Beyond the Occult (59 page)

What is so important about this case is that it leaves no doubt whatever that multiple personality
is
a ‘coping mechanism’ and not, as Max Freedom Long believed, a matter of ‘possession’.
This obviously explains why so many multiple personalities seem to complement one another — as if the alter egos are built up of the spare parts that the ‘original personality’ leaves unused.
The conscious personality is the part of us that copes with the world, and it is basically composed of
decisions
.
We decide, from moment to moment, how we will react to our present situation — like a schoolboy in class deciding whether to put up his hand to answer a question or keep quiet.
The ‘original self’ of most multiple personalities — Clara Fowler, Chris Sizemore, Janette — has decided that the least troublesome strategy is to keep quiet.
But other aspects of the self will inevitably feel frustrated by this play-it-safe situation, which stands in the way of personal development.
When the pressures are serious enough and the original personality is weak and miserable enough, the alter-ego takes over … .

Yet is this the
whole
story?
Allison’s second case of multiple personality raised an element of doubt.
Carrie Hornsby was an incredibly beautiful redhead whose good looks were her greatest misfortune.
Like Janette she was rejected by her mother and upset when her father — who was in the army — apparently deserted her.
Her first alter-ego came into being when she was four and a small boy sat on her chest until she almost suffocated.
The creation of an alter-ego always seems to be a withdrawal mechanism, a retreat from some unpleasant situation, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand.
This first personality was a boy, like her tormentor.
Her masculine aspect developed as a result of associations with the lesbians hired by her grandmother as hands at the ranch: the grandmother hated men.

One night at the ranch Carrie was unable to sleep and decided to go for a moonlight ride to a nearby lake.
There she ran into a group of motorcycle riders having a drunken
party, and was gang-raped.
Thereafter she was terrified of sex.
When her high-school boyfriend told her that it was time she ‘came across’, she blacked out.
When she regained self-awareness they were driving home, and she gathered from her boyfriend’s comments that she had apparently enjoyed the sex.
Later she married this boyfriend.

A doctor at the centre for the treatment of alcoholics where Carrie worked persuaded her to perform oral sex on him: this would happen with the doctor’s wife typing just outside the door.
He actually billed her for these sessions, and she paid the bills: the relationship was clearly sado-masochistic.

Carrie decided she needed treatment when she found herself walking up to her neck in the sea and had to swim back to shore.
Under hypnosis in Allison’s office the personality responsible for this episode emerged: a girl called Wanda who called Allison a fat-headed son of a bitch.
Later a third personality, a small girl called Debra, appeared.
She treated Allison as her father and his other multiple-personality patient, Janette, as her mother: this produced some embarrassing situations.

One day a friend of Carrie’s — another nurse — approached Allison and told him a strange story.
She was interested in ESP and telepathy and had attended a course with an instructor who claimed to be able to enter the minds of other people: he was able to do this merely from a detailed description of the person.
After demonstrating his abilities successfully he attempted to ‘enter’ Carrie’s mind.
He immediately became worried and agitated and broke off the experiment.
Later he confessed that he had encountered some sort of evil force and declared that a drug addict who had died a few years before had taken over Carrie’s body: he said her name was Bonnie Pierce or Price.

Allison was deeply sceptical: he had been brought up as a rationalist and this sounded absurd.
All the same he wrote off to various record departments to see if he could verify the existence of a Bonnie Pierce who had died in New York in 1968.
He was unsuccessful.
But as Carrie’s condition grew worse he decided to try an unusual experiment: to exorcize
her.
He knew that she had dabbled in witchcraft in high school and that one of her boyfriends had been serious about black magic.
It followed that Carrie herself might believe in the efficacy of exorcism and that it might cure her.
She was placed under hypnosis but denied that Bonnie was present.
A colleague who was also in the room suggested trying to place her in an even deeper trance.
This worked.
Now Carrie said there
was
a Bonnie inside her and that she urgently wanted to get rid of her.
Allison now suspended a crystal ball on a chain above Carrie’s head and commanded Bonnie to leave her body.
He declared that the ball would swing until the spirit had left, and that when this happened Carrie should raise her finger as a sign that she was now free.
To Allison’s surprise the ball began to swing in a circle, although he tried hard to hold it still.
Then it slowed down.
At the same time Carrie raised her finger.
When brought out of her trance Carrie confided that she had always felt there was a spirit inside her and that now she felt free of it.

However this failed to solve the problem of Wanda and the other personalities.
Wanda hated Carrie: she used to slash her wrists and take overdoses of pills.
Ultimately Allison’s attempts at ‘integration’ were a failure.
After violently attacking him and almost incapacitating four police officers and two ambulance men, Carrie was handcuffed and hospitalized.
When she came out she committed suicide with an overdose of drugs and alcohol.
Allison never found out whether Bonnie had been a real person or a figment of someone’s imagination.

Like Adam Crabtree, Allison seemed to encounter more than his fair share of multiple personalities, raising the obvious question of how far his own expectations caused them to materialize.
Yet in at least one case the classic symptoms confirm the correctness of his diagnosis.

A grotesquely overweight woman named Babs was sent to Allison after attempting suicide.
Oddly enough it was Lila, another multiple-personality patient who had become Allison’s assistant, who realized that Babs was suffering from the same disorder.
And when Babs admitted that she had
blackouts during which whole sections of her life were obliterated, and that she had once ‘missed’ an entire year of school, Allison felt certain that Lila was correct.
Soon Allison had encountered Lenore, a negative and destructive personality, and Alice, another competent B-4 type.
Not long thereafter another personality called Tammy emerged, a charming, self-confident person who seemed to know all about Babs and her problems: in fact Tammy was virtually a ‘built-in therapist’.
Babs, she explained, had become a multiple personality because of a miserable and loveless childhood and various traumatic experiences.

