Dividing To Conquer

Dividing to Conquer?
Women, Men, and the Making of Multiple Personality Disorder

Author(s): Debbie Nathan
Source: Social Text, No. 40 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 77-114
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/466797
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Dividing to Conquer?
WOMEN, MEN, AND THE MAKING OF
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER
Yes, in a way being MPD made me feel special and creative. The bottom line Debbie Nathan
is, I do have a lot of talents in me that I probably wouldn't have known about,
but they're my talents, not my alters. I'm creative, but it doesn't mean I'm
MPD. When you have three children, you don't usually sit down and draw,
but I've found I'm pretty good at it.
-Former multiple personality disorder patient who now believes the condi-
tion was created by her therapist (Pendergrast 1995)
In 1990, twenty-nine-year-old Mark Peterson of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was

brought to trial for sexually assaulting a twenty-seven-year-old waitress
whom the media referred to as "S." The charges stemmed from an inci-
dent in which Peterson and S. had sex after he took her out for coffee and
then asked her to "love" him. S. complied, and while having sex, she
embraced Peterson and said, "That feels nice."
Although Peterson believed the encounter was consensual, S. later
brought rape charges against him. The statute used to prosecute him
makes it a crime to have sex with a person one knows to be mentally
unable to consent. According to the prosecutor, S. fit this definition
because she suffers from multiple personality disorder (MPD), and Peter-
son knew about her condition. Thus, he must have been aware that the
personality who agreed to have sex with him was not S. but one of her
forty-six alter selves.
During the trial, S. testified about her illness. Though she has heard
voices in her head since childhood, it was only recently, during a course of
psychotherapy, that she discovered her multiple personalities. Because
she has MPD, she believes she was abused as a child, starting in infancy-
even though she has no memory of this. At the trial she said she had
amnesia for the sexual incident with Peterson, but some of her personali-
ties remembered it. So the judge swore in six of them, including Franny, a
motherly woman who originally reported the rape to friends. When
Franny "came out" in the courtroom, S.'s words suddenly took on a new
lilt, and her eyebrows and face worked more vigorously. Franny was fol-
lowed by Jennifer, a lively twenty-year-old who said she didn't know what
sex was. It was Jennifer, not S., whom Peterson asked to love him, and it
was Jennifer who said it felt nice. But she only did this, she said, because
"I seen it on TV. People wiggling like that. And when a person says it feels
good, the other person is supposed to say it feels good." Peterson was
convicted (Imrie 1990; Gorney 1990; Merskey 1992).
Months later, in Orange County, California, Bonnie, a forty-eight-
year-old college instructor, and her thirty-five-year-old businesswoman
sister Patti sued their wealthy septuagenarian widowed mother, claiming
that she and their now-deceased father had abused them in a satanic cult
when Bonnie and Patti were children. During the trial, Bonnie wailed as
she described being sexually tortured and raped by her father and
strangers, impregnated twice, prodded with electric shocks, forced to
fatally stab a transient kidnapped from Los Angeles' skid row, and made
to kill and cannibalize animals and infants. Patti said she was prostituted at
age nine, used in pornographic films, and taken to a library once where
she was forced to eat human pus and scabs. Bonnie's eleven-year-old
daughter testified that she, too, was abused by her grandmother during
bloody rituals in a cave.
The plaintiffs said they developed MPD to protect themselves from
all this, and that is why they didn't recall what had happened until they
began therapy (Bonnie's daughter did not remember anything, either,
until recently). Their therapist, a former Lutheran minister, also took the
stand and discussed his belief that satanic ritual child abuse had been
occurring for centuries. His view was echoed by Dr. Bennett Braun, an
internationally acclaimed MPD researcher and therapist. The jury lis-
tened to this testimony for several days. In the end, they did not award
monetary damages, but they did find Bonnie and Patti's mother guilty of
negligent child rearing. After all, a woman juror explained to the media,
the plaintiffs suffered from MPD, and none of the experts-not even
those called by the defense-"disputed the fact that 25 to 97 percent of all
people who have MPD were severely child abused" (Adams 1991b; see
also Adams 1991a; Campbell 1991; Chu 1991; Efron 1991; Grimaldi
1991).
The California satanism trial ended in the spring of 1991. By fall,
television star Roseanne Barr Arnold was publicly accusing her parents of
having sexually molested her from the time she was an infant, something
she said she forgot until she entered therapy in her late thirties (People
1991). Arnold's parents and sisters angrily denied the charges, but Arnold
insisted they were true. In her second autobiography, My Lives (Arnold
1994), she describes developing twenty alter personalities as a result of the
abuse.
Arnold's revelations and accusations, as well as S.'s, Bonnie's, and
Patti's, are the forensic tips of an iceberg of less trumpeted cases of MPD
that have never made it into court. Since the early 1980s a geometrically
increasing number of people have come to see their problems-every-
thing from overeating to involvement in sexual and criminal activity-as
78 Debbie Nathan
caused by alien selves residing in them without their knowledge. That
perception is officially codified in recent editions of the American Psychi-
atric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, popularly known as
the DSM. For the past seven years, mental health workers throughout the
United States have used the third revised edition of the manual, which
defines MPD as
A. The existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities

or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of per-
ceiving, relating to and thinking about the environment and self).
B. At least two of these personalities or personality states recurrently take full

control of the individual's behavior. (American Psychiatric Association
1987)
From 1646 to 1970, fewer than two hundred people worldwide were
assigned medical labels reminiscent of today's description of MPD. Of
those, a mere handful came from the United States. But since 1970, the
number of cases of multiple personality in North America has skyrocketed
to more than thirty thousand. The vast majority have been diagnosed
since 1980, when MPD first gained official recognition as a psychiatric
disorder in the DSM. Proponents of the validity of MPD believe that,
despite the remarkable increase in reported cases, it is still vastly under-
diagnosed, and that at least 1 percent of the North American population
suffers from it (Mesic 1992).
Individuals with MPD have much in common. Most striking is gen-
der: as many as nine out of ten are female. Typically they are women in
their early thirties who work in service occupations such as nursing and
teaching; they also tend to be relatively well educated and are considered
by their therapists to be remarkably intelligent. By the time they receive
the MPD label, such women have generally spent several years shuttling
through the mental health system with diagnoses such as schizophrenia
and, much more commonly, depression. Their MPD symptoms and
behavior then begin manifesting in stereotypical ways. For instance, many
report feeling that time has passed without their being aware of it. Fre-
quently they complain that some of the clothing in their closets is not
their style, and they have no idea where it came from until they receive
credit card bills or canceled checks indicating they bought it. When first
diagnosed, MPD patients tend to deny they have the illness. Once they
accept it, they frequently become suicidal and attempt to mutilate them-
selves (Putnam et al. 1986).
All this is said to represent an extreme form of dissociation-a psy-
chological condition in which "the subject maintains for a considerable
length of time some line or course of action in which he appears not to
Dividing to Conquer? 79
be actuated by his usual self-or, alternatively, his usual self seems not to
have access to the recent memories that one would normally expect him
to have" (Gregory 1987:97). Other examples of dissociation are sleep-
walking, trance states, fugues, and psychogenic amnesia, which is a
memory gap for a recent, finite length of time. The main cause of disso-
ciation is considered to be psychic trauma, and with MPD in particular
the culprit is typically described as childhood sexual abuse (Putnam
1989). MPD is supposed to follow such events because some children
have a better-than-average potential to dissociate, and ego defense mech-
anisms that normally prevent this behavior may be damaged when
exposed to trauma. If this happens, a dissociated "alter" personality or a
personality fragment emerges to encapsulate trauma memory that the
ego cannot deal with. With continuous abuse, each new incident evokes a
new alter or fragment who acts to segregate yet another terrible memory
from consciousness.
Therapy for MPD consists of recovering the memories via abreaction,

a dramatic process in which the patient enters a hypnotic trance and
accesses alters who flail wildly, shake, wail, and weep as they narrate
accounts of childhood trauma. The therapist then allies with these alters
and urges them to communicate with the patient's main ("host") person-
ality. Once memories are made conscious, the alters' function is obsolete,
and they presumably are free to reintegrate with the host.
Typically, there are many alters and fragments to work with: twenty-
five is quite common these days, and some people have hundreds. Each
personality has its own character: there are child alters who are younger
than the host; teenagers and adults; opposite-sex alters; alters of other eth-
nic or racial background than the host; depressed alters; a vicious, cruel
persecutors, who may be suicidal; and wise, kind "inner self helpers,"
who know about the others and try to help them (Hacking 1992). During
the past few years, alters have also increasingly assumed the form of
demons, angels, sages, lobsters, gorillas, unicorns, God, and objects such
as trees. They may inhabit elaborate inscapes-everything from castles in
enchanted forests with tunnels and mazes to high-rise office buildings,
and even separate galaxies (Ganaway 1989).
Though they occupy one body, alters are sometimes said to differ
physiologically from each other in ways that confound simple psychoso-
matic explanations (Mesic 1992). One prominent MPD therapist notes
that some of his patients have allergies, asthma, diabetes, and particular
eyeglass prescriptions when they are certain personalities but not when
they are others. Too, when some alters are dominant, the patient's skin will
show signs of past abuse, such as cigarette burns or weals from whips. But
when other personalities predominate, the skin is unmarked.
These bodily changes mean little to psychiatrists and social scientists
who question the validity of MPD. They point out that many of the phys-
80 Debbie Nathan
iological transformations that multiples undergo have been reported in
non-MPD subjects under hypnosis, and they add that studies consistently
show multiples to be highly hypnotizable, with many moving in and out of
The disorder,
trance states spontaneously. This fact is said to explain why they are so
prone to developing MPD. The disorder, skeptics say, is iatrogenic and
skeptics say,
socially constructed-induced by therapists into the psyches of hypnotiz-
able, suggestible patients, or via less direct means, such as modeling by the
is iatrogenic
mass media.
Evidence for this argument is compelling. Consider, for example, that and socially
in England and Europe, where the validity of the diagnosis is strongly dis-
puted, there are very few cases. North America, on the other hand, is the
constructed-
locus of a coterie of therapists and researchers who staunchly accept and
promote MPD and who think the reason it scarcely exists across the induced by
Atlantic is that few clinicians there bother to look for it. You cannot detect
MPD, proponents claim, unless you try. therapists into

