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knightly@pawb.social 2 months agoYeah!
The Royal “We”, aka the “Majestic Plural”, is the use of a plural pronoun to refer to a single person holding a high office.
For plural folks, using a plural pronoun to reference the multiple persons existing within a single body is also appropriate (though I don’t know if that usage has a fancy name yet~). And when referencing these persons individually, we just use their own pronouns the same as with non-plural folks. 🤓
otp@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The first paragraph sounds like the royal we, and the second paragraph sounds like dissociative personality disorder, lol
knightly@pawb.social 2 months ago
They’re calling that one “Dissociative Identity Disorder” these days, and it’s clinically distinct from plurality.
DID is usually a trauma response, one marked by memory gaps as the separate personalities are partitioned off from one another. One can’t switch identities consciously, but rather does so involuntarily as a stress response.
Plurality is usually benign and doesn’t involve notable memory gaps as the different alters can be co-conscious and are not strongly partitioned apart. Plural individuals can often switch which personality is “fronting” consciously. Rather than a disorder, it’s an uncommon form of neurodiversity.
otp@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Thank you for the correction, it was mostly my mind blending DID and the outdated MPD together.
I guess it is notable form a grammatical perspective, though I can’t say I’d personally put it at the same level as the gender-neutral/singular “they”.
I’d be interested if there’s some sort of biological basis for plurality (as there is with being transgendered, for instance). The wikipedia page describes it as an online subculture, mostly akin to roleplaying (from my impression), so it doesn’t feel like it should be in the same category, lol
knightly@pawb.social 2 months ago
I had a plural friend back before they started building communities for themselves online and the consistency of their identities over the years leads me to suspect that there is a biological basis, but the scientific research on the topic is still in its infancy.
That said, there is some adjacent research that seems to point in that direction. The Internal Family Systems Model is a perspective on psychotherapy that begins with the assumption that all individuals contain multitudes, and works to restore mental balance and harmony by identifying the disparate parts of one’s self and addressing the conflicts between them. There are multiple studies over the last three decades showing therapies based on that model to be effecatious for the treatment of depression and other psychological symptoms in some populations.