Silent Partner

“Sharp spikes would lend traction,” I said. “Along with a few heads to step on.”

25

My plan, Monday morning, was to return to the library and search for more on Billy Vidal and the Linda Lanier dope bust. But the Fed-Ex man came to the door at 8:20 bearing a single parcel. Inside was a dictionary-size book bound in dark-green leather. A note rubber-banded to the cover said: “Here. I kept my side of it. Hope you do ditto. M.B.”

I took the book into the library, read the title page:

THE SILENT PARTNER: IDENTITY CRISIS AND EGO DYSFUNCTION IN A CASE OF MULTIPLE PERSONALITY MASQUERADING AS PSEUDO-TWINSHIP. CLINICAL AND RESEARCH RAMIFICATIONS.

by

Sharon Jean Ransom

A Dissertation Presented to the

FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

In Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

(Psychology)

June 1981

I turned to the dedication page.

To Shirlee and Jasper, who have meant more to me than they could ever imagine, and to Paul, who has guided me, adroitly, from darkness to light.

Jasper?

Friend? Lover? Another victim?

In the Acknowledgments section, Sharon reiterated her thanks to Kruse, following it with cursory appreciation for the other members of her committee: Professors Sandra J. Romansky and Milton F. Frazier.

I’d never heard of Romansky, supposed she could have come to the department after I’d left. I pulled out my American Psychological Association Directory and found her listed as a consultant in public health at a hospital in American Samoa. Her bio cited a one-year visiting lectureship at the University during the academic year 1981-1982. Her appointment had been in women’s studies, out of the anthropology department. In June of ’81 she’d been a brand new Ph.D. Twenty-six years old- two years younger than Sharon.

The “outside member” permitted on each committee, usually chosen by the candidate for easygoing personality and lack of deep knowledge in the field of research.

I could try to trace her, but the directory was three years out of date and there was no guarantee she hadn’t moved on.

Besides, there was a better source of information, closer to home.

Hard to believe the Ratman had agreed to sit on the committee. A hard-nosed experimentalist, Frazier had always despised anything vaguely patient-oriented and regarded clinical psychology as “the soft underbelly of behavioral science.”

He’d been department chairman during my student days and I recalled how he’d pushed for the “rat rule”- requiring all graduate students to conduct a full year of animal research before advancing to candidacy for the Ph.D. The faculty had voted that down, but a requirement that all doctoral research feature experimentation- control groups, manipulation of variables- had passed. Case studies were absolutely forbidden.

Yet that was exactly what this study sounded like.

My eye dropped to the last line on the page:

And deep thanks to Alex, who even in his absence, continues to inspire me.

I turned the page so hard it nearly tore. Began reading the document that had earned Sharon the right to call herself doctor.

The first chapter was very slow going- an excruciatingly complete review of the literature on identity development and the psychology of twins, flooded with footnotes, references, and the jargon Maura Bannon had mentioned. My guess was that the student reporter hadn’t gotten past it.

Chapter Two described the psychotherapy of a patient Sharon called J., a young woman whom she’d treated for seven years and whose “unique pathology and ideative processes possess structural and functional, as well as interactive, characteristics that traverse numerous diagnostic boundaries heretofore believed to be orthogonal, and manifest significant heuristic and pedagogic value for the study of identity development, the blurring of ego boundaries, and the use of hypnotic and hypnagogic regressive techniques in the treatment of idiopathic personality disorders.”

In other words, J.’s problems were so unusual, they could teach therapists about the way the mind worked.

J. was described as a young woman in her late twenties, from an upper-class background. Educated and intelligent, she’d come to California to pursue a career in an unspecified profession, and presented herself to Sharon for treatment because of low self-esteem, depression, insomnia, and feelings of “hollowness.”

But most disturbing of all were what J. called her “lost hours.” For some time, she’d awakened, as if from a long sleep, to find herself alone in strange places- wandering the streets, pulled to the side of a road in her car, lying in bed in a cheap hotel room, or sitting at the counter of a dingy coffee shop.

Ticket stubs and auto rental receipts in her purse suggested she’d flown or driven to these places, but she had no memory of doing so. No memory of what she’d done for periods that calendar checks revealed to be three or four days. It was as if entire chunks had been stolen out of her life.

Sharon diagnosed these time warps correctly as “fugue states.” Like amnesia and hysteria, fugue is a dissociative reaction, a literal splitting-off of the psyche from anxiety and conflict. A dissociative patient, confronted with a stressful world, self-ejects from that world and flies off into any number of escapes.

In hysteria, the conflict is transferred to a physical symptom- pseudoparalysis, blindness- and the patient often exhibits a belle indifference: apathy about the disability, as if it were happening to someone else. In amnesia and fugue, actual flight and memory loss take place. But in fugue the erasure is short-term; the patient remembers who he or she was before the escape, is fully in touch when he comes out of it. It’s what happens in between that remains the mystery.

Abused and neglected children learn early to cut themselves off from horror and, when they grow up, are susceptible to dissociative symptoms. The same is true of patients with fragmented or blurred identities. Narcissists. Borderlines.

By the time J. showed up in Sharon’s office, her fugues had become so frequent- nearly one a month- that she was developing a fear of leaving her house, was using barbiturates to calm her nerves.

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