Often you must try hard, since according to MPD promoters, many
the psyches of
patients with the illness experience long periods when their alters stay
hidden; and they may even deny having them (Kluft 1987; Putnam 1989).
hypnotizable,
Of course, the question then becomes, if someone says she doesn't have
MPD, how do we know she does? To elicit symptoms, pioneer MPD ther-
suggestible
apist and researcher Dr. Richard Kluft recommends subjecting the patient
to marathon sessions that demand her total attention and that even phys- patients, or
ically confine her. "My experience is that unforced dissociation often
occurs sometime between two and a half and four hours of continuous via less direct
interviewing," Kluft writes. "Interviewees must be prevented from taking
means, such as
breaks to regain composure, averting their faces to avoid self-revelation,
etc. In one recent case of singular difficulty, the first sign of dissociation
was noted in the sixth hour, and a definitive spontaneous switchingmodeling
of per- by the
sonalities occurred in the eighth hour" (Kluft 1987:115).
mass media.
Once the patient dissociates, the diagnostician then suggests that she
has more than one personality. One clinician recommends that therapists
begin by indirect questioning such as, "Have you ever felt like another part
of you does things that you can't control?" If she gives positive or ambiguous
responses ask for specific examples. You are trying to develop a picture of
what the alter personality is like .... At this point you may ask the host per-
sonality, "Does this set of feelings have a name?" . . . "Can I talk to the part
of you that is taking those long drives in the country?" (Cited in McHugh
1993:5)
Recently, several women formerly diagnosed with MPD have sued

their therapists and complained publicly that they developed the illness
because of therapist suggestion (Whitley 1991, 1992; Goldstein and
Farmer 1993; Gross 1994; Pendergrast 1995). As one woman has
described it:
My doctor told me that any little voice I heard, for instance, if I were driving
and I thought, "Oh Elizabeth, you have to turn here," or if I were behaving
like a child when playing with my children, these were all cases of different
alters coming out. (Sileo 1993:22)
Another aspect of MPD that raises skeptics' eyebrows is the fact that
its manifestations are historically and culturally specific. One study that
traced cases over the past two centuries found that while self-mutilation
and prior history of childhood trauma are common MPD behaviors
today, they were quite rare in early presentations (Sileo 1993). It is also
noteworthy that earlier multiples had only two or at most three personal-
ities, and changing from one to the other took several minutes or hours.
Contemporary patients, on the other hand, typically possess mind-bog-
gling plethoras of alters, and they make the transition from one to another
almost instantaneously (Putnam et al. 1986).
Researchers also note that whenever a therapist publicly announces a
new symptom, reports of it immediately multiply. From this they conclude
that prevailing expectations and beliefs about MPD shape the way the dis-
order is manifested (Sileo 1993). The media's contribution to this shaping
is illustrated by what happened after The Three Faces of Eve was published
in 1957. Before then, popular narratives about multiples were virtually
nonexistent, as were actual cases. But immediately after publication of
the story of the pseudonymed Eve, who was said to have three personali-
ties, her therapists (who authored the book) were overwhelmed by people
diagnosing themselves as multiples. Of the thousands of individuals Eve's
psychiatrists referred for assessment, they felt that only one was truly suf-
fering from MPD (Thigpen and Cleckley 1984). For the others, the idea
of being multiple was clearly compelling-a fact that was echoed in the
appearance, by the late 1970s, of several more mass-market books
describing what it was like to have the illness. In the next ten years, an
even bigger rash of literature hit the shelves.1 Television followed. Don-
ahue was the first to feature MPD as a topic, and by the early 1990s,
Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, and Larry King
were also regularly showcasing multiples, who regaled American TV audi-
ences by switching, at emcee command, to alters with dramatically differ-
ent postures, voices, and vocabularies.
Such images have become so commonplace that it now appears easy
for psychologically "normal" people to imitate behaviors diagnostic of
MPD. This is shown in experiments by sociologist Nicholas Spanos and
colleagues (1985), who found that with very little prompting, college stu-
dents could be induced to describe "other selves" inside them that were
identical to MPD patients' characterizations of their alters. That the dis-
order is at least to some extent learned is also suggested by Canadian
82 Debbie Nathan
psychiatrist Harold Merskey (1992), who reviewed several well-known
cases, including those of Eve and Sybil, the pseudonymous woman whose
story about her struggle with MPD became a best-seller and then a movie
in the 1970s. Merskey was unable to locate any case where a patient's
alters developed without being shaped or primed by external factors such
as therapists or the media. For example, Sybil's psychiatrist, Cornelia
Wilbur, first diagnosed Sybil as schizophrenic. Only later did Wilbur
encourage Sybil to produce multiple personalities, apparently as part of a
marketing strategy for the book (Sileo 1993; Taylor 1994).
Even the purported link between severe child abuse and MPD is
questionable, particularly as a blanket generalization. The assertion that
maltreatment causes many personalities goes back to Sybil's claims that
her schizophrenic mother shoved objects such as knives and buttonhooks
up her daughter's vagina, forced cold-water enemas up her rectum, and
engaged in lesbian orgies with neighborhood girls in Sybil's presence
(Schreiber 1973). For years these accounts have been accepted as true.
But recently, Dr. Herbert Speigel, another psychiatrist who treated Sybil,
stated publicly that Sybil's reports of sexual abuse were uncorroborated
and that he does not believe them (Wilbur died in 1992, before Speigel
went public with this refutation) (Taylor 1994). This is not to say that
other patients' abuse stories are false. But for the aggregate MPD popu-
lation, it is impossible to determine whether abuse causes the illness, since
almost all large studies of the linkage have relied heavily on patients'
accounts, without significant attempts to verify their stories (Frankel
1993).
The abuse-MPD connection is also qualified by the fact that since the
early 1980s, more and more patients have been claiming they were raised
in satanic cults and horribly abused during rituals performed by devil-
worshiping adults-in consort with members of the Ku Klux Klan, the
CIA, and the FBI. By the end of the decade, this conspiracy theory was so
popular that some of MPD's leading North American theoreticians were
reporting that 25 percent or more of their patients had been tortured in
cults while they were children (Mesic 1992).
Patients with such memories typically report that their group's rituals
include extremely violent, sadistic behavior such as murdering children,
and that girls are impregnated at an early age, then forcibly aborted and
made to slaughter and cannibalize their newborns. Patients also say their
groups have large memberships, are generations old, and are linked to
other chapters nationally and internationally. They further claim that the
cults practice technologically sophisticated mind control (using electric
shock and "virtual reality" devices, for example) to ensure that members
remain loyal or to guarantee that if they escape, they will either return or
commit suicide. Patients and many of their therapists assert that part of
this brainwashing, or "programming," involves deliberately dissociating
the cult child into multiple personalities so that if she ever leaves, she will
be amnesiac for the abuse (Rose 1993; Smith 1993).
But extensive investigation over the past decade by law enforcement
has failed to turn up any evidence to support these claims. That many
MPD patients' narratives therefore seem confabulated raises serious ques-
tions about the validity of the child abuse memories of MPD sufferers in
general. This in turn challenges the very definition of the disorder, since
its sine qua non is said to be childhood trauma.
Amid heated debate about the validity and politics of abuse claims,
scientific research has emerged suggesting that many adults do either per-
manently or intermittently fail to recall sexual abuse incidents that they
suffered as children (Briere and Conte 1993; Herman and Schatzow
1987; Loftus et al. in press; Williams 1993). One interpretation of this
finding is that it supports the arguments of therapists, theoreticians, and
popular writers who believe that childhood sexual abuse commonly or
even typically causes total repression or dissociation of memories, with
accompanying symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and eating disor-
ders. Social worker E. Sue Blume (1991), for example, writes in her pop-
ular self-help book for incest victims that half of adults who were sexually
abused as children do not remember that the abuse happened. John Brad-
shaw (1992:143) recently stated in the women's magazine Lear's that
"about 60 percent of all incest victims don't remember the sexual abuse
for many years." Coupled with the inarguably high rates of sexual abuse
unearthed among women during the past two decades (Russell 1986), the
"repression-dissociation" theory of sexual abuse suggests that emotionally
troubled people who lack such memories may need to recover them in
therapy or self-help groups. This prescription has been followed by many
women who subsequently have been diagnosed as suffering from MPD.
On the other hand, the question asked by an increasing number of
cognitive psychology researchers is, does trauma really cause total repres-
sion or dissociation of memories? Or is amnesia for sexual abuse simply
an example of how people normally forget all kinds of things, whether or
not they are traumatic? Studies have shown that adults remember virtually
nothing about any events that occurred before they were twelve months
old. For incidents that happened before three years of age they recall very
little. And for anything before eight-which is well past the time MPD is
supposed to set in-recall is extremely spotty and variable (Usher and
Neisser 1993). Further, research suggests that the traumatic nature of an
event is not directly connected to either forgetting or remembering it.
Studies done on people who have been hospitalized or involved in auto-
mobile accidents, for instance, have found that within months, many do
not recall the experience. On the other hand, two studies have examined
84 Debbie Nathan
children who underwent the voiding cystourethrogram (VCUG), a painful
and embarrassing medical test that involves exposing the genitals and
traumatizing the urethra in ways that presumably feel something like sex-
ual abuse. These studies found that even after several weeks, children
tended to remember the test quite well. Further, the more times they
underwent the procedure, the better was their recall (Goodman in press;
Merritt et al. in press).
Amid these studies showing that recollections of trauma are neither
particularly ephemeral nor especially long lasting, other research suggests
that the memories of both children and adults can be significantly altered
and even created from scratch-complete with appropriate affect (Ceci
1993; Loftus and Coan in press). With this in mind, it is significant to
note that social psychologists have demonstrated that MPD patients'
accounts of satanic ritual abuse are constructed in much the same way as
the memories of people who say they have experienced past lives and
UFO abductions (Spanos et al. 1993; 1994).
It thus seems probable that MPD sufferers' "memories" of satanic
molestation are not real. And if at least some of these patients' less bizarre
abuse narratives are also false-if the current etiological characterization
of MPD is arguable, in other words-then what is it about having multiple
personalities that is true? Why do women have inside them child alters,
animals, and cross-gendered selves, and what are such beings trying to say
about the feminine minds they inhabit? Why are there now magazines,
gallery exhibits, and concerts devoted to the literary, artistic, and musical
productions of women multiples? Why are psychiatrists who were instru-
mental in defining and popularizing MPD during the past decade now
worried that many women actively seek the diagnosis and rage when they
do not receive it (Braun 1993)?2 Why does Gloria Steinem call MPD a
gift, extol its sufferers as "accidental prophets," and muse enviously about
what it would be like to have three menstrual periods per month (Steinem
1992:316-19)? What do the diabolic memories imply? What do the abuse
narratives mean? And why is all of this predicated on the idea of child-
hood sexual victimization?
In short, why is this most radical expression of dissociation theory so

