Book Review: For the Many

Title: For the Many

Author: "Not Applicable"

Date: 2025

Quote: "Living as plural is often a paradox. You are never alone, yet the experience can be profoundly isolating...Take what works. Leave the rest." 

I think this is the most unusual book I've read this year. My generation learned about what's now called dissociative identity disorder, because after all "multiple personalities" could just mean the way other people see us when we're bored or interested or informed or uninformed or whatever, from sensationalized stories like Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve. Most people never know anyone who actually experiences "life as plural," who not only dramatizes emotional conflicts as "part of me wants to do this, and part wants to do that" but really does both "this" and "that" while experiencing perself as two different people, using different parts of the brain, one personality not remembering what the other one did or wanted or why. The assumption was that, in order for the brain to organize itself in this way, someone who started out with one consistent "normal" personality and brain like everyone else must have been horribly traumatized in some way, the person's story would have to be a melodrama, at least one aspect of the person would have to be "tortured," and the person would be "healed" and terribly grateful if those personalities could meld back together into something "normal." This turned out not necessarily to be true. Brains, we learned around the turn of the century, react to physical conditions as well as to the emotions of love and fear. What we now know about DID is that we don't know and never did know much.

Here, however, is the first guidebook for fellow "systems" written by a person who feels capable of accepting perself as "a system" in which three "persons," Ann, Wheel, and Echo, occupy the same body. The three coexist like roommates. They have had the experience of fusing together and dissociating again. Fusing the "alters" together is not a solution to every difficulty, they warn. Nor is it harmful to any of the personalities. The compartmentalized brain works in its own way. If one aspect of the person dumps out food that another aspect wanted to eat, now and then, the whole system seems to have learned to cope with that. Probably Ann, Wheel, and Echo are all perceived as unusual by the other people they know, but they cope. Therapists and therapy techniques have helped them maintain calm, patient acceptance of one another. They warn readers, though, that it may be best not to disclose to people who have some kind of authority over you if you experience yourself as a "system." "System" people may be able to function on their own in society more effectively when others may suspect, but don't know, how far from typical their consciousness really is.

How many readers will ever find a use for this book in real life? Who knows? It's free for the downloading from https://beingmany.net. It's an interesting, strange read. Anyone might meet a person with DID some day so who knows when, or to whom, or how much, this book may be useful.