With Tammy’s help the therapy seemed to be making excellent progress.
Then one night Babs rang up in a state of desperation.
She had just blacked out in church and insulted her best friend: now she was almost hysterical.
On the spur of the moment Allison told her to lie down, put herself into a trance and summon Tammy.
Then they were both to join in prayer for God’s healing power to solve their problems.
This expedient was rather too successful.
When Allison was summoned the next morning by Babs’s husband he discovered that Babs had turned into a five-year-old child.
And this new personality remained in control.
Yet if Allison had recalled the Mary Reynolds case recorded by William James he might have taken some comfort.
Mary Two was also virtually a new-born baby when she first appeared, yet she ‘grew up’ at an astonishing rate, learning to speak within a matter of weeks.
This is what happened to Babs.
She matured with remarkable speed.
She and her husband went through a second courtship and married again, and when her memory returned fully she was at last an integrated personality.

Here again the diagnosis seems perfectly clear.
Babs had ‘created’ the other personalities to cope with her problems, and she finally had to start from scratch and develop an undivided personality.

The case of Babs makes it quite clear once again that multiple personality
can
be explained as a coping mechanism, and that in such cases it is quite unnecessary to evoke Long’s
low spirit hypothesis to explain it.
So it comes as something of a surprise for the reader of
Minds in Many Pieces
to learn that Allison ended by accepting that in certain cases, the ‘spirit hypothesis’ is the only one that works.
His change of heart came when he was treating a twenty-four-year-old girl called Elise who had sixteen alter-egos and five ‘Inner Self Helpers’.
‘Each served a specific purpose in her life and each was created to handle a trauma that Elise herself couldn’t face.’
Once a person has learned to ‘solve’ a problem by creating an alter-ego it becomes the simplest method of avoiding any difficult problems.

One day, when Elise had been discussing the death of her grandmother, she ‘faded out’ and a male who identified himself as Dennis took over.
Close questioning of Dennis finally convinced Allison that he was not a normal alter-ego; he seemed to serve no purpose and Allison was unable to discover when he was ‘born’.
Dennis went on to explain that he stayed in Elise’s body because he liked having sex with Shannon, another alter-ego.
Shannon had been ‘born’ to cope with Elise’s loss of her baby: now she returned every October and stayed until the anniversary of the baby’s death the following March.
She was emotionally strong and self-assured and Dennis had, apparently, fallen in love with her.
When Allison asked how Dennis could have sex with her he explained that when other men made love to Shannon he slipped into their bodies and enjoyed it.
He was not in the least sexually interested in Elise, although she and Shannon had the same body — a statement that brings a fascinating insight into the psychology of sex.

When Elise woke up she complained about Dennis and declared that none of the other personalities liked him.
It seemed that when Shannon was having sex with a man of her choice Dennis would pinch her to let her know that he was enjoying it too.
Elise’s ‘Inner Self Helpers’ also confirmed that Dennis was not one of Elise’s personalities but an interloper in the body.
In a further interview Dennis explained that he had been a stockbroker named Julius who had lived in Louisiana and had been shot in the course of a
robbery.
Since then he had been wandering in and out of various male bodies, apparently under the guidance of someone who ‘assigned’ them — he was unsure about who this was.
The chief ‘Inner Self Helper’ told Allison that Dennis had ‘entered’ Elise when she and her friends had been experimenting with black magic in her late teens: she had tried to induce Satanic possession and ‘opened her mind’.
Allison was also told that he could get rid of Dennis the next day but that he should stand well back in case Dennis entered his body.
However when Allison placed Elise under hypnosis the next day yet another personality emerged: a woman called Michelle who declared that she hated God and had no intention of being driven out of Elise.

Allison took Elise — who had listened to tape-recordings of these other personalities — to a grassy spot in the hospital grounds.
She collapsed on to the grass and began to scream, ‘Get out of my body!
Get out!’
Another voice replied, ‘I’m not going to leave.’
Elsie cried, ‘If there’s a God, help me,’ then became unconscious.
When she woke up an alter-ego called Sandi took over, and Sandi described three dark-blue spheres leaving Elise’s body.
The next day the ‘Inner Self Helper’ said that Dennis, Michelle and another female spirit he had never met had all left Elise.

There was a further surprise to come.
The ‘Inner Self Helper’ declared that Shannon was not an alter-ego but the spirit of Elise’s dead baby.
The baby would also have to be got rid of.
One day, after another noisy session, Shannon told Allison that she would be leaving in a few hours.
Elise woke up with amnesia.
This slowly disappeared over the next few days, but Shannon never returned.

Allison goes on to describe another case that convinced him that there were ‘spirits’ involved.
This was a girl called Sophia, and Allison’s attempts at fusion of her personalities had been highly successful.
Yet two personalities remained, girls called Mary and Maria who seemed to serve no purpose.
Finally, under hypnosis, Sophia was regressed to her birth and stated that her mother had had triplets.
The doctor, who had been her mother’s lover, suffocated the first two but was
interrupted by a neighbour before he could kill Sophia.
The three spirits had been hovering over the babies’ bodies, prepared to enter, and now two of them were ‘homeless’.
So Sophia invited them to share her body: they accepted gratefully.