritualism with complete credulity (they couldn't possibly have been
faking those effects |
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Title: The Way Back: Inside the mind of a multiple personality
Author: Donna Mae Rose
Publisher: Outskirts 2007
ISBN: 1432706055
"The Way Back is unique in that it is written by a person diagnosed with MPD." Well, there are lots of books like that now, but maybe she didn't know about them. "MPD is a strange phenomenon; however, you will read that anyone facing any unwanted circumstance can rise above the fears and difficulty to their desired goal." Now, that we can agree with! "The greatest blessing of all was that the journey took me right into my Divine Nature." So, this might be helpful to people who believe in Divine Natures.
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Osiris, my friend! What has happened to your nose? Title: The Osiris Complex: Case Studies in Multiple Personality Disorder Author: Colin A. Ross (singlet) Publisher: Univ. of Toronto Press 1994 ISBN: 0802028586 More than adequately exemplifies the current mode of thought in the mental health industry concerning multiplicity. Having declared multiplicity a disorder, they've spent the last twenty years playing the game for all it was worth... making money and prestige by exploitive therapy of abuse victims, multiples, and those who were simply looking for meaning in their lives. Now that the public has seen behind the curtain, it's not fun any more, so it's the DID dustbin for us; multiple personality officially no longer exists. "Contrary to prevalent opinion, MPD patients do not have more than one personality; the so-called different personalities are fragmented components of a single personality, abnormally personified and dissociated from each other." Yeah. |
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Title: Discovering Your Subpersonalities: Our Inner World and the
People In It Author: John Rowan Publisher: New York: Routledge, 1993 ISBN: 0-415-07366-9
We didn't even know what a "subpersonality" was, so we had to look it up: What Are Subpersonalities |
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Title: Set this house in order: a romance of souls Author: Matt Ruff (singlet) Publisher: Harper Collins, 2003 ISBN: 0060195622 Two reviews of this controversial novel are found at the Pavilion Library: |
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Title: Jekyll on trial: multiple personality
disorder and criminal law Author: Saks, Elyn R., 1955- Publisher: New York University Press, 1997 ISBN: 0-814-78042-3
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Title: Jennifer and her Selves
Author: Gerald Schoenewolf
Publisher: Donald Fine, 1991
Pretty stereotypical account by the author of 101 Common Therapeutic Blunders, who certainly exemplifies those here in a self-serving narrative. If this account is even real, which some reviewers have questioned, Schoenewolf was an inexperienced newbie shrink who found himself working with a multiple, and did not immediately refer her to a more knowledgeable therapist. He fell in love with his client&, who responded (?) by spontaneously integrating (or was it really integration?). He finally did refer her to another, disinterested therapist. The book contains not only his diary, but her diary -- a simulation, written by Schoenewolf himself!
One of our correspondents said: "Not too bad a book, even if I did want to smack the author upside the head a couple times. (He got integration and co-consciousness mixed up, for one!) But I cheered him when he realized he might not have any business trying to get them to integrate; what if Jennifer was (gasp!) better off this way? If nothing else, he said one very interesting thing: Sybil and crew's integration wasn't permanent.... they came back and she just let them stay. If that's true, I imagine she figured/realized she had no choice. I'm hoping it's true! ... It WAS the first book I've ever read that said multiplicity is .. a lifestyle option.... But the therapist tried to tell a couple of system residents that they weren't real and/or not a different person than Jennifer and/or just her walking, talking unconsious. Mildred [of Jennifer's system] tried to set him straight, and neither was listening to the other!"
Teresa has an interesting review of Jennifer and her Selves.
order Jennifer and her Selves
Sybil ~ The Book, The Film, The Real Story
Sybil's closest relative, Naomi Rhode, verifies her life story Shirley A. Mason - The Woman I Knew by Nancy Preston, Sybil's Friend
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About the Sybil Movie
Click here to discuss 'Sybil' at the Internet Movie DatabaseClick here to discuss the 'Sybil' remake at IMDB
Everything we have on the Sybil book, Sybil film, and Shirley Ardell Mason, is on our Controversy page.
