“The Perfect Child” by Lucinda Berry: Janie, six-year-old psychopath, may have multiple personality, even if the author hadn’t intended it

Janie is an abused and abandoned six-year-old girl. The police discover that her mother had been murdered. Her father is unknown. She is adopted by a doctor, Christopher, and a nurse, Hannah, who had been unable to have a child of their own.

It gradually becomes apparent, and is eventually learned, that Janie is a psychopath, who had killed her mother by slitting her throat; who kills her cat and likes to hurt people, because she enjoys seeing them in pain; and kills Hannah’s sister by pushing her down a flight of stairs.

The author, Dr. Lucinda Berry, is “a trauma psychologist and leading researcher in childhood trauma. She uses her clinical experience to create disturbing psychological thrillers, blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction. She enjoys taking her readers on a journey through the dark recesses of the human psyche” (1).

In an author interview from before she wrote this novel, Dr. Berry says that each of her novels is based on a different psychological condition. For example, one of her earlier novels had been about a child with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality), whose symptoms included memory gaps (2).

Thus, Dr. Berry intended The Perfect Child to be about a child whose psychological problem is psychopathy, not multiple personality. But it is possible that Janie has a psychopathic alternate personality.

Janie does not have memory gaps, as far as is known, but nobody ever asks her if she does. Indeed, the novel has very little about what Janie is thinking. Point of view switches from Hannah to Christopher to a social worker. No chapter is written from Janie’s point of view.

Raising the possibility that Janie has multiple personality are, 1. her puzzling inconsistency in maturity and ability to form relationships, as if she switched among alternate personalities of different ages and ability to relate, and 2. Hannah’s impression that Janie is possessed by a demon or the devil.

Janie can sometimes socialize as though she were quite normal. And she relates to Christopher in such a loving, enmeshing way that it keeps him loyal to her no matter what crimes she commits. But Janie is also known to have walked around with feces in her pants for days.

As to demon possession, Hannah’s diary includes the following: “I can see the demon in her eyes when I look at her…I heard her talking to it again today. In a different language. Latin? She thinks he’s funny. She says he’s the one who told her to put her poop on the walls. When the devil takes over, there is nothing you can do.”

Christopher, after reading the above in Hannah’s diary, says: “I stopped there, stunned. Hannah wasn’t a religious person, never had been. Her parents hadn’t brought her to church, not even on the holidays” (1, p. 301).

So was Hannah’s impression that Janie was possessed a symptom of Hannah’s own mental illness? Or was Hannah distinguishing between Janie’s host personality and Janie’s psychopathic alternate personality, who made Janie do bad things?

Comment

This novel may be another example of “unacknowledged multiple personality” (search past posts). 

Copyright

The author is Lucinda Berry. But the copyright is owned by Heather Berry. Who is she? Is one name or the other an alternate personality?

1. Lucinda Berry. The Perfect Child. Seattle, Thomas & Mercer, 2019.

2. Meet The Thriller Author, Hosted by Alan Peterson https://get.thrillingreads.com/mtta-62-lucinda-berry/

Added July 21, 2019

Psychopathy

“The current conceptualizations of psychopathy have been criticized for being poorly conceptualized, highly subjective, and encompassing a wide variety of underlying disorders. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D., has written:

‘…psychopathy and its synonyms (e.g., sociopathy and antisocial personality) are lazy diagnoses. Over the years the authors’ team has seen scores of offenders who, prior to evaluation by the authors, were dismissed as psychopaths or the like. Detailed, comprehensive psychiatric, neurological, and neuropsychological evaluations have uncovered a multitude of signs, symptoms, and behaviors indicative of such disorders as bipolar mood disorder, schizophrenia spectrum disorders, complex partial seizures, dissociative identity disorder [multiple personality disorder], parasomnia, and, of course, brain damage/dysfunction’ ” (1).

1. Wikipedia. “Psychopathy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy