Kidnykid's Full Review: Joan Frances Casey - The Flock/the Autobiography o...
WARNING: SPOILER ALERT
Joan Frances Casey is a pseudonym used by a woman who went to see a psychiatric social worker with the pseudonym of Lynn Wilson. Casey was troubled by some problems she was having while working on her masters' degree, and made the appointment with Wilson, in the belief that she would need merely a few outpatient sessions and would then quit therapy. THE FLOCK is the story of the controversial form of therapy Wilson used on Casey, called "reparenting."
Although Wilson did not go to the extremes exhibited by some who used reparenting as a technique, she did suspect early on that Casey was a multiple. Soon after she firmed up her diagnosis, she dropped all pretense of formality in the writings she contributed to this book, and it is at this point that her writing style changes from a relatively formal case-note structure to the more informal diary that appears through the bulk of the book. By the time the style switch occurs, it is extremely evident to all but the most dense of readers that Wilson and Casey are extremely close, and that Wilson considers Casey her sixth child, at least informally.
For her part, Casey's portions of the book are interspersed with Wilson's, and it takes her a good deal longer to warm up to both the diagnosis (dissociative identity disorder) and Wilson. It takes Casey even longer to have all parts of herself accept the diagnosis of DID, and to accept their cause - longstanding emotional abuse from her mother, and sexual abuse from her father. Some of Casey's personalities were so firmly attached to Casey's dad that they refused to believe the truth about his sexual abuse. Other personalities were so firmly attached to Casey's mother - who did not approve of Casey's postgraduate studies and told her so in no uncertain terms - that Wilson's gentle encouragement to acknowledge the truth about her mother left those personalities baffled.
With personalities firmly in tow, Casey went to Harvard to earn a PhD about midway through the reparenting therapy. During the first year and a half of her PhD studies, she would spend her summers and Christmas vacations with the Wilsons, and grew to love both Lynn and her husband Gordon as she had never loved her biological parents. In fact, she was unable to reach a reconciliation with her biological mother and sister until after therapy had formally ended, with her sister (at least) aware of the deep attachment between Joan, Gordon and Lynn. And at the end of the book, in descriptions of Casey's post-integration life, it is clear that Casey regards the Chicago area - not Richmond, Virginia, where she grew up - as "home" precisely because she is so close to the Wilsons.
The climax of the book, integration, is not the end of the story. The truth is that after integration, Casey ended up having what could colloquially be called single-personality disorder. Within months after integration, she ended a relationship with a man she had met as an undergraduate, a professor with whom she worked, because the relationship was essentially stagnant. The man was reluctant to accept Casey's DID at first, then reluctant to give up the notion that she was ill at the very time she was almost integrated and whole, so the two agreed to split up when they could not resolve their differences. After that, she couldn't find a nonabusive man to save her life - and finally went into therapy with another therapist, who suggested to both Casey and Wilson that they write a book about Casey's DID therapy. THE FLOCK is the result.
THE FLOCK is by far the best book on DID on the market. In fact, I feel it's vastly superior to SYBIL, because one knows Wilson's and Casey's biases from page one. One is also not made to believe that those who disagree with those biases are bad people, which was a mistake the authors of SYBIL made.
In fact, the only thing that Wilson and Casey left themselves open for were the same accusations that plagued Shirely Mason (the real Sybil) at the end of her life - there is always the possibility that THE FLOCK is a fictionalized account of a real psychiatric case, a possibility diminished in my mind by the plausibility of the descriptions of problems Casey had with doubting psychiatrists who gave her grief. (Casey would occasionally see a psychiatrist at Harvard, who turned out to be so skeptical of the diagnosis of DID that Casey ended up feeling as if she were being emotionally abused all over again. This psychiatrist had Casey pegged as a manipulative patient with alleged multiple personality disorder, and Wilson was labeled Casey's puppet therapist.)
There are two major criticisms of THE FLOCK. The first is that the hostility some of Casey's personalities had toward Nancy is dropped abruptly after Casey is integrated; little or no space is devoted to the way in which Casey and her mother, given the pseudonym Nancy, resolve their problems. One minute, the personalities are confused about her, and the next (a few pages later), Joan is talking to Nancy (respectfully, but with appropriate trepidation) about her father's sexual abuse when she was a child. The two don't clash at all, it seems, after the acute phase of integration, when the personalities see Nancy in the midst of their own quasi-psychotic turmoil. Toward the end of THE FLOCK, Casey pays a visit to Nancy and her sister, and there is no mention even at this point of whether or not Casey confronts Nancy about Nancy's apparent emotional abuse. I would have liked to read about how they resolved Casey's mixed feelings about it, or whether it was brought up in the first place as a topic of conversation.
My second, and final, problem is that I feel the way in which Casey's post-integration therapy is described may offend some feminists. I feel strongly that Casey really was naive about relationships; after all, let's remember that she divorced her husband in favor of a much older man who was not committed to loving her as she really was, complete with the direction in which she was growing and changing as a human being. She then went directly from this relationship into a string of three highly abusive boyfriends in a row. That says something about her inability to relate to men. However, the discoveries she makes during her second round of therapy sound like a feminist's nightmare; she confesses that she did more than her share of emotional abusing herself. That doesn't mean she deserved what she got, merely that she thought that this was the normal way to conduct relationships and that she wanted to correct this behavior pattern during therapy. But she grew to feel that she was actually baiting these guys to abuse her, and a lot of feminists in the domestic-violence field would rather portray women like her as angelic, pure victims rather than somewhat naive adolescents in adult bodies who need some guidance about how to conduct a relationship. Essentially, that's what Casey was after integration - an adolescent in a 30-year-old's body, who needed some guidance on how to conduct a relationship. She really thought she was doing it right, before she went into therapy.
Even with these problems, though, I'd recommend THE FLOCK highly. It's worth reading, because you will learn about a concept called "emotional truth." (I'm not going to tell you that. You have to read the book to learn.)
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