compelling for women? Questions of empirical validity aside, to what
extent is MPD-and dissociation in general-an expression of gender
conflict and politics? As such, how does it serve women, and how does it
misserve us?
Though I cannot answer these questions, I want to at least pose them

by asking the reader to bracket the usual way MPD is discussed: Was a
crime committed or not? Did Mark Peterson date-rape S., or did she con-
sent? Were Bonnie's mother and father satanists or weren't they? Are
Roseanne's parents felonious deviants, or is she merely a publicity hound?
In what follows, I want to put these legalisms aside and engage with
broader issues by exploring how women from earlier historical periods
have embodied the concept of the divided self. I also suggest how their
multiplicity was defined, shaped, and often directly evoked by male pro-
fessionals, who used these women for their needs at the same time the
women used the men and the disorder for theirs. My aim here is to con-
tribute to a discussion of both the promises and the problems inherent in
a feminine psychology expressed via narratives of victimization-particu-
larly sexual victimization.
Any attempt to understand MPD must first detour through anthropology,

because although multiplicity is not a cross-cultural given, what is com-
mon to many societies is the feeling among some of its members that
they are being meddled with by outside forces. This is so, anthropologist
Michael Kenny (1981:354) believes, because "the mode of apprehension
which we call the ego must often deal with manifest contradiction and
paradox." The tension that such conflict engenders is mediated in various
ways, depending on the specific culture the individual belongs to. Spirit
possession, for instance, is institutionalized in many societies and often is
confined to women. These distaff arrangements, according to the anthro-
pologist I. M. Lewis (1989: 30-31), are "thinly disguised protest move-
ments directed against the dominant sex. . . in cultures where women lack
more obvious and direct means for forwarding their aims."
In the Sudan, for instance, anthropologist Janice Boddy (1989) has
investigated Arab women in one village and found that, at some point in
their lives, a large percentage of them are likely to be diagnosed as suffer-
ing from possession by spirits known as zar. The circumstances leading to
a diagnosis of zar possession involve rather stereotypical problems, such
as marital difficulties and inability to bear children. A woman comes to
suspect she is tormented by spirits if she suffers from persistent headache,
nausea, anorexia, lassitude, apathy, depression, insomnia, anxiety, vague
aches and pains, or fertility problems. Treatment for these troubling
symptoms involves contacting the zar and convincing it to reveal itself and
its desires.
Closer to home, several subcultures in the United States include pos-

session states as a normative condition. In some charismatic Christian
groups, devotees value the experience of being possessed by the Holy

Spirit. Among Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Haitian immigrants who prac-
tice Santeria and Voudun, gods regularly "mount" mortals and speak
through them. When possessed by these spirits, people act in stereotypical
ways that depend on whatever theories their culture has developed to both
explain and evoke them. A Pentecostal in a church in Houston or Spanish
86 Debbie Nathan
Harlem speaks in tongues because tongues are a God-given gift delineated MPD gives us the
in the New Testament. In the same cities, a woman santera speaks in the
low voice of Chango, the male god of iron, who inhabits the pantheon of opportunity to
her religion as outlined by its priests. Such practices and practitioners
observe a kind of
embody theories-theories not merely of the sacred but of how people are
enjoined to behave as they interact with it.
illness, a kind of
Theories always affect how reality is perceived, and when theory
interacts with its object, it has, as Kenny (1981:339) puts it, "truly cre- behaviour, a kind
ative and, at the same time, mystifying potential." As an example, he cites
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, where intellectuals' elaborate of treatment, a
demonologies were confirmed by the confessions of people they accused
of being demon-possessed. And though the inquisitors typically used tor- kind of doctor,
ture to extract confirmations, most people who confessed to being witches
seemed truly to believe they were possessed. and a kind of
It is the same with MPD. Like possession states, the disorder is

shaped by theory-not just psychological theory expounded by mental person in the
health professionals, but also by religious theory, political theory, and
whatever other relevant ideas encompass those who become its reported
making. And
victims. Because these theories constitute a cultural way of mediating when we remind
individual distress, the symptoms MPD patients suffer do not feel feigned.
On the contrary, they are absolutely real. To the extent that the uncon- ourselves that this
scious is a cultural rather than a psychological fact, multiples are not
malingerers. person generally
To look at them sympathetically we must thus bracket empirical ques-
tions about diagnostic validity and historical memory. Only then do we get is a woman,
the chance to follow the construction, via both its theories and its theory-
makers, of a disorder and of the individuals who come to embody it. As it becomes
Hacking (1992:3) puts it, MPD gives us the opportunity to observe "a
kind of illness, a kind of behaviour, a kind of treatment, a kind of doctor, possible to
and a kind of person in the making." And when we remind ourselves that
glimpse the
this person generally is a woman, it becomes possible to glimpse the gen-
dered truth of her multiplicity.
gendered truth
3
of her multiplicity.
Hacking outlines four epochs during the past two centuries when the
divided self has been medicalized in Western culture. During the first
period, which began in the early 1800s, the phenomenon was called "dou-
ble consciousness." It was exceedingly rare, but the prototypical case was
that of Mary Reynolds, whose history Kenny (1986) summarizes. Mary
was a taciturn, melancholy young woman who migrated at the age of
twelve with her evangelical Baptist family from Birmingham, England, to
rural Pennsylvania. The Reynoldses left Birmingham because of violent
religious persecution there in the late eighteenth century, and surviving
letters written by Mary suggest that the move from English urbanity to the
colonial backwoods was an unhappy shock for her. In Pennsylvania she
became withdrawn, deeply pious, apt to wander by herself in the woods,
and rapturous about nature and its relation to God's works. In 1811 she
was still unmarried and thus was considered a spinster.
One day that year, as Mary sat in a meadow meditating, she was
struck unconscious. When she awoke, she was blind and deaf. Within sev-
eral weeks she recovered, a fact that she attributed to the grace of God. All
this was perhaps not surprising, for among Baptists of the period, being
struck blind, then restored to sight, was considered a sign of divinely in-
spired conversion-which is how Mary interpreted what happened to her.
Then, shortly after her recovery,
unexpectedly, and without any kind of forewarning, she fell into a profound
sleep, which continued several hours beyond the ordinary term. On waking
she was discovered to have lost every trait of acquired knowledge. Her mem-
ory was tabula rasa, all vestiges both of words and things, were obliterated
and gone. It was found necessary for her to learn everything again . . . after
a few months another fit of somnolency invaded her. On rousing from it, she
found herself restored to the state she was before the paroxysm; but she was
wholly ignorant of every event and occurrence that had befallen her ...
(Mitchell 1816, cited in Kenny 1986:27)
In contrast to her original personality, Mary's second one was outgoing,

vivacious, reckless, and given to satirizing the hypocrisy of local evangel-
icals and mocking her doctor's advice that she marry a rural farmer to
cure her disorder. (Responding to one suitor, whom she called a "matri-
monial pill," Mary's second self refused a marriage proposal, insisting
that she was 338 years old and already had survived six husbands.) For
several years this personality alternated with her original one, until gradu-
ally it came to dominate, albeit in tamer form. Mary became a school-
teacher, remained a spinster, and spent the rest of her life unremarkably.
Her case of double consciousness was strikingly similar to others
that followed among English-speaking people during the next few
decades. Almost always they were girls or young women who embodied
two personalities: the original one typically cautious and proper, the new
one vivacious, carefree, and given to flirting. Each had amnesia for the
other: in one well-known case, the second personality had to relearn how
to write and play the piano (interestingly, mundane skills such as walking,
eating with tableware, or using the toilet never had to be relearned).
Most of the stricken girls and women were either servants or middle
class and had been raised in fundamentalist Christian milieux. Often
there is a sense that the transition from girlhood to womanhood precipi-

tated their multiplicity, as in the cases of two prepubescent girls wh
88 Debbie Nathan
were stricken during the 1830s but recovered when their menstrual peri-
ods began (Hacking 1992).
Such cases made little sense until the rise of physiological theory
about the double brain. In 1844, Arthur Ladbroke Wigan, an English
general practitioner, published a book arguing that since the brain is com-
posed of two hemispheres, we must have two minds. Accordingly, if one
hemisphere is defective or damaged, and if that bad half comes to control
the body, insanity follows (Wigan 1844). With the popularization of dou-
ble-brain theory, some people became convinced that they could feel their
own brains malfunctioning. A Frenchwoman sought treatment after notic-
ing that "the course of her ideas was not the same on [one] side as on the
other." Another woman who perceived things differently on either side
complained that sometimes her thinking would cease altogether on the
left, and that an "icy torpor" would grip half her skull (Harrington
1987:18). The process responsible for these maladies was also said to
cause double consciousness. Immediately after Wigan's work was pub-
lished there was a flurry of new cases.
A second wave of interest in double consciousness began around
1875 in France, where the condition was renamed "multiple personality."
The change was not accidental, nor was the fact that it happened in
France. For late nineteenth-century leftist intellectuals there, the idea of
double or even triple selves provided ammunition for a scientific struggle
against religion that was inextricably bound up with Third Republican
grievances against the church and monarchy. Apologists for the latter-
conservative neo-Kantian philosophers-posited the existence of a tran-
scendental ego, a soul, which embodies itself through the brain and whose
existence can be proved by theology or metaphysics. To this the posi-
tivists countered that people with multiple personalities were proof that
the ego was not a priori, that instead it was constructed from memory,
experience, and constantly developing self-consciousness.
The multiples who embodied these positivist arguments were French-
women, generally from humble backgrounds. They were women who
would have lived out their lives in anonymity had it not been for their mul-
tiple personalities and for the male intellectuals who not only studied them
but also publicly applauded them. The relationship between feminine psy-
chic affliction and nineteenth-century masculine theorizing was eloquently
embodied in the work of positivist and pioneer hysteria researcher Pierre
Janet.
It is clear that Janet collaborated with his patients in constructing
their multiple personalities. For instance, he insisted that they name their
alters, since "once baptized, the unconscious personality is more clear
and definite" (Janet, cited in Ellenberger 1970:139). With one hysteric, a
young woman named Lucie, Janet conducted this insistent exchange:
How are you?
I don't know.
There must be someone there who hears me.
Who is it?
Someone other than Lucie.
Ah, indeed. Another person. Would you like us to give her a name?
No.
Yes. It would be more convenient.
All right. Adrienne.

