In some cases, however, delusions become apparent. Harry and I were both fascinated by what have been called “moral panics,” outbreaks of spreading terror, often directed at one supposedly “deviant” group or another — Jews, homosexuals, blacks, hippies, and, last but not least, witches and devils. During the 1980s and early 1990s, satanic cults popped up all over the United States, and their gruesome rites were all soberly reported in the newspapers. Countless arrests, trials, imprisonments, and wrecked lives resulted from that hysterical contagion. Social workers, psychotherapists, law enforcement officials, and the courts were all swept up in the panic. In the end, there was no evidence of a single accusation having been true. One conviction after another has been overturned. Caught in an epidemic of traveling thoughts, hundreds of people were eager to believe that the woman or man at the day-care center, the sheriff, the coach, the neighbor down the street were monsters who raped and mutilated children, who drank their blood and ate their feces for breakfast. Gruesome memories sprouted from the minds of grown-ups and children, accounts of Black Sabbath masses, of sodomy and untold numbers of murders, but no one ever found a dead body or any marks of torture on a single person. And yet people believed. There are those who still believe.
Think of the stories that bloomed and circulated after 9/11, that no Jews were killed at the World Trade Center and that the U.S. government had manufactured the atrocity. This nonsense had adamant followers, as, of course, did the Bush administration’s big lie about the same carnage and Iraq. It is easy to claim that those who are swept up in these beliefs are ignorant, but belief is a complex mixture of suggestion, mimicry, desire, and projection. We all like to believe we are resistant to the words and actions of others. We believe that their imaginings do not become ours, but we are wrong. Some beliefs are so patently wrong — the proclamations of the Flat Earth Society, for example — that dismissing them is simple for most of us. But many others reside in ambiguous territory, where the personal and the interpersonal are not easily separated.
It should not be forgotten that Harry had been rewriting her own life in psychoanalysis for years, that what she called a slowly developing “revisionist text” of her life had begun to replace an earlier “mythical” one. People and events had taken on new significance for her. Her memories had changed. Harry had not recovered any dubious memories from her childhood, but on February 19, 2003, only a month before Beneath was shown, she told me that when she looked back on her life, vast stretches of it had vanished. With a little prompting, she could easily fill in those blanks with fictions. Weren’t most memories a form of fiction anyway? She remembered what I had forgotten, and I remembered what she had forgotten, and when we remembered the same story, didn’t we remember it differently? But neither of us was prevaricating. The scenes of the past were continually being shifted and reshuffled and seen again from the vantage point of the present, that’s all, and the changes take place without our awareness. Harry had reinterpreted any number of memories. Her whole life looked different.
And, Harry asked, where does it begin? The thoughts, words, joys, and fears of other people enter us and become ours. They live in us from the start. Moral panic, the multiple-personality epidemic, and recovered-memory mania ran wild in the eighties and early nineties as a wave of suggestion passed from one person to another, a kind of mass hypnosis or spreading unconscious permission that allowed countless people to suddenly become many, a Pandora’s box. Therapists reported on patients with dozens of personalities. Whole populations housed inside a single body — men, women, and children coming out as alters. What did it mean? And then when the name of the illness was changed to Dissociated Identity Disorder and skepticism reasserted itself, the numbers of people diagnosed with the illness diminished to a few cases here and there. What Harry wanted to know was: Were we just one person or were we all many? Didn’t actors and authors invent characters for a living? Where did those people come from?
I argued that however passionate artists were, they knew the difference between creator and creation, that the illness, under whatever name, was connected to trauma and that, without question, the epidemic had been encouraged by eager and often ill-informed therapists.
Harry sat across from me, her gray hair curling out from under her beret, waving at me with her right hand, with which she knocked over her teacup and sent the pale brown liquid seeping across the tablecloth. Yes, yes, she said, but aren’t creatures and alters manufactured from the same subliminal material? Aren’t these others inside us like dream figures? She shooed away our solicitous waiter who had come running, placed her napkin over the stain, and continued. She had been working with Rune for some time, and for Beneath the two of them had been playing games and staging them on film, games with masks, costumes, and props. And when they played, things began to happen. Harry held me with her eyes. I asked her, What things?
What excited and sometimes frightened her, she said, was what Rune brought out in her, and whatever it was, she believed it had been in her for a long time but had never been let out. I recorded her words in my journal the same evening, or at least her words as I remembered them. The whole project is almost over now, Rachel. Soon the trilogy of my personas will be finished. She stressed that Rune had been embedded in Beneath as a “personified possibility.” She had borrowed the words from Kierkegaard. It was the idea of Rune she wanted to exploit, far more than Rune himself, but the idea of him had given her mobility, had opened doors inside herself. Harry’s voice grew louder, and I noticed that a man and a woman at the table next to us had stopped talking and turned to glare at us. I put my finger to my lips to indicate that she should lower her voice, and Harry’s mood turned dark. That’s what I mean, she hissed at me. Don’t be loud, Harry. Don’t make waves, Harry. Keep your knees together, Harry. It’s not polite, Harry.
Irritated, I said to her, Good grief, what have I done? I noticed you were talking too loudly to keep our conversation private, and I sent you a discreet signal. Harry leaned toward me and growled in my direction. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The thing, the person — whatever it is — is ruthless, cocky, loud, cold, superior, cruel, dismissive, and untouchable. The thing is not polite. It has never been polite.
Sounds like a real charmer, I said to Harry. I was smiling, but Harry did not find my characterization funny. She looked at me gravely. I suggested that different personalities bring out various aspects of our own, and I explained that I often feel loud with soft-spoken people or retiring and shy with someone who bellows at me. It all depends on the interaction. Harry insisted that she was talking about something far more dramatic. She had never been able to resist what she called “the pull of the other.” As a child she had always obeyed the rules. She had rarely been punished, because she couldn’t bear the idea of disappointing her parents. Neither one of them had been strict or severe, but for some reason, she had always felt wrong, not right. I worked so hard to turn myself into the right kind of child, but I never succeeded. It pained me to listen to her, but I knew I was hearing her revised story.