1999

22.1

Robert Doak

Who Am I This Time? Multiple Personality Disorder and Popular Culture

On July 5, 1999, NBC’s Dateline reported that the Washington State Supreme Court had ordered a review of Bill Green’s prison sentence for a brutal rape. No one, not even Green’s attorney, questioned the fact that police had caught their man and that, according to normal standards, the trial had been fair. The victim, surprisingly, was opposed to legal punishment for Green. She was not permitted to testify for the defense, however, because her reason was not accepted by the lower court. The contention of forty-four-year-old Mary Alice Santinini, who was also Green’s therapist, was that "the body of Bill Green did it but not Bill Green. It was Tyrone."

Santinini’s enigmatic statement was one that would shake the system of jurisprudence in the state of Washington and lead to the decision which would make Washington the twenty-fifth state to accept a plea based on a little-known disease called multiple personality disorder (MPD). During Green’s prison interview on Dateline, a number of alternate personalities emerged with remarkable clarity. With each shift, reporter Dennis Murphy pointed out differences in posture, voice quality, and linguistic style, as well as attitude. In another part of the program, Santinini, foregoing any concern for privacy, described the rape and enumerated her reasons for supporting Green. At the end of the Dateline segment, there was little doubt that Bill Green did suffer from MPD, but the overriding question remained: did his disorder absolve him from guilt?The question strikes at the heart of our assumptions about moral and legal responsibility, but the legal debate is only a part of a nation-wide interest in MPD that has grown significantly in the last decade. It should not be surprising, therefore, that popular literature, which is a barometer of the values, attitudes, and beliefs of large numbers of people, should reflect this interest. The standard definition of MPD is the one offered by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which calls it "the existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities, each of which is dominant at a particular time" (qtd. in Bliss 119). Designated in recent psychological literature as "dissociative identity," the disorder is particularly intriguing in fiction because it is characterized by sudden, radical shifts in personality that the patient is often unaware of.

Almost unheard of in popular culture until the 1950s, MPD burst on the public’s consciousness in CorbettThigpin and Hervey Cleckley’s 1957 book The Three Faces of Eve, which was made into an award-winning film starring Joanne Woodward. At that time, according to Thigpin and Cleckley, it was assumed that "multiple personality is a rarity in psychopathology" (vii). Since then many more publications on the subject have appeared and diagnoses of the disorder have multiplied. In June 1999, amazon.com listed 122 books on the subject, most written within the last ten years. In 1985 psychiatrist Eugene Bliss noted that the belief in the rarity of multiple personality is "probably incorrect" (118). "Cases are now being detected in large numbers," he said, adding that he himself had diagnosed more than "a hundred during the past five years" (118). Irwin and Barbara Sarason’s 1996 text on abnormal psychology suggests that the disorder "is of increasing interest because of the marked increase in the number of cases currently being described . . . and the linkage that has been made . . . [with] traumatic childhood experiences" (147). The Sarasons add that "improved diagnostic criteria . . . are thought to have contributed to the increased number of reported cases" (147). Recently the disorder gained added attention when comedienne and talk show host Rosanne Barr revealed her own experience with MPD and devoted two hour-long shows to discussion of two well-known cases of MPD. On May 11, 1999, The Rosanne Show featured Truddi Chase, author of When Rabbit Howls, and on June 1, 1999, Rosanne discussed the disorder with Chris Sizemore, the Eve Lancaster of Three Faces of Eve. Similar talk-show appearances by Dr. Cameron West, who chronicled his own experiences as a multiple in First Person Plural, have increased the public’s awareness of the disorder.As Thigpin and Cleckley’s book indicates, case studies of MPD patients are often as interesting as fiction about the subject. More recent studies confirm the dramatic potential of actual cases. Among them are Flora Schreiber’s book Sybil (1973), which became the basis of an acclaimed film starring Sally Field, and the made-for-TV films Shattered Mind (1996) with Heather Locklear and Her Deadly Rival (1996) with Annie Potts.

