The humble mushroom picker Smut Clyde, as you may know, suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder. Sometimes he thinks he is a fictional Kiwi psychologist named Dr Bimler, sometimes he believes to be the legendary papermill investigator Hoya Camphorifolia on PubPeer (in reality a collective of senior professors, publishing executives and celebrity watchdogs). Thus, the hero of this article by Smut Clyde is the 74 year old psychiatrist named Colin A. Ross, who invented the Multiple Personality Disorder (and Satanic Ritual Abuse, and other things).

Ross is insane. But not in a funny way insane, the guy is actually dangerous. But in Texas, he is free to do whatever he feels like.

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The Stress of Her Regard

By Smut Clyde

Project SANGUINE was the plan to bury huge nuclear-attack-hardened cables in an underground circuit around Wisconsin and turn the state into a radio antenna for transmitting messages to submerged nuclear-deterrent submarines, in the ELF band – for Extremely-Low-Frequency waves penetrate deeper into the ocean than shorter wavelengths. It sounds like something that John Sladek might have imagined as a grotesque satire on military grandiosity, but I am not making it up.

One countering disadvantage of the ELF waveband is the very slow bitrate… any message would be limited to a brief ‘bell-ringer’ code, signalling the submariners to surface and receive detailed orders. The other disadvantage is that (as any fule kno) broadcasting any EM rays is always most efficient when you have a dipole of the same scale as the wavelength in question, and in the ELF band these waves are comparable in scale or larger than the Earth itself. Wisconsin is reportedly shorter than that so the SANGUINE transmitter would have wasted most of the energy pumped into it (to be provided by dedicated and equally bomb-hardened nuclear reactors). Consequently only a scaled-down version of SANGUINE was ever built. Unless that is just what they want us to think.

I hear you wonder, “What does this have to do with chess-boxing and eye-lasers and multiple personalities, Uncle Smut?” I’m glad you asked!

I wrote all that to explain that although the electrical rhythms of synchronised neural activity in your brain can be plotted as an EEG and classified as alpha- or β- or delta-waves, or even θ – not to forget the flat-line omega-wave – they are probably not accompanied by long-distance communication. Chiz chiz, say all of us who had hoped to upload our consciousness into the ionosphere by coupling our pineal-gland transmitters to the 5-Hz Schumann Resonance and its harmonics.

But try telling that to Colin A. Ross! For Ross is the real subject of this post (which I recycled from an earlier post elsewhere by using the lesser-known Schubert Resonance). He is also Data Point #4 in support of my theory that ‘Psychiatrists are consistently crazypants’. Cases #1 to #3 being Hans Eysenck, Peter Gøtzsche and Hannibal Lecter.

Hans Eysenck has been in the scientific press a lot recently (though posthumously), with psychology journals belatedly retracting some of his more damaging and fraud-based research (like his claim that lung cancer is not linked to smoking, but to a slight flaw in the personality). I first encountered him through Tom Sharpe’s second novel “Indecent Exposure“, in which Lieutenant Verkramp – who is unusually stupid and brutal even by the standards of the Afrikaaner police – seizes upon Eysenck’s ideas on using electric-shock aversion therapy to modify behaviour and sexual orientation.

Ross, in contrast, is still with us. He enjoys a following within new-age / conspiracist circles, on account of his opinionations on the prevalence of multiple personality disorder (MPD). As quondam President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, he is perhaps the greatest populariser of this problematic construct.

You can read elsewhere about the back-story of MPD, and how belief in MPDs crossed over from fringe flaky psychology into popular culture. The “childhood trauma = multiple personalities” narrative / etiology became a literary tradition: “Three Faces of Eve” begat “Sybil” begat “The Minds of Billy Mulligan” begat “When Rabbit Howls”. The line of descent is notable for the increasing number of Alters and the increasing severity of the triggering trauma, as conventions evolved and each author had to out-do previous imaginations. “Michelle Remembers” (1980; ably reviewed by El Coyote over at Hoaxtead) introduced its own twist of Satanic family ritual abuse as the rationale for the MP plot device. Competition is rife as to who has endured the worst traumas and wound up with the greatest number of personality splinters lining up for their turn to drive the body. There were documentaries.

This trope entered the conspirasphere when it merged with a second evolving literary tradition: one that began with Philip K. Dick (so I choose to believe), with his drugged-out paranoia plots, and his feelings of inauthentic selfhood. “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” does not count because reasons. Dick’s protagonists are always discovering that their memories are as spurious as their personalities… all implanted as a mask for a real identity that for some reason wanted to remain in concealment.

The outcome of this crossing of the streams was the exciting notion that our alternative personalities include hidden assassin personae, lying concealed within our psyches, waiting their cues to emerge and fulfil the CIA’s agenda. Just saying, judges are unreceptive to that particular not-guilty plea, or so I hear from a friend.

A significant landmark along the development of the genre was “The Control of Candy Jones“, in 1976. Candy Jones’ age-regressed memory-crafting was directed under hypnosis by her husband, who would have been aware of Dick’s oeuvre through his day job as conspiracy-monger, as a pre-Alex Jones radio host. The conventions of the genre were still crystallising at the time, so Candy was only able to remember her alternative CIA-constructed personality to be an interrogation-proof spy courier, rather than an elite assassin or soldier. Also her narrative missed out the existence and details of MK-ULTRA / MONARCH (later retconned into the genre) because the program had not been publicised by 1976. It is possible that I am digressing.

So Ross knows all this stuff. And before you know it, he is writing about Project BLUEBIRD and “CIA doctors” and Manchurian Candidates. And “Military Mind Control” (“Terese, a woman treated in Dr. Ross’ private practice, is a survivor of childhood trauma that included paternal incest, ritual abuse and military mind control”).

