Authors: Debbie Nathan
She had started therapy thinking she needed only a few sessions.
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But soon she wanted more. And more. On the couch she talked about her old feelings of loneliness, her simultaneous feelings of superiority and abject worthlessness, her puzzling body aches. To pay for the treatment, which cost $15 per hour, she wrote to her father and lied, telling him she needed more money for school. But after several sessions with Connie, the insomnia got worse and the clogging of her sinuses returned. So did the old menstrual pain.
To treat these problems, Connie wrote prescriptions for powerful, habit-forming drugs, many of which had just been patented in the 1950s and were being aggressively marketed by pharmaceutical companies.
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To help her sleep, Shirley got tablets of Seconal, a highly addictive barbiturate. Taking it regularly and then trying to withdraw can cause anxiety, vivid dreams, and even hallucinations. Connie treated Shirley’s menstrual pains with Demerol, an opiate related to heroin. It is extremely habit forming, with side effects that include light-headedness, confusion, and blacking out. Shirley also got Edrisal and Daprisal for her monthly pain. Both
combined aspirin with amphetamines—now commonly known as speed, which if taken excessively can cause hallucinations and paranoia. Edrisal and Daprisal eventually proved so addictive that they were yanked from the market. But they were readily available in the 1950s, along with the narcotics and barbiturates Connie prescribed.
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Soon Shirley was in her second semester at Teachers College, still managing to attend classes and complete her school work. But she spent her free time half zonked on mind-bending medications.
Weekends were especially difficult. Shirley was alone then, mulling over her problems, hating her dead mother and simultaneously pining for her. She wished she could see more of Dr. Wilbur, but Dr. Wilbur was too successful and important for a garden-variety neurotic like Shirley. Soon the therapy would come to an end. Dr. Wilbur had provided several hours of talk and a veritable medicine chest of pharmaceuticals. That was all she could do to help.
One day in late winter, during a therapy session that had begun routinely, Shirley surprised Connie by telling her about some bizarre “jams” she’d gotten into over the years. Sometimes, she said, she would “come to” in antiques shops, her mind a blank, facing dishes or figurines that were smashed into pieces. She could not remember breaking them, but to avoid trouble she would politely apologize and pay for the damaged merchandise. She told Connie she’d had $2,000 worth of these jams. Equally disturbing, she added, was that she sometimes found herself in strange hotels with no idea what city she was in. She would struggle to figure out her location, then catch a train or bus home.
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Astounded, Connie decided that Shirley was experiencing fugue states, and she told her about having treated that very condition in the first patient she’d had after getting her medical degree in Michigan. The patient back then had been a soldier who wandered off for long periods of time, then came to with no memory of disappearing.
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Fugue states were no garden variety condition, Connie realized, and as she talked with Shirley she went back in her mind to wartime Omaha. She recalled the day Shirley walked into her office, charged to the window and pounded her hand on the glass. Back then Connie had thought this strange behavior was a hysterical
seizure. Now she believed it was a fugue state. A person suffering from the condition would leave home for hours, days, or even weeks, acting like a completely different person. None of this behavior was intentional, for fugue states were caused by dissociation—the splitting of consciousness. They were a very rare form of hysteria. And from Connie’s point of view, they were spectacular.
Ten days after receiving her fugue-state diagnosis, Shirley had a Tuesday morning appointment with Connie. Answering the doorbell, Connie found her patient looking different than usual and acting oddly. Shirley always came dressed in modest little suits with color-coordinated hats, gloves, and shoes. Today she wore only a skirt and blouse—no jacket, no accessories. Usually, she settled herself primly on the couch, and spoke softly and timidly. Now her movements were energetic, her voice loud and childish. Connie was confused.
“How are you today?” she asked her patient.
“I’m fine but Shirley isn’t,” was the answer. “She was so sick she couldn’t come. So I came instead.”
Connie did not miss a beat. “Tell me about yourself,” she said.
“I’m Peggy!” the patient chirped.
