Authors: Debbie Nathan
“Checked out of lab, 7 to 7:30. Worked with Willie at Teachers College. Home by 9:45. Then Doctor called.”
The diary described how Connie said she had “been thinking it over” and decided to do narcosynthesis on Shirley that very night. “But it’s late,” Shirley protested. “Germs and disease don’t wait,” Connie answered, adding that she would be at Shirley’s home in seven minutes. She arrived at 10:15 and injected Shirley with Pentothal. The session lasted until midnight.
Shirley remembered nothing except falling asleep, then trying hard to wake up. “Who is Mary?” Connie asked when she was conscious again.
“My grandmother,” Shirley answered. But according to Connie, another personality had appeared, named Mary. Besides Mary there were five others now: Peggy Ann, Peggy Lou, Vicky, Mike, and Helen.
Connie talked more about Mary, then about Peggy. She finally left at a quarter to one in the morning. Shirley lay in bed, dizzy from the barbiturates, half in and half out of her mind. She heard Willie walking outside her room. She thought it was her dead mother. She screamed.
A few days later, according to the diary, on a Saturday in February,
Connie and Shirley began a week-long marathon of daily Pentothal injections and shock treatment. Shirley reported it made her terribly sick and nauseated. According to Connie, Shirley’s urge to vomit came not from the drugs and shock but from Shirley’s traumatic past. “What are you trying to throw up?” she asked. “Mother?”
Shirley didn’t answer.
On Sunday, Connie gave her more Pentothal, Shirley’s arm became sore from the injection, and she spent Monday crying. Toward evening she had a “Peggy episode.” Connie made a nighttime house call, bringing her syringes with her. On Tuesday Shirley went to Connie’s for a therapy session and Willie came to the office to pick her up. Shirley got sick on the bus and later remembered nothing about the office visit or the ride home.
On Wednesday Connie administered phenobarbital. Shirley slept for two hours until Connie roused her and took her home. Again, she did not recall the trip. Next day Connie again injected Pentothal, as well as another barbiturate. Shirley got so nauseated and woozy that she couldn’t walk to the bathroom; Willie had to carry her. Connie left Shirley’s apartment, came back, left, came back, left, and came back. At the end of several hours Shirley began talking about her mother.
On Friday—again according to Shirley’s diary—Connie came to the apartment three times. She “[g]ave Pentothal and shock, sustained release spansules of Phenobarbital,” Shirley later wrote, using technical language which suggested she was already thinking of herself as a doctor. “Began to menstruate,” she wrote about herself.
Saturday, Connie left town for a weekend trip to Michigan. She called Shirley as soon as she got home on Sunday, and next day she came to the apartment.
Peggy appeared during that visit, then disappeared. Shirley returned, and Connie informed her she had dissociated into her other personalities and “lost over a week” of her life. Connie put her arms around her amazing patient. She held her tight.
W
ITHIN TWO YEARS OF STARTING
therapy with Connie in New York, Shirley had turned into a drug addict. Pentothal was her fix. She experienced pain and terrible forebodings when the needle first went in, along with strange, sickening smells and tastes. But as the potent barbiturate coursed through her veins she grew woozy and joyful. She opened wide up to Connie then, talking and talking—even about shameful things, such as masturbation, that she would otherwise never dare mention.
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Connie would keep the thick needle in place in Shirley’s arm for hours, intermittently pushing the plunger to release more Pentothal. As she manipulated the syringe, she asked about Shirley’s childhood and recorded the answers. Afterward, she would cover her with a blanket and let her sleep off the drug. Shirley would awaken hours later with no memory of what she’d done or said on the Pentothal.
At her next therapy session Connie would tell her how she’d acted, assigning proper names to each behavior. When Shirley had run around pounding her fists and cursing her mother for not letting her paint green chickens, Connie identified the complainer as Peggy. When she’d sat and chatted demurely, she was Vicky. Praying, reciting poetry, and warning about the Adventist end of the world earned her the identity Mary Lucinda—Shirley’s dead grandmother’s name.
