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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2005, 304 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2006, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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The harrowing, insightful, and courageous account of a prominent man's struggle with multiple personalities.
Robert Oxnam was a high-profile, successful man: A renowned scholar and president of the Asia Society, he appeared frequently on television and traveled the world as a sought-after expert. But what the millions of people who’d seen him didn’t know -- what even those closest to him didn’t know -- was that Oxnam suffered from multiple personality disorder. It was only after an intervention staged by family and friends, in response to frequent blackouts and episodic rages assumed to be alcohol-driven, that he sought treatment with Dr. Jeffery Smith; the first of his eleven personalities emerged in a session in 1990. After years of treatment, he has integrated them into three: Robert, Wanda, and Bobby, who take turns narrating this remarkable, unprecedented chronicle.
Chapter One
Bob: "I Always Thought I was 'Real.'"
On a cold, cloudy afternoon in March 1990, driving my black Honda through the spiderweb of highways north of New York City, I had no idea that this day would change my life forever. I was in a funk of a mood, dark and irritable, loathing the meeting with my psychiatrist that lay ahead. Seven months earlier, when I first met Dr. Jeffery Smith, I had real hope that he could cure my spiraling depression and anger. But now, after enduring extensive therapy sessions and a month in a rehabilitation clinic, I felt worse than ever. It was time to break from Dr. Smith.
But I realized that cutting off relations with Dr. Smith would be a challenge. He seemed like a genuinely concerned colleague, professional but approachable, a very hard man to dislike. Working from a simple office in an unpretentious modern building, he certainly was not the sort of shrink who siphons off patients' money to pay huge overhead. He dressed in a casually ...
Multiple personality disorders (MPD) have come in for a lot of bad press over the years. Some in the medical community don't believe they exist at all, many believe they are over-diagnosed, and some baulk at the suggestion that they are caused by the need to suppress memories of significant childhood trauma, usually of a sexual nature - memories that are later "recovered" during treatment.
Many readers have also been burned recently by memoirs that are not all that they purport to be, the most recently notorious being A Million Little Pieces, so you would be right to have your cynicism antennae well attuned when considering whether to believe the story told in A Fractured Mind.
However, as one reads Oxnam's story, and as one learns about his life, as one of the most respected Asia specialists in the world, one can't help but wonder why he would invent such a story - in publicly telling it he has nothing to gain and a great deal to lose. The conclusion that many will reach can be summed up by the immortal (and oft repeated) words of Sherlock Holmes, "We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."..continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Marlene Steinberg, M.D., author of The Stranger in the Mirror: Dissociation -- The Hidden Epidemic
...Oxnam reveals how someone who appears so successful and talented on the outside can be filled with overwhelming self-hatred...According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th
Edition, the primary characteristic of
Disassociate Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) is the existence of more than one distinct
identity or personality within the same individual. The identities will ‘take
control’ of the person at different times, with important information about the other identities out of conscious awareness. This differs from Schizophrenia, the symptoms of which include delusions and hallucinations, disorganized behavior and/or speech.
The most famous MPD sufferer is arguably Shirley Ardell Mason (1923-1998),
better known as "Sybil". In the early 1950s, having been plagued by ...
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