Sometimes it can get Crowded in the Consulting Room

Painting by Ken -Artist Kim Noble's alter 

I was catapulted into the then-uncharted territory of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) - previously multiple personality disorder - one day in the early 70's, when a woman client I had been seeing for almost 2 years, came for her regular session and remarked that I had painted my walls a different colour and wasn't there someone who played the piano in one of the other rooms of the flat? I was a bit taken aback - I hadn't had any painting done recently and no-one lived in that room any more. In those days, I was a recently qualified psychotherapist and much as it pains me to admit it, I took notes in sessions. On this particular day it stood me in good stead. Writing down her observations helped me to think. I'd seen and read "The Three Faces of Eve", I'd seen "Sybil". Was I sitting with such a person? "When were you last here?" I asked - as of-course anyone would, who was certain they'd seen their client for their usual session the previous week! "I came once when She was drunk," came the immediate insouciant reply.
 And thus began a 20-year on-off relationship with a few extremely riveting, sometimes troublesome "personalities", who had different accents, different dreams, different world-views, different histories and different parents but each of whom mysteriously inhabited the same body and who had to give way to each other in order to communicate with me. They fought bitterly with each other over this issue in the early years, but later were able to be extremely co-operative - not only in sessions, but in taking on different tasks e.g. when writing exams, decorating rooms and taking on professional activities. As Valerie Sinason said about DID when she was recently interviewed in the U.K. about her artist client, Kim Noble, "its a brilliantly creative survival device".
I also thought so - especially after one instance when my client cancelled a session in order to go to the women's tennis at Wimbledon and nevertheless turned up at the usual time! I hadn't realised that I should've checked that the cancellation had been agreed on by the Others. Luckily for me there was mainly only one Other - I'm not sure if I could've handled a whole lot more!  After that I often thought how convenient it would be to call on this capacity. For example: I could be lying in bed while another part of me was going for an early morning run - something I always felt I should be able to do, but never could.

But what is the self defending against in these instances? Its usually the unbearable pain and confusion of childhood abuse - often sexual abuse - perpetrated by someone the child does or is supposed to trust. Unfortunately, until the 80's very few psychoanalysts actually believed in the reality of childhood sexual abuse and incest. The real experiences of women patients were seen as incestuous Oedipal fantasies, and trusted analysts re-enacted the silencing of their patients in ways that echoed their silencing by perpetrators. In parallel with this cultural blindness, multiple personality disorder was frequently misdiagnosed, or went unrecognised - largely because (according to Sinason) there is at least one really high-functioning personality present, who even if not aware of all the Others, is able to keep things together. Useful supervision was hard to come by.

In Kim Noble's case the perpetrators were her babysitters. However horrific the sexual abuse was, and this is graphically represented (as is the dissociation), in the paintings of Ria Pratt, (one of Kim's more than 100 alters), she has emerged, having used dissociation as a way to survive, as a celebrated artist who has managed to express her pain and terror in an extraordinarily creative way. Thirteen of her alters paint - here are some more examples showing a great diversity of styles.

Ria Pratt's - "Training in Progress"

Key's iconic painting with symbols

Abi's lone figure

                                                                 











There are many people who don't believe that dissociation actually happens - and psychoanalysts and psychologists are among them. If you are one of the doubters, I welcome your comments.