While high on Pentothal, Shirley herself started to feel that she was remembering having recently spent time as different selves. “There were
two people: Mary, and the one Willie previously referred to as the quiet one who doesn’t know her name,” she wrote in her treatment diary after recovering from a session with the needle. “Each knew what the other was saying and doing. They took turns talking, planning, buying, etc.” One of the alter personalities, Shirley recalled, had even taken her old paper doll collection from childhood out of a cupboard and spread it on her bed.
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For two or three days after these injections Shirley often would feel peaceful and relaxed. She could take a chemistry test without shaking and hyperventilating, and instead of tossing and turning at night she slept like a rock. But she started to crave Pentothal. Even when she wasn’t high she could taste it. Sometimes after receiving a dose, she wandered on foot through Manhattan talking to herself, and the next day she would feel so depressed that she would pop fistfuls of pills, then get jittery hands and diarrhea. She couldn’t remember what she read in her chemistry books or heard in her lectures. Once she left a laboratory class in Manhattan and ended up in the Bronx without knowing how she’d gotten there.
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Despite Shirley’s increasingly troublesome dependence on Pentothal, Connie was still convinced that narcosynthesis would return her to her early childhood and unearth the secret traumas that had split her mind. She pressed her patient relentlessly for more “memories.” She sat on Shirley’s bed, chuckling, as Shirley’s cat batted its paws at the Pentothal injection equipment.
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During this time she discussed other patients: the woman, for instance, who suffered an emotional crisis in the wee hours and kept Connie up all night. When Shirley asked if it was OK for one patient to hear about another patient, Connie said yes, if the patient doing the hearing was special, as Shirley was. “I don’t deal with you like I do the others,” Connie said.
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Still, Shirley could not remember trauma—nothing beyond her earlier talk of what probably was her tonsillectomy, and the “vaginal assaults” that could well have been a childish misinterpretation—a screen memory—of what Adventist enemas felt like. But this was old material, from the first months of therapy in the mid-1950s. Now years had passed, and Shirley’s new “trauma” memories were pathetically trivial. Mattie Mason had been opinionated, Shirley told Connie. Mattie was pushy. She yelled when Shirley made a mistake practicing the piano. The therapy stalled.
Pentothal had seemed so promising at first, but now she was constantly
depressed and anxious again—and begging for another injection. The veins in her arm often swelled with clots that threatened to cause a stroke or even death. It eventually dawned on Connie that Shirley was getting addicted. Connie decided Pentothal was dangerous and tried to stop administering it. A tug of war began around the addiction. As Connie tried to withhold Pentothal, Shirley frantically demanded more. She spent hours scolding, cajoling, and groveling, on the phone and in single-spaced letters.
“
[T]his morning I felt so depressed,
” one such letter to Connie began. It continued in a gush of entreaties and subtle suicide threats:
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You didn’t explain why I could not have Pentothal today … I felt so confused … you said to take the Dexamyl … I said I had been taking more and more per day since Thursday and still I had dissociated and was so much more depressed … you said take the Demerol … I said I would almost rather take the whole bottle of Seconal … I felt rejection and denial … I know you are very, very busy, but you did not say, “Shirley I am just too busy to take time out to give you Pentothal” … The pain is now and the test and class is tomorrow … tomorrow is too late to take the Pentothal … I know you care … What have I done? … I am scared … I keep crying inside … I’d better take the Seconal and go to bed … I took half a Dexamyl and a fourth of a Demerol … I wrote four pages about how I felt.
Still Connie withheld Pentothal, and Shirley struggled to earn more injections. For a few weeks she stopped splitting into alters who knew nothing of each other’s existence. Instead, she reported that she sometimes sensed the different personalities right by her side, and she understood they were elements of her own psyche, not people separate from her. Sometimes, she said, she had feelings that were not Peggy but merely “Peggyish.” Connie was delighted, and in mid-1957 she pronounced Shirley “integrated”—cured of her multiple personality disorder.
But she still wouldn’t give her Pentothal, and Shirley’s integration disintegrated. Like a hydra, she sprouted additional alter personalities. Soon there were eight: the Peggys; Vicky; Mike; Mary; and now a sad eleven-year-old named Shirley Ann; a bookish teenager, Clara; and Marcia, a snooty student.