Very well, Adrienne. Do you hear me?
Yes. (Merskey 1992:331-32)
We do not know what happened to Lucie and Adrienne, but at least one
other of Janet's patients helped him construct his own professional and
political identity. When he assumed the psychology chairmanship at the
College de France, he introduced his colleagues to the laundress Felida.
She was, Janet said proudly, a "very remarkable personage who has played
a rather important part in the history of ideas." Speaking at Harvard Uni-
versity's medical school in 1906, he added that the multiple personalities
of this washerwoman constituted
the great argument of which the positivist psychologists made use at the
time of the heroic struggles against . .. spiritualistic dogmatism . . . But for
Felida, it is not certain that there would be a professorship at the Collkge de
France, and that I would be here speaking to you of the mental state of hys-
tericals. (Janet 1929, cited in Kenny 1986:87)
It is no coincidence that the French fascination with multiple person-

alities coincided with interest in hysterics. Indeed, both types of women
were studied by the same men. Janet was a former student of neuro-
pathologist Jean-Martin Charcot, the first modern researcher of hysteria.
In the 1870s, Charcot headed the hysteria and epilepsy wards at France's
Salpetriere hospital-a public institution utilized mainly by the poor that
de Marneffe (1991:73) has called a "virtual warehouse for roughly five
thousand deranged and sick women." Charcot's research on these patients
was financed by a staunchly antichurch Third Republican government,
and one of Charcot's aims in studying hysterics was to recast Catholic
explanations-such as the idea that they were possessed by demons-into
"natural pathological" categories (Harrington 1987:168; McGrath 1986).
Charcot and his followers eventually defined hysteria as a hereditary dis-
order caused by "functional" lesions in the central nervous system that
interfered with sensory-motor operations but caused no detectable dam-
age to the brain. Though they were invisible, Charcot set out to classify
these lesions by closely observing hysterical attacks and minutely cata-
loguing patients' every behavior and posture.
90 Debbie Nathan
Charcot, who was also intensely interested in art, combined this fas-
cination with the idea that women's hysterical behavior was a variant of
the transcendental ecstasy and Dionysian mania depicted by the Great
Masters. He thus elaborated an aesthetically tinged concept of the "per-
fect" attack and photographed his patients progressing through its atti-
tudes passionelles, including "threat," "amorous supplication," "erotism,"
"ecstasy," "crucifixion," and "teasing." The perfect attack was immortal-
ized in Charcot and his colleagues' Iconographie photographique de la
Salpetridre, published between 1876 and 1880. Later editions included
photographs of hysterical women patients alongside reproductions of clas-
sical paintings. The similarities in pose and facial expression between sub-
jects in the two media are striking (de Marneffe 1991).
In retrospect, it is clear that this is so because women in institutions
like the Salpetri&re were at least partly conditioned to imitate stylized pre-
conceptions of hysteria. It was certainly not hard for them to learn how.
For one thing, hysterics were housed on common wards, giving them
ample opportunity to observe each other and to standardize a behavioral
repertoire. Furthermore, even though the patients were not aware of what
they were doing, doctors customarily educated them in the details of the
perfect attack by presenting them in demonstrations put on for students
and visitors. In the nineteenth-century asylums, Janet later reminisced,
French physicians "saw nothing wrong in carrying on experiments in
public, amid the chatter of casual spectators, and they would themselves
discuss the meaning of the experiments with their patients" (cited in Har-
rington 1987:181). At one hospital hysterics could even get a formal med-
ical education, since the students often made patients who wrote well
copy notes of lectures and observations (Harrington 1987).
Given the evidence that nineteenth-century French hysteria was
shaped by ideological and social demands, the particular forms it took are
telling. Those researchers who were interested in double-brain theories
had patients who could produce a smile on one half of their face and a
frown on the other. Other doctors treated people who felt no pain in parts
of their bodies, and commentators of the period puzzled that outside
France this numbness was a rarity. But it must be remembered that in tra-
ditional Christian doctrine, patches of anesthesia on women are proof that
they have consorted with the devil. Harrington speculates that since
French positivists like Charcot wanted to rob the church of practices such
as exorcism, they may have encouraged women to produce anesthesia so
that they could secularize it. It is probably no coincidence that Charcot
and many of his theoretical descendants, including Freud, used the word
stigmata to describe hysterical paralyses, convulsions, and other abnor-
malities.
By the late 1880s Charcot was proposing that psychic trauma was one
cause of hysteria. Janet elaborated on this: if one's neurological structures
were genetically degenerate, he said, extreme trauma during childhood
could trigger "dissociation" of the structures and create parallel psychic
states. In order to reintegrate these states, the clinician must help the
patient remember her trauma, usually by hypnotizing her. As her memo-
ries began to emerge, the neurological structures would realign. But until
then, dissociated states acted as independent, internally coherent, mutually
amnesiac operations capable of achieving such complexity that each could
be a separate personality.
Yet these grand ideas soon became passe in France, for several possi-
ble reasons. For one, the positivists had won their battle with the neo-
Kantians. Freud is also thought to be instrumental, since psychoanalysis
did not consider multiple personalities to be separate states of conscious-
ness. Instead they were simply behavioral variants of hysterical neurosis.
Likewise, the new diagnosis of schizophrenia, proposed in 1911, covered
many behaviors displayed by multiples and offered a Freudian, psycho-
dynamic explanation in place of Charcot's and Janet's more biologistic
reasoning. Even so, multiple personality did not disappear. Instead it
cropped up in England and the United States, where, ironically, it but-
tressed a religious reaction against the positivists, who earlier had used
multiplicity to promote their own beliefs.
Actually, it is not surprising that multiplicity could be all things to
all people. In his exhaustive account of the beginnings of modern psy-
chology, Ellenberger (1970) notes that the entire nineteenth century was
preoccupied with the problem of the coexistence in one person of two
minds. This concern grew as men and women at the fin de siecle faced
a spectrum of apparently incompatible choices: faith or agnosticism, tra-
ditional values or scientism, capitalism or socialism, common sense or
intuition.
The idea that the world and its inhabitants are a composite of con-
flicting opposites is an ancient one in the West and has long been embod-
ied in religious antinomies such as God and Satan, good and evil. But
with the rise of Darwinism, Lord and Lucifer were biologized. Defined as
a product of evolution, man was said to bear the stamp of his animal ori-
gins, to have the beast in him. Such thinking influenced the romantics,
who imagined the soul at war with itself and who obsessed over the irra-
tional, creative, and demonic components of the psyche and at how they
erupted from a hidden world beyond everyday experience. Robert Louis
Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, reflected this
pervasive anxiety about existential duality. So did the doppelginger,
Svengali and his "mesmeric" romance, Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, and
characters in the works of Kafka, Maupassant, Poe, Dostoevsky, and
many other literati and artists of the period.
92 Debbie Nathan
But if humanity was congenitally tainted with dark, bestial impulses
and haunted by its animal past, did the soul still transcend biology? Was
life a force, independent of material? Was the universe friendly? The doc-
trine that answered yes to such questions was spiritism, a self-proclaimed
"scientific religion" that aimed to prove the existence of the nonmaterial
world by communicating with the dead. To fulfill this mission, the Society
for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 in England. A similar Amer-
ican group based in Boston followed two years later. Both busied them-
selves with research into psychic phenomena and related topics such as
hypnosis, apparitions, clairvoyance, and telepathy (Hacking 1992).
Multiple personality was also a focus, since spiritists believed alters
were dead souls transmigrated into a living body. If this could be demon-
strated, it would prove that the universe was a coherent evolutionary
process whose main subject was Thought and Consciousness. Evolution
could thus be shown to have created the brain in order to incarnate the
spirit. And if a single brain could embody one spirit, then why could that
same brain not hold a second spirit as well, or a third one-souls transmi-
grated from dead people?
In testing this theory, spiritists looked not only at multiple personality
but also at hysteria, possession, and spirit mediumship. All these states
were thought to be variants of what William James called "the cracked
self," through which spirits could intrude (cited in Kenny 1981:341).
Mediums-women who held seances with "sitters," entered trances, and
communicated with the sitters' dead friends and relatives-were thus a
pressing research topic.3 One famous subject of James's investigations was

Lenore Piper, a Boston housewife. When Piper entered a trance, she
became the physical medium for "control" spirits who assumed several
forms, including Johann Sebastian Bach, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
and an American Indian maiden named Chlorine (Kenny 1986). Once
they took over Piper's body, these controls summoned dead souls for the
sitters, introduced them, and often spoke for them in Piper's voice. Dur-
ing a sitter's first seance, both the controls and the dead souls often
seemed vague and poorly defined. During subsequent sessions, they
became clearer and more concrete.
Observing this progression, James realized that during seances, both

