The Flock

by Joan Frances Casey

  “I understand you want to make an appointment,” the doctor said.

  “That depends,” Kendra demurred. “Do you know I’m a multiple?”

  “I’ve read your chart,” the doctor said noncommittally.

  “Oh, great,” Kendra said.

  The chart. Well, the doctor would have to get to know the Flock before she understood that the chart reflected more of Dr. Tate’s problems than mine. I had read the chart and was appalled by what was written there. After warning me away from further contact and reminding me that he could have me withdrawn from school if I continued my “manipulative” behavior, the psychiatrist wrote that he and Dr. Matthews were going to work closely together on this complicated case.

  Dr. Matthews confirmed that he had never heard from Dr. Tate. Nor had I.

  Kendra asked Dr. Wu if she had ever worked with a multiple.

  “No,” she said, “but we can discuss all of this when you come in.”

  Kendra took a deep breath. By now we all knew the psychiatric routine.

  “I understand that you’d rather talk to me in person about all of this,” she said, “but I’m afraid I need some answers before I make an appointment. If you’ve read the chart, then you should understand that my experience with your group practice has not been the best. I don’t want to waste your time or mine if we can’t communicate. So, do you believe in multiple personality?”

  “I believe in you,” Dr. Wu replied.

  “I’m quite aware that I exist,” Kendra said coolly, “and I trust that you are also aware of my existence. That is not the issue. Do you believe in Multiple Personality Disorder as described in the psychiatric literature?”

  She said, “Yes.”

  Kendra said, “Fine.”

  The appointment was made. Kendra ended the call by giving Dr. Wu Lynn’s and Dr. Matthews’s phone numbers. “They can tell you a lot more about me than the chart did,” she suggested. “If you call either of them, you’ll know better who I am before I come in.”

  She hung up the phone and turned to me. “Renee,” she said, “why do you persist in throwing yourself at these psychiatrists? This convinces me that you are the craziest one in the Flock.”

  —

  THE OTHERS STAYED OUT of the way when I went to see Dr. Wu. Kendra didn’t approve, and she watched carefully so that she could act if needed.

  Dr. Wu was young and guarded. When I asked her why she had decided to see me, she explained that she was a resident; she wanted to be exposed to as many different types of patients as possible, and to learn about the disorder. I was delighted: I thought everyone should learn more about MPD. But I was distressed that she had not contacted Lynn or Dr. Matthews. She hadn’t had time, she said, and, no, she had never read Sybil or any of the clinical literature on MPD.

  “What led up to your seeing Dr. Brandenberg?” she asked.

  I explained that I wanted some supportive therapy. “I’d like to see someone once a week who can help me with the stress of being a graduate student and a teaching fellow combined with the stress of being multiple. Things are great now—the Flock is calm and cooperative. I’d like to keep it that way.

  “You don’t have to do any real treatment of pathology, no abreaction of abuse or anything like that,” I reassured her. “I just want to keep the Flock from getting into a crisis situation.”

  I talked for forty minutes, feeling less and less comfortable. Dr. Wu remained cool, guarded, distant. Just about the most unnerving thing to me was lack of response. “Where are you?” I wanted to ask. “Are you listening?” Instead, I continued to explain about the condition, waiting for some sign of understanding, some indication of support or empathy. Even some indication of disbelief would have been preferable to the blank, emotionless mask I faced, “Maybe you’d understand better if you met one of the others,” I suggested. She said nothing, and I figured she’d deal with whatever she saw. I slipped inside.

  Jo became aware in the doctor’s office, the room darkening with dusk. She glanced at her watch. Five forty-six. Where was she? Lynn had neglected to mention that I was going to try again to find a supportive psychiatrist, and Jo had neglected to look at the calendar where the Flock recorded appointments. As usual, her amnesia kept her in the dark.

  Jo glanced around the office. She didn’t know the woman who sat behind the desk. She squinted to read the titles in the bookcase across the room, thinking that they might help her figure it out. A professor? No, the woman wore a white coat. Probably a medical person. The books were too far away for Jo to make a better guess at identification, but the woman was saying something now.

  “So, why is it that you think you could not tolerate hospitalization?” she asked.

  “Hospitalization!” Jo thought wildly. “Oh, no, what have they done to me now?” She concentrated on her nerve endings. No pain, no evidence of a suicidal gesture. “Do you want to hospitalize me?” Jo finally asked in her distinctive, halting manner. She glanced out the window and recognized the street as being near campus.

  “No, I don’t want to hospitalize you,” Dr. Wu said, “but you told me earlier that you wanted to avoid hospitalization at all costs…or, rather, Renee said that. I wondered why you feel so strongly.”

  Jo relaxed a little and smiled hesitantly. Obviously this woman knew she was a multiple.

  Then she felt annoyed. She was annoyed that Renee would drop her into this situation, and annoyed with this strange woman as well. If this person knew she was a multiple and recognized her as a different personality from the one who had been speaking earlier, why didn’t she tell her what was going on? Why didn’t she introduce herself? Why did she only ask a question for which Jo lacked referent and context?

