humanist + humorist

Finally finished reading this book! (Previously mentioned in the “talking to headmates in the mirror” post.)

I…can’t exactly recommend it?

I was really hoping to. As a detailed historical snapshot of “how the mental-health profession thought of dissociation in 1905”, it’s fascinating. I’m still not over the reveal of “one headmate claims they were plural as a toddler, and the doctor thinks that can’t be right, because that’s so implausibly young to start splitting.”

But as a record of the treatment of this particular patient — it’s really depressing. Gave me the same feeling I had reading The Third Person (Emma Grove’s 2022 graphic memoir, summary with content warnings on pluralstories), where you start out thinking “okay, this therapist doesn’t know what he’s dealing with and is clearly in over his head, but he seems thoughtful and open to learning, so maybe he’ll get better”…and by the end it’s just a constant escalation of “no, buddy, what are you doing, this is so obviously bad for your patient, oh noooo.”

Extra-frustrating because this book is written by the therapist, and…he notices! A few times he mentions having misgivings, or second-guessing whether he’s doing the right thing! And then he’ll talk himself right back into doing more of it.

There’s also a point where, in talking about teenage headmate Sally, he refers to “her true function — if she had one, which may be doubted” (405). My good sir, your own writing recounts multiple instances of Sally giving you key information that the other headmates were unaware of, and of her physically taking care of their body, including thwarting another headmate’s suicide attempt! You should be first in line to defend this girl as an essential protector, no matter how many obnoxious pranks or immature insults she pulls in between! Justice for Sally, dammit.

(Double-plus-frustrating because he’s the same doctor who treated the system in My Life As A Dissociated Personality, and it seemed like they had a really healthy, positive experience! Apparently that only happens if the patient’s therapeutic goals and attitudes line up with his own from the start. If not…disaster.)

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I started writing this post back at the beginning of the book, because on the fourth page, the author just casually threw out the names of a half-dozen other previously-studied dissociative patients. More of them come up throughout the text, so I kept the draft open. Wanted to track down sources for as many as I could.