Certainly there is a case to be made that an adept in the dark psychiatric arts, with a large enough stash of interesting drugs, could train a patient into alternative patterns of behaviour – i.e. MPD as an iatrogenic disorder. Not to be confused with artificially-induced jealousy, which is an Iagogenic disorder.

Ross is also known for writing A LOT about “the great psychiatry scam“. This is where psychiatrists pretend to treat their patients by handing out pills like Candyman without knowing or caring whether the meds work, when they should instead be relying on equally unscientific therapy-shaped conversation.

It is common for psychiatric whistle-blowers, who denounce their profession’s bias towards medicalisation and over-medication, to know whereof they speak. Ross is no exception, with a phase in his career when he was an enthusiastic prescriber of heroic doses of the major neuroleptic drugs – all in the cause of dismantling his clients’ dysfunctional personalities and reassembling the components in more aesthetically-pleasing ways. Not all the patients survived the process, or so it was alleged in lawsuits, which is how Ross lost his license to practice in Nebraska… and indeed in the rest of the civilised world. He was forced to shift to Texas instead, a region notoriously welcoming to medical murderers. He provides psychiatric services in Dallas, runs a trauma program in Michigan, lectures other psychiatrists about what they’re doing wrong, and provides the ‘Hannibal’ scriptwriters with inspiration.

Ross since distinguished himself with his on-going promotion of the long-abandoned ‘trophoblast theory of cancer‘, and his defence of cancer-scammer Nicholas Gonzalez (in the form of papers extruded for journal-shaped dumpsters). As one expects from a Science Maverick and career contrarian.

In his writings on Satanic Ritual Abuse Ross remains scrupulously agnostic, explaining that it is his job to heal his patients’ psyches, not to question their anamnesis (and if police use the memories elicited from his patients to imprison their parents for life, that is not his business). Also, to take a position on the actual existence of satanic-ritualistic child-abusing traditions would require multiple PhDs in history – more learning than he (or anyone else) could possibly acquire. If only he applied the same modest acceptance of limitations more widely, perhaps he would have asked a physicist about the workings of ELF.

There is a solid history here of Contrarian Thinking, but what raises Ross above his rivals in maverick-rage and commends him to our attention is his belief in eye-lasers. Another SF trope of long standing. If I recall correctly, eye-lasers first featured in Charles Harness’ masterpiece of ‘wide-screen baroque’, ‘The Paradox Men’ (Superman’s X-ray vision does not count because reasons). The idea is that the retina and the optics are capable of transmitting energy as well as receiving it.

So here is Alcide Nikopol casting his eye-beams upon an unfortunate ice-hockey player whose identity he intends to usurp. I must explain that in this first book of the ‘Nikopol Trilogy’, the character is possessed by an alternative personality in the form of the renegade god Osiris Horus, after the Egyptian pantheon stranded their pyramidal starship over Paris… Horus went renegade because he disagreed with the pantheon’s policy of negotiating with the French theofascist regime about refuelling rather than just taking it by force.

Later in the trilogy, Nikolai and Horus use the eye-beam trick to defeat the ruling world champion of Chess-boxing. Some would call this cheating. Opinions are divided as to who invented chess-boxing, but on the present evidence it was graphic artist Enki Bilal (not to be confused with Muhammad Bilal of PubPeer fame, who is also a graphic artist in his own way).

To be scrupulously fair, Ross is not an advocate of reverse-driven retinal emanations. When he proposes that the ‘Evil Eye’ is a real phenomenon, and that individuals with malign intentions can influence events and the health of others at a distance by the power of their gaze alone, neither lasers nor visible light are involved. His eye-beams are the low-frequency gestalts of collective neuronal activity, operating in broadcast mode and channelled to shine out forward by the anatomy of the eye-sockets.

“For instance, it is possible that a medicine man may emit a focused electromagnetic signal during a fertility ritual that actually increases the germination rate of seeds in a field.”

Ross, Anthropology of Consciousness (2010)

Vide the Whackyweedia:

“In 2008, Ross applied for the James Randi Educational Foundation’s One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge with the claim that energy from his eyes could cause a speaker, receiving no other input, to sound a tone.[5] …
However, he claimed that he could still send energy beams out of his eyes, and was working on modifying the software to ignore an eye blink.^[7] His claim has not currently been tested by the JREF. In 2008, he was granted the tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award.^[1]“

Ross is evidently under the impression that the skull is a barrier to ELF transmissions so our brain activity is bottled up inside (recall that ELF waves pay little attention to anything smaller than planetary size) and only escapes where it can. Also that the beams are collimated and focused as they pass out through the optic-nerve foramens so that they are immune to the inverse-square law of distance… that is not how diffraction works.

Logic compels me to the conclusion that other directed-energy beams shine downwards from the nose where the ethmoid bone is porous, and outwards from the ears, but there is a dearth of folk traditions about individuals who can cast the Evil Ear or the Evil Nose, which reduces the urge to speculate about the scientific mechanism.

Dr Colin Ross also presents his unique and challenging scholium of thought through case studies, short stories, poetry, “a 1000-line poem written in iambic pentameter couplets“, plays, essays on the Spirit World, travelogues, and satire about the liberal over-reaction to Donald Trump.

CODA

Readers who crave more of this stuff might enjoy “Multiplicity: An Explorative Interview Study on Personal Experiences of People with Multiple Selves” (Ribáry, Lajtai, Demetrovics & Maraz, 2017), a summary of the four authors’ visits to MP forums and support groups. I have not checked whether they have separate entries at the Department of Clinical Psychology & Addiction at Eötvös Loránd University, preferring to believe that they are alters within a single headspace.

Full marks to anyone who guessed that the paper was published by Frontiers.

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