For both pro and anti endos, no DNI
I ended up dozing off in the pedicure chair, I'm so goddamn cute now, I've just seen all the bots, and we're going to be crushed by snow tomorrow
It's a damn good day, this January 24th, 2026
Let's speed run this, there's so many new people
Hi, I'm dude, I graduated in social services, did my hours to get licensed, went back to school for law. Now I do neither, but I love syscourse and maintain access to university libraries.
This gives me unique access to research and things like the cited, annotated DSM.
Let's start from the beginning and then get into the best of the best research. Every single linked post contains REAL research, real (mostly) peer reviewed articles, real sources to back up every single point, and archived websites exploring community history.
Here's a syscourse history/research primer
Late 1800s to early 1900s
Freud first used the term "endogenic" to refer to the fantasy theory of CDDs (jump to the second post). The idea that we're all faking it. This specific fact was immediately forgotten, and we can jump adjacently to Pierre Janet, the person who originally conceptualized the theory of structural dissociation. It's that old. The Haunted Self, a book discussing the history of the theory and proposed treatment for structural dissociation, often cited by anti psych people because one of the three authors is known to have abused his patient, is not the theory itself, nor are they the people who came up with the theory. This is so much more than just a theory, but we'll get to that in a bit.
In the early to mid 1900s, the Multiple Self Theory gained traction. Yes, this is also that old. This is where all the BEST research is. "Endogenic" appears to just be the newest term for a phenomenon that has been going on for centuries under various other names, and discussed in depth in journals outside of psychology-- philosophy, consciousness, Self, anthropology. Research into "endogenics" is in its infancy, with maybe 5 credible articles that have a very shaky basis (links further down). Research into MST is robust and far reaching. MST has described everything from switching to internal communication and exists outside of trauma theories.
And it's not just the MST. I don't particularly enjoy kinhost, but this is a great page covering other theories that were growing alongside all this, with real research article links.
Endogenic, in reference to the fantasy theory, continued to see usage but no one seems to care about that.
In the 1980s we saw the satanic panic, a very important milestone in CDD history, if not a disappointing one. The panic would continue until roughly 1994, though the False Memory Syndrome Foundation would run until 2019, and Grey Faction and the Satanic Temple continue their work to this very day.
In 1989, the very first MPD newsletter started. You can still read all of it here. It's actually really beautiful stuff. The community continued to grow into the 90s.
To summarize the second half of the above linked post, 1995 presents the VERY FIRST community mention of non disordered multiplicity (we're not going to talk about Ross' paper from the 80s in this post). Astraea's web would be the first website to discuss this topic. Go and search everything you can, use every search term you can think of, check every archive you can access. I assure you. It starts with astraea.
And astraea is a piece of crap. They would start the empowered multiple movement, a literal DID hate group that tried to boycott the diagnosis as a whole and fought to remove it from the DSM.
You know how these days there's an argument over whether endogenics should use "system"? This isn't our first rodeo. It was in the late 90s, during the fight over the word "multiple" (related to MPD, which was still in use) that "plurality" was coined as an anti psych alternative. "System" wouldn't come into use until much later, with plurals claiming it was dehumanizing, and created by doctors to control us. Then they forgot they said that and decided they wanted system.
Anyways, IMO, the multiple self community and plural community collided right at this point, with the multiple selves being the very first "endogenic" systems (a term that was still over a decade away from being "loving coined", despite all prior usage AGAINST CDD systems).
The 2000s saw an absolute surge in CDD research and support for the trauma theory. We can now see the TOSD on brain scans, among other incredible facts. We can almost diagnose CDDs with imagining. I have posted so much of this research. This isn't up for debate, so I'm not bothering with links for this portion. I don't even know what I'd link to make the point--
OMG, yes I do. Those citations are overkill, I love it.
And we're finally seeing official, real research into endogenics and plurals.
“Here’s Dissociative Identity Disorder, and we’re not that”: a constructivist grounded theory exploration of multiplicity experiences
The online community: DID and plurality
Varieties of tulpa experiences: The hypnotic nature of human sociality, personhood, and interphenomenality
Anomalous self and identity experiences.
Of all of it, my favorite is the Stanford tulpa studies. Essentially, a study of 5 different groups from the across the world, who utilize dissociation (or prayer) to experience a second consciousness. Including tulpas. Scans show two separate streams of activation, and that's really fucking cool.
I really like all of lurhmann's work.
This has already happened, we're here, we're just waiting on final papers, you can either catch up or look dumb, this is INCREDIBLE for several reasons, and is already proving helpful in terms of developing therapy techniques. I expect in the near future that we'll see direct comparisons between CDD systems and plurals, and I genuinely can't wait.
I expect that it'll be different. That CDDs will continue to be linked to neural biomarkers related to trauma, and that plurality will present in a hundred other ways. That we can finally put this argument to rest.
"Endogenic" would be "coined" in 2014. Previous usage of this term would never be discussed again, no matter how much I talk about it. Endogenic became synonymous with plural, and plural was already synonymous with empowered multiple rhetoric. The words changed but many of the ideas did not, leaving a very ingrained ableism to many pro endogenic arguments.
In 2017, the plural association was created and everything got worse for everyone every single year ever since.
If anyone would like any further information or a deep dive into anything in particular, please let me know.
I hope this is helpful to someone. Welcome to hell ❤️