the sitter and the medium were engaged in an intense give-and-take-a
"warmth," James called it (cited in Kenny 1981:343)-that gradually
added detail to both the control and the dead spirits. Today we call this
suggestion, and James noted other evidence that it was the basis of Piper's
mediumship. For example, he observed experiments where Piper was
tricked into contacting spirits of dead people who never existed but whom
the sitter had merely invented.
Piper was also exquisitely sensitive to unwitting suggestions from
Much evidence researchers, and this responsiveness undoubtedly promoted her prestige
as well as theirs. Before James and his colleagues began studying her, she
suggests that, had the habit of grinding her teeth and shaking spastically as she entered
a trance. The men found this distasteful and upsetting, and after spending
while mediums
time with them, Piper became more sedate during transitions (Guiley
1991; Kenny 1981). Such accommodations must have helped Piper enter
had usually
the social world of the spiritist intellectuals, for she became much
acclaimed among spiritists and eventually made three trips to England to
developed
serve as a subject for researchers there. Even in her hometown, Boston,
their supranormal her everyday clientele shared their privilege with her. Her sitters, after all,
formed a complex social network of middle-class Bostonians who came to
abilities long Piper and her spirits with their most intimate problems and confessions
(Kenny 1986). She thus had a certain power over them, much as con-
before they were temporary psychotherapists have over their patients.
Both spiritist researchers and their skeptical detractors were also fas-
ever discovered
cinated with multiple personalities, and this interest added to the psychic
and social capital of the afflicted women even more than it did to medi-
by researchers, ums'. Indeed, much evidence suggests that, while mediums had usually
developed their supranormal abilities long before they were ever discov-
the alter
ered by researchers, the alter personalities of multiples were directly
evoked by the men who studied them. Consider "Sally Beauchamp," the
personalities
most famous turn-of-the-century American case (Prince 1969; Kenny
of multiples were 1986; Leys 1992).
Sally's original personality, Clara Fowler, was a young New England
directly evoked by woman who first consulted with the prominent Boston psychotherapist
Morton Prince in 1898. She was seeking treatment for neurasthenia, a
the men who
turn-of-the-century disorder characterized by fatigue, sadness, and a gen-
eral depletion of the vital forces. The malady was said to be caused by
studied them.
modern civilization, and particularly by damage done to females' con-
genitally weak constitutions by their efforts to act like men. Fowler fit the
bill perfectly. She had left her working-class home at age sixteen, earned
her living as a nurse, and, when she came to Prince, was supporting her-
self while attending college (later she would study at all-woman Rad-
cliffe). Her academic aspirations were especially predisposing to nervous
disorder, for, as a prominent neurologist of the period put it in 1895
while addressing the students at Fowler's future alma mater:
Women at college work harder than men, [and] out of their eagerness arises
disregard of physiological limitations . . . I see women fall into ill-health ...
from self-devotion unintelligently guided, from emotional causes such as
rarely injure the lives of men, from lack of willingness to yield to the just
demands of their own physiological conditions. . . . There are days for most
of you when to use the mind persistently is full of dangers. You are women,
not men. (Cited in Kenny 1986:136)
94 Debbie Nathan
When Fowler began her visits to Prince, he was already intensely involved
in studying multiple personality as part of his skepticism about spiritism.
In treating Fowler, he concluded that her neurasthenia covered an under-
lying dissociation, and he began hypnotizing her. An alter then emerged,
which Fowler christened Sally Beauchamp. According to Prince, Fowler
was a "religious prig" with "marked literary tastes and faculties" and
"essentially a bibliophile" (cited in Kenny 1986:135). Sally, on the other
hand, was vivacious, adventurous, and amoral and a practical joker who
ridiculed femininity by smoking cigarettes, threatening to cut off her hair
to make herself "look like a guy" (cited in Leys 1992:183), and reciting
bowdlerized versions of the "love, honor, and obey" parts of the marriage
vows to Prince while simultaneously jesting about infidelity. Prince, who
had a reputation for being seductive to women, was unabashedly charmed
by Sally. At the same time, he devalued her femininity by giving her the
boy's name Chris, characterizing her as adolescent and immature, and
deriding her as a parody of the new woman. Eventually Fowler produced
three more personalities-all female-whom Prince christened the Saint,
the Devil, and the Woman. Sally referred to this last one as the Idiot
(Leys 1992). Prince's therapeutic aim was to locate an original personal-
ity and annihilate the others, including Sally. Bound up in this project was
his expectation that the "real" Clara Fowler would marry.
Kenny calls Fowler's alter personalities "experiment[s] with the con-
tent of her selfhood," made possible by Prince's hypnotherapy and the
poetic license it gave her (Kenny 1986:145). Such license did not stop in
the physician's office. Prince's book about Sally Beauchamp, The Dissoci-
ation of a Personality, became wildly popular and is still in print (Prince
1969). More than five hundred plays were based on the book, and one
drew capacity crowds on Broadway. This was not the only way that
Fowler benefited from her condition. Because of her contact with Prince
and her fame as a multiple, she was able to meet and socialize with a
wealthy psychiatrist. The two eventually married, and she spent the rest of
her life as a society matron. Her role as a wife placed Fowler squarely back
into the respectable feminine role that her doctor prescribed for her-a
role that earlier multiples like Mary Reynolds had rejected. Yet while
Fowler's alters did not transgress gender, they used the "matrimonial pill"
to remedy her humble socioeconomic origins.
Another Prince patient, Nellie Bean, was more explicit in how she
used multiplicity to challenge femininity. Bean was an attractive, middle-
aged widow who sought therapy because she had developed neurasthenia
after the death of her husband, with whom she had been unhappily mar-
ried for years. When she first met Prince, Bean had no labels for mood
shifts that alternated between euphoria and depression. In treatment she
soon developed three alter personalities, the first two of them women.
Bean seemed to think Prince could determine the personalities' sex, for
when the third one began developing under hypnosis, she beseeched him
not to let it be female. Womanhood, Bean complained, meant that one had
to "love people," and she dreaded this because "if one loves one must suf-
fer-that is what it means to be a woman-to love and suffer." Her emerg-
ing third self, she told Prince, was "the one chance I'll ever have to be
anything but a woman and I have had enough of that now" (Kenny
1986:152).
Not all multiples were happy with the secularized directions in which
spiritist skeptics like Prince channeled their behavior. One of his patients,
for instance, Grace Oliver, was diagnosed as having two selves. The orig-
inal one was sexually repressed, but Oliver's second personality, "Spanish
Maria," was uninhibited and loved everything from Spain; through auto-
matic writing she even wrote a garbled version of the language, though she
claimed not to have studied it (Crabtree 1985). Oliver's case was
described in William James's Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1919 and
1920, and Prince used her as a demonstration during lectures on psy-
chopathology delivered at Harvard. Later, Oliver read a book about St.
Louis medium Pearl Curran and her spirit, "Patience Worth," and about
the novels the two had written.4 The book compared this literary team to
Oliver and Spanish Maria. It concluded that since Spanish Maria was
poorly developed, she must be fabricated; but Patience Worth was so well
defined that she must indeed be supernatural. Oliver felt cheated. If only
Prince had applied spiritist principles to her instead of new psychology,
she might have cultivated Spanish Maria and found the same success and
happiness as Curran and Patience Worth had. Oliver considered herself
victimized by a rationalist medical paradigm that had failed to channel her
experiences in constructive directions (Kenny 1981).
By the time Grace Oliver began protesting her diagnosis, in the 1930s, she
and her Hispanic alter were already psychiatric artifacts. A decade earlier,
multiple personalities had started a rapid fade from popularity in Amer-
ica, as psychic research ceased to be a fad and schizophrenia became the
dominant label for the fractured mind. Hysteria also took on new life,
thanks to its redefinition by Freud, who did not believe in the existence of
independent, unconscious selves fighting a battle of alter egos. Instead, in
accordance with his concept of the system unconscious lying beneath the
system conscious, he thought that multiple personalities actually were ego
states "repressed" below consciousness.
During his seduction theory stage, Freud had come to believe that the
paralyses, anesthesias, and other bodily signs common to hysterics were
their bodies' efforts to recount unspeakable memories. Unspeakable, he
96 Debbie Nathan
thought, because they were about childhood sexual abuse committed by
family members and servants. Such were the stories and the culprits his
patients "remembered" during their hypnotherapy sessions. Unlike Char-
cot and Janet, Freud listened to these stories carefully and did not consider
hysteria a product of organic degeneracy. On the contrary, according to
Freud's colleague and collaborator Joseph Breuer, hysteria's origins had to
be sought in a "surplus rather than in a defect," since its sufferers were
"vivacious, talented and full of mental interests . . . the bloom of
mankind" (Breuer and Freud 1964:179). In honoring hysterics' behavior
and recollections, Freud also imbued afflicted female bodies with lan-
guage, since he considered his patients' symptoms a way of speaking
about childhood and private life.
But it is clear that in his search for memories, Freud probably injected
his own sexual material into his patients' accounts. He claimed he could
trace recollections back to infancy: "The early period before the age of
one-and-a-half years is becoming ever more significant," he wrote, adding
that he "was able to trace back, with certainty, a hysteria that developed
... for the first time at eleven months and hear again the words that were
exchanged between two adults at that time! It was as though it comes
from a phonograph" (Freud 1985:226). In describing how he unearthed
repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, Freud noted that before
his patients came in for analysis, they "know nothing about these scenes,"
and when he told them to expect such memories, they usually became
indignant. Generally, they would only reproduce the "scenes" after being
practically forced:
One only succeeds in awakening the psychical trace of a precocious sexual

event under the most energetic pressure of the analytic procedure, and
against an enormous resistance. Moreover, the memory must be extracted
from them piece by piece. (Freud, cited in Masson 1984:91)
Freud eventually gave up hypnotherapy and the seduction theory of

neurosis, partly because he recognized that many of the memories he was
drawing from his patients seemed too illogical or bizarre to be true. The
case of Emma Eckstein is instructive. Eckstein suffered from many symp-
toms of hysteria, including unexplainable episodes of bleeding. Since the
publication of Jeffrey Masson's Assault on Truth (1984), much has been
made about Freud's incompetence in prescribing a bizarre nasal operation
to cure Eckstein and in subsequently ignoring a bandage that was inad-
vertently left in her nose. As a result of this blunder, Eckstein almost
hemorrhaged to death-yet Freud attributed this crisis to her hysteria.
While it seems absurd to blame nearly fatal bleeding on hysteria, the fact
remains that it would have been equally senseless to attribute Eckstein's
hysteria to some of the childhood traumas she recounted during her hyp-
notherapy. After one session, for example, Freud noted how Emma talked
about the devil sticking pins into her finger and putting a piece of candy
on each drop of blood. Eckstein also described "a scene about the cir-
cumcision of a girl. The cutting off of a piece of the labia minora (which
is still shorter today), sucking up the blood, following which the child
Medical
was given a piece of the skin to eat" (cited in Masson 1984:105). This
narrative is strikingly similar to the accounts of contemporary MPD
anthropologist
patients and self-proclaimed survivors of satanic abuse; in fact, Freud
Sherrill Mulhern remarked that the story evoked images of "a primeval devil religion whose
rites are carried on secretly" (cited in Masson 1984:105). And though he
calls the late did not believe in witches, he wondered why the torture-induced confes-
sions of the accused during the European witch-hunts seemed "so like the
twentieth-century communications made by my patients under psychological treatment"
(cited in Masson 1984:104).
rehabilitation of
Freud could never penetrate Eckstein's bizarre account to find the
truth of her childhood. His growing doubts about her and other patients'
MPD a violent
sexual abuse "memories," coupled with his researches into his own inces-
tuous preoccupations and fantasies, led him to abandon the idea that
reaction to
trauma was the main cause of hysteria. He never totally discarded sexual
Freudian drive abuse as a factor in psychopathology. But he felt that such mistreatment
per se did not make the patient ill. Rather, her sickness resulted from the
theory and one subjective feeling of having broken a taboo. And though he retained the
notion that the body speaks, Freud redefined hysteria to mean not repres-
of psychiatry's sion of memory but repression of infantile libidinous desiring. The wishes
embedded in such desire, Freud recognized, could never be expressed
most dramatic literally, and therefore memories of early childhood always contained dis-
guised, defensive elaborations of events, even in material emerging during
attempts at treatment. Both when it was encoded and later when it was retrieved,
memory obeyed the rules of repression. It was always a "screen" on top of
paradigmatic
literal history (Haaken 1994).
reversal.
Medical anthropologist Sherrill Mulhern (1991) calls the late twenti-
eth-century rehabilitation of MPD a violent reaction to Freudian drive
theory and one of psychiatry's most dramatic attempts at paradigmatic
reversal, since current MPD theory rejects the idea that psychopathology
arises from intrapsychic conflict between unconscious drives and real-
world demands. Instead, it returns to the trauma theories of Janet and to
Freud before he abandoned his seduction theory.
Again, there are several factors that inform this return. One is the
feminist effort during the past generation to expose the reality and preva-
lence of child abuse-an effort that has multiple determinants, including,
as I will discuss later, a gender shift in the profession of psychotherapy
(Philipson 1993). Another force behind resurrection of trauma theory is
98 Debbie Nathan
the revival of hypnosis as a method for recovering traumatic memories.
This, too, has a political history that lately has merged with the feminist
project. Mulhern recounts how hypnosis fell out of favor during the rise of
Freudianism but was resurrected during World War I, when psychiatrists
trying to get shell-shocked soldiers back into the trenches found that it
relieved their symptoms. It worked, they believed, because it helped
patients relax so that they could dissociate emotion from cognition and
thus reduce the psychic pain that usually accompanies recollections of
horrible events. When they hypnotized soldiers, clinicians recognized that
many of the memories they were recovering were riddled with fantasy. But
this was not considered a problem. After all, there was seldom any ques-
tion that the patients really had been to war, so any embellishments in
memory were considered harmless at worst, and at best helpful to their
healing.
The U.S. government's interest in hypnosis was further fueled during
the Korean War, mainly because of fear that Chinese Communists were
using sophisticated techniques to induce American prisoners of war to
make hostile public declarations about capitalism and the United States.
The government began calling this practice "brainwashing," and though
research has since discredited the concept, the idea that Manchurian
Candidate-style manipulations and "subliminal messages" can create
human robots has remained popular in American culture. During the
McCarthy era, this belief was quite prevalent, and beginning in the late
1950s, the federal government provided more than $5 million for hypno-
sis research. Findings replicated what had been well known in the previ-
ous century: that some people are very highly hypnotizable, for instance,
and that they can produce dramatic bodily changes in response to sug-
gestion.
The new research also revealed that while memories elicited under
hypnosis can be richly textured, much of the detail is actually fantasy.

