^ Alter - Astraea

Sep 29, 2014 12:45 PM

http://astraeasweb.net/plural/glossary.html#median<--- Links within this note section found by clicking link to Astraea's original source)

Alter - In the original psychiatric view, being multiple meant the people in your group were one-dimensional, representing aspects of one person which had been split off. It meant naming the aspects of a single personality. Right after Dr. Pierre Janet presented his ideas on "dissociation", the "alters" were supposed to fit the Jungian archetypal pattern: the Child, the Stern Protector, the Harlot, the Aluminum Siding and Storm Door Salesman and so forth.

The professional literature portrayed persons in multiple groups as cardboard characters, lacking substance, etc. The more substance they did have the more it was supposed to have been drained from the "depleted host", the original person who had put almost all her (it's always "her" in these reports) energy into these imitation people. This is how the word "alter" came into use; it meant a non-person; two-dimensional masks, paper dolls that the weak pathetic host personality hid behind for protection. "The characters pop up in times of stress to assist the weak host personality." This is still actually believed by some doctors.

Use of the term "alter" implies that one person in the group is real and the rest are not, or are less real. Even in systems where there really is an original person the others came from, or where one person considers themself to be hosting the others, "alter" is taken by many systems as an insult, roughly analogous to "white only" and "separate but equal" in the segregated South. Original people in systems can be just as competent and capable as anyone else in the group.

What should you say instead, to indicate you mean members of a multiple group, rather than one-person/one-body individuals? Truddi Chase & The Troops said "self" and "selves". Or you can just say people. If you feel you have "people in your head" you can say "headmates" (bearing in mind that not all multiples feel the others are "inside", let alone "in their head"). Some groups in the late 80s called them insiders.