At rock bottom, the facts are these: Shirley Ardell Mason was multiple, and her therapy with Dr. Wilbur helped her.
Please try to keep in mind that what you see in the movie Sybil with Sally Field is only very loosely based on the real events in the life of Shirley Ardell Mason. The novel by Flora Rheta Schreiber is not a psychiatric case history. It is a fictionalized narrative. Some of the facts were changed to conceal Shirley's identity. Others were exaggerated for shock value. The Sybil movie was deliberately made to resemble a horror movie. The Sybil remake starring Tammy Blanchard was also based on the book, rather than on what actually happened between Cornelia Wilbur and Shirley Ardell Mason.
The Sybil book and films are the public image of multiple personalities -- and have done a lot of damage to multiples. (Please read that if you don't read anything else on this page.)
Among the many untruths perpetuated by the 2007 Sybil remake, one of the worst came at the end, with the statement that Shirley Ardell Mason ended her life as a "recluse". She was an artist who exhibited her paintings at local galleries. She taught art for years, designed toys, and owned her own business. She was a devout member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church and was well known and liked there. Only a very few people knew Shirley was Sybil.
Her story has been verified by her cousin Naomi Rhode, and we have personal mail from other family members verifying the story of Shirley and her family. Nancy L. Preston's book 
After Sybil presents a much more realistic picture of Shirley Ardell Mason. Ms. Preston was interviewed for the DVD and that interview is included in the extras. Ms. Preston's website, Sybil's Friend, has lots of personal reminiscences about her art teacher, mentor and friend.
Dr. Patrick Suraci offers Sybil In Her Own Words: The Untold Story of Shirley Mason, Her Multiple Personalities and Paintings. (You can also buy Sybil in her Own Words on Kindle now.) Dr. Suraci's blog post on Shirley Mason's case history reveals important facts that Dr. Wilbur's detractors would like to have swept under the rug. (Click here for a video of Dr. Suraci explaining Shirley's art.)
To see if a store close to you rents copies either of the DVD release or the old VHS version (which was drastically cut); Formovies.com Sybil Listing
If you are still interested in the old VHS version or want to try for the old 192-minute version; Video Addicts Want List Here, post a message saying you want a copy of the Sybil movie. Don't forget to mention our website.
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Title: Internal Family Systems Therapy Author: Richard C. Schwartz Publisher: New York: Guilford, 1995 ISBN: 0898622735 (acid-free paper) To learn more about internal family systems therapy, click here. Some MPD/DID multiples might find this approach useful in organizing an operating system. December 03, 2011: Dr. Schwartz and his son Mark are currently involved in this lawsuit alleging malpractice. It's like something out of Pendergrast's or Joan Acocella's accounts of the 80s and 90s. Is it for real, or is the claimant -- who owns and manages several entertainment companies -- trying to cash in? |
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Title: My Mom is Different Author: Deborah Sessions Publisher: Sidran 1994 ISBN: 0962916439 Written for little children, this is an introduction to MPD classic, trauma, dissociation, splitting, psychotherapy, hospitalization, and other yummy subjects. My Mom Is Not Your Entertainment Hilarious parody by a member of the Flatlanders system. |
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Title: Black Milk: On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity, and Motherhood Author: Elif Shafak Publisher: Penguin 2011 reprint edition ISBN: 0143121081 Deeply conflicted between her need to write and her unexpected love, marriage and pregnancy, the great Turkish novelist Elif Shafak experienced writer's block for the first time in her life after her daughter was born. In Black Milk she examines her lives in light of her experience and of writers she admires who were also wives and mothers -- and those who weren't. She envisions her identities as a harem of "finger women", tiny replicas of herself. Each of them is Elif Shafak, but with vastly differing styles, interests and desires. This is very similar to the median experience, although she never uses the word. Shafak wants to "integrate" these mini-me's, for they are all herself; she wants to give respect to all, setting none aside or treating them as of lesser importance. She says most people have an oligarchy of selves, with some voices going unheard; she wants a democracy. She speaks of it as facing her "inner diversity" and learning to "be One."
