Two sources about IRL “talking to headmates in the mirror”

My tally of “accounts by IRL plural systems who mention using mirrors to see different system members” is up to 2!

Still not a lot, but I figured I would post about them together somewhere.

One is a memoir from 1995, the other is a biography from 1906. So you know for a fact that neither of them could’ve been incepted with the idea from the Moon Knight TV show.

(…and, listen, I would defend the show’s use of “talking to a headmate by seeing them in a mirror” even if it had zero basis in reality, because it’s a great way to portray “talking to someone you can perceive, but who isn’t a separate body in the same physical space as you.” A TV series needs to be able to represent unusual, possibly-confusing concepts with visual shorthands that are easy for an audience to follow! But also…turns out it has some basis in reality.)

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First up: The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder, by Jane Phillips, 1995.

The author notes early on that, while she approves of the then-new cutting-edge term “DID”, the book is sticking with the vocabulary she used while the events were happening. If you want to read the whole book, heads-up for some graphic descriptions of trauma.

When alone, I often steadied myself by spending long hours staring into my mirror. I was far from vain, actually believing myself to be quite ugly, but when I stared into my mirror, I somehow slipped out of myself. The faces that looked back at me were not really mine. They all seemed related to me but they were sometimes very young, sometimes very old, beautiful, wise, boyish, feminine, mischievous. . . . These faces were all very real to me, separate folks, it seemed to me, friends of a sort, and in the quiet of my bedroom I listened to them speak. My favorite, and the one I often sought, was beautiful, powerful, and wise. Was I crazy to believe she was there? Maybe. I was a little old for imaginary friends, but I could not live without her or the others, and I felt calmer, stronger, and safer after our visits in the glass. (20)

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So I’m a multiple,” I had said.

“Yes,” he’d said. “You’re a multiple.”

So that was it —the thing that had tripped me up, the mysterious presence that had been lurking in the far, dark corners all these years. It meant there had been faces in my mirror back home in my old bedroom —faces and voices, too. (49)

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Suddenly my eyes caught in the mirror, and in a flash I had dissociated into the mirror. When I was younger, many of my selves had come to me via my bedroom mirror and, back then, I often longed for someone special to look into my eyes and actually see me. This person would recognize my one true self—something I could not do—and would coax that self to life.

All these years later, there in my bathroom mirror was the same intense look: the expression of profound longing, the desire to be given life. My childhood fantasy came back to me, then abruptly shifted: I was no longer waiting for someone to come along, recognize me, and bring me to life.

My back and arms rippled into gooseflesh. I stared into the mirror, back through time and selves and my own history. I dropped my toothbrush. And then I began to cry and laugh and whoop. It had taken years, and it had come as a terrific surprise to my grown-up self, but the moment was every bit as significant and intense as I had once longed for it to be. Only now I knew that I was the person who would see me first, I would coax that shy but hopeful self out of the glass, I would rescue the lonely, yearning younger selves. (214)

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And second: The dissociation of a personality; a biographical study in abnormal psychology, by Morton Prince, 1905. (The Internet Archive has a nice clean scan of the 1908 second edition.)

All the personalities in this system start off using the same name, pseudonym’d here as Miss Beauchamp, so the doctor makes an effort to number them in the order that he meets them. B I and B IV are both sort-of-functional adults. The only one who picks a different name for herself is Sally (previously B III), an impish lovable-rascal 14-year-old.

If you want to read this whole book, heads-up that the doctor is pretty stuck on the idea that one personality is the “real” Miss Beauchamp, and it keeps disrupting his otherwise-pretty-helpful therapeutic efforts. (Dr. Prince is the same psychiatrist who treated the author of My Life As A Dissociated Personality, but that patient shared his goal of getting the members integrated. As of this posting, I’m about 2/3 of the way through reading the current book, and they’re vocally not into the idea.) 

This is what happened, substantially in B IV ‘s own words as I took them down :

B IV, in a depressed, despondent, rather angry frame of mind, was looking at herself in the mirror. She was combing her hair, and at the time thinking deeply over the interview she had just had with me in regard to her ultimatum to Sally. Suddenly she saw, notwithstanding the seriousness of her thoughts, a curious, laughing expression — a regular diabolical smile — come over her face. It was not her own expression, but one that she had never seen before. It seemed to her devilish, diabolical, and uncanny, entirely out of keeping with her thoughts. (This expression I recognized from the description to be the peculiar smile of Sally, which I had often seen upon the face of B I or B IV.) IV had a feeling of horror come over her at what she saw. She seemed to recognize it as the expression of the thing that possessed her. She saw herself as another person in the mirror and was frightened by the extraordinary character of the expression. (Here she broke off her story to ask if it was possible to see oneself as another person in this way.) It suddenly occurred to her to talk to this “thing,” to this “other person,” in the mirror; to put questions to “it.” So she began, but she got no answer. Then she realized that the method was absurd, and that it was impossible for her to speak and answer at the same time. Thereupon she suggested to the “thing” that it should write answers to her questions. Accordingly, placing some paper before her on the bureau and taking a pencil in her hand, she addressed herself to the face in the glass. Presently her hand began to write, answering the questions that were asked, while B IV, excited, curious, wild for information of the past, kept up a running fire of comment on the answers of Sally, for, of course, the “thing” was Sally. (360-361)

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The fact that the writing was spontaneous, like that which I had an opportunity to personally observe and which will be given in the next chapter, deserves to be emphasized, because this spontaneity removes it from the class of artifacts unwittingly manufactured by the observer. B IV, as she testifies, was not in an abstracted state while the writing was done, but was alert, conscious of her surroundings, excited and extremely curious to know what the hand was writing. It is to be regretted that she was not under observation at the time, — though this would have given rise to the suspicion that the doubling of consciousness was an artifact, — but I have seen the same feat performed under substantially similar conditions.

Under these conditions of alertness the content of the writing indicates that the authorship was that of some sort of a self which at the moment was co-conscious and possessed of wide memories and of a peculiar individuality. Beginning with the smile in the glass, followed by the desire to tease, the evidences of dislike, and the knowledge exhibited on the part of Sally, we find, running throughout the episode, evidences of a very different kind of mentation in the subconscious self from that peculiar to the primary consciousness. But besides this difference in quality, the wide extent of the field of the subconsciousness, as revealed by her replies, is worth noting. A study of Sally’s replies shows a knowledge of facts, which, from my personal familiarity with them, there is reason to believe were not known by IV. They belonged to Sally’s life or to that of B I. (364-365)

(Between these two excerpts, there’s a transcript of the actual conversation. I won’t copy the whole thing here — it’s full of references to people and events that were described earlier in the book, and won’t make sense out of context.)

Fun bonus note: Sally later explains that her experience of “existing as a separate self-aware personality” goes back to when they were physically a toddler — her first memories are of learning to walk, and of the fronting headmate stopping because she was bored/tired while Sally wanted to keep walking.

Dr. Prince spends a couple pages (394-396) examining this claim, because he believes it’s unrealistically young for such a “division of consciousness” to happen! (He doesn’t think she’s lying on purpose; rather, he offers the reader a couple different hypotheses for why Sally might think this is the case, even if you can’t accept that such an implausible, fanciful idea could actually be true.)