The most prominent early treatment of the disorder in popular fiction is "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886), a story which reveals MPD’s kinship with the shadow archetype. Other instances of the disorder appear in Psycho (1960), when Norman Bates is revealed to be his mother, and Bewitched (1945), a film in which a character kills a person while undergoing a personality shift. In preparation for popular culture’s extraordinary focus on the disorder in the 1990s, there were several milestones in the discussion of the disease in the 1980s. Among them were Jeremy Hawthorn’s 1983 study Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character, which perceived latent instances of the disorder in fiction antedating psychiatry’s discovery of the problem, and the DSM’s 1987 revision of its criteria and symptom list.

Popular culture’s interest in the phenomenon is nowhere clearer than in four recent works, the detective novels All Around the Town (1992) by Mary Higgins Clark and Cain His Brother (1995) by Anne Perry, the espionage novel by Richard Aellen called The Cain Conversion (1993), and Brian De Palma’s horror film Raising Cain (1992). Each of these works, except Perry’s Victorian tale, identifies the disorder explicitly, and all four examine common symptoms of the malady. As a result, the narratives—even Cain His Brother—take on the appearance of case studies reminiscent of Thigpen and Cleckley’s and Schreiber’s books.

There are several literary reasons why contemporary writers who deal with crime, espionage, and horror might be attracted to MPD. Most obviously the disorder presents the therapist with a complex mystery, especially because most patients have no awareness of what their alters do and because patients typically demonstrate a reluctance to talk about what they know about their "other selves." The Sarasons report that when a person does know of the existence of alternates, "in the majority of cases . . . the individual tries to hide" them (148). It is this feature of the disorder that presents the greatest obstacle to solving the mystery in Clark’s All Around the Town as Laurie Kenyon’s psychiatrist finds that Laurie’s seven personalities have make a pact to say nothing about each other.

An additional reason for popular culture’s interest is that the personality shifts, which occur generally when stress becomes so heavy that a stronger, more agressive personality takes over, can give way to violence. In All Around the Town, for instance, a shift occurs; and one of Laurie’s alters stabs a favorite English teacher; in Raising Cain a number of shifts result in several murders and kidnappings. In each of these cases the core personality undergoes a "blackout" when a shift occurs, and after the stress subsides, the core personality returns and feels no guilt since it knows nothing of what happened during the "blackout." What makes the shifts even more frightening, however, is their unpredictability. (Only after psychotherapy do some patients acquire a limited ability to recognize when a shift is imminent.) Unpredictability is a feature of the disorder which makes suspense a common characteristic of MPD narratives, a fact made especially clear in Raising Cain. In Richard Aellen’s spy novel The Cain Conversion, however, there is an attempt to gain control of the shifts. Psychiatrists not only gain an ability to predict the occurrence of shifts; they develop the ability to trigger shifts in the subject of their experiments. It is a mastery which, though bordering on the incredible, is corroborated by Chris Sizemore, who, during her appearance on the Rosanne Show, accused her own therapist of programming her to respond to a certain telephone message. As most discussions indicate, MPD develops as a result of uncommon stress on a very young subject, like Laurie Kenyon, who was kidnapped at the age of four. However, as Hawthorn reports, researchers have found that only especially imaginative persons create alternates (11), for the shifts amount to self-hypnosis. Most people do not possess this self-hypnotic power and simply descend into insanity when confronted with overwhelming stress. This tendency is demonstrated in The Cain Conversion, when the KGB’s chief psychiatrist reports on her many failures to develop multiple personalities in a variety of subjects: "Some went insane and others [became] so malleable to suggestion that they had no ego, no identity at all" (197).For especially sensitive and fanciful persons, however, the shifts become a means of protection. For this reason, Truddi Chace interprets MPD as a wonderous ability of some creative minds to defend themselves. Because of the extraordinary imaginative ability of the typical MPD subject, it is not uncommon to find subjects with unusual artistic talents. Sybil Dorsett, for instance, was a superb painter, and the drawings of Chris Sizemore and Cameron West also demonstrate extraordinary artistic skill.

