I saw my first dissociative patient (at least the first one that I recognized) in 1977.
I am a family physician. I had become very interested in themedical and psychological uses of hypnosis in 1972, and within five years it had become a routine part of my everyday practice. When a colleague phoned to say that she was moving out of town and asked if I would accept one of her patients (“I know you’re not taking new patients, Marlene, but this woman really needs you”), I agreed.
Thus began a journey that never in my wildest imaginings would I have anticipated—a view into the inner world of the highly dissociative patient. Slowly, I realized that I had another such patient in my very own family practice, and yet another.
She was a pleasant and intelligent patient, and I liked herimmediately. In her late twenties, she had a very responsible job in the government offices, which she did well. However, she drove me to distraction, because I never knew where I was at with her. She suffered from terrible headaches; I would prescribe the newest pharmaceutical miracle, she would phone me from work and say, “That medicine is wonderful—why didn’t you give it to me earlier?” And then, three hours later, she would be sitting in my office and when she saw me would glare at me and say, “What did you give me that crap for? It isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on!”
I will call her Jayere, because that is the name I have given her in various papers that I have presented.
Jayere had a documented history of early child abuse. My colleague had done some hypnosis with her and taken her (in hypnosis and at the patient’s request) back to a birth experience, in which Jayere reported that she had heard her mother say, “Take the little bitch away.”
Now, whether that really happened is not the issue. The issue is that this is what she believed, and if that is how one believes one has been greeted on entering this world, it doesn’t bode well for one’s future emotional harmony.
In fact, the birth mother deserted the child and the husband when Jayere was three weeks old. The husband, not well educated and in a laboring job, with absolutely no knowledge or experience of children let alone a weeks-old baby, passed her around to various friends so that he could go to work. Ultimately, at the age of thirteen months, she was found on the beach, wrapped in newspaper and left for dead, having been hit in the head with a beer bottle. Bits of beer bottle glass were embedded in her tiny scalp.
She was in several foster homes over the next few years and, at the age of five, was adopted into a family where (as she told me) strict discipline was the order of the day.
As our doctor—patient relationship became established and grew, I became more and more confused. She had had, from previous family doctors, twelve psychiatric referrals. These resulted in twelve diagnoses. I made the thirteenth referral, and thus she received the thirteenth diagnosis—that s