  Finally, Jo said, “I’m not ignoring your question, but when I find myself in strange places…I mean, you know I’m a multiple, and I don’t know where I am….I don’t know who you…Who are you?”

  “I’m Dr. Wu,” she said.

  “A psychiatrist?” Jo asked. When she responded affirmatively, Jo explained, “I’m amnestic and I have trouble answering questions when I don’t have the context. So why were you asking me about…”

  “Your time is up anyway,” she interrupted. “Do you want to make another appointment?”

  I took over and made an appointment for a week hence, but was far from sure that the others would let me keep it.

  “I told you it wouldn’t work,” Kendra said to me.

  Throughout the week, I argued with the others to let me try one more time. “Come on,” I said. “She’s young and really doesn’t know anything about MPD. Maybe she’ll relax. Let’s give her another chance.”

  At the start of the next appointment, I asked Dr. Wu if she had had time to call Dr. Matthews or Lynn. No, she hadn’t, but she had talked with others on the staff who had seen me last year. “I will not get caught up in your manipulation,” she said. “I hear that you’re used to setting the rules and getting your own way, but that won’t happen this time. I will see you every two weeks rather than weekly. And I will not be available to you in any emergency.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said slowly. “If I developed a therapeutic relationship with you and then called you to say that things were getting disjointed and crazy, you wouldn’t talk to me?”

  “I suppose I wouldn’t hang up on you,” she said, “but I want to make it very clear that I will never see you more often than every other Thursday, those sessions will never go beyond fifty minutes, I will not help you during any crisis, and I will deal with no other personality.”

  “Great,” I thought, “I’m coming here for help in dealing with the disorder, and she says that she’ll only help me if I’m able to hide the pathology.”

  Now that Dr. Wu had defined the limits of our professional relationship, she wanted to know my therapeutic goals. I knew I’d never be back, and decided that I had nothing to lose.

  “I’d like to be able to talk with you about the stresses of school and a
bout the additional stress of being a multiple,” I said, repeating myself from the last session. “I’d like for you to offer some support,” I continued, “and to offer suggestions as to how I might better cope with stress and little problems so that they don’t develop into crisis situations. I’m coming to you because I don’t think it’s right to involve school friends in these needs.”

  “So your therapeutic goal,” she said, “is to be able to tell your friends that you think you’re multiple?”

  “No,” I said, “that is not my therapeutic goal. I have no narcissistic need to tell people about my problem. My fellow students have their own problems. I’m not going to dump my problems on them. That’s why I came here—I wanted to find a professional to help me rather than my relying on my friends.”

  I took a deep breath. “And I don’t think I’m a multiple,” I said, “I am a multiple. Thank you for your time.”

  “Do you want to make another appointment?” she asked.

  “No,” Kendra said, “we won’t be back.”

  Unable to sleep that night, I tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Maybe I was finally learning from experience. I would never again look for help there. “But why can’t somebody outside the Flock do some learning?” I wondered.

  —

  WITH THE HOPE OF outside support gone, the Flock compensated by finding support within. One morning at the end of October, I woke to find pages of typed transcripts. These transcripts were the product of brand-new, total inner-Flock communication. Although Jo and other personalities continued to be amnestic and unable to communicate consciously with others in the Flock, on a deeper level the barriers were gone.

  The personality who applied this new ability called herself Unity. She hadn’t ever presented herself to any external person; she never took the consciousness in a way that interfered with any other personality. She claimed to exist solely to help us communicate better with one another, to help the Flock move closer together.

  I didn’t know if Unity was new to the Flock or if she had always been a part, unnoticed and unheard. Her background didn’t much matter; our new closeness did.

  Unity facilitated discussions in a self-induced hypnotic trance. Knowing that conscious awareness of the middle-of-the-night conferences would be important to at least some of the personalities, Unity asked the organizing Karen personality to type transcripts while the conferences were going on. Even I, the least amnestic of all the functioning personalities, had no memory of the meetings. But four times during October and November, I woke to find a transcript from a conference that had reportedly taken place an hour or so after I had gone to bed. I felt no fear about my “lost time,” no frustration at finding that the body had operated without my control.

  I did feel silly about the whole thing. And I was not alone in that feeling. Based on the transcript, our first intra-Flock session was a test run, filled with expressions of disbelief.

  Unity introduced herself and reassured the others that they would not remember what took place at the conference. She suggested that we see how such deep-level communication might work.

  The transcript read:

  KENDRA (in response to Unity): Come on. After getting us up for this, you might tell us what it’s all about.

  UNITY: First of all, I did not get you up for this. I told you, you need not know you were up at all.

  JO: The reality of the situation is that the body is sitting at the typewriter. Whether any personalities remember it later or not, in some sense, I am up.

  UNITY: I admit that I’m extending definitions somewhat so that there can be a record of this conference. Would you feel differently if I had let the body stay in bed while we communicated like this?

  JO: I can’t answer that.

  UNITY: We would have been doing the same thing, except that Karen would not have been typing.

  RENEE: Jo’s right, though. There’s a big difference between lying in bed and sitting at the typewriter.

