Sharon took a detailed history, probing for early trauma. But J. insisted she’d had a storybook childhood- all the creature comforts, worldly, attractive parents who’d cherished and adored her up until the day they died in an automobile crash.
Everything had been wonderful, she insisted; there was no rational reason for her to be having these problems. Therapy would be brief- just a tune-up and she’d be in perfect running order.
Sharon noted that this type of extreme denial was consistent with a dissociative pattern. She thought it unwise to confront J., suggested a six-month trial period of psychotherapy and, when J. refused to commit herself for that long, agreed to three months.
J. missed her first appointment, and the next. Sharon tried to call her but the phone number she’d been given was disconnected. For the next three months she didn’t hear from J., assumed the young woman had changed her mind. Then one evening, after Sharon had seen her last patient, J. burst into the office, weeping and numbed by tranquilizers, begging to be seen.
It took a while for Sharon to calm her down and hear her story: Convinced that a change of scenery was all she really needed (“a willful flight,” commented Sharon), she’d taken a plane to Rome, shopped on the Via Veneto, dined at fine restaurants, had a wonderful time until she woke up, several days later, on a filthy Venice side street, clothing torn, half-naked, bruised and sore, her face and body caked with dried semen. She assumed she’d been raped, but had no memory of the attack. After showering and dressing, she booked the next flight back to the States, drove from the airport to Sharon’s office.
She realized now that she’d been wrong, that she seriously needed help. And she was willing to do whatever it took.
Despite that flash of insight, treatment didn’t proceed smoothly. J. was ambivalent about psychotherapy and alternated between worshipping Sharon and verbally abusing her. Over the next two years it became clear that J.’s ambivalence represented a “core element of her personality, something fundamental to her makeup.” She presented two distinct faces: the needy, vulnerable orphan begging for support, endowing Sharon with godlike qualities, flooding her with flattery and gifts; and the rage-swollen, foul-mouthed brat who claimed, “You don’t give a shit about me. You’re only into this in order to lay some giant fucking power trip on me.”
Good patient, bad patient. J. grew more facile at switching between the two, and by the end of the second year of therapy, shifts were occurring several times during a single session.
Sharon questioned her initial diagnosis and considered another:
Multiple personality syndrome, that rarest of disorders, the ultimate dissociation. Though J. hadn’t exhibited two distinct personalities, her shifts had the feel of “a latent multiple syndrome,” and the complaints that had brought her into therapy were markedly similar to those exhibited by multiples unaware of their condition.
Sharon checked with her supervisor- the esteemed Professor Kruse- and he suggested using hypnosis as a diagnostic tool. But J. refused to be hypnotized, shied away from the loss of control. Besides, she insisted, she was feeling great, was sure she was almost completely cured. And she did look much better; the fugues had lessened, the last “escape” taking place three months earlier. She was free of barbiturates, had higher self-esteem. Sharon congratulated her but confided her doubts to Kruse. He advised waiting and seeing.
Two weeks later J. terminated therapy. Five weeks after that she returned to Sharon’s office, ten pounds lighter, back on drugs, having experienced a seven-day fugue that left her stranded in the Mojave Desert, naked, her car out of gas, her purse missing, an empty pill vial in her hand. Every bit of progress seemed to have been wiped out. Sharon had been vindicated but expressed “profound sadness at J.’s regression.”
Once again, hypnosis was suggested. J. reacted with anger, accusing Sharon of “lusting for mind control… You’re just jealous because I’m so sexy and beautiful and you’re a dried-up spinster bitch. You haven’t done me a fucking bit of good, so where do you come off telling me to hand you my mind?”
J. stomped out of the office, proclaiming she was through with “this bullshit- going to find myself another shrink.” Three days later she was back, stoned on barbiturates, scabbed and sunburned, tearing at her skin and weeping that she’d “really fucked up this time,” and was willing to do anything to stop the inner pain.
Sharon began hypnotic treatment. Not surprisingly, J. was an excellent subject- hypnosis itself is a dissociation. The results were dramatic, almost immediate.
J. was indeed suffering from multiple personality syndrome. Under trance, two identities emerged: J. and Jana- identical twins, precise physical replicas of each other but psychological polar opposites.
The “J.” persona was well-mannered, well-groomed, a high achiever, though tending toward passivity. She cared about other people and, despite the unexplained absences due to fugue, managed to perform excellently in a “people-oriented profession.” She had an “old-fashioned” view of sex and romance- believed in true love, marriage, and family, absolute fidelity- but admitted to being sexually active with a man she’d cared deeply about. That relationship had ended, however, because of intrusion by her alter ego.
“Jana” was as blatant as J. was reticent. She favored tinted wigs, revealing clothing, and heavy makeup. Saw nothing wrong with “tooting dope, popping the occasional downer,” and liked to drink… strawberry daiquiris. She boasted of being a “live-for-today bitch, queen of the hop-to, a total Juicy Lucy wrapped up in a fucking Town and Country ribbon, which makes what’s inside all the more hot.” She enjoyed promiscuous sex, recounted a party during which she’d taken Quaaludes and had intercourse with ten men, consecutively, in one night. Men, she laughed, were weak, primitive apes, governed by their lusts. A “sexy snatch is everything. With one of these, I can get as many of those as I want.”
Neither “twin” acknowledged the other’s existence. Sharon regarded their existence as a pitched battle for the patient’s ego. And despite Jana’s flair for drama, it was the mannerly J. who appeared to be winning.
J. occupied about 95 percent of the patient’s consciousness, served as her public identity, carried her name. But the 5 percent claimed by Jana was the root of the patient’s problems.
Jana stepped in, Sharon theorized, during periods of high stress, when the patient’s defense system was weak. The fugues were brief periods of actually “being” Jana. Doing things that J. couldn’t reconcile with her self-image as a “perfect lady.”
Gradually, under hypnosis, Jana reappeared more and more, and eventually began describing what had happened during the “lost hours.”
The fugues were preceded by a pressing drive for complete physical escape, an almost sensual pressure to bolt. Impulsive travel soon followed: The patient would put on a wig, get in her “party clothes,” jump in her car, get onto the nearest freeway, and drive aimlessly, often for hundreds of miles, without itinerary, “not even listening to music, just the sound of my own hot blood pumping.”
Sometimes the car “took” her to the airport, where she used a credit card to book a flight at random. Other times she stayed on the road. In either case, the jaunts usually ended in debauchery: an excursion to San Francisco that climaxed with a three-day orgy of “meth sniffing and righteous group gropes with a bunch of Angels in Golden Gate Park.” Pill-eating in a Manhattan disco, followed by skin-popping heroin in a South Bronx shooting gallery. Orgies in various European cities, assignations with derelicts and “head-case street pickups.”
And a “righteous skin groove.” Making a pornographic movie “somewhere out in Florida. Fucking and sucking like a superstar.”