A weekend spent with books on multiplicity

Nightmare and Jennifer and Her Selves

In my opinion, these are both not-so-great books - unless you want to read about "great person who tried to help a multiple, got more than s/he bargained for, and screwed up a lot along the way."

In Nightmare a well intentioned teacher tries to help a multiple, who ends up living in what sounds like a highly unappropriate way with some people who are performing 24 hour a day therapy on her. (To be fair, there was some recognition on the part of those involved that they might do it a different way later.)

The language of the book is not to my mind respectful. The narrator calls Nancy "emotionally mutilated." To whom is she referring - the whole? The individual parts of the system? I found this and other similar vague judgement calls as to what "healthy" would be and how Nancy's system didn't meet it to be disturbing. This continual black and white thinking permeates a lot of the description - and, one senses, the decisions about which episodes to put into the book and which to leave out.

Jennifer and Her Selves was a book I couldn't finish, after Jennifer spontaneously supposedly integrates on a car trip in order to please her therapist - and he finds this to be a positive move. I flipped through it and found that he had to refer her as he couldn't handle the situation - a good decision under the circumstances, I'm sure, but my own experience suggests that would have been a kind of devastating rejection. The epilogue gives me hope as he admits that he had to get his "countertransference" under control. I suppose it's a good thing that this therapist had the courage to write about his own mistakes.