At least one psychoanalyst even believed that when children were constipated, mothers could cause lifelong trauma by giving them enemas. In his book Childhood Experience and Personal Destiny, Dr. William V. Silverberg spared no details. He used eight pages to discuss nozzles, anal sphincters, abdominal cramps, and gas—not to mention the noxious effect enemas produced in boys and girls: “a permanent state of low self-esteem and rage.”21
For her psychoanalytic training Connie chose the New York Medical College, in the suburbs just north of New York City.22 It offered a program tied to Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital, a public facility bordering the city’s poverty-stricken Spanish Harlem. At the hospital Connie continued working as a neuropsychiatrist. At the college, she lay on a couch several days a week for months, getting psychoanalyzed by one of her professors. This “training analysis” was required for her certification. Today no records survive indicating who psychoanalyzed Connie. But clues she dropped in letters and conversations suggest that it was William V. Silverberg, the doctor who believed that enemas could ruin children’s lives.
Though she now had psychoanalytic credentials Connie continued to work as a hospital psychiatrist.23 One case she treated was a twenty-two-year-old psychotic male. For four days he had been so agitated that he could not sleep a wink, and his mania had given him a 105 degree fever. His doctors feared he would die if he didn’t calm down. Connie was called in because of her expertise in administering Pentothal. “You are going to go to sleep,” Connie murmured as she injected the patient. “You’re going to let go of all the responsibility, you are simply going to turn over to us.” The patient went to sleep and his fever dropped. Connie boasted that her treatment had saved his life.24
She was now able to supplement her hospital work with a private practice in psychoanalysis, and she started the work in a lackluster building not far from the hospital.25 One of her early patients was Frederick Keith Brown, a shy, obese lawyer from the rural Midwest who was five years Connie’s junior. Brown—known to all as Keith—sought therapy to get through a divorce. Connie learned he was a former federal prosecutor who now worked in a corporate law firm and spent most of his time representing the insurance company Lloyds of London. He was also a fellow alumnus of the University of Michigan. And he was rich. Very rich.26
As soon as his divorce came through Connie married him. In 1953 the newlyweds moved to Park Avenue,27 to a grand apartment with soaring ceilings, a marble fireplace, two living rooms, a dining room, three bedrooms, and a maid’s quarters. There was more than enough space for an office. Connie furnished hers with fresh-cut flowers, photographs she had taken of tropical beach scapes, an overstuffed chair for herself, and a long, leather couch for her patients.28
The practice grew, and soon she was seeing not just neurotics, but schizophrenics. In New York in the early 1950s, very few psychoanalysts did office work with psychotics—they recommended committing them to mental hospitals. A handful of doctors were willing to see such patients, however, and Connie allied herself with these exceptionally nurturing colleagues.29 One of her office patients was a twenty-eight-year-old woman who, when she first came for treatment, hadn’t spoken for months and was a “filthy slob,” Connie said years later. She was “pulpy fat,” she wore no makeup, and her clothes were torn and dirty. For the first four weeks of her therapy, she sat wordlessly pulling her hair. Finally Connie intervened. “You sit there and pull your hair and I know it’s because you’re absolutely furious. Now I want to know what in the hell are you so damn mad about?”30
“I want to scream,” the patient answered.
“Go ahead and scream,” Connie replied. The young woman screamed, then started talking again. Eventually she lost weight, began dressing nicely, and looked “just stunning,” according to Connie.
Connie also saw what were then called “psychoneurotics,” and her treatment seemed to help many of them. Yet she appeared eager to engage her patients in a hunt for someone to blame for their troubles. Manhattan psychiatrist Arthur Zitrin, a contemporary of Connie’s, recalls seeing a woman patient who had previously gone to Connie for therapy and came out hating her family. Zitrin was disheartened that Connie seemed to have made no effort to help the woman understand her relationship to her parents, and instead simply urged her to blame and reject them.31
In 1953, the same year Connie set up her practice on Park Avenue, thousands of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts traveled to Los Angeles for the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association. There, two doctors from Georgia read a gripping paper and showed a stunning film. The presentation concerned a patient of theirs, an achingly beautiful woman in her twenties who could split on command into three completely different personalities. The doctors gave one of these personalities the pseudonym Eve White, whom they described as demure, retiring, quiet, and rigidly conventional. A second personality, named Jane, seemed better adjusted. She was mature and “capable.”