  UNITY: Well, I suggest that the two of you come up with a “relevant” difference. You both know that the biggest problem that the “normal” world has with multiplicity is that it insists on the convention of one mind in one body. I suggest that the two of you become more flexible in your thinking if you expect the world to do the same.

  JO: There is a relevant difference between flexibility and sloppy thinking.

  UNITY: I won’t bother to respond to that. Most of what we need to talk about during these conferences has to do with cooperation. Renee has correctly expressed our therapeutic goal as comfort and productivity for all. That’s simply not possible without greater connection among us. It need not be conscious right now; it need not lead to integration. We can cooperate quietly, internally, and, as it were, in a dream. But cooperate we must. I will take no position on any given topic. I will facilitate and ensure that all interested personalities have a say in the final external decision on whatever topic we discuss.

  After this first dream conference, I felt even more disbelief than I had evidently expressed during the group discussion. I called Lynn. “You’re not going to believe this one,” I began. “In fact, I feel a little embarrassed even talking to you about it.”

  Lynn sighed. “Renee, what did you do this time?”

  I described the conference to her and read the transcript. “Who would believe this?” I said. “It’s just too hokey! I’d like to find a way of denying it myself.”

  Lynn agreed that the conference seemed strange, but she applauded the Flock’s creativity. “Don’t you see what’s happening, Renee?” she asked. “The others are determined to have a say now.

  “I think Unity’s a pretty smart lady,” Lynn added, “because you are being forced to deal with the reality of the conference through the transcripts. There’s no way that you can pretend you’re running the show anymore.”

  “Thanks for making me feel so important,” I said.

  In truth, I was impressed with the new group cooperation. And, whether I liked it or not, the conference transcripts appeared, at irregular intervals. I decided that it did no good to worry about any conference that took place without transcription.

  The first Flock conference happened after our initial visit with Dr. Wu. Following our second appointment, Unity called another caucus. She asked me to explain why I had gone back to Wu for the second visit, then let the others have their say:

  UNITY: Was anyone else at Dr. Wu’s office aside from Renee and Kendra?

  ISIS: I was. She thinks we’re difficult and dangerous, that we’ve manipulated a lot of people to do our bidding, including Lynn. Dr. Tate let Dr. Wu know that he thinks we used him. Wu is damn sure that that’s not going to happen to her. By the way, she has already decided that she would hospitalize us at the least provocation, just to show us who’s boss. She thinks you—and, by the way, she does think of you, Renee, in the singular sense—have an ego problem, and that you think you are far more powerful than you actually are.

  RENEE: If that’s so, then we are all lucky that Dr. Wu didn’t meet Isis. At least I don’t pretend I can read minds.

  UNITY: There isn’t any reason to think that Isis’s interpretation is less accurate than yours, Renee. Was anyone else there?

  RUSTY: I looked at her one time, and she didn’t like my new dad.

  RENEE: This is ridiculous. Wu doesn’t even know Gordon.

  ISIS: What Rusty means is that your good doctor thinks that we’ve manipulated both Lynn and Gordon.

  JO: Renee, why do you have to put us through things like that?

  RENEE: I just wanted to establish a therapeutic relationship with someone here on campus, just like hundreds of other students. What’s wrong with that? I tried to set up something with Wu for the good of the Flock. Don’t make me into an ogre.

  JOAN FRANCES: Dr. Wu knows I’m just pretending. She knows I’m not a multiple personality. (Groans from the rest of the group.)

  KENDRA: Damn it. Renee, do you see what you’ve started w
ith Joan Frances? Isn’t that reason enough to keep away from that fool?

  RENEE: OK, we’re never going to see Dr. Wu again, but what am I supposed to do for some support? What if things begin to fall apart?

  UNITY: How do the rest of you feel about Dr. Matthews?

  MISSY: That man’s place is scary. And the other girl, who hits her head, might come, and then Renee would be mad.

  ISIS: Josie is always a danger, but a lot of us have had fairly pleasant contact with Dr. Matthews. How about if the rest of us help Renee out and work together to keep things under control if we go to see him?

  JO: I don’t want to see any psychiatrist.

  Through full Flock discussion, then, negotiations were made and compromises were offered until a solution emerged. I would see Dr. Matthews if I felt overly stressed, and everyone in the Flock agreed to help out. The greater communication within the Flock made it less likely that a crisis would occur, but it was good to know that there was somebody nearby.

  DIARY    November 18, 1984

  When Renee called me, hedging a little on telling me why she sounded so embarrassed, I imagined all sorts of things. I was completely surprised by Renee’s explanation of the “intra-Flock conference” conducted by a personality we had not met. I had long since given up looking for a personality who could always tell what the Flock needed. The literature suggested that every multiple had a personality who “knew everything about everyone” and who provided assistance to the therapist. Renee had long ago stopped worrying about not meeting the criteria of an internal self-helper personality.

  Now, suddenly, there is an internal self-helper, who apparently does far more than offer her therapist polite suggestions: Unity took charge and provided the climate for Flock cooperation. Not only that, she saw to it that there were transcripts of the internal conferences. Whether this was intended or not, the transcripts let me keep track of the Flock’s continuing growth. Unity was well worth waiting for, and I am hoping to meet her when the Flock comes home for Thanksgiving.