MPD develops most commonly as a result of parental abuse. At times it is simple verbal abuse, as in the novel Cain His Brother, where a guardian takes every opportunity to humiliate the nephew in his care because he had despised the boy’s father, who was his own brother. In The Cain Conversion, however, the child Misha is subjected to constant physical, as well as emotional abuse. Under the direction of psychiatrists, Misha’s father beats his son, kills his pets, and repeatedly castigates him because the boy is a reminder of his hated mother, who left her husband for another man. Often the abuse is sexual, as it is in Cameron West’s First Person Plural, Sybil, and All Around the Town, although in the last instance it is Laurie Kenyon’s abductor, not a parent, who rapes and terrorizes her.Once a person develops the tendency to retreat into another personality, any kind of stress is capable of initiating a shift. Often patients hear voices prior to undergoing a shift, a trait reminiscent of the behavior of Dean Koontz’s main character in Whispers, a novel with an obvious kinship to MPD narratives. In Perry’s Cain His Brother, there is an added implication that Victorian social constraints are instrumental in causing the shifts. As a rule, after three or four weeks of being a diligent business manager and dutiful father and husband, Angus Stonefield begins to have headaches and hear voices, after which he departs for Limehous Reach, a slum area of London, where he takes on the identity of his wild twin. When he is finally cornered, he yells, "No more virtuous wife by the fireside! No more church on Sunday and ‘Yes sir,’ ‘No sir’" (240).Since mystery is prominent in cases of MPD, detectives usually play significant roles in popular fiction featuring MPD. Perry’s Victorian "agent of inquiry," William Monk, is perhaps most representative. It is his investigations which reveal that the supposed twin, Caleb Stonefield, is actually an alternate of Angus. The crusty detective in Clark’s novel determines that Laurie’s abductor is a dynamic television evangelist, and he intervenes during the climax to save Laurie and her sister. In Raising Cain, however, the police detectives are largely ineffective until they solicit the help of a psychologist familiar with MPD.

Not surprisingly, psychiatrists also generally play important roles in MPD narratives. On one level they become surrogate detectives who try to determine the source of a patient’s stress and eventually try to achieve integration of the disparate personalities. Although Linda Badley has written that "in recent horror texts . . . analysts are portrayed as inept or invasive and manipulative" (17), in MPD stories, psychiatrists are often heroes. Typical is Clark’s handsome Australian specialist, Dr. Justin Donnely, who takes the lead in uncovering Laurie Kenyon’s past and at the end marries Laurie’s sister. In the pre-Freudian setting of Cain His Brother, there is, understandably, no psychoanalyst, but a vicar in Angus’ home town provides the equivalent of a psychological diagnosis of Angus. In language remarkably reminiscent of twentieth-century case studies, he reports that after being abused, "the boy created an alternative self which would take the blame for his failures, and which would also be free to hate his uncle as he wished to" (401).

The psychiatrists in The Cain Conversion and Raising Cain are more problematical. The leading Russian psychiatrist is responsible for the KGB’s diabolical plan to fashion an assassin, and yet she expresses an extraordinary degree of sympathy for the subject of her experiments and tries to protect him in the end. The main psychiatrist in Raising Cain, however, is driven by a Faustian desire for knowledge. The Norwegian father of Carter Nix, a psychiatrist of international renown, carries out abusive experiments on children in order to gain knowledge of MPD. The job of acquiring the children falls to Carter and Cain, and they are only barely prevented from kidnapping the two-year-old daughter of Carter. The evil portrait of the elder Nix is offset only by the police psychiatrist, Dr. Waldheim, who had once worked with Nix and who alerts the police to Dr. Nix’s plans. In All Around the Town and The Cain Conversion, MPD sufferers achieve a satisfying wholeness, and the means through which integration is achieved are similar. One subject, Laurie Kenyon, has the help of a psychoanalyst, but both rely ultimately on their families in overcoming their malady. Just as Suzy Mitchell in Shattered Mind achieved integration after recognizing the threat to her family, Laurie Kenyon is able to overcome her susceptibility to personality shifts because of love for her sister, and Bill Sullivan overcomes the power of the KGB’s triggering message with thoughts of his wife and two children.