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Title: Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy Author: Joe Sharkey Publisher: St. Martin's 1994 ISBN: 0312104219 Based on the award-winning "Profitable Addictions" series of investigative reports by the Houston Chronicle, this book explains the classic psychiatric insurance scam by focusing on one institution, Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. Amazon says: "Many in the psychiatric profession have abandoned the severely mentally ill while private, investor-owned hospitals offer bounties of up to $1500 to clergy, teachers, police and "crisis counselors" for recruiting -- one Texas legislator uses the term "body-snatching" -- troubled adults, adolescents and children covered by insurance policies that pay up to $30,000 for inpatient care. In 1993, the fraud practiced by Medicare- and Medicaid-subsidized hospital chains such as National Medical Enterprises, with 86 psychiatric hospitals and revenues of $1.74 billion in 1991, was revealed by the FBI. The psychiatric industry, Sharkey warns in this chilling, well-documented account, is lobbying for a large slice of the health reform pie and continues to "create mental illness with advertising."
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Title: : Multiple personality; an experimental investigation into the nature of human individuality
Author: : Boris Sidis
Publisher: New York, Greenwood Press, 1968 (orig. published 1904)
Sidis believed there was such a thing as adult onset multiplicity, caused by physical injury. He has a lot of case studies of people who never showed signs of amnesia, dissociation or other selves until they were in an accident, mostly when they had a head injury. He also has the usual "hystero-epilepsy" cases. This is a fascinating side trip.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005 12:31:29 PM This book is now available to read for free astraeaswebmulti/online. Multiple personality; an experimental investigation into the nature of human individuality by Sidis
look for this book at Advanced Book Exchange
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Title: I'm Eve Author: Chris Costner Sizemore with Elen Sain Pittillo Publisher: New York : Jove, 1978 ISBN: 0515075140 Chris Sizemore tells her life story which was (to put it mildly) erroneously reported by Dr. Corbett Thigpen in "The Three Faces of Eve". |
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Title: A Mind of My Own Author: Chris Costner-Sizemore Publisher: Morrow, 1989 ISBN: 0688081991 Chris continues telling her own true story, begun in I'm Eve, in a warm, engaging narrative. While she continues to maintain her stance that multiplicity is a mental illness for which the only cure is integration (she reports a brief confrontation with the Troops (Truddi Chase) over this issue), what she has to say about it is not like the usual psychiatric blah blah. Chris does not believe in fragmentation. Describing her research into reincarnation and past-life memories (citing Ian Wilson's studies among others), she asserts that her actual selves (not the stereotypes described by Thigpen and Cleckley) were separate entities. "Despite authorities' claims to the contrary, my former alters were not fragments of my birth personality. They were entities, whole in their own rights, who coexisted with my birth personality before I was born. They were not me, but they remain intrinsically related to what it means to be me."More at Multiple Personality Before Eve by Adam Crabtree. He characterizes Chris' selves as past-life personalities. |
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Title: Magic Castle Author: Carole Smith Publisher: St. Martin's Press ISBN: 031217196X The real story here is not little Alex and his violent behavior which was interpreted by his mother and doctor as multiple personalities, but his mom's fight against the mental health industry to try to get some help for his real problems. One wonders if the SRA stories were invented by her, for example. It's not at all clear whether he was actually multiple, or whether the idea of MPD was used as a kind of therapeutic tool that he could work with to sort out his genuine issues. |
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Title: Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination Author: Daniel Smith Publisher: Penguin 2007 ISBN: 1594201102 Recently, a series of British studies uncovered the fact that mentally healthy people hear voices. As these findings become accepted by modern psychiatry, professionals must abolish their prejudices. Hearing voices will no longer mean an automatic diagnosis of schizophrenia or psychosis; societies and movements have been formed to study what it really means to hear voices. Here, Daniel Smith explores the place of voices in Western history, with a special focus on Joan of Arc, Socrates and Daniel Paul Schreber. Readers of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind might be interested in what Smith has to say. |
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Title: Which One Am I?: Multiple Personalities and Deep Southern Secrets Author: Thomas S. Smith, James Darrell Williams& Publisher: CreateSpace 2012 ISBN: 1479120774 Very few books on multiplicity are written by loved ones. I'm Eve was co-written by Chris Sizemore and her cousin, and After Sybil was written by Nancy L. Preston, one of Shirley Mason's close friends. Now, Which One Am I explores what it's like to have a life partner who's plural. This is not about natural multiplicity -- Darrell Williams& have classic blackout DID/MPD originating in childhood abuse, and much of the story is dedicated to how they found out about their past. But they have chosen to refuse integration and live as they are. Most important, they have found a loving and caring partner in Thomas Smith.
