Silent Partner

between identicals was due to heredity, how much to genetics?

“Riding with the resistance,” she termed it. Taking careful note of the patient’s body language and speech tones, synchronizing her own movements with them.

Exploiting the hidden message, in accordance with Dr. P. P. Kruse’s theory of communication dynamics.

This went on for several more months; at a casual glance, nothing more than two friends gabbing. But the patient responded to the shift in strategy by slipping deeper than ever into hypnosis. Showing such profound suggestibility that she developed total skin anesthesia to a lit match, eventually adjusting her breathing to the cadence of Sharon’s speech. Appearing ready for direct suggestion. But Sharon never offered one, just kept on chatting.

Then, during the fifty-fourth session, the patient slipped spontaneously into the Jana role and began describing a wild night that had taken place in Italy- a party at a private villa in Venice, peopled by weird, grinning characters and fed by flowing booze, abundant dope.

At first just another Jana orgy tale, every prurient detail recounted with relish. Then, halfway into the story, something else.

“My sister’s there,” Jana said, amazed. “A fucking wall-flower over in that corner, in that ugly unvarnished chair.”

Sharon: “What’s she feeling?”

“Terrified. Scared shitless. Men are sucking her nipples- naked, hairy. Baboons- they’re swarming over her, sticking things into her.”

Sharon: “Things?”

“Their things. Their scummy things. They’re hurting her and laughing and there’s the camera.”

Sharon: “Where’s the camera?”

“There, on the other side of the room. I’m- oh, no, I’m holding it, I want to see everything, the lights are all on. But she doesn’t like it. But I’m filming her anyway. I can’t stop.”

As she continued to describe the scene, Jana’s voice faltered and quivered. She described J. as “exactly like… looking exactly like me, but, you know, more innocent. She was always more innocent. They’re really going at her. I feel…”

Sharon: “What?”

“Nothing.”

Sharon: “What did you feel, Jana? When you saw what was happening to your sister?”

“Nothing.” Pause. “Bad.”

Sharon: “Very bad?”

“A… a little bad.” Angry expression. “But it was her own fucking fault! Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, right? She shouldn’t have gone if she didn’t want to play, right?”

Sharon: “Did she have a choice, Jana?”

Pause. “What do you mean?”

Sharon: “Did J. have a choice about going to the party?”

Long silence.

Sharon: “Jana?”

“Yeah. I heard you. First I thought yeah, sure she did- everyone has a choice. Then, I…”

Sharon: “What, Jana?”

“I don’t know- I mean I really don’t know her. I mean we’re exactly the same but there’s something about her that… I don’t know. It’s like we’re- I don’t know- more than sisters. I don’t know what the right word is, maybe part- Forget it.”

Pause.

Sharon: “Partners?”

Jana, startled: “I said forget it, enough of this shit! Let’s talk about fun stuff, what I was doing at the fucking party.”

Sharon: “All right. What were you doing?”

Jana, baffled; after a long silence: “I don’t… remember. Aw, it was probably boring anyway- any party she’d go to had to be.”

A door had been opened; Sharon restrained herself from nudging it further. She let Jana ramble on, waited until all her anger dissipated, then ended the session, certain that a breakthrough had taken place. For the first time in more than three years, J. had allowed the twins to coexist. And had offered a new clue: The word partner seemed to have strong emotional loading. Sharon decided to pursue that, brought it up the next time she hypnotized J.

“What’s that, doctor? What did you just say?”

Sharon: “Partners. I suggested that you and Jana are something more than just sisters. Or even twins. Perhaps you’re partners. Psychological partners.”

J. is thoughtful, silent, starts to smile.

Sharon: “What’s funny, J.?”

“Nothing. I suppose you’re right- you usually are.”

Sharon: “But does it make sense to you?”

“I suppose so, though if she is my partner, she’s certainly a silent one. We never talk. She refuses to talk to me.” Pause. Her smile widens. “Silent partners. What business are we in?”

Sharon: “The business of living.”

J., amused: “I suppose so.”

Sharon: “Would you like to talk more about that? About being a silent partner?”

J.: “I don’t know. I guess so… Maybe not. No. She’s so rude and unpleasant, I really can’t tolerate being around her. Let’s change the subject, if you don’t mind.”

J. didn’t show up for the next session, or the next. When she finally reappeared, two months later, she seemed composed, claimed her life was going great, she just needed a tune-up.

Sharon resumed hypnotherapy, continued her attempt to get the “twins” to meet. Five more months of frustration, during which Sharon began thinking of herself as a failure, wondered if J.’s needs couldn’t be better served by another therapist, “one with more experience, perhaps a male.”

But Kruse encouraged her to continue, advising still more reliance on nonverbal manipulation.

Another month of status quo and J. disappeared once again. Five weeks later she materialized, bursting into the office while Sharon was seeing another patient, calling that woman a “fucking wimp,” telling her, “your problems don’t mean diddly,” and ordering her out of the office.

Despite Sharon’s attempt to take charge of the situation, the other patient ran out crying. Sharon told J. never to do that again. J. became Jana and accused Sharon of being “an evil and selfish cunt. You’re a fucking manipulating cunt out to get everything I own, everything I am. All you want to do is bleed me fucking dry!” After threatening to sue Sharon and ruin her, she stormed out of the office.

And never returned.

End of treatment. Time for the failing therapist to ruminate.

A hundred-page discussion section. A hundred pages of Monday-morning quarterbacking. The end point: Sharon’s realization that her attempt to reconcile J. and Jana had been doomed to failure at the outset because the “twins” were “intractable psychic enemies; the triumph of one necessitated the death of the other- a psychological death, but one that had to be so vivid, so decisive that it might have been a literal demise.”

Instead of seeking integration, she realized now, she should have worked at strengthening good J.’s identity, teamed up with the good twin to destroy the “destructive, flagrantly disturbed Jana.”

“There’s no room,” she concluded, “in this young woman’s psyche for any type of partner, let alone the conflictual, silent partners represented by the splits of her personality. The nature of human identity is such that the business of living is, must be, a solitary process. Lonely at times, but enriched by the strength and satisfaction that comes from self-determination and a fully integrated ego.

“Alone, we’re born; alone, we die.”