Word: oxnam
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Then things got really bad. One day, what seemed like seconds after he had begun a session with his psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffrey Smith, the doctor informed his astonished patient that their time was up. "I spent this past 50 minutes," he told Oxnam, "talking with ... Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." In short, Smith explained, Oxnam was suffering from what used to be called multiple-personality disorder. (It's now known as dissociative identity disorder.) Like Sybil, the character in the 1970s book and TV movie, he had several independent identities...
...just an utter shock," Oxnam tells TIME, "as if an earthquake had just hit. My second reaction was that this was hogwash. It had to be a doctor pulling a scam." Eventually he accepted the diagnosis, and Smith began teasing out the hidden personalities, helping Oxnam discover them one by one. In order to help others who might be suffering--and, says Oxnam, "to offer a look at the multiple nature that is in all of us"--he wrote A Fractured Mind...
Unfortunately, the book dwells on Oxnam's personalities in excruciating detail, allowing each to speak with its own voice until the readers' eyes glaze over. It's like listening to a long, very complicated story involving people you have never met and cannot keep straight. There's Tommy and Robert and Wanda and Bobby and the Witch and the Librarian and Eyes, and they all live in the Castle, and ... you get the idea...
Finally, to the relief of all, we meet Baby, who reveals that Oxnam was physically, verbally and sexually abused as a young child--the ultimate explanation for his later addictions and multiple identities. Indeed, experts in dissociative disorder believe that childhood abuse is often the reason behind multiple personalities. Says Smith: "When a child is in an unbearable situation, he or she can sometimes split off from that experience, leaving behind someone who's able to handle inhuman degrees of pain, and soon that part of the person's being takes on a personality of its own. Once that happens...
...Oxnam and Smith don't buy it. And whether or not Oxnam really was all those different people, his book is a brave effort to explain how a troubled man found a way to get better. He's already down from 11 personalities to three, he says, and they've hammered out a working relationship...