My Name Is Darrell... And I Have 25 Personalities Long Beach Post, Feb. 1, 2013. |  |
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Title: The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery Author: Michelle Stacey Publisher: Tarcher/Putnam 2002 ISBN: 1585421359
Stacey's take on Mollie focuses on her anorexia and its context in Victorian
America. Stacey based a lot of her book on Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma: An Authentic Statement of Facts in the Life of Mary J. Fancher by A.H. Dailey (Brooklyn: Eagle Book Printing, 1894). This book is out of print. look for copies of Mollie Fancher through Advanced Book Exchange: One does occasionally turn up, usually going for about $75-100. Anthony Walsh has got a lengthy document on Mollie which includes a bit more about her other selves. The doctor who looked after her apparently documented them in some detail. The People's Almanac 2 has much more about Mollie's group, which you can read at Trivia Library: Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma. |
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Title: Incest, and the Betrayal of the Soul in Psychotherapy Author: Robert Stein (singlet) Publisher: Spring, 1973 ISBN: 9780882145068 Stein, a Jungian therapist, wrote this book to raise tough questions about incest, the therapy process and the therapist-patient relationship. It is written in a clear, readable style, and still relevant today.
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Title: The Stranger in the Mirror: Dissociation, the Hidden Epidemic Author: Marlene Steinberg (singlet) Publisher: Cliff Street 2000 ISBN: 0060195649 Another in a recent series of books by professionals assuring us that dissociation is real and happens to everyone, and promoting the idea of the "dissociative spectrum" with, of course, multiplicity at the extreme end. And, of course, being multiple is still a disorder. The author seems to be a little out of touch with present-day realities -- she uses dissociation and multiplicity to explain why some people feel they are the opposite gender from their bodies, and to let us know that anyone who believes in reincarnation is delusional. Remember, DID is an identity disorder - they're trying to depoliticize it by telling us no one really has more than one person per body. The goal is to keep multiples as clients, just reshuffling the deck a little. More at strangerinthemirror.com. |
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Title: Demystifying the Autistic Experience Author: William Stillman Publisher: Jessica Kingsley 2002 ISBN:1843107260 Reviews at Amazon say: "Presents autism in a positive light, and describes why we do things instead of dismissing us as uniformly defective and inappropriate." "He proves autism is not this wild unmanagable condition that requires massive intervention." Describes the reasons behind the things autistics do without being flowery or assuming autistics are all geniuses. Roguealleycat@amazon sez: "Some great points and people should read it, although he has some notions of respectful language that are certainly not universal to the autistic community." And, that the author "does not make it sound as if those of us who are happy with ourselves either lack insight or aren't autistic enough to appreciate how disabled we are." If you are interested in books by autistic authors, try Amanda Baggs' Autistic Authors Booklist.
