Sybil Exposed (16 page)

All this standoffishness is said to encourage transference neurosis, during which the patient, imagining the therapist as a parent or other influential grownup, generates painful recollections of childhood. These recollections might describe events that really did happen. Or they could be what Freudians call “screen memories”—fantasies overlaid onto infantile imaginings too primitive to be expressed in words. Sorting real memories from screen memories is not necessary for Freudian therapists, however. What is important are the emotions accompanying both productions. Analyzing those emotions is thought to lead to deeper truths.

Many neo-Freudians got rid of the couch and replaced it with two chairs, set face to face. They stopped acting like blank slates, sometimes even talking to patients about their own lives. They offered verbal praise—and even touch. It became acceptable to give encouraging pats on the back. Hugs still raised eyebrows, but they were at least thinkable.

These changes flowed from neo-Freudians’ changing ideas about the source of painful childhood recollections. No longer were they thought to be based upon infantile conflicts with one’s parents—from the Oedipus complex, for instance. Instead, they came from actual injuries committed by these caretakers, and to heal, it was not necessary to develop a transference neurosis. Instead, patients needed to dredge up memories of the hurtful things done to them so long ago.

Most of those bad things, the new thinking went, had been perpetrated by mothers, some of whom were so cruel that they were even creating psychosis in their children. Psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichman, who worked at a private mental hospital in Maryland, invented a term to describe such mothers: “schizophrenogenic.” Medical journals echoed Fromm-Reichman. Psychiatrists who treated schizophrenic children began interviewing their mothers. Inevitably, the doctors found these women to be “guileful,” “self-indulgent,” “irritible,” “sarcastic,” “ostentatious,” “exhibitionistic,” and prone to “manipulate,” “exploit,” and “ignore” their offspring—which was precisely the reason these children were psychotic.
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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.”
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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.
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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?”
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“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.”
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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.
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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.

In October of that year Connie’s office buzzer rang. It was Shirley.

S
HIRLEY 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.