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Several high-profile ritual abuse trials centered on day-care centers (most notably, the McMartin Preschool case), and involved the testimony of very young children questioned by therapists and public officials who specialized in coaxing out reports of molestation. The statements they supplied were so elaborate and grotesque -- including mass murders, sex with zoo animals, feats of inhuman strength, rocket ships and networks of underground tunnels -- that they defied the hard evidence and sometimes even the laws of physics. Records revealed that the officials who examined the children had used leading questions and baldfaced suggestions to get these yarns.

The bubble burst. Law enforcement authorities confirmed that there was absolutely no evidence that satanic cults devoted to raping and eating babies roamed the land. Adults who had been convinced that they suffered such abuse -- or less gothic ordeals -- during childhood began to question their therapists' diagnoses. An organization for accused family members, the False Memory Foundation, formed to champion the claim that all "recovered" memories resulted from manipulative therapeutic practices. Even the credibility of Freud and his theory of repressed memory was attacked in the pages of the New York Review of Books by the literary critic Frederick Crews.

At the pinnacle of the craze, multiple personality disorder became a fad diagnosis among those who fervently believed in the reality of ritual abuse. This represented no great leap; as the millions of readers of "The Three Faces of Eve" and "Sybil" knew, suppressed memories of severe childhood trauma cause MPD. The disorder is considered to be an extreme version of a common psychological coping mechanism: dissociation or emotional detachment. Unable to bear the agony of his or her experience, the child was understood to divide internally into two persons: one, recessive and usually childlike, who would retain the traumatic memory, and another who would continue to grow up and become the dominant, operative self. Apparently, splitting is habit-forming, with more personalities appearing during periods of great stress. Some "multiples" claim to have hundreds of alters. Oxnam reports having once had 11.

The diagnosis of MPD was tarnished by the implosion of the ritual abuse and recovered memory hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s. Most dramatically, one prominent therapist specializing in the disorder, Dr. Bennett Braun, was sued by a former patient for persuading her that she contained 300 separate personalities and was the cannibal high priestess of a satanic cult. Some of the continuing skepticism about MPD is warranted: The theory of repressed memory -- a theory that many researchers reject as being completely unproved -- lies at the heart of the definition of the disorder. In other ways, the stigma is unjustified, since a condition that at the very least closely resembles MPD had been observed decades before the recovered memory craze took place.

In the 1950s, the repressed memory of being made to kiss a dead relative's corpse was considered enough to cause Eve to split; by 1973, the ante had been upped, and the trauma that fractured Sybil was pure Grand Guignol, a series of sadistic torments perpetrated by her mentally ill mother. This escalating sensationalism in MPD narratives does bear a suspicious resemblance to the way that reports of ritual child abuse grew more and more lurid until they finally beggared belief. MPD creation stories, like tales of ritual satanic abuse, often seem to be the stuff of gruesome playground legend. ("Sybil" was passed around and hugely popular among my 12-year-old friends.) But even the ritual abuse debacle could trace its remote origins to the necessary public acknowledgement of real child abuse hidden within families.

The traumas said to be at the root of Oxnam's condition belong more or less to the "Sybil" range on the atrocity spectrum, but "A Fractured Mind" is exceptional in not lingering over them or even attempting to identify Oxnam's abusers. (You can make an educated guess, though.) MPD narratives, like Freudian case studies, tend to be structured like penny-dreadful detective stories, reaching their climax in shocking revelations of unfathomable cruelty. They feed our culture's morbid preoccupation with extreme child abuse, particularly sexual molestation -- an obsession that, however real the problem, has little to do with legitimate concern about child welfare.

"A Fractured Mind," to its credit, eschews the tabloid approach. Instead it focuses on the effects of his condition on Oxnam's life, work and relationships, and in this, for all its strangeness, it steps away from the fringe. The book does follow the familiar structure: 1) odd behavior leading to the seeking of treatment; 2) revelation of an unsuspected alternate personality to the therapist; 3) gradual appearance of additional alters; 4) exposure of the core infantile alter and its terrible memories to the therapist and the previously oblivious dominant personality. But all this gets accomplished about halfway through the book, whereupon the focus shifts to Oxnam's efforts to achieve "integration."

Architectural metaphors abound in accounts of MPD. For Oxnam, his mind was a castle with "Bob" above the front gate, running things unaware of the presence of the alters. The alters, each with his own room, included Tommy, a raging, violent teenager; Robbey, the efficient if slightly soulless worker; Robert, a professorial intellectual; Bobby, an exuberant, misbehaving child usually kept in the dungeon; a sexy female librarian whose face is always hidden; and a reclusive clock collector named Lawrence. Each alter except for Bob had at least partial awareness of the others. In a sinister black castle nearby lived Eyes, who saw everything but could not speak, and the Witch, the spiteful, punitive figure associated with Oxnam's abusers. With treatment, she is eventually transformed into the benevolent Wanda.

What goes on among these personalities resembles nothing so much as office politics, which isn't surprising, perhaps, when you consider Oxnam's professional life. "It's infuriating," Robert complains of the then-dominant personality, Bob. "I've got lots of good ideas but so little gets through  The Asia Society presidency?  I would run it totally differently from Bob." Bob, having learned of these gripes, retorts, "Let Robert try to raise money for a ten-million-dollar budget and cope with a bunch of bickering staff, trustees and donors at the same time." When the two personalities decide to merge, they conduct the process like a business deal. Oxnam compares communications between alters to "instant 'mental email'" and the "file transfer process" in a computer.

Next Page: Does MPD only affect certain kinds of people?

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