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Title: The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age Author: Sandy Stone (Allucquere Roseanne Stone) Publisher: MIT 1995 ISBN: 0262193620 By the Author of Violation and Virtuality. How the internet and other means of communication have undermined the established illusion of one-self-per-body. Go for it. |
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Title: The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness Author: Martha Stout Publisher: Viking 2001 ISBN: 0670894753 As far as we can tell, the real message of this book is that behavior we all thought was normal or merely idiosyncratic is actually symptomatic of a treatable mental disorder. Think about it: we've all heard that dissociation is a natural response (whether to trauma, or whatever). If that's the case, then why is modern psychiatry trying to cure it rather than merely observing it? It's wise to ask ourselves as we read this and other such books: Who benefits? If we accept the dissociation belief system -- particularly this New Wave variety which discounts multiplicity as just another dissociative delusion -- what do we get out of it? What does the doctor get out of it? |
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Title: Sybil In Her Own Words: The Life, Letters and Art of Shirley Ardell Mason Author: Patrick Suraci, Ph.D. Publisher: Abandoned Ladder 2011 ISBN: 0615446000 Upon Flora Schreiber’s death in 1993, Dr. Patrick Suraci inherited a painting that Shirley Mason had done for her, initiating a friendship with Ms. Mason that lasted until her death in 1998. Dr. Suraci’s recently published book picks up where Schreiber’s story left off. It explores the productive life of Shirley Mason as artist and teacher, mostly through letters and taped conversations. Dr. Suraci verified details of Shirley's early life and abuse, her work with Dr. Wilbur and her later life. Dr. Suraci's blog post on Shirley Mason's case history reveals important facts that Dr. Wilbur's detractors would like to have swept under the rug. Dr. Suraci is a psychologist in private practice in the city of New York.Here's a video where Dr. Suraci shows some of Shirley Mason's pictures and explains their symbolic meaning:
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Title: Trance and Possession in Bali: A Window on Western Multiple Personality, Possession Disorder, and Suicide Author: Luh K. Suryani and Gordon D. Jensen Publisher: Oxford University Press 1994 ISBN: 0-19-588610-0 A well-written, detailed but completely understandable exploration of possession trance, its relation to multiplicity, and their place in the healing rituals of traditional, indigenous cultures. "In this book, the authors describe the psychosocial experiences of the Balinese in Trance-possession states during traditional healing, dance, drama and gamelan performance, as well as in several mental disorders. This book is a collaboration between a Western psychiatrist with a wide experience of Balinese Culture and Mental Health and Western trained Balinese steeped in local culture." "It concludes that trance-possession in Bali is the same, phenomenologically, as multiple personality disorder (MPD) in the West. It also presents criteria for the diagnosis of possession in any culture, a new theory of possession, and multifold comparisons of trance-possession in Bali with MPD in the West." |
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Selves in Bali The concept of self in Bali, by L.K. Suryani.
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Title: The Myth of Mental Illness Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Harper Collins 1974 (updated in 1984) ISBN: 0060911514 This is as relevant today as the day it came out. Szasz uses clear, simple language to expose the facts behind the stigmatization of those who are different. He insists that most of the things we call mental illnesses are merely variances in normal human behaviour, or normal emotional states like loneliness or insecurity that could be helped in ordinary ways. You may not agree with everything he says, but that's not why this book is listed here.
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Title: Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Harper Collins 1987 ISBN: 0815604602 Szasz restates his claims, presents his findings and explains his theories in plain language. He even gives you a bit on why he uses plain language. This book may be a better introduction than "The Myth of Mental Illness" if you've never read Szasz before. His theme is always the same: what we term mental illness is, by and large, behaviour which is explicable and reasonable given the society in which we live. Society's vigorous repression (through drugs, electroshock, etc.) of those who are different has become a form of institutionalised hate crime. We have come to regard the mental health industry as a kind of religion, as the standard against which normalcy is measured. |
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Title: The Medicalization of Everyday Life Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Syracuse Univ. Press 2007 ISBN: 0815608675 Once more, Szasz takes a look at our lives and times and how the pharmaceutical industry, in cooperation with the mainstream media and the legal system, have formed a government of social control. Medical and health decisions are made for us, "for our own good", every day. Find out what the system is doing to you and your kids -- how much of your life can you take back? Want more on Thomas Szasz? Visit http://www.szasz.com/. |
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Title: Coercion as Cure, A Critical History of Psychotherapy Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Transaction 2007 ISBN: 0765803798 Like Masson, Szasz pulls no punches. This is what happens when we presume that a certain select group of people know more about ourselves than we do. This is not about the misuse of psychiatry; this is about the idea that psychiatry itself is a misuse of social and political power. Want more on Thomas Szasz? Visit http://www.szasz.com/. You might also be interested in |
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Title: William James on Exceptional Mental States
Editor: Eugene Taylor
Publisher: Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1984
ISBN: 087023451X
According to Robert H. Wozniak's page on William James, James didn't believe normal people had a single self -- that's an illusion, he thought. He lived at about the same time as Mollie Fancher and there is much more about him in The Passion of Ansel Bourne. This book consists of transcriptions of scholarly lectures by James in 1896, covering Dreams and Hypnotism, Automatism, Hysteria, Multiple Personality, Demoniacal Possession, Witchcraft, Degeneration, and Genius. "The first four talks establish James as the master of a modern dynamic psychology of the subconscious, while the remainder articulate the pathological working of the subconscious in the social sphere."
