A compelling account of abuse so repellent as to sometimes defy credulity.
Psychiatrist Baer recalls “the most important and deeply fascinating experience of my professional life”—his many sessions with a patient suffering from dissociative identity disorder.
Supplementing his detailed notes with audio and video tapes, drawings, letters and journal entries, the author builds a dramatic, novelistic account of the years he spent treating a woman known here as Karen. Baer first met her in January 1989, when she came to his Chicago office complaining of depression and suicidal feelings. Her periodic losses of memory and her accounts of horrific childhood abuse led the psychiatrist to suspect that Karen had what used to be called multiple personality disorder. After nearly four years of therapy, his suspicions were confirmed when he received a letter from one of her “alters,” a seven-year-old named Claire. Karen then provided him with the names and descriptions of 11 distinct alternate personalities, each with a unique history. At this point, Baer began hypnotizing Karen and guiding her through trances in which more personalities—male and female, young and old—were induced to speak to him. They also sent him drawings and wrote revealing letters, portions of which are reproduced here. Baer then led Karen through an integration process, sometimes guided by advice from an alter. As Karen consolidated these alters, whose function had been to protect her, painful memories emerged, but so did her coping abilities. By 1998, she had integrated them all; however, years of abuse had taken their toll, and she remained Baer’s patient for another eight years. While controversy still surrounds the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, Baer’s account is given weight by Karen’s participation—she verified its accuracy as it was being written and provides a prologue and an epilogue.
A compelling account of abuse so repellent as to sometimes defy credulity.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-38266-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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