8. History
<p>Nov 16, 2013 04:41 AM</p>
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<a href="http://astraeasweb.net/plural/faq.html">http://astraeasweb.net/plural/faq.html</a> (<--- Links within this note section found by clicking link to Astraea's original source)</p>
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"MPD is a recent phenomenon -- there were no cases prior to Sybil -- then an explosion of diagnoses in the 80s and 90s. Doesn't this prove that multiplicity is a fad diagnosis and a fraud?"</p>
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Reports of multiple personalities -- not necessarily Sybil-type MPD -- have existed since ancient times.</p>
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The Greek belief in daemons -- spirits who gave helpful or harmful advice -- was actually a complex doctrine which, among other things, explained multiplicity.</p>
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Jesus is described as doing an exorcism for an apparent multiple who had epilepsy in Mark 5:1-20.</p>
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In 1646, the German physician Paracelsus wrote of a woman who said someone was stealing money from her. It turned out to be a second self.</p>
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Multiple personality used to be called Gmelin's syndrome after Dr. Eberhardt Gmelin who in 1791 wrote up a detailed report about a German lady with "exchanged personality". Her one other self spoke French and behaved like a French aristocrat. Gmelin wrote that multiplicity could be a "royal road" to understanding how personality was formed. He did not see it as a disability. As recently as 1993, psychologist George B. Greaves was suggesting a revival of "Gmelin's syndrome" as a name for this condition. He said: "It would be strange, indeed, were we to surmise that that in humankind's vast history, what we now know as multiple personality ... should not have existed prior to 1789."</p>
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Biologist-physician William James observed several cases of adult onset multiplicity: among them were Ansel Bourne and Mary Reynolds. In his 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, he dealt with the "everybody has more than one personality" idea which he said was characterized by continuity of consciousness and a "feeling of ownership" in regard to the different selves' feelings and emotions. He said the cases of multiple personality he had observed probably happened when the continuity and "ownership" were disrupted. He believed the experiences of different persons in the group would cause the shared brain's neurology to become different from singlets over time.</p>
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There is also the Dissociation Archives at Oregon University which has full records of cases dating back to 1831. Show this to the next person who tells you multiple personality was unknown and unstudied before Sybil.</p>
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Multiples who were well known in psychological literature prior to Sybil include:</p>
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Mary Reynolds, born 1785, a "second state" documented (not "diagnosed") beginning in about 1811.</p>
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Psychologist Boris Sidis wrote a whole book about multiples: Multiple Personality, an Experimental Investigation into Human Individuality, published in 1904.</p>
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One of the cases mentioned by Sidis is Sally Beauchamp (real name Clara Norton Fowler) who was a patient of Dr. Morton Prince. He was a hypnotherapist who invented the term "multiple personality disorder" and was the author of The Dissociation of a Personality (entire book online at archive.org).</p>
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The Doris Fischer Case of Multiple Personality (long PDF, entire book), 1910.</p>
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Mollie Fancher, 1865. (entire book, fascinating)</p>
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Chris Costner-Sizemore (The Three Faces of Eve), 1952. Her story was very well known. The book sold millions of copies. A very well-produced film with Joanne Woodward and Lee J. Cobb came out in 1957. The only problem was that it wasn't true. Chris had many more than three selves, and the doctors had falsified many aspects of her case to make themselves look good. She wrote two of her own books to set the record straight.</p>
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Click here for the DVD of 3 Faces of Eve</p>
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Deluxe edition of the DVD. Commentary track by director Nunally Johnson.</p>
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Additionally, a few of the cases presented in our Early Accounts of Multiple Personality predate Sybil.</p>