buy William James on Exceptional Mental States
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Title: Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet Author: Sherry Turkle Publisher: Simon & Schuster 1997 ISBN: 0684833484 Listen to this: "At one extreme, the unitary self maintains its oneness by repressing all that does not fit. Thus censored, the illegitimate parts of the self are not accessible. This model would of course function best within a fairly rigid social structure with clearly defined rules and roles." Did you hear that? A singlet is one who has repressed everything that doesn't fit. That presumes that there were lots of things that didn't fit in the first place. This would seem to suggest that multiples who do feel they are parts of a whole are keeping all those "illegitimate" parts of the self uncensored. Isn't that a lot better than the dissociation theory? |
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Title: Mending Ourselves: Expressions of Healing and Self-Integration
Author: Edited by Lynn Wasnak& Publisher: Many Voices Press 1993 ISBN: 0963727702 One of the very few books on life after the integration process. A series of short essays like Multiple Personality from the Inside Out and just as readable. If you are opting for integration, this one is highly recommended.
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Title: Wounded Innocents Author: Richard Wexler Publisher: Prometheus, 1995 ISBN: 0879759364 "The war against child abuse has become a war against children. In the name of "child protection" innocent families are disrupted nearly two million times every year and thousands of children are needlessly torn from their parents and thrown into foster care--even as children in real danger are ignored. While the problem of child abuse is serious and real, journalist Richard Wexler charges that our solutions to the problem have actually made it worse--in fact, hurting the very children that they were intended to help." From the Lifting the Veil review, which you can read in its entirety here. Read about the New York City Admin. for Children's Services and what they do to families in the name of "protecting the children".
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Title: First Person Plural Author: Cameron West Publisher: Hyperion 1998 It is another courageous healing story. It has aroused some controversy because of the relative ease with which he learned to communicate with his people once he realized they were there. This isn't unusual though, despite what you're told in some of those cheap dime novels. People reading this book and comparing it with their own experiences, remember that as Truddi Chase says no two groups or systems are alike, we all have different ways of communicating, perceiving the world, processing information, and different people handling different things for different purposes. West does in fact have a degree in psychology, but it is from the Association of Humanistic Psychology, not the standard APA, and he explains in the text that he worked for the degree in order to better understand multiplicity in general as well as his own condition. He is not a practicing therapist. Compulsive Reader's Coral Hull reviews First Person Plural
Cameron West's Website |
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Title: A Rainbow for Patti Author: Carol West Publisher: Behavioral Science Center 1993 ISBN: 0-938837-11-7 "The author's story of how and why a multiple personality develops is based on her own experience and was designed to explain this disorder to children who use this technique to survive." 21 Dec 2006: The author says: "Contrary to most of the books published on Multiple Personality Disorder, A Rainbow for Patti is a gentle, non-threatenting introduction to this disorder. It is written at a child's level, and is only 45 about pages, with several illustrations done by child selves. It is designed for therapists to use in introducing the subject to clients, as well as to help family and friends of those with MPD to understand the disorder. It does not mention abuse, and is not frightening in any manner. It is also a heart-warming story of self-acceptance, hope and inner strength. "The book was professionally published in 1993, but due to the publisher going out of business, I am now the distributor. I have more than 100 copies of the book, and they can be purchased by contacting me at az.curly.q @ hotmail . com. $14.95 includes S&H.
