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Existential Issues in Multiple PersonalityWe welcome your comments! Please click here to email us. Finally, the deep (?) stuff. Does multiplicity exist? What's it really like? What are the sociocultural implications? Relative State Devoted to exploring what plural experience is like, how people think about it, what they believe about it and how it affects what we think about other things. Multiple personality is not DID! Please read this by Dr. Ralph Allison. Split Personalities Probed Report on an actual attempt at a scientific study, intended to show that brain imaging proves the existence of separate personalities. Never mind about the "memory suppression" nonsense or the trauma-split assumption, it's the brain imaging part that's important. One Brain, Two Selves This is the report on the above scientific study, published in NeuroImage, a professional journal. (PDF ahoy!) Multiple Personality and Brainwave Changes From the BBC's Tomorrow's World program, a short piece confirming MRI experiments charting brainwave changes in multiples. A few more citations of brain studies on multiples.
Trauma, Testimony, and Fictions of Truth: Narrative in When Rabbit Howls By Deborah Carlin. Discusses multiple personality, childhood trauma, and the idea that reliving one's abuse in narrative form is therapeutic. Focus is on Truddi Chase and When Rabbit Howls, although other books are mentioned. However, also have a look at Historical vs. Narrative Truth by George Ganaway, in which he describes how an abuse narrative can also include screen memories or outright fantasies which mask actual abuse histories and distract the therapist from helping the client with what really happened. A few sentences from this much-maligned paper were taken entirely out of context and used by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in order to make it appear as if Ganaway were discrediting all multiplicity as attention-getting fakery -- when nothing could be further from the truth. He knows it's real, even if he thinks of it in terms of the classic model. He even acknowledges the existence of multiple-like hosting setups in Spiritualist mediums, in the absence of the usual trauma-dissociation-splitting pattern. Clearly, these are complicated issues even for non-trauma plurals. Minds, Memes, and Multiples By Stephen R.L. Clarke. The concept of a multiple self is not new; it is actually very old. The Inner Mind: Multiple Personality Before Eve By Adam Crabtree. This is part of a longer article speculating how the mind really works. Here he looks at the documented or recorded history of multiple personality and what people have thought about it in centuries past. The rest of the article and the website are worth looking at. These are by the author of Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality (Contact the author here) Survival of Bodily Death and Multiple Personalities By Adam Crabtree. Note again that this is extremely speculative and bears strong resemblence to Allison's ideas. It's still worth reading, especially if you have questions about the place of past-life personalities in multiple systems. (One of the other people at the conference this was presented at was Aaron DeGlanville... errr, that's not the same Aaron DeGlanville who is now serving a 30-year term for soliciting underage girls on line, is it??) Postmodernism and the Construction of the Divisible Self By William Dunning. Postmodern thinking and the concept of collective identity. The Intrapsychic and its Vicissitudes By Peter Giovacchini. Here we see that the psychiatric industry doesn't always agree with itself, either.
Speaking For OurSelves By Nicholas Humphrey and
Daniel Dennett. This paper's been floating around for about ten years. We
think it's one of the first scholarly papers to discuss multiplicity from a
philosophical standpoint. The Dead Emperor's New Clothes By A.M. Lippitt. Multiplicity, Japanese culture and television. Fascinating. Multiple Personality & Personal Identity By John P. Lizza. Morton Prince and the reality of household selves. Towards a theoretical framework of the etiology and structures of multiple personality By Regan McClure. Although she still holds to an abuse model for the origins of multiplicity, she makes a strong case for multiplicity as natural, and the idea of a "single self" as the illusion. She suggests that the category of "dissociative identity disorder" be changed or removed entirely from the DSM. Billy Milligan Speaks A statement given by Billy Milligan for our web site. Stay tuned. You can click here to buy copies of "The Minds of Billy Milligan" from our Bookstore page. The Story of Mary Reynolds by Joshua Nichols. A modern examination of a 19th-century multiple. The theme of this article is that Reynolds' little system existed independently and was not iatrogenically created; therefore, multiple personality can occur without benefit of suggestion by therapists. I might also add that Miss Reynolds seems not to have been abused or mistreated as a child. Back then, emotional sensitivity, and sometimes chronic illness (very fashionable for ladies back then) were thought to be the psychological origin of multiple personality. Truddi Chase and the Doom Patrol By Steven Shaviro, part of Doom Patrols, entire book now available on line. This is based on the fact that Crazy Jane, a character in The Doom Patrol comics, was explicitly based on Truddi. Violation and Virtuality By Sandy Stone. Another look at the Sarah case; and an online persona, invented by a singlet, taking on a life of its own. Sandy Stone's Home Page The author of Violation and virtuality and "The War of Desire and Technology".
Second Thoughts: Vicki(s) on multiplicity and dissociation as "disorders"; should we define ourselves in such terms? The Story of Mollie Fancher By Anthony Walsh. A recap of Mollie's life, focusing on her symptoms of "hystero-epilepsy" and multiple personalities rather than on her much-vaunted psychic abilities. If Mollie interests you, you can read the People's Almanac article to learn more about her group: Trivia Library: Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma. You might also like to read The Fasting Girl by Michelle Stacy, although here the focus is on Mollie's anorexia and she barely mentions the group.
>May 28, 2001: I am posting information about the Kaycee Nicole thing because it is another case of "Violation and Virtuality", not because I think Kaycee/Debbie was multiple. It is relevant in terms of creating and maintaining online identities. Anthony Temple Kaycee Nicole on Wikipedia Who was she and how did this get started? End of the Whole Mess PDF ahoy! But worth it. Summary of the bizarre events on the Blogger weblogs and metafilter.com, May 2000-May 2001. If you think this phenomenon is only as old as the internet, click here. My take on the Kaycee Nicole thing
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Created on ... September 23, 2007
Thank you Wicks