Even so, subjects emerging from trance typically feel that every part of the
memory is as real as any other. It was further noted that highly hypnotiz-
able people in therapy are extremely dependent on and demanding of the
clinician's total attention and approval. Thus, when these patients are
asked to probe their memories for more details about childhood trauma, if
they do not remember anything, they tend to compulsively "fill in the
blanks" by adding information from other sources. One way they do this
is by searching the therapist for clues, in much the same manner as
William James described how mediums flesh out spirits by "warming" to
the conscious and subliminal suggestions of the sitter.
Though forensic psychiatrists generally know about these research
findings, many if not most therapists who treat MPD patients do not.
Mulhern cites a 1980 study that polled American psychologists and found
that few realized that hypnosis can inject fantasy material into memory.
They also were generally unaware that because people with MPD are
highly hypnotizable, they are continually moving in and out of trance
states, regardless of whether the therapist induces them.
Amid this post-Cold War climate of naivete about hypnosis and sug-
gestion, child abuse has emerged as a major social policy issue. It made its
first modern appearance in the early 1960s with the publication of pedia-
trician Richard Kempe's "Battered Child Syndrome"-a landmark Jour-
nal of the American Medical Association article that demonstrated that
injuries to children traditionally attributed to accidents actually were
caused deliberately, by parents and other adult caretakers (Kempe 1962).
As medical workers turned their attention to this problem, they began
noticing that children who were physically abused sometimes also had
been sexually assaulted.
But the increasing attention paid to child sexual abuse owed a much
larger debt to the women's movement than to medicine. By the early
1980s, feminist writers and activists such as Florence Rush (1980) had
expanded their analysis and condemnation of sexual violence to include
incest, which subsequent studies revealed is chillingly prevalent in modern
Western culture (Russell 1986). As part of this expansion, they
denounced psychoanalysis, particularly as practiced in post-World War II
America. Especially reprehensible was its tendency to blame women's suf-
fering on their own intrapsychic conflicts instead of on patriarchal oppres-
sion; to prescriptively equate femininity with heterosexuality, domesticity,
marriage, and motherhood; and to summarily dismiss all recollections of
childhood sexual abuse as female fantasizing. Further, psychoanalysts
stressed emotional distance and interpretation rather than empathy. This
was a style well suited to the demographics of the situation, in which the
analyst was usually a man and the patient a woman.
In comparison, object relations theory seems far more woman cen-
tered and constructive. Relational thinking explains emotional pathology
as a normal reaction to bad parenting and other external trauma, and the
therapist is encouraged to adopt an empathic, holding attitude toward the
patient. In many ways, this is a positive development. It is significant,
however, that object relations theory began captivating American clini-
cians at the same time that this country began experiencing a sharp
decline in the percentage of men who were becoming psychotherapists
and a concomitant dramatic influx of women into the field. This gender
reversal has been accompanied by problems that inevitably occur when a
formerly male profession is feminized: psychotherapists' prestige during
the past two decades has fallen, as has their income and the academic
quality of the training most take. All this has happened in tandem with
their embrace of relational theory (Philipson 1993).
100 Debbie Nathan
As a result of this new approach, they began focusing on the prob- It is amid this
lems of adults who had suffered family violence as children. This hap-
pened as therapy was expanding its patient base beyond upper-class politicization of
Americans and becoming attractive and available to middle- and working-
belief in women's
class Americans (Skolnick 1991)-particularly women. And as more
women entered therapy, the problems they brought with them increasingly
narratives and
were framed as caused by severe childhood trauma. Frequently patients
suffered from symptoms such as anxiety, unpleasant dreams, anger, and revival of
depression-which resembled those of ex-soldiers with post-traumatic
stress disorder. So therapists focused on recovering traumatic memories, traumatogenic
employing the same hypnosis and relaxation techniques that were being
used on combat veterans. When patients began telling stories of sexual theory that MPD
abuse that they had not recalled before treatment, feminist-oriented clin-
icians vowed not to question their credibility. Instead, theoreticians such as has made its
Masson (1984) and Herman (1992) revived the old Janetian and early
Freudian concepts of dissociation and repression to explain how it was comeback, this
possible that traumatic memories could have been isolated so long from
time as the most
consciousness before finally returning in therapy. It is amid this politi-
cization of belief in women's narratives and revival of traumatogenic the-
extreme and
ory that MPD has made its comeback, this time as the most extreme and
dramatic psychic marker of child abuse-particularly sexual abuse.
dramatic psychic
In a sense, the purported link between childhood trauma and MPD is
not new; it has been a topic of speculation for years. But until the late marker of
1970s, no general theory was advanced, and even Eve, of The Three Faces
of Eve fame, did not report abuse in her childhood (she said her alters child abuse-
emerged when she saw people who had been killed in accidents and when
she witnessed her mother cut her arm). Thus Eve was not a fully modern particularly
multiple.5 That distinction belongs to Sybil, whose biography, with its
sexual abuse.
horrifying tales of sexual abuse, was first published in 1973, just as incest
was being tied politically with child abuse and neglect. As the decade pro-
gressed, Sybil's therapist, Cornelia Wilbur, joined the psychiatry depart-
ment at the University of Kentucky and began collaborating with other
faculty who were doing case studies of multiple personalities. Most of
their subjects reported coming from puritanical, fanatically religious, fun-
damentalist Christian families in which severe corporal punishment was
meted out for even minor misbehaviors. Under hypnosis, many remem-
bered scenarios of sadomasochistic sexual abuse, including gang rape;
being buried alive; mutilation; and being forced to help murder infants.
These reports were at first localized: in case reports about multiple per-
sonality patients from other research centers around the country, narra-
tives about sadistic torture were absent (Mulhern 1991).
A consistent clinical picture of MPD nevertheless gradually devel-
oped among a nationwide network of therapists. By 1979, there was a
newsletter for mental health professionals interested in multiple personal-
ity, as well as sectional sessions and courses within the American Psychi-
atric Association's yearly meetings. A coterie of psychiatrists lobbied suc-
cessfully during the 1970s to get MPD listed in the upcoming DSM-III,
and the disorder made its first appearance there in 1980. After that, MPD
was rapidly institutionalized as a psychiatric malady. By 1984, four pro-
fessional journals had published issues devoted entirely to the subject,
and that same year the newly organized International Society for the
Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation (ISSMP&D) held its first
annual conference.
At the same time that it was catching on among professionals, MPD

was also becoming something of a populist movement. In 1985, laypeople
diagnosed with the disorder began a newsletter, Speaking for Ourselves,
and a support group. Soon they were establishing formal and informal
networks throughout North America.6 Eve, whose real name is Chris Size-
more, by now had increased her alter personalities from three to twenty-
two and joined the ISSMP&D's executive board. By the late 1980s, she
and other multiples were attending the group's regional and international
conferences as both audience members and lecturers (Kenny 1986).
The topic many of them specialized in was the ritual abuse survivor
testimonial, where individuals or groups of people suffering from MPD
told professional audiences about their childhood victimization in satanic
cults, how they managed to escape, and the gargantuan emotional and
spiritual efforts they were making to heal body and soul from the diabol-
ical trauma inflicted on them. These stories became so common that by
1986 ISSMP&D conference participants reported that a quarter of their
patients were alleging cult abuse. To many if not most MPD therapists,
these stories seemed credible, and they came to share their patients' belief
that locally, nationally, and even internationally, satanic cult networks were
cooperating with right-wing groups and the CIA to brainwash children as
part of a plot to gain power. By the early 1990s, Dr. Colin Ross, who later
would become president of the ISSMP&D, was espousing this theory and
speculating that 70 percent of MPD sufferers had been abused in cults.
Manchurian Candidate conspiracy theory became almost etiological for
MPD.
Many feminists not directly involved in the mental health professions

have also adopted this belief as part of their politics. For instance, in 1988
feminist legal scholar and antipornography activist Catharine MacKinnon
delivered a nonskeptical presentation on ritual abuse at a conference
devoted to the subject and sponsored by a university antirape program.
Later, in Ms. magazine, she compared the torture and murder of women
in Serbian-occupied Croatia with the fate of "victims of ritual abuse in [the
United States]" (MacKinnon 1993:30). Ms. has also published a cover
102 Debbie Nathan
story written pseudonymously by a purported cult survivor, headlined For many feminists
"Believe It! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists: One Woman's Story" (Rose 1993).
Feminist attention to the satanic imprisonment and escape tales that MPD is no longer
often accompany MPD narratives generally focuses on three points: that
an affliction of
cult abuse stories must be believed because women are telling them;
that ritual abuse is shocking yet not surprising, given that we live in a
degenerate
gynophobic culture; yet that by finding ways to live through the abuse-by
developing MPD, for instance-victims show superlative feminine
hysterics or
courage and resourcefulness. In fact, whether or not they consider it the
result of cult abuse, for many feminists MPD is no longer an affliction of raving paupers.
degenerate hysterics or raving paupers. Now, to be multiple is to be intel-
ligent and highly creative, a "survivor" whose special talents allow her to Now, to be
weather the abuse yet emerge alive and productive. As part and parcel of
multiple is to be
this stance, many multiples advocate discarding the D in MPD and replac-
ing it with G for "gift." Gloria Steinem (1992) has enviously enumerated
some of these gifts: the ability to speak different languages without having intelligent and
studied hard, for instance, or to menstruate more than once a month.
Several small-press magazines dealing with MPD issues publish readers' highly creative, a
poetry, short stories, and drawings. Child protection community groups
"survivor" whose
and professional conferences mount displays of MPDs' art, and some
multiples who are musicians perform songs and whole repertoires about
special talents
the disorder.7 MPD sufferers are also lauded as capable actors in the
political economy. One form of therapy, for instance, has the patient allow her
appoint an "executive personality," charged with leading the alters in
"board meetings" or even "parliaments." In accordance with such think- to weather
ing, many multiples now denounce therapy's goal of integrating the per-
sonalities. Echoing political theory, they invoke every alter's right to equal- the abuse
ity and civil rights.

