Plurality Conceptualized

Disclaimer: This article does not use traditional psychological terms to refer to members of plural systems. Throughout this essay, I use the words 'system members', 'people', 'colleagues' and 'collectives'; I hesitate to use the words 'alter', 'alternate personality', 'ego state' or 'personality' to refer to constituent members of plural groups.

What is plurality?

Plurality is the subjective definition of many minds in one body.

It can manifest in the phenomenon commonly known as multiplicity, in which completely discrete minds live in one body. Multiplicity itself has many sub-types: it includes natural multiplicity, in which the system-members arose without any influence from stress or trauma, and trauma-based or stress-based multiplicity, in which an original person split, and others formed to help the original person through difficult situations, or to keep him company. They aren't mutually exclusive, either: a system can include both naturally-occurring people, and splits from those people. The Fen Group is a natural plural group; we have been separate from the beginning.

It can also appear as soulbonding, or subjective communication with fictional characters in one's mindscape. The soulbonds may or may not frontrun, or take control of the body. The 'bonder' may simply talk to the others within the mindscape, or the soulbonds may sometimes spend time at front handling daily duties or speaking to friends and acquaintances of the system. The mechanism of soulbonding can have numerous explanations. I tend to believe that it is a conscious entity's affinity to a specific work, but others view it as a spiritual phenomenon. The explanation for soulbonding, in my opinion, is highly subjective.

A less 'extreme' form of plurality is median or midcontinuum, in which one person is faceted enough to experience his consciousness as being separate to some degree, but not to the same extent that a multiple system's constituent members would. There can be median members within a multiple system or a soulbonding collective. For example, Kerry, one of the Fenners, sometimes experiences herself as a median collective.

These experiences are not mutually exclusive, either: one system can experience many different types of plurality.

History of views on plurality in the west, and modern plural activism

Traditionally, Western cultural has opposed the idea, labelling it pathological (first calling it Multiple Personality Disorder, and then changing it to Dissociative Identity Disorder), and showing the public the worst examples of plural collectives, including those of Shirley Mason (fictionalized as 'Sybil'), Billy Milligan and others. It is treated as a frightening spectacle, with axe-murderer 'alternate personalities' and harrowing stories of child sexual abuse. It feels like a guilty pleasure, like reading a gruesome Stephen King novel to frighten oneself and remind oneself how wonderful it is to be 'normal'. This does not adequately reflect the experience of many plural collectives, including our own.

Since at least the 1990s, non-disordered plural collectives have started forming their own communities, primarily on the Internet. Astraea's Web, created in the late nineties, was one of the first sites to directly advocate natural multiplicity as a human variation, rather than a dangerous pathology that must be dealt with through traditional psychological methods. Soon followed Amorpha's Collective Phenomenon, the Two Courts, the Anachronic Army's Dark Personalities, the short-lived Pavilion project, Lemarath System, the Blackbirds and the Layman's Guide to Multiplicity, who continued the work of spreading awareness about natural multiplicity.  However, even in 2008, the idea of non-pathological multiplicity has been primarily promulgated over the Internet and through other 'alternative' media and has been ignored by mainstream science and psychology.

Explaining Plurality

Unfortunately, there is no hard scientific evidence either proving that plurality is a valid psychological state, or that it cannot possibly exist. Its subjectivity makes it hard for scientists to measure objectively, for example, with brain scans or standard psychological testing. Part of this stems from cultural bias against plurality; it's seen as pathological or a clever delusion by highly intelligent, but very insecure people. That makes it very difficult for plurals to explain their experiences or back up their assertions with academic journal articles. They often must resort to metaphysical explanations, or refrain from explaining it altogether.* This isn't to say that their experiences aren't valid, but such explanations may not work with the general public or with psychologists. I think that plurality should be defended from a philosophical and cultural standpoint, with particular focuses on neurodiversity and the right to self-determination and self-definition*.

The opposition to plurality is based upon cultural biases, rather than hard scientific evidence. There is absolutely nothing saying that many people sharing a body cannot live harmoniously together. The aversion is merely a cultural bias, similar to that experienced by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Because most people aren't plural (or LGBT), they make their statistical norms into cultural standards, and anyone who deviates from those norms has a pathological existence. As my colleagues Richard and Darwin Ghia-Wilberforce said in their brief article 'The Main Person Fallacy', deviating from a cultural norm is NOT inherently pathological. For example, someone with an IQ of 160 deviates from the norm (that score is four standard deviants from the norm if the standard deviant is set at fifteen points, as it usually is on the IQ bell curve), but does she have the mental disorder of 'hypergnosia' or 'hyperactive mental disorder'? No, she doesn't. The same applies to being queer or plural. It's just a variation, and nothing more. The neurodiversity movement applies this thought process to numerous mental conditions (autism and ADD, for example) similar to plurality in that they're simply just differences from the norm. The only reason that they seem 'disabled' or have some sort of 'pathology' is that they're the outliers in the normal distribution. If society were made up of primarily autistics, or plurals, or bisexuals, non-autistics, non-plurals and 'monosexuals' (a term used by some bisexuals to describe gay and straight people) would be the 'abnormal ones'.

I also believe that regardless of variation, people have the right to be treated and addressed the way they wish to be treated, as long as they don't impinge on others' rights. This is a value shared by all members of the Fen Group. It is only moral to treat a self-reported plural group the way they would like to be treated -- would you want to have your very existence invalidated by someone else, even if it's culturally 'easier' to have that existence validated?


*That's good if you don't wish to raise consciousness about plurality among the general public, but it's not if you want to -- you do need some sort of argument. By the way, this isn't to say that plurality can't be explained metaphysically, but it doesn't work for staunch atheists and monists. It doesn't work for me, for example!
*My opinions are not necessarily representative of the Fen Group, but fellow frontrunners Richard and Kerry say that they agree with me here.