Christian Jungersen - The Exception

Then she looks calmly at her visitors and smiles.

‘Aha …’

They talk about the possibility that Anne-Lise is envious of them, maybe because of their friendship, or because their jobs are more exciting, or their relationship with Paul is better than hers; any envy she feels that might remind her of other disturbing situations in her past, when she felt undervalued and excluded. Maybe she didn’t dare allow herself to show anger then.

At last, they’ve arrived at the point where psychological expertise might help them understand.

Malene sums up: ‘Something about Anne-Lise’s personality makes her reactions unpredictable. We wondered if that “something” means it’s essential that we treat her with special care? Could she cope, if we confronted her and told her that we think she has sent the emails?’

Malene waits for Grith to say something illuminating.

She doesn’t.

Malene tries again. ‘… Of course, we’ve also come to you because we want to help Anne-Lise. Do you think she needs psychological counselling?’

Grith says that they mustn’t expect yes-or-no answers and doles out psychological tit-bits straight from an agony-aunt column.

Malene starts checking out the furniture. The large brass standard lamp behind Iben is elegant and casts a pretty light. The cachepot on the window sill is stylish too and would be perfect for her own place.

What a disappointing session. Or it would’ve been if she had come here expecting something special.

Malene realises that her main reaction is relief. If you’re close to someone, you can easily develop all kinds of funny ideas about that person’s relationships with others. Now that she has seen Iben with her ‘other friend’, she can be reassured that Iben is much closer to her than to Grith.

Malene warms her hands on her mug. God knows what Grith has observed tonight and what she thinks about the whole episode.

Grith sets out bags of potato chips and they devour them instantly. Malene thinks that they should leave soon.

Grith starts to speak about one of her patients: ‘She’s a woman with what people used to call a split or multiple personality.’

‘Christ! One of your patients?’

Malene has always been fascinated by stories of people with split personalities but has never met anyone who has actually known someone. Her interest makes Grith warm to her subject.

‘Yes. Only the new classification for psychiatric conditions calls it Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID for short. My patient has at least two personalities, in addition to her dominant one. One of them is a little girl. That’s very common.’

At last Grith is coming alive. It’s impossible to tell what has held her back, but she is completely animated now; her eyes seem even larger and as she talks, her thin arms flail about.

‘In psychiatry we’ve come to take a much greater interest in DID than we did before. All those Hollywood films packed with clichés about split personalities were distracting, I suppose. Somehow they made psychologists and psychiatrists take their cases less seriously than they should. Most people in the trade thought it was embarrassing and dull to write up DID case histories in professional journals, but it’s not like that any more — things are moving fast. During the last twenty years or so, the number of recorded cases in the US has risen sharply and so have the much more common borderline cases.’

‘How many people do you think suffer from DID, including the minor cases?’

‘Just over six billion, give or take.’

‘But that’s the entire …’

‘Think about it. We’ve all done things that we would hardly have believed we were capable of. It’s especially common in young people, while the personality is still in transition, to a certain extent. You do things and then you forget all about them.’

Grith looks at Iben and then over at Malene. ‘Can either of you recall having done anything like that?’

They both try hard to remember. Neither speaks.

After a while, Grith continues: ‘See what I mean about forgetting? Keep trying. Can you recall ever experiencing a deep feeling of regret?’

‘Isuppose so …’

‘Maybe I can …’

‘There, you see! Behaving badly is dramatic, so it ought to be something you remember. But sitting alone in your kitchen and repenting over a glass of milk is sad and dull, so in theory it should be more difficult to remember. In practice, though, we recall these dreary moments of regret quite easily. You know that and I do too. It’s because we’re all split — a little anyway. In the kitchen, with that glass of milk, we are who we know ourselves to be.’

Malene’s voice sounds faint at first. ‘Grith, you describe it so well — the whole scene, that glass of milk, everything.’

‘Thanks. Everyone knows that when you’re depressed, you can only remember sad things and it’s difficult to think of something cheerful. It’s as if the happy experiences have vanished. The important thing to remember is that the divide between one aspect of a personality and another needn’t be anywhere near as extreme as the characters you see in films. The sides to dissociated personality are usually much less starkly differentiated, but, even so, the split can be enough for a patient to forget what he or she was up to ten minutes earlier. Or it can make days or months or even whole years of a life disappear into the shadows.’

Malene has a question: ‘So, just as an example, is it conceivable that Anne-Lise might have sent the emails, but can’t remember having done it?’

‘It certainly is. She might not have a complete alternative identity, with a name and so on; but even so, she could have sent them and forgotten about it.’

Malene had taken off her shoes earlier. She gently rubs the sole of one foot over Grith’s rug, registering the rough surface with her toes.

‘We could never be frightened of Anne-Lise,’ she says. ‘At least, the Anne-Lise we know — that’s why we wouldn’t take her threat to kill us seriously. But how different might her other personality be?’

‘If I’ve understood you correctly, no one knows if Anne-Lise wrote the emails. They could have been sent by anyone at all. Right?’

‘Right. Absolutely anyone. I was just wondering, you know, “If … then what?”’

‘If she did, then she could be like the other cases I’ve come across. Each identity can have any combination of characteristics and other identities are entirely independent of the person you think you know. The “other” could be the complete opposite.’

Iben stares at the tropical fruit slices. She raises her hand a little, but doesn’t actually reach out for the bowl. ‘What you’re saying is that hypothetically we could all have many sides to our personality that we don’t know of. And these “others” might be out of control, doing all kinds of things, while we have no memory of it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Logically, then, it’s impossible for a person to know if there are any “others”.’

‘Yes … well, no. People often seem to have an idea that something is going on, if they dare to pick up the signs. The possibility of fluid identity boundaries is one of the new areas of research. So are the implications of discovering that splitting is relatively common. Even if you’re one of the rare cases of zero awareness of other identities, looking for physical traces usually works: objects in your home in unexpected places, something as simple as a shopping bag in the wrong room — that sort of thing.’

Malene accidentally kicks out with one foot and her toes hit a table leg. It hurts, but not too much. The others don’t notice. She bends over a little to examine her foot and massages a tender arthritic toe.