yet emerge alive
5
and productive.
MPD today clearly is something that a hundred years ago it wasn't. While
the nineteenth-century multiple had only two alters or perhaps three, her
modern sister has scores or hundreds. Earlier personalities' aggressions
were confined to insouciance and flirting. Today's alters use foul lan-
guage, go on spendthrift shopping sprees, self-mutilate, and even murder.
Embedded in this behavior are a hubris and an aggressiveness that were
missing in earlier eras. Further, and perhaps most tellingly, even during
their heydays multiples used to be quite rare. Far more common were
women whose arms inexplicably would not move or who suddenly went
mute: women who mediated their problematic relation to the world
through the metaphor of hysteria and repression. Today this is almost
unknown. Instead, we now have dissociation-which at its most extreme
proliferates into alter egos who noisily refuse to be silenced.
Meanwhile, the relationship between women and the authorities who
help them construct multiplicity has both remained the same and changed.
Therapists today employ the divided feminine self to argue religious and
philosophical questions, much as the French Third Republicans and the
spiritists did. The discussion still seems bound up with the traditional
masculine idea of the feminine psyche as a dark continent-Freud's caput
Nili-a dangerous outpost that beckons the adventuresome explorer.
Dr. Bennett Braun is a modern-day example. A Chicago psychiatrist,
he is one of the world's preeminent MPD researchers and activists in the
move to make the condition respectable to modern psychiatry. Braun
helped get MPD listed in the DSM for the first time in 1980. He is largely
responsible for the founding and growth of the ISSMP&D. In 1987 he
instituted the world's first inpatient unit devoted to treating MPD.
Braun, who was born in 1940, describes himself as "counterphobic"
and a "stimulus freak." He brags of breaking his first horse at age twelve
and adds that he "learned my hypnotic patter talking to horses" (Mesic
1992:122). As a youth he enjoyed scuba diving, then graduated to sky div-
ing, photographing sharks underwater without a protective cage, fire walk-
ing barefoot on hot coals in Fiji, running with bulls in Spain, socializing
with prostitutes, and riding with the police during graveyard shifts. In the
middle of medical school he quit to join the army. There he researched
substances prescribed to mentally disabled soldiers at a military arsenal
infamous for testing LSD on unwitting subjects during the 1950s.
After resuming work as a civilian psychiatrist, Braun diagnosed his
first MPD patient in 1974, shortly after Sybil was published. He quickly
discovered three more cases and eventually traveled to California to meet
psychiatrist Ralph Allison, who had already seen thirty-three. A religious
Presbyterian whose father was a minister, Allison had earlier coined the
term ISH, or inner self helper, to denote the unique, divine alter that he
believes exists in every multiple as a source of spiritual inspiration for both
patient and therapist (Allison 1974, 1980). He has also used exorcism as
therapy for one of his MPD patients, in order to rid her of the spirit of an
evil, deceased drug addict who had invaded her body. Allison likened his
work with such patients to the space program and referred to himself as
"an explorer of this second frontier" (Allison 1980:4-5).8
After seeing Allison, Braun returned to Chicago. By 1984 he had
published twenty articles on MPD, started a dissociative disorders treat-
ment program and organized the ISSMP&D. Echoing Allison, he refers to
MPD therapy as "a new frontier" that "gives your life tremendous mean-
ing" (Mesic 1992:125). He has a reputation for taking on the most
intractable cases, and his patients, who come to Chicago from throughout
North America, are said to lionize him. As one woman put it, "When my
other therapists dumped me, [Bennett] caught me. . . . I'm like a wild
104 Debbie Nathan
horse he's had to break of things .... I wouldn't have lived if [he] hadn't
helped me" (Mesic 1992:127).
Braun's pioneering involvement with such women has caught him up
in the ritual abuse scare. He believes many of his patients are escapees
from national and international cults, organized, as he puts it, like "the
communist cell structure" (Braun 1989). One reason he thinks this is
that he and his colleagues have received threatening phone calls and mail.
Apparently they discount the strong possibility that such messages are
coming not from the cult but from their own patients, since it is not
uncommon for people diagnosed with dissociative and borderline per-
sonality disorders to engage in this kind of behavior.9 Instead of com-
menting publicly on this, Braun merely describes his cloak-and-dagger
efforts to shield himself from the satanists: putting his house in trust and
his utility accounts in another name, changing his voter's registration to a
nonresidence address, and refusing to receive calls at home (Mesic 1992).
In 1993 he was sued by a former patient who accused him of wrongly
convincing her that she had three hundred personalities and was an
escapee from a satanic cult; as of this writing the case remains unlitigated
or otherwise resolved (Gross 1994).
Braun sees himself as a scientist-adventurer. Other clinicians, such as
Dr. Robert Phillips, focus on mystical, religious issues. Phillips wrote a
preface to the book When Rabbit Howls (Troops for Truddi Chase 1987),
in which patient Truddi Chase is said to have ninety-two alter personali-
ties. One is a mysterious male named Ean who speaks a language said to
resemble Old Gaelic. Ean, according to Phillips, is "beyond this time and
place," and his presence in Chase suggests that we may be "peering into a
world of which we cannot conceive, and are privileged to go beyond our
senses into the world of the spiritual" (Troops for Truddi Chase
1987:368). Likewise, in Katherine, It's Time, psychiatrist Ralph G. Walton
notes that working with the book's multiple personality heroine "forced
me to confront fundamental metaphysical issues of reality. Events that
transpired during our hours of therapy literally sent shivers down my
spine, raised goosebumps on my skin." At the same time, Walton is com-
pelled to temper his attraction to mysticism with avowals that he really is
a scientist, after all. All the while that Katherine and her alters are giving
him goosebumps, he is thinking about "modern physics":
I believe that the confluence of spin, energy, and identity, as outlined in

[Katherine's] description of the "final farandola"-the high velocity spin that
she maintains completed her transformation into a whole, unified personal-
ity-to an astounding degree mirrors some of the recent developments in
quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, which indicate that the ultimate
nature of or identity of the universe is very much related to the concept of
spin. (Castle and Bechtel 1989:x)
Phillips and Walton sound like the old male spiritists, with Truddi
Chase and Katherine their new female mediums. Today, however, there is
no requirement that the professionals in these relationships be men.
Today, more likely than not, they are women. Yet while this gender shift
may have injected cultural feminist notions of the female psyche into the
dyad, it has not subverted the clinical romanticization of multiplicity as a
terrain of dark secrets and mysterious powers. Consider, for example, the
narrative of Albuquerque therapist Gail Carr Feldman, author of Lessons
in Evil, Lessons from the Light. Feldman (1993:4) begins by describing
how she and her husband have always been known as "the couple who
sought and found unusual things to do," such as hiking the Himalayas and
skiing "most of the major North American downhill ski areas." She notes
that her interest in sexual abuse therapy flows from this sense of adventure
because it is so difficult and challenging. As her story opens, she has been
a clinician for seventeen years. Now she is approaching age fifty and feel-
ing only "80 percent happy" and "worried" about the other 20 percent,
which seems "mysterious, elusive, and most of all, oppressive" (Feldman
1993:13).
Then she gets a new patient, Barbara, a stylishly dressed, articulate,
middle-aged black professional woman who has sought out Feldman
because she is troubled by her lack of sexual responsiveness to her hus-
band and by rages she displays toward her teenaged daughter. During her
first visits, Barbara has no trouble describing a childhood spent in dire
poverty in the South or her suspicions that she was molested by her
grandfather. Then, during hypnotherapy, she begins recalling gruesome
ritual abuse by her mother, grandmother, and other members of a trans-
generational cult. This she describes in black English, a speech pattern
much at odds with her usual educated way of talking. As she abreacts the
narratives with Feldman, the latter analyzes Barbara's family's cult activity
as patriarchal, and Feldman becomes increasingly angry at her husband
for not understanding that such horrors reflect how men "run every insti-
tution in the country . . . run the schools and write the history books"
(Feldman 1993:80).
Her marriage is strained by these feminist insights, but Feldman's ire
dissipates as Barbara begins seeing visions of "the Light" and discovers a
motherly spiritual guide who is "like God... part of the Light." Feldman,
a convert to Judaism who is not particularly devout, now begins wonder-
ing if she, too, can believe in the Light. Alone one day, she enters a trance
and tries to contact Barbara's spirit guide; she also becomes fascinated
with the idea of past lives, attends a group session in California, success-
fully recovers one of her own, then performs a regression on Barbara. As
Barbara completes therapy, Feldman (1993:280, 291) optimistically enters
marriage counseling and thanks her former patient for teaching her "so
106 Debbie Nathan
much [about] evil and . . . the human spirit" and that "there is an eter- The idea of alter
nity." Finally, Feldman writes and markets a book about these "lessons."
As with the other heroines of this genre, one can only assume that Barbara selves with
is sharing royalties (if not public acclaim) with her therapist-author. One
also senses that both individuals, whether they write books or not, profit special insights
psychically from the diagnosis, the alters, and the memories.
and powers
6
connotes
As I indicated earlier, these new and old stories about women multiples
and their doctors-as well as the mass-market books about them, the lec- tremendous
tures and presentations at asylums and conferences, the Broadway plays,
the magazines, talk shows, movies, art exhibits, and self-help groups-all hubris for women.
these productions transcend the narrow question of whether dissociation
and multiple personality disorder are objectively "real." With this in mind, Even if she
we can return to S. and her child-abused alters in court in Wisconsin; to