There is one way in which popular narratives depart from the case studies of actual MPD sufferers. Instead of twenty-two personalities, which Chris Sizemore described, or the ninety-two, which Truddi Chase reported, fictional accounts of the disease generally include only a few. In Cain His Brother there are only two personalities, as there are in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." In All Around the Town there are seven, and in Raising Cain only four are identified, although many more are implicated. Literary reasons may account for the more manageable numbers in popular narratives, and they might also be behind the practice of pairing off the personalities, which is not a tendency reported in major case studies. Most representative of this coupling practice is the lineup in Raising Cain, where Cain is the violent alter to Carter, and the meek, seven-year-old Josh is the polar opposite for the menacing Margo. The fact that some of the alters, like Margo, are of different genders is, however, quite typical. Four of the seventeen personalities Cameron West describes in First Person Plural are female and one of Laurie Kenyon’s is male. Ironically, the most frightening scene in Raising Cain occurs as the female alter prepares to kidnap Carter Nix’s wife and daughter at the end of the movie. After the elder Nix has been killed, De Palma creates a scene in which Margo looms over little Amy Nix as she searches among the bushes for a whispering voice. Margo appears in a screaming red dress and bulky black wig, and the film ends abruptly with Margo towering behind Amy and her oblivious mother.

One other interesting correlation between popular narratives and actual case studies occurs in fiction’s occasional allusions to psychological documents. One example occurs in Raising Cain during Dr. Waldheim’s explanation of MPD to a bevy of bored policemen. She mentions a best-selling book she had written with the elder Dr. Nix, and a police official offhandedly asks whether the book was called "The Three Faces of Cain." Similar allusions to MPD literature occur in The Cain Conversion when the chief KGB psychiatrist recommends that another character read The Three Faces of Eve and when she borrows a traumatic event in The Three Faces to create an "aversion memory" for Bill Sullivan. The purpose is to keep Sullivan from traveling to Kansas, his false childhood home, where he would likely learn that his personal history had been fabricated. With this in mind, the psychiatrist replicates through hypnosis an episode similar to one in Three Faces in which the young Eve Lancaster (Chris Sizemore) is forced to kiss the body of her dead grandmother. The only difference is that after hypnosis Sullivan remembers kissing his dead grandfather.This kind of self-referentiality is perhaps an indication of the popular writer’s need to authenticate his/her fictional treatments of the disorder. It is a need which is made apparent especially in long explanations of the disorder. In The Cain Conversion, Aellen takes a very explicit approach as he includes Dr. Marina Sorin’s journal entries from October 30, 1962, to November 23, 1977. In these notes, the Soviet psychiatrist not only charts her attempts to engender personality shifts in Misha Amenov but inserts much background material from previous MPD research. DePalma’s approach in Raising Cain is quite different—even a bit ridiculous. In a five-minute section of the movie, Dr. Waldheim gives police detectives a crash course in the disorder as they walk down innumerable halls in the police station. While she talks, the policemen make satirical motions behind her back and frequently have to pull her in the right direction after she turns down the wrong hallway.

These sometimes awkward attempts at authentication are probably unnecessary, given the extraordinary attention that popular culture has paid the disorder. It is an attention which is not surprising since MPD cases commonly include prominent motifs in popular fiction, like mystery, violence, and suspense. On a deeper level, however, popular culture’s interest can be related to a more general concern for what it means to be human. As Flora Schreiber said in Sybil, exploration of the phenomenon gives us a new insight into the normal and suggests "the uncanny power of the unconscious mind in motivating human behavior" (3).

Ultimately, popular MPD narratives offer lessons in the complex role of imagination.MPD sufferers are extraordinarily imaginative, but they are unique only in the completeness with which their imagination separates them from "real" life. For MPD patients, imagination is both life-saving, and life threatening. It can release them from overwhelming trauma but can lead them to violence, which, as Cameron West demonstrates, is sometimes directed at themselves. The loss of control which the shifts entail leads to an essential question: "Who Am I?" It is a question central to all self-exploration but one which hovers at the center of The Cain Conversion, All Around the Town, Raising Cain, and Cain His Brother. It is the primary question which the Washington State Supreme Court must consider as it weighs the issue of Bill Green’s legal responsibility.

Robert Doak
Department of English
Wingate University
Wingate, NC 28174-0157

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