“In Pieces” by Sally Field (post 2): Enraged alternate personality, standing on coffee table to confront much-taller stepfather eye-to-eye, says she’s not going to take it anymore

Preceding Chapter One, Sally Field quotes a poem by Emily Dickinson, which says “There is a pain so utter” that it “covers the Abyss with Trance,” so that “Memory can step Around” it and go “safely—where an open eye” would have subjected the person to destruction “Bone by Bone” (1, p. 5).

That is a poetic version of the prosaic theory of multiple personality: A child, subject to trauma that would be incapacitating were it fully experienced and continually remembered, enters a trance in which an alternate personality is created to take the pain and memory, allowing the regular personality to function, but leaving it with memory gaps (“Memory can step Around”) for the times that the alternate personality had substituted.

In the first five chapters, Field’s stepfather, Jocko, sexually abuses her, causing her to enter a trance state: “What I didn’t want to see or feel, I would send off into a cloud of fog, hidden in a mental whiteout” (1, p. 78). And she has memory gaps: “I’m naked. How did I get naked?” (1, p. 73).

Finally, at age fifteen, an alternate personality, who wouldn’t take the abuse anymore, comes out: “And then one night some piece of me…finally ripped out of my self-imposed fog and took center stage. Rage…I stepped onto the coffee table [Jocko was much taller] and there we were…eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose…

“ ‘I hate you! YOU’RE the liar! Not ME! And you know NOTHING!’ From my mouth came a voice, but it didn’t belong to me, and from a faraway place I watched as this little person who looked like me stood up until she seemed to tower over this man…

“ ‘You don’t know who I am!’ This guttural voice, filled with loathing, vomited forth as she peered into his eyes…He was frightened of her…Somehow, some part of me that wasn’t afraid, that didn’t care if I was loved, or if I lived or died, had beaten him. He knew it too” (1, p. 89-91).

1. Sally Field. In Pieces. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.