“Regeneration Trilogy” by Pat Barker (post 5): Billy Prior has multiple personality memory gaps; Dr. Rivers worries Prior might get multiple personality.

In chapters ten and eleven of The Eye in the Door (second novel of The Regeneration Trilogy) (1), Billy Prior has the kind of memory gaps that is typically seen in multiple personality.

Prior went to lunch one day, but suddenly “He was back at his desk [at his office]. No interval. One second he was in the pub, the next sitting behind his desk…He couldn’t remember leaving the pub…Three hours had passed since he broke for lunch, and of that he could account for perhaps twenty to twenty-five minutes. The rest was blank” (1, p. 314).

“Shortly after six he thought he recognized voices, and went out of his [office] and a little way along the corridor. Major Lode [Prior’s boss] and Lionel Spragge were deep in conversation by the lifts…[Lode comes to Prior’s office and says,] “Just seen Spragge…Says you offered him a job.” Prior replies, “I didn’t offer him anything.” Lode says, “Well, he certainly seems to think you did” (1, pp. 314-315).

The reader knows that Prior had been conducting an investigation in which he wanted to get in contact with Spragge, so it makes sense that Prior would have contacted Spragge, possibly during the three hours of Prior’s memory gap.

That evening, Prior feels like taking a walk to the Achilles Monument. When he gets there, Spragge is waiting for him, but Prior pays no attention and starts to walk away. Spragge stops him and “tapped his watch. ‘Achilles. Nine o’clock’ ” (1, p. 318), quoting the appointment that Prior had made to meet him. But Prior can’t remember making any such appointment. However, back in his apartment, based on circumstantial evidence, Prior reasons that he must have “made the appointment all right. God knows when, or why” (1, p. 320).

At his next psychotherapy session with Dr. Rivers, Prior reports that he has had seven episodes of memory gaps, lasting from twenty minutes to three hours (1, p. 320).

In considering this session with Prior, Dr. Rivers thinks that “There was one genuinely disturbing feature of the case: that odd business of making an appointment in the fugue state and keeping it in the normal state. It suggested the fugue state was capable of influencing Prior’s behaviour even when it was not present, in other words, that it was functioning as a co-consciousness. Not that a dual personality need develop even from that. He intended to make sure it didn’t. There would be no hypnosis…no encouraging Prior to think of the fugue state as an alternative self” (1, p. 328).

Incidentally, during that same psychotherapy session, Prior confronts Dr. Rivers with Dr. Rivers’ own symptoms, which date back to a possible traumatic event when Rivers was five years old. Rivers acknowledges to himself that “It was almost as if the experience — whatever it was — had triggered an attempt at dissociation of personality [which is what multiple personality is], though…not a successful one. Still, he had been, throughout most of his life, a deeply divided man…” (1, p. 327).

Comment

There are several mistakes regarding fugues and multiple personality. The classic fugue: Following a traumatic event, a person forgets who he is and travels away from where people know him. He may soon remember who he is and resume his previous life, or, in the most dramatic cases, he may start a new life under a new name at the new location.

But Billy Prior never forgets who he is, travels elsewhere, etc. On the contrary, whatever he does during the time of his memory gaps, he goes by his regular name, and is accepted as himself by people who know him. And this is what commonly happens in multiple personality: The person switches to an alternate personality, but the alternate personality remains incognito, in that he answers to the person’s regular name, and so other people don’t realize the switch has taken place. But when the regular personality resumes control, he has a memory gap for the period of time that the alternate personality had taken over. So Prior’s scenario is not that of a fugue, per se, but of multiple personality.

The episode in which Prior’s regular personality meets Spragge at a time and place that Prior’s alternate personality had evidently arranged is unrealistic. Even if it were the regular personality who arrived for the appointment (influenced by the alternate personality’s giving him the impulse to do so), as soon as Prior met Spragge, the alternate personality would have taken over, and conducted whatever business he had with Spragge, later leaving the regular personality with a memory gap for the meeting.

It is also clinically unrealistic (or at least very unusual) for an adult patient to complain to his therapist of having memory gaps. If most persons with multiple personality complained about their memory gaps, the diagnosis would not be missed so frequently. The reason that most persons with multiple personality do not complain about their memory gaps is that they have been having memory gaps since childhood, and it is something they have learned to live with and ignore.

Dr. River’s fear of using hypnosis is misplaced, if for no other reason than that it is unnecessary to use hypnosis to meet alternate personalities. In past posts, I have given clinical examples of one person who had found poems she didn’t recall writing, among her personal papers (which had evidently been written during memory gaps) and another person who found a green coat in her closet, which she had no memory of getting. While you could use hypnosis to put the host personality “asleep” and meet the alternate personality who wrote the poems or had gotten the green coat, I did not. All I had to do was persist in discussing the poems or the green coat, and eventually the alternate personalities who knew about these things took over and told me about themselves and what they knew, much of which could later be corroborated.

I am only halfway through the trilogy. Perhaps Dr. Rivers will do better in regard to multiple personality in the second half.

1. Pat Barker. The Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration [1991], The Eye in the Door [1993], The Ghost Road [1995]. London, Viking/Penguin, 1996.