never seeks
Bonnie, her sister, her daughter, and their tales of satanism; to Roseanne
Arnold and her memories of incest. I have avoided doing any more
formal treatment,
research into these women than what has been presented in the mass
media, where the question is always whether we should believe the recov-
the fractured
ered memories of their alters or the indignant denials of the accused. I do
not know how these women felt after they read Sybil, whether they now woman will
see themselves as accomplished writers, painters, and poets, or if they
feel confident speaking before audiences. I do not know how each estab- always be subject
lished her womanhood among her kin and among men: how Roseanne felt
about her father when she was a child, the way Bonnie and her sister got to the gaze and
along with their parents, what tensions drove S. to imitate a TV show
when she told Mark Peterson that sex with him felt "nice." Nor do I know authority of
how all these feelings were evoked, shaped, and articulated in the com-
the clinic.
pany of therapists and alters. Suffice it to say that the feminine psyche that
organizes such feelings is not a legal fact and cannot be adequately
explored in the limited conceptual space of the police station or the court-
room.
I hope that the histories of women like Mary Reynolds, the laundres
Felida, Sally Beauchamp, Spanish Maria, their sisters, and their doct
help open a space where, as theorists of our culture, we gain room to co
sider the dilemma of promoting dissociation as a foundation for the
temporary feminine psyche. The idea of alter selves with special ins
and powers connotes tremendous hubris for women. At the same tim
comes freighted with presumptions of the most horrible victimage,
this means that regardless of whether her doctor is male or female
even if she never seeks formal treatment, the fractured woman will always
be subject to the gaze and authority of the clinic. No matter how many
times Gloria Steinem calls MPD a gift, as long as it is regarded as a
mainly female condition, it will always be considered an illness. Having
said that, we cannot simply dismiss the alters among us by comparing
MPD to Elvis sightings, UFO aliens, and the spectral evidence of Salem
village. Such comparisons are necessary, particularly when the accusations
alters make are adjudicated by courts, fines, and prison sentences. But we
must go beyond skepticism if we want to understand the current feminine
voice in all its pain, hope, and multiplicity.
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Notes
Thanks to Jan Haaken, Diana Halbrooks, Michael Kenny, and Matt Love for
sharing ideas and materials for this article.
1. The first wave of this genre includes The Five of Me (Hawksworth and
Schwarz 1977); I'm Eve (Sizemore and Pittillo 1977); Tell Me Who I Am before I
Die (Peters 1978); Michelle Remembers (Smith and Pazder 1980); The Minds of
Billy Milligan (Keyes 1982); and The Healing of Lia (Ward and Farrelli 1982).
The second round is represented by When Rabbit Howls (Troops for Truddi
Chase 1987); My Father's House (Fraser 1989); A Mind of My Own (Sizemore
1989); Suffer the Child (Spencer 1989); Katherine, It's Time (Castle and Bechtel
1989); The Flock (Casey 1991); Ghost Girl (Hayden 1991); and Satan's Children
(Mayer 1991).
2. The possibility that the very name multiple personality disorder influences
patients to demand or feign the diagnosis led the editors of the latest edition of
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) to revise the
terminology. As of 1994, MPD has been replaced with "dissociative identity dis-
order." Definition and criteria, however, remain essentially unchanged (see
Speigel 1993; American Psychiatric Association 1994).
3. Mediumship in America had its origins among women-in fact, its nine-
teenth-century roots lie not far from the cultural and geographic area that
spawned Mary Reynolds's dual personalities. In 1848, Margaret and Kate Fox,
two teenaged girls from Hydesville, New York, began hearing strange raps and
knocks. They developed a code to communicate with the spirit and determined
that he was a peddler's ghost. The girls became very famous and sparked a wave
of interest in spiritualism, mediumship, and trance (Goodman 1988).
4. Curran is another example of a woman whose identity as medium pro-
vided her with social status and links to civic life unavailable to most women of
her time and class. A poorly educated housewife, Curran was playing with a
Ouiji board one day in 1913 when it produced a message from Patience Worth,
who indicated that she was a seventeenth-century Englishwoman who had been
killed in America by Indians. Patience Worth wrote her communications in late
medieval English, and over the next twenty-four years she dictated more than
four thousand pages of literary work to Curran. This collaboration produced
several novels, including one on the life of Jesus Christ that became quite popular
(Crabtree 1985).
1 12 Debbie Nathan
5. In fact, the personalities of Eve-who in a later autobiography called her-
self Chris White-emerged in a stereotypically classical way. White first con-
sulted therapists Thigpen and Cleckley because of headaches apparently caused
by severe marital conflict over her reluctance to raise her daughter as a Catholic,
which was White's husband's religion but not hers. After a particularly vicious
fight with her husband, White arranged a therapy session, where a second
personality appeared. She called herself Chris Costner. This last was White's
maiden name, and Chris Costner told her therapists that she was childless, sin-
gle, and sick of Eve White's husband. This rejection of marriage and domesticity
echoes the preoccupations of Mary Reynolds, Sally Beauchamp, and Nellie
Bean. Yet when Thigpen and Cleckley christened their patient's first alter for
their book, they called her "Eve Black." This literary baptism constructed Eve
according to the traditional Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy and gave no indication
that what Eve's alter was challenging was not her "whiteness"-i.e., her self-
hood-but her wifedom (Sizemore and Pittillo 1977; Thigpen and Cleckley
1957).
6. Such networks were also realized informally through means such as com-
puter bulletin boards. Prodigy, for example, which has 2 million members in the
U.S. and Canada, had several active "support group" bulletin boards in the early
1990s dedicated to survivors of incest and sexual abuse in general. In addition,
one bulletin board (and sometimes more) was devoted to victims of ritual abuse,
and another served people with MPD. Board participants often communicated
on more than one section, exchanging not only self-help advice and information
about political organizing around abuse issues, but also fine details about their
memories of cult abuse. These communications crisscrossed vast geographic dis-
tances. Nevertheless, many therapists insist that it is impossible for people in dif-
ferent parts of the country to tell the same cult abuse stories unless they really
happened. Such clinicians seem unaware of the influence of cyberspace in
homogenizing the narratives. (For printout examples of such exchanges on
Prodigy, contact the author.)
7. See, e.g., the magazines Survivorship, S.O.A.R. (Survivors of Abusive Ritu-
als), and Healing Paths. For art, see the work of Wendy Hoffman, whose exhibit
"Replicas from Memory: A Child's Drawings of Satanic Abuse," was announced
in the Village Voice, 3 July 1990, 96. For music, see Kathleen: They Do Not Own
Us, by Robin Landsong (Greenhouse Recordings, Olympia, Wash.).
8. Allison was also the psychiatrist who first diagnosed MPD in Kenneth
Bianchi, "the Hillside Strangler," who terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s by
serially torturing, raping, and murdering ten girls and young women. Allison's
diagnosis was later discredited when investigators and other psychiatrists discov-
ered evidence that Bianchi was faking MPD as part of an insanity plea. Another
accused sex criminal was more successful. In the late 1970s, an accused rapist
whose story is immortalized in The Minds of Billy Milligan (Keyes 1982) was
acquitted on grounds of insanity demonstrated by MPD. The diagnosis was
made by Cornelia Wilbur, Sybil's therapist.
It is worth noting here that in the relatively rare cases where men emerge
from mental health evaluations with an MPD diagnosis, often they were exam-
ined in the first place because they had committed violent crimes-including the
serial rape and murder of women. As part of the diagnosis, the accused's violent
alters are typically blamed on childhood psychological, physical, and emotional
abuse committed by his mother (Cameron and Frazer 1987; Caputi 1987; Jen-
nings 1990; Levin and Fox 1985).
9. For an interesting popular account of this phenomenon, see Little Girl Fly
Away (Stone 1994), which describes a middle-aged Kansas woman who began
receiving anonymous threatening phone calls and letters during the late 1970s
and eventually was nearly stabbed to death. After a four-year manhunt, police
determined that the culprit was the woman herself. She eventually was diagnosed
as suffering from MPD, purportedly caused by having been sexually abused by a
neighbor when she was a preschooler.
114 Debbie Nathan

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Dividing to Conquer?

Women, Men, and the Making of Multiple Personality Disorder

MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER

In 1990, twenty-nine-year-old Mark Peterson of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was

A. The existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities

B. At least two of these personalities or personality states recurrently take full

Therapy for MPD consists of recovering the memories via abreaction,

MPD, proponents claim, unless you try. therapists into

Recently, several women formerly diagnosed with MPD have sued

In short, why is this most radical expression of dissociation theory so

Though I cannot answer these questions, I want to at least pose them

Any attempt to understand MPD must first detour through anthropology,

Closer to home, several subcultures in the United States include pos-

groups, devotees value the experience of being possessed by the Holy

It is the same with MPD. Like possession states, the disorder is

In contrast to her original personality, Mary's second one was outgoing,

there is a sense that the transition from girlhood to womanhood precipi-

All right. Adrienne.

It is no coincidence that the French fascination with multiple person-

pressing research topic.3 One famous subject of James's investigations was

Observing this progression, James realized that during seances, both

One only succeeds in awakening the psychical trace of a precocious sexual

Freud eventually gave up hypnotherapy and the seduction theory of

hypnosis can be richly textured, much of the detail is actually fantasy.

100 Debbie Nathan

Dividing to Conquer? 101

At the same time that it was catching on among professionals, MPD

Many feminists not directly involved in the mental health professions

102 Debbie Nathan

ity and civil rights.

Dividing to Conquer? 103

104 Debbie Nathan

I believe that the confluence of spin, energy, and identity, as outlined in

Dividing to Conquer? 105

106 Debbie Nathan

we can return to S. and her child-abused alters in court in Wisconsin; to

Dividing to Conquer? 107

. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV).

108 Debbie Nathan

Frankel, Fred H. "Adult Reconstruction of Childhood Events in the Multiple

Fraser, Sylvia. My Father's House. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.

Goodman, G. S. "Attachment and Memory: Individual Differences in Children's

Dividing to Conquer? 109

Mayer, Robert. Satan's Children. New York: Avon, 1991.

Putnam, F W Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York:

Dividing to Conquer? 111

."Abuse of Trust." D (Dallas) (January 1992), 36-39.

Dividing to Conquer? 113

114 Debbie Nathan

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