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Title: The Multiple's Guide to Harmonized Family Living:
A Healthy Alternative, or Prelude, to Integration
Author: Tammy Whitman & Susan Shore
Publisher: Artistic Endeavors, Marina del Rey CA 1994
ISBN: 188439003x
Quoting from Janus of the Gateway's review on Anita's Booklist:
"Presents an alternative approach to dealing with MP, emphasizing harmony among inner selves rather than casting off or integrating them into a single personality. Written by a person with MP, it gives suggestions on how to help your inner people get along better with each other with less friction and cross-purposes. Not a big book, easy to read (not filled with psycho-babble). Maybe not for everyone, but might be very appropriate for some? I liked it - it even made us smile sometimes! :)"
buy The Multiple's Guide to Harmonized Family Living
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Title: Nobody Nowhere Author: Donna Williams Publisher: Harper 1994 ISBN: 0380722178 Donna Williams coped with the very different, often confusing sensory input common to autism by relying on the fact that she was also multiple. Autism and multiplicity may have similar neurological bases. You may buy this book direct from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. (Strongly recommended as Ms Williams told us the publishers' editions of this book can be hard to get.) buy an audiocassette of "Nobody Nowhere" read by Debra Winger. Donna's Homepage Also you might be interested in Donna's author page at amazon.com and her amazon.com blog. |
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Title: Somebody Somewhere:
Breaking Free from the World of Autism Author: Donna Williams Publisher: Three Rivers 1995 ISBN: 0812925246 Williams describes her life after the publication of the first book and her experiences teaching special-needs children in her native Australia. You may buy this book direct from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. (Strongly recommended as Ms Williams told us the publishers' editions of this book can be hard to get.) For more information on what autism really is or can be, please visit autistics.org. A Note on Autism by an anonymous, autistic reader
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Title: Autism: An Inside-Out Approach Author: Donna Williams Publisher: Jessica Kingsley 1996 ISBN: 1853023876 Williams takes this opportunity to criticize so-called therapies for autism based in stereotypes which limit the definition and abilities of autistics. She presents an exhaustive list of the different kinds of autism and therapies used to treat them, and also explains a bit more about her multiplicity. "Exploring autism from the inside, it shows clearly how the behaviours associated with autism can have a range of different causes, and in many cases reflect the autistic person's attempt to gain control over their internal world. The sensory and perceptual problems that challenge a person with autism are described in depth, together with strategies for tackling them so as to enable that person to take more control of their lives." Roguealleycat@amazon sez: "Some good descriptions. Debunks some myths, but sometimes replaces them with new ones. Treat with extreme caution, and ask an autie before applying the concepts to them or you could hurt them badly." |
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Title: Like Color to the Blind Author: Donna Williams Publisher: Times 1996 ISBN: 0385255950 Williams talks about her continuing activities related to her previous books, and about living in the everyday world, including her brief marriage to an autistic gentleman. If you want to understand more about the Irlen filters she wore to prevent sensory overload, read what she says about Irlens here (scroll down a bit). You may buy this book direct from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. (Strongly recommended as Ms Williams told us the publishers' editions of this book can be hard to get.)
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Title: Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct Author: Donna Williams Publisher: Jessica Kingsley 1998 ISBN: 1853026123 "Expanding on themes of her previous book, Autism: An Inside-Out Approach, Donna Williams explains how the senses of a person with autism work, suggesting that they are 'stuck' at an early development stage common to everyone. She calls this the system of sensing, claiming that most people move on to the system of interpretation which enables them to make sense of the world. In doing so, as well as gaining the means of coping with the world, they lose various abilities which people with autism retain. She goes so far as to suggest that the constraints of space and time do not exist in the same way for autistic people, and that the emotional as well as the physical world is seen and therefore approached in a different way. The book provides a fascinating insight into the way that people with autism perceive the world, going into far more depth than Williams' previous books." A current theory of autism is that while neurotypical children develop a huge amount of neurons which "retire" after the kid is about two, the neurons of autistic children don't retire and remain active. This could account for some of Ms Williams' ideas explained above. Roguealleycat@amazon sez: "Theory on autistic developmental stages: sensing, interpretation, and significance. "Sensing" makes sense, the rest lose me. Take with a large metaphorical saltshaker rather than the usual grain." |
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Title: Exposure Anxiety - The Invisible Cage: An Exploration of Self-Protection Response in the Autism Spectrum Author: Donna Williams Publisher: Jessica Kingsley 2003 ISBN: 1843100517 "Exposure anxiety is increasingly understood as a crippling condition affecting a high proportion of people on the autism spectrum. To many it is an invisible cage, leaving the person suffering from it aware, but buried alive in their own involuntary responses and isolation.... Exposure Anxiety makes it hard to stand noticing you are noticing. It can make love a form of torture, repel you from the sound of your own voice, make you meaning deaf to your own words and those of others and compel you to avoid, divert from or retaliate against the very things that which most have the power to reach you." Roguealleycat@amazon sez: "Useful stuff interspersed with bad. Contains irresponsible promotion of a drug (no warnings about serious dangers) and the author applying her own ideas about autism and Asperger's to the rest of us."
