The gullibility of therapists studying multiples, particularly in the 1980s and 90s, cannot be overstated, and their reports of "knowledge the host could not possibly have" must be taken with several pounds of salt.
I think what was very often happening was that in systems with no communication, the others were learning things on their own time, and while the ostentible 'host' may have believed they could never have had an opportunity to learn it, they simply didn't have the memories of the others learning it. Arthur of the Billy Milligan system, for instance, could read and speak Arabic, but he was a scholarly sort of person who had put in his own effort to learn it-- he didn't pick it up by osmosis.
Many of the therapists were also probably working off the assumption that the person believed to be the host was in control of the body most or all of the time, and that only therapists could elicit a deliberate switch, whereas in reality, even in systems where a frontrunner really was kept deliberately ignorant, the others had been coming up front for years to do their own things.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2004-10-15 05:52 pm (UTC)I think what was very often happening was that in systems with no communication, the others were learning things on their own time, and while the ostentible 'host' may have believed they could never have had an opportunity to learn it, they simply didn't have the memories of the others learning it. Arthur of the Billy Milligan system, for instance, could read and speak Arabic, but he was a scholarly sort of person who had put in his own effort to learn it-- he didn't pick it up by osmosis.
Many of the therapists were also probably working off the assumption that the person believed to be the host was in control of the body most or all of the time, and that only therapists could elicit a deliberate switch, whereas in reality, even in systems where a frontrunner really was kept deliberately ignorant, the others had been coming up front for years to do their own things.