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In the midst of this proliferation of alter selvers, Walter traveled from Michigan to New York City to visit his daughter. Connie met with him
and asked him a few questions about his deceased wife. Mattie, Walter replied with embarrassment, had always been “nervous,” but he said he knew nothing about her physically abusing Shirley. Connie didn’t inquire about sexual abuse—she seemed so convinced it had happened that she saw no point in asking. She sternly told Walter Shirley was sick and needed money for her psychoanalysis. Walter did not see any of Shirley’s other personalities during the visit. But he promised to send her a hundred dollars a month, to cover her rent and phone bill.
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Almost four years had passed since Shirley first walked into Connie’s office as an upbeat graduate student with nagging but bearable emotional problems. Now, after hundreds of hours of therapy and countless pills, shots, and machine-induced convulsions, she was a thirty-five-year-old junkie who spent most of her time in bed and who, when she did get up, checked her mail box for money from her father, or walked the streets muttering to herself. When Jean Lane called to say hello, Shirley sounded so drugged that conversation was difficult.
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And her roommate, Willie, was a problem. On the one hand she watched out for the alters: Peggy Ann, Peggy Lou, and the rest. On the other hand Willie was possessive. She didn’t like Shirley talking to other women. When Shirley was in bed, Willie sometimes crawled in and tried to grope her. Willie was a lesbian, and Shirley wondered if she was, too.
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But she was afraid to ask her psychoanalyst, who was co-authoring a book calling male homosexuality perverse and mentally disturbed. Connie also had opinions about lesbianism: It was usually caused by a domineering mother and a weak father, and it was unnatural and bad.
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Shirley twisted between Adventism and psychoanalysis; faith and science; barbiturates and Benzedrine; her male self, Mike, and her females Peggy, Vicky, and the rest. Almost four years had passed since she started therapy and she had entered a maze of multiplicity that fractured more and more as time went by. Dr. Wilbur had promised to make her better. Instead she felt much worse.
She agonized about what to do. In late spring she made a decision.
On a warm afternoon toward the end of May, 1958, she walked into Connie’s office for her appointment. In her purse was a typed, single-spaced letter that
ran to five pages.
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At first glance it looked like the dream and self-analysis diaries she usually brought to therapy. But this one was different.
From the first paragraph, it was clear the letter was a confession of wrongdoing. It began with Shirley admitting that she was “none of the things I have pretended to be.” She had tried before to tell Connie the truth but could not “hold out very long when you showed doubts, and an actual desire to believe I was … the fine things you admire.”
“I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong,” the letter continued. “But it is not what I have led you to believe … I do not have any multiple personalities … I do not even have a ‘double’ … I am all of them. I have been essentially lying.”
The rest of the letter explained how Connie had misdiagnosed her, and how Shirley had abetted the error. Before coming to New York, she wrote, she had never pretended to have multiple personalities. She hadn’t even done so years ago when she ran around Connie’s office in Nebraska and pounded on the window.
“I was only distraught and desperate the day I acted ‘like Peggy’ … I had injured my hand as I sat cutting a linoleum block and dwelling morbidly on the fact you had told me the week before that you would be leaving Omaha sometime within the next year or so … I was trying to show you I felt I needed help.”
As for her tales about “fugues” to Philadelphia, they were lies, too.
“I make certain successes in art or teaching or music or whatever, momentarily, but I cannot seem to ‘take’ any success and I then get the tremendous … and uncontrollable … urge to do some fool thing. The last few years … the fool thing turned out to be to disappear and make people think I had no knowledge of what I had done or where I had been. Quite thrilling. Got me a lot of attention.”
Pretending only made her feel worse, but she was scared to come clean, she told Connie, afraid “you would be angry when you found out I had been untruthful and then you would not let me come to talk with you anymore.” Shirley knew she had a problem. It wasn’t “dissociations,” but it was something extremely worrisome and debilitating. Now, she “very, very, very much” wanted Connie’s help to identify her real trouble and deal with it honestly.