Psychoanalysis: A Perspective That May Hamper Your Ability to Understand a Person Who Has Multiple Personality

This post discusses Robert J. Stoller’s Splitting: A Case of Female Masculinity. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1973 (Foreword 1997), 393 pages. The book begins:

“What would convince a biologically normal woman that she had a penis?…This is a book about Mrs. G…and the pieces into which she was split…Mrs. G broke almost all of society’s rules. She did what she did to survive…If this required a penis, she acquired one; if it meant creating a second personality, she did…Then, because she wanted help, Mrs. G became a patient at UCLA. I want to tell you what happened.”

Dr. Stoller treated Mrs. G for many years, during which he identified two alternate personalities, “Charlie” and “Carrie,” which Mrs. G had had since childhood (more than twenty-five years before he met her). He saw Mrs. G as split and fragmented, but, to him, multiple personality was only one of a dozen psychiatric diagnoses that Mrs. G had been given over the years, and, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, it was just one of her defenses, not her primary condition.

What is most valuable in this book for readers of this blog are the transcripts of psychotherapy sessions that Dr. Stoller had with Mrs. G.: Dr. Stoller often doesn't know—and doesn't know that he doesn’t know—to what personality he is talking at any given time.

For example, in the chapter on her father, “Mrs. G” tells Dr. Stoller about what a great guy her father was; then on the next page she explains that her father was horrible; and then on the next page she says she doesn’t recall much about him. Dr. Stoller doesn’t realize that the “Mrs. G” of these sessions includes at least three different alternate personalities whom he has never identified.

In many of the book’s transcripts, Mrs. G comes across as smart and well-related. But in some transcripts, she is disjointed and “crazy.” It seems to me that Dr. Stoller is trying to tell it like it was, but that he is also asking for pity, as if he were saying: Look what I had to contend with! This woman could be very crazy! What he apparently didn’t understand is that Mrs. G appears to have had at least a dozen personalities, and when they would all try to talk at once, it would sound disjointed and crazy.

Mrs. G would often mention that, between sessions, she had had episodes of being “crazy.” Dr. Stoller rarely clarifies to what she is referring. In a person with multiple personality, there are many possibilities, including: feeling “crazy” if she has had amnesia for periods of times and so has done things that she doesn’t recall doing; or feeling “crazy” if she has felt like a child when she has switched to a child-aged personality (she is in her thirties); or feeling “crazy” if she experiences emotions or impulses from, or hears the voices of, other personalities, but doesn’t understand that this is what was happening. When Mrs. G mentions to Dr. Stoller that she has felt “crazy,” he is never able to clarify these sources of her distress. Not to mention that her “penis” probably belonged to one of her personalities.

My point here is not to criticize Dr. Stoller personally. This may have been his first multiple personality patient. And the first modern textbook on multiple personality would not be published for another sixteen years (1). I think that Dr. Stoller was very bright and dedicated.

My point is that Dr. Stoller’s psychoanalytic training and perspective—including the concept of “splitting”—blinded him to the probability that Mrs. G had multiple personality disorder as her primary condition. There are some psychoanalysts who are experts in multiple personality, but they are exceptions.

Nevertheless, Dr. Stoller’s book is valuable and fascinating—I recommend it—especially if you read it as though you were doing a literary analysis, and ask yourself: Does “Mrs. G” always talk like she is one and the same character?

1. Putnam FW. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.