Authors, authors!

Popular MPD narratives have tended to capitalize on the freakishness of the material -- the spooky transitions from one alter to another, the radical differences between the personalities (unsurprisingly, "The Three Faces of Eve," as the 1950s version of the disorder, featured a slutty temptress lurking inside a prim housewife), and the ghastly trauma unearthed by the therapist/detective. "A Fractured Self" signals a change in the official characterization of MPD, from a bizarre affliction to a common trait taken to a pathological extreme. "Everyone I know reports feeling differently and acting differently in different places with different people," Oxnam writes. He just takes it a little -- make that a lot -- further.

"Having different parts is not the exclusive province of multiples," Smith writes in his epilogue, "but having amnestic or memory barriers between parts of the self is." In a rather elegant metaphor, he explains, "We could describe a house in two ways, either as a collection of rooms or as a collection of walls. Both are true, but one cannot construct a house out of rooms. Only walls can be constructed, and rooms are the result  We see rooms, and it is easy to forget that their existence is really a consequence of there being walls." In other words, it is the memory barricades that define MPD, not the personalities themselves, however colorful.

The credibility of Oxnam's account resides in these walls. The memory gaps and blackouts he experienced before seeking therapy, the appalling discovery that he'd been shoplifting from a favorite merchant for years, the fact that while sailing a boat he could not remember or discuss any aspect of Chinese politics -- these are the aspects of his story that suggest he really did inhabit a partitioned self. (Alcohol abuse is a less comprehensive but more commonplace possible explanation.) It also supports their case that Smith has never used hypnosis on Oxnam or attempted to "call forth" alters, as the least scrupulous therapists often do.

Still, it doesn't help that neither Oxnam nor Smith acknowledge the powerful role of suggestibility in patient-therapist relations. Oxnam admits that some "sick" people do "fake" having MPD. But critics of the diagnosis mostly don't accuse the afflicted of "faking" their condition. They argue that vulnerable, eager-to-please patients caught in a dangerous feedback loop with a charismatic therapist can come to wholeheartedly believe in a complete untruth (especially if hypnosis is involved). Tellingly, it is exactly those therapists who specialize in MPD and are on the lookout for its symptoms who seem to stumble across the most cases of what is supposed to be a very rare condition.

Most problematically, Smith never really addresses what he must know are valid questions about the legitimacy of repressed memories. He asks, referring to news reports of child abuse, "How is it that we can read about dreadful things happening to children almost daily, and then be told that adult recall of the same kinds of experiences is deluded?" But responsible critics of recovered memory don't claim that all adult memories of abuse are bogus, only ones "recovered" through dubious therapeutic practices. If a patient can be persuaded to believe that she is a cannibal devil worshipper who has molested her own children, then those who reasonably question less outlandish memories obtained with the same methods shouldn't be dismissed as apologists for child abusers. Implanting bogus memories of abuse is tantamount to abuse itself, and a responsible psychiatrist should admit as much.

After a breakthrough in his recovery, Robert finds himself released from the castle and sitting in a beautiful meadow with the remaining alters, Bobby and Wanda, discussing their situation. Then he pauses to explain that the meadow itself, even the appearances of the alters is really just a metaphor: "To make this affective environment intelligible, I have resorted to physical descriptions, as if the three alters were actually real outside people -- saying, for instance, 'Wanda stared at me, so deeply that I knew I had no choice but to listen.'"

It's a disorienting passage because in its own way, MPD is a surprisingly literal disorder, one that insists that someone who doesn't behave consistently must really contain more than one self. In that case, what's to say the MPD itself isn't a kind of metaphor, or theater? Critics of the diagnosis like to point out that the disorder only ever crops up in therapy -- the patient's relatives and friends invariably report never having noticed the famous "transitions" between alters or the supposedly radical changes in manners and appearance that follow.

Maybe MPD only really comes into existence when a certain rigid kind of person is confronted by a therapist. Perhaps when such a patient is forced for the first time to account for a lifetime of avoidance and compartmentalization, the manifestation of multiple personalities seems like the best way to explain themselves to this powerful new authority figure. An ordinary middle-aged man who has a fling with a young woman when his wife is out of town may say, "I don't know what got into me"; Robert can claim that Bobby, who "never gave up his self-image of a single young man," took over. Does the distinction really matter that much?

"A Fractured Mind" may indeed represent an attempt to redeem the diagnosis of MPD/DID, to present it in a less alien light and to separate it from the excesses of the recovered memory craze. In some ways, Oxnam's story is far more plausible than "Sybil," a book that was eventually discovered to be largely fraudulent. But by demonstrating how someone with MPD isn't so drastically different from the rest of us "singletons," Oxnam risks showing that he isn't different at all.

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