She gave details. Peggy was a little girl with dark hair and a Dutch-boy haircut. Shirley couldn’t stand up for herself, so Peggy took over her body to stand up for her. Shirley couldn’t get angry, so Peggy got angry. Shirley was always scared and Peggy liked to have fun. When she gained control she went anywhere she felt like. Including to Philadelphia.
Peggy did not tell Connie about the game Shirley and her mother had played when Mattie would call her daughter Peggy, Peggy Ann, or Peggy Lou. When Mattie playfully used these names Shirley would act saucy and mischievous. Mattie would laugh and tell the “Peggys” how cute they were.
Peggy talked all during her therapy hour. Connie acted as though speaking with her were the most natural thing in the world, and she invited Peggy to come back three days later. Privately she hoped Shirley would emerge then for at least part of the time. Connie planned to gently break it to her then that she had a condition even stranger than fugue states.
The woman at the door on Friday had on a suit with all the accessories. It was Shirley, and she apologized for missing her last appointment. Connie told her she hadn’t missed it—she had actually been in the office as someone else. But before Connie could introduce the subject of multiple personality disorder, Shirley changed the subject to something mundane. She kept it there until the end of the session.
Next week, the patient showed up with no hat or gloves. Still, she seemed poised and well mannered rather than loud and childish, like Peggy. “I’m Vicky,” she announced to Connie—short for Victoria Antoinette Charleau. She did not mention that Vicky had been Shirley’s imaginary playmate when she was a child. Her teachers had known about her, and as a child, Shirley herself had recognized Vicky as a daydream. But Vicky merely explained she’d been raised in Minnesota but her real family lived in Europe. Soon they would be coming to America.
Connie asked Vicky if there were any other people inside Shirley besides herself and Peggy.
“Oh yes!” Vicky answered. As a matter of fact, there were two Peggys. The real name of the one Connie already knew was Peggy Lou, but there was also Peggy Ann. Both were outgoing, though Peggy Ann was more aggressive.
Connie told Vicky that she and the Peggys were welcome to come see her on Park Avenue anytime. Anyone who happened to be using Shirley’s body should feel free to drop by, she said.
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Vicky left, and Connie, flabbergasted, did the math. She’d known about multiple personality disorder for years, of course. Shirley Mason’s case was stunning. She had a least four personalities, more than Connie had ever heard of. “This is one of the most outstanding cases of all time,” she told herself. “It exposes what Freud called ‘the unconscious.’” Curing a patient of multiple personalities would be the ultimate test of Connie’s capabilities. As she recalled years later, she believed Shirley would make an excellent research project.
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Connie decided that she would have to psychoanalyze not just Shirley but Peggy Ann, Peggy Lou, and Vicky—yet no one had ever used psychoanalysis to dig into the mind of a multiple. No one had trawled for the dark traumas that must have caused such an extreme dissociation of memories and identity. Even Eve’s doctor had touched only lightly on his patient’s
childhood history. The worst experiences he’d found were a time when Eve saw a man whose body had been cut into pieces in an accident, and a funeral she attended in which she had to touch her dead grandmother’s face. Much worse things must have happened to Shirley, Connie surmised. Things as awful as the horrors of war that shattered soldiers. Things so bad that they fractured a child’s mind into many pieces, many personalities.
Connie vowed to cure her patient no matter how much time it took. She would do it in her office, because Shirley deserved personalized, loving care, not warehousing in a crowded mental hospital.
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She decided to see Shirley for three therapy sessions a week. Money was irrelevant. If need be, the treatment would be given on credit.
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At Shirley’s next appointment she showed up as Shirley, and Connie broke the news that she had multiple personalities. Connie expected her patient to be horrified and frightened; instead, Shirley seemed curious, and even relieved to have “a bona fide condition.” She rushed out to the library to read Morton Prince’s 1905 book on multiple personality again.
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Within weeks of receiving her new diagnosis, Shirley was regularly presenting herself at Connie’s office as Vicky or one of the Peggys. Then, one day, she appeared as a fifth person: a young boy named Mike. He talked about using carpentry tools to make things with his dad, Walter Mason.
