There's something that keeps coming to mind: in 1791, a physician named Eberhard Gmelin studied a case of "exchanged personality" and believed that multiplicity could tell us something about how personality is formed in the first place. William James said similar things, a hundred years later. A hundred years after *that,* when it had become a psychological fad, people talked about plurals not in terms of what having more than one self might have to say about "the personality" in general, but in terms of all these other things that it had nothing intrinsically to do with-- self-hypnosis, dissociation, the (supposed) amazing ability of the mind to do anything it thinks it can, supposed angelic inner-self-helpers who delivered spiritual messages, etc. (If you want to see some of the junk about what people actually thought we could do, see: anything by Ralph Allison, Infinite Boundary by D. Scott Rogo, and Revolution from Within by Gloria Steinem.) Apparently, we're supposed to hold the key to curing diseases with our minds, talking to God, and/or psychic powers. According to an article published in OMNI magazine in the early 90s, we don't just talk with God/s, but are actually messengers of the gods.
All of which are much more interesting and exotic than a boring humdrum mundane thing like finding out more about how what we refer to as personality is created. And exploitable. It always has to be about potential gain for other people, it seems. "If we could somehow discover how MPD patients accomplish their amazing blah blah etc etc..." Because it's always about the amazing things (whether or not they were exaggerated or even real), the things that, if tapped, will benefit other people and allow them to use our supposed amazing powers for good (not for awesome).
Some of Temple Grandin's elitist bullshit about autism comes to mind, also. "How fortunate it is that there are high functioning aspies like me who move civilization forward with our great genius, now let's see if we can find the gene for low-functioning autism and prevent That Kind of Person from being born." We were recently reading a book about language and realized that parts of our own language development and language recognition didn't match up with how the book described language acquisition in "all humans." We'd heard similar kinds of things from other people with various kinds of brains like ours, but again, such things are not as interesting as being a messenger of God, or having amazing savant powers that can be exploited by others.
The big thing both we and Astraea noticed when they worked at a bookstore that sold a lot of New Age-type things was that the New Age seemed to be all about "what you can get"-- it's pretty much the inverse of a lot of religious traditions which emphasize spiritual growth over material acquisition. It's all about wanting to have your cake and eat it too-- about supposedly being able to use spiritual things for material gains, and not just the typical things like "I want to attract good luck" that a lot of folk magic traditions emphasize. We can't really help but conclude that a similar kind of mentality is at work when people look at plurals, or autistics, or whatever, and see us only in terms of what they want us to be-- something they can benefit from.