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Title: Everyday Heaven: Journeys Beyond the Stereotypes of Autism Author: Donna Williams Publisher: Jessica Kingsley 2004 ISBN: 1843102110 Donna's fourth autobiography, covering the nine years after her divorce and describing her everyday life, explorations of her sexuality and orientation, dealing with the death of loved ones, and so on.
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Title: Not Just Anything Author: Donna Williams Publisher: Jessica Kingsley 2004 ISBN: 1843102285 This is Donna's journal. "A mosaic of logic, passion and philosophical musings by Donna Williams, sometimes jolting, sometimes moving, often illuminating. In it Donna takes you on a poetic adventure into places past, present and beyond. Often intertwined with the world of autistic experience, her writings divulge with immediacy, a person in the grip of overload and shutdowns, of extreme sensory and emotional highs and passions, of alienation from self, from body and fear of the intensity of emotion, of the struggle to know self, to communicate, to comprehend. At other times, her writing somehow transcends the often assumed limitations of autism, and she dissects so many of the concepts we take for granted, bringing us face to face with our own social constructions of 'reality' and so called 'normality' in a way only Donna can." |
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Title: The Jumbled Jigsaw: An Insider's Approach to the Treatment of Autistic "Fruit Salads" Author: Donna Williams Publisher: Jessica Kingsley 2005 ISBN: 1843102811 "The Jumbled Jigsaw exposes autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) not as single entities but as a combination of a whole range of often untreated, sometimes easily treatable, underlying conditions. Exploring everything from mood, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive and tic disorders to information processing and sensory perceptual difficulties, including dependency issues, identity problems and much more, Donna demonstrates how a number of such conditions can combine to form a 'cluster condition' and underpin the label 'autism spectrum disorder'." |
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Title: Aristoi Author: Walter J. Williams Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates; TOR SF, Sept. 1992 ISBN: 0812514092 A very intricate, involved science fiction novel about a very intricate, involved future of humanity. One of the major premises is the deliberate creation and maintenance of multiple personality systems, not by sinister government forces but by individuals who choose multiplicity as their preferred way of functioning in reality. In fact, given some of the stuff they have to do, they have to be multiple.
Read a review of Aristoi here |
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Author: Ian Wilson
Publisher: London: Gollancz, 1981
ISBN: 0575029684
We recommend this book for people who need a bit more critical thinking when it comes to claims of reincarnation or other psychic phenomena, and even multiplicity itself. Wilson, author of Jesus: The Evidence and Murder at Golgotha, is not a debunker, but does try to explore the possibility that we should not necessarily believe everything we read. Likewise, don't take him without a few grains of salt; we suspect him, not of sloppy research, but selective research. We think he's ignored some data which might show flaws in his theory.
Reincarnation? The Phenomena Which Seem To Suggest It By Filippo Liverziani. This article sources a lot of All in the Mind?, and other works concerning investigations of reincarnation and multiple personalities, so you can see the kinds of things Wilson reports on.
buy All in the Mind?
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Here are some book reviews at Dark Personalities, by Lemarath^Teresa.
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