Brooklyn Zoo by Darcy Lockman Page A

drinking at eleven and using crack at sixteen and angel dust at twenty. He got what passed for help—that is, antipsychotic medication—for the first time in jail at age twenty-five. He’d never had any kind of talk therapy. During his time away from jail, he’d fathered a child every few years—none of the five now wanted much to do with him. His acting out was like Russian roulette: he’d tried to hang himself dozens of times while at Attica, where the guards would always arrive in time to save him, in time but also much too late.
    “Your stepfather never comes to visit like your mother?” I asked.
    “No, just in my dreams,” he said, shaking his head. “But sometimes Ken comes.”
    “Ken?”
    “He’s this white guy.” Grant was black. “He’s been coming around since I was a kid.”
    “Do other people know Ken?”
    “I’m not really sure,” he told me. “When Ken comes, Grant leaves.”
    I paused at the last part. I’d quickly assumed Ken was just another auditory hallucination, a voice in Grant’s head. But if he really experienced himself as leaving upon Ken’s arrival, he might be describing an alter, another personality. Dissociative identity disorder (DID), or multiple personalities, is theoretically an outgrowth of early and chronic traumatic experience, so it fit with Grant’s history, but there was debate in the field about the disorder’s actual existence. Some clinicians identify DID in a large number of their traumatized patients, while others claim it’s iatrogenic, or brought on by the treatment itself, by practitioners who want to find it working with patients who are eager to please. I’d taken an entire class on the defense called dissociation, the process that underpins DID. Like all defenses, dissociation is a normal function of the mind, widely experienced, for instance, in the benign form of daydreaming—the daydreamer “leaves” a situation mentally while remaining physically present and physiologically awake. Dissociation also offers protection from overwhelming experiences of terror, as an unbearable event is processed as if not quite happening to the self. Trauma victims commonly describe watching themselves as if from the outside as the very bad thing goes on, and therapy with this population is necessarilyfocused on integrating the disturbing experiences—making them part of their conscious and continuous life story. Like other defenses, dissociation is only pathological when it becomes a person’s go-to way of dealing with even objectively minor life stressors, and this is what theoretically happens in dissociative identity disorder. DID always made sense to me: it just seemed like dissociation reaching its inevitable potential. But I’d never before been seated at a metal table across from someone who had it, and I found it perversely exciting.
    “What do you mean Grant leaves?” I asked. There were specific questions designed to clarify whether someone was prone to dissociation, but damn it I couldn’t remember them just then.
    “Sometimes Ken takes over,” he replied.
    When I finished my interview with Grant, I went back upstairs and straight to Dr. Wolfe’s cubicle—he had been assigned to oversee the case—and he was thoughtful.
    “It might explain why he can’t remember the robberies,” he said. “Or he could be malingering.”
    It was hard for me to believe that the fragile man who’d sat before me could fake a toothache, let alone anything as elaborate as a white man named Ken, but I agreed the matter warranted more attention. Dr. Wolfe suggested I add a self-report measure that helped flesh out dissociative experiences to the list of tests I’d administer to Grant, and he told me he’d want to speak to Grant himself before the testing was through. We told Dr. Ruben, the psychiatrist who’d made the referral, that I suspected DID, and he expressed faux annoyance: he’d had high hopes that this one might be treated with a quick dose of