But it was the third personality who fascinated not just the psychiatrists, but eventually, all of America. Her pseudonym was Eve Black. Her primary doctor, a burly blond man named Corbett Thigpen, who practiced psychiatry as a profession and stage magic as a hobby, described Eve as “childishly daredevil” and “erotically mischievous,” with “a touch of appealing sexiness.”32 Thigpen quoted Eve Black’s recollections of taking over Eve White’s body to enjoy a wild night on the town: “I go out and get a little polluted, [and Eve White] wakes up with the hangover and timidly wonders what in hell’s made her so damned sick.”33
Thigpen and Eve’s secondary psychiatrist, Hervey Cleckley, used their work with Eve to challenge traditional psychological concepts. “The developmental integration of what we call personality,” they told their audience, “appears to be a complex process of growth or evolution, a not-too-well comprehended unfolding of germinal potentialities.” Eve’s experience raised the question: “What is the real referent of this familiar term personality?”34
The mass media was bewitched. Rennie Taylor, a male science writer for the Associated Press, wrote an article after the APA convention which featured details about Eve Black, and it ended up in dozens of newspapers nationwide. “A demure, pretty brunette … turned into a dare-devilish, irresponsible creature in front of her doctor and later into a bright, agreeable, conscientious girl,” Taylor wrote. “Eve Black went out with men casually, got a job as a night club entertainer, bought and charged expensive clothes. The third personality, called Jane, took the clothes back to the stores. Later Eve Black bought more clothes and had them altered so Jane couldn’t take them back.”35 Time magazine covered Eve’s case, too, with similar information about her wild misdeeds.36 News spread that Thigpen and Cleckley had a book in press which would appeal to lay readers.
It would come out four years later, titled The Three Faces of Eve, and quickly become a bestseller, for good reason. Those multiple faces, after all, symbolized the biggest dilemma faced by American women in the 1950s. Expelled from the workplace after World War II ended, they’d been pressured to settle in at home as docile housewives and mothers. Passively accepting this new domesticity recalled the joylessness of Eve White, while feeling dissatisfied and rebellious suggested the immaturity and immorality of Eve Black. Psychotherapy could integrate these conflicts, the new book suggested. It could turn a distressed woman—a split-personality woman—into a contented, responsible Jane.
Even if Connie missed the APA convention in 1953, she surely heard about Eve that year. Eve’s multiple personality disorder was said to be the only case psychiatrists had heard of for decades. Connie knew that to be untrue. Her medical school mentor in Michigan, Dr. Robert Dieterle, was still in touch about the woman he had diagnosed with multiple personalities back in the 1930s. In this climate, and with this inside knowledge in her back pocket, Connie must have been alert to every possibility—particularly after the paper Thigpen and Cleckley presented at the convention was published in 1954 in a prestigious mental health journal.
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br /> In October of that year Connie’s office buzzer rang. It was Shirley.
CHAPTER 8
THE COUCH
SHIRLEY DOUBTED THAT CONNIE WOULD remember her when she made her first visit to Park Avenue, but Connie knew her immediately and “was genuinely pleased to see me,” Shirley wrote to Walter. As the two women sat and chatted, Shirley recapped her life since Omaha. “I think it is just wonderful all you have done—I always knew you had brains,” Connie exclaimed. Shirley was ecstatic.1
She remembered how just a handful of psychotherapy sessions nine years ago had enabled her to keep going ever since. Of course, she’d suffered relapses of her longtime symptoms of hysteria: constipation, colds, sore throats, sinus trouble, headaches, nausea, weight loss, aching joints, painful menstrual periods, fatigue, depression, anemia, and times when she felt confused and unable to remember things. But now her former doctor was in New York! A half dozen more sessions might keep her nerves from ever acting up again. She booked a few weekly appointments and didn’t tell Walter she was back in therapy. She had run into Dr. Wilbur by chance, she lied to her father.
Her sessions with Connie immediately veered in odd directions. Lying on the couch, Shirley talked about her teaching in the Midwest, her work at the Colorado mental hospital, and her current graduate studies. But Connie also talked about her life, and she offered to help Shirley fulfill her own professional aspirations. According to Shirley’s letters to her father, Dr. Wilbur described her work with the Veterans Administration and talked of lecturing throughout the city and the world. She said she knew psychiatrists in charge of local mental hospitals for children, and she could give references if Shirley wanted to work in art therapy. Or if she wished to study psychology she could take classes at the New York College of Medicine. That would be easy, Dr. Wilbur said. She had studied psychoanalysis there and was working at a college-run hospital. She had connections.
Further, Shirley wrote, Dr. Wilbur was “doing some kind of research in the use of certain drugs and their effects on certain types of mental illnesses.”2
Shirley’s old crush on Connie came roaring back, along with her buried ambitions to be a doctor—a psychiatrist, she said, just like Dr. Wilbur. She was still finishing her masters degree in art education, and she’d been planning to get a Ph.D. Now she made a mental shift to medicine. Long ago her parents had told her she was too weak to go that route, too nervous. Dr. Wilbur disagreed. Shirley was strong and brilliant. More therapy would enable her to become a psychoanalyst.
Shirley nursed her new plan, turning inward and losing interest in Teachers College. By day she went to classes as usual, but by night she became nervous again for the first time in years. She lay in bed fantasizing, yearning, worrying, tossing with insomnia, exhausted when the sun came up.
She had started therapy thinking she needed only a few sessions.3 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.4 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.5 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.6
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.7 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 ti
me. 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.8
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.9
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