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By now, Connie had noticed the difference between Shirley’s multiple personalities and those of notables Miss Christine Beauchamp and Eve. Those women’s alters had also been women—adults. But Shirley’s were all children. Even Vicky, with her beautiful manners, told Connie she was only thirteen years old. Talking about her family, Vicky described having brothers and sisters in England, and loving parents there who one day would cross the Atlantic to rescue her from Minnesota. When Connie asked why she lived there, Vicky described herself as a caretaker for Shirley and the children, and she hinted at terrible secrets in the Mason family. She would not elaborate.
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Connie decided to use World War II–era narcosynthesis therapy to extract details. But before she went back to Shirley’s childhood, she wanted to know what happened during the “fugues”—particularly a recent trip to
Philadelphia. She asked Shirley’s permission to inject her with Pentothal. As an Adventist, Shirley was frightened of mind-bending drugs, but by the end of 1955 she reluctantly agreed to the treatment.
The first Pentothal session occurred in her apartment. As Shirley lay in her bed, Connie tied Shirley’s upper arm with a tourniquet to make her veins pop out. Then she filled a large syringe with the chemical and plunged the needle into one of the veins. Shirley groggily became Peggy. In a little girl’s voice, she talked of traveling to Philadelphia, checking into a hotel near Center City, and getting a yen for some new pajamas. She found a children’s clothing store and bought a brightly colored pair. She put them on in the hotel, curled up in bed, slept well, and later awoke and did some sightseeing. Then she turned back into Shirley and didn’t know where she was.
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Connie turned on a tape recorder to capture the story. For years thereafter, she would inject Shirley, then push the “on” button of her reel-to-reel machine.
Almost all the tapes have since been destroyed. But some transcripts remain, together with the transcriptionists’ accounts of how Shirley sounded while she was talking. One record of an early Pentothal therapy session suggests that Shirley produced torrents of what the old military psychiatrists had recognized as dreamlike, false-memory garble.
The transcript, from a recording made in 1955, indicates that Shirley had received prior Pentothal injections. Earlier, Peggy had told Connie she first appeared to Shirley at the age of seven, when Shirley was playing in a hayloft with a boy named John Greenwald. He had jumped onto an old cash register with a gun in it, Peggy added. The gun went off, shooting John and killing him. The horror of witnessing his death caused Shirley to dissociate. She disappeared mentally, and Peggy took over her body.
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Peggy’s story was chilling, but it was fantasy. Dodge Center newspapers from the early 1940s and state death records in Minnesota indicate that John died when Shirley was seventeen years old, not a young child, and that she was not present at the gun accident which killed him. But Connie didn’t know about these records. She assumed that Shirley’s Pentothal-induced story was a real memory.
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Now, in the session memorialized in the transcript, Shirley trembled and screamed. “The people, the people!” she wailed.
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Who were “the people”? Had they abused her when she was a child? In
earlier Pentothal sessions Connie had pressed for details but gotten none. Now she hoped Vicky would talk. She called for her, and Vicky’s well-bred voice responded from the couch.
“Tell me about Peggy,” Connie asked.
“She’s always mad,” answered Vicky. “She’s mad at her dog because he won’t listen to her, and he doesn’t love her.”
Unaffectionate terriers revealed nothing about mind-shattering trauma. Connie pushed on. Vicky offered another angle.
“Peggy thinks that she’s a boy. She gets mad because she knows she isn’t. She wants to get married when she grows up and she wants to be the boy … the man.”
Connie changed the subject, still looking for abuse. During previous Penthothal sessions Shirley had said she was afraid of music. She said she hated her childhood piano recitals because when she made a mistake the audience laughed, humiliating her. Connie wondered if something much worse was involved. She asked Vicky why Shirley had such animus toward music.
“Because music is beautiful … and it’s sad and nobody cares.”
“Why should something beautiful hurt?” Connie asked.
Inadvertently or not, she had cued her patient she was looking for trauma.