When Rabbit Howls by The Troops for Truddi Chase

Originally published in 1987, When Rabbit Howls was presented as the first account of child sexual abuse to be written by a survivor, as unbelievable as that may seem given the shelves of rubbernecking misery porn now available in all good bookshops. It was also the first personal account of Multiple Personality Disorder (currently known as Dissociative Identity Disorder) to be presented to the public. Truddi Chase's psychotherapist,  Robert A. Phillips Jr. Ph.D., lays out the premise in his introduction: Truddi Chase, the first-born, has slept since she was two years old. The person who now appears to be Truddi Chase is in fact a conglomerate of 92 separate individuals who operate through a shared body. These people, collectively known as the Troop Formation, collaborated in the writing of the book as a part of the therapy process, each of their contributions originally showing distinct handwriting styles. Their stated aim in creating the manuscript is to bring attention to the horrific realities of child abuse—at the time of the book’s publication even more of a taboo than it is today—and lay bare the nature of life as a multiple, with its attendant confusion, amnesia and loneliness.

Yet things are more complicated than even this summary suggests. For a start, the Troops have chosen to write the book in the third person. Maybe this is a logical solution to the difficulties any reader would encounter in distinguishing between 92 potential first person narrators (Falkner eat your heart out), but it doesn't explain how or why the story is often focalised through the mind of The Troops' therapist. Stanley, as the Troops prefer to call Dr Phillips, is almost as much the protagonist of the book as any of the woman's myriad personalities. When we read about the progress made in therapy sessions, revelations come to us through Stanley's mind. We learn about his client's condition as we watch him struggle to diagnose and treat her. We're even granted access to conversations and thoughts he has in situations where his client is nowhere to be seen. Again, there may be a technical explanation for some of this: when a new personality takes control, the previous one often melts away, returning later with no memory of what has happened in the interim, so an external eye is necessary to give the story some kind of coherence.

This is a paradox at the core of the book. In order to show the realities of their Disorder, the Troops are heavily reliant on the conventions of fiction. In their own introduction, they acknowledge that the book condenses four years of therapy into a nine month narrative, and while one secondary character is a distillation of many real people and situations, another character—the expert psychologist Stanley turns to for advice and a second opinion—is actually a reflection of the shared ideas and conclusions Chase and Phillips came to through their sessions. The reader is thus forced to make a decision on how much of the book to take as non-fiction, how much should be read as a symbolic expression of the truth and how much might be pure fiction. According to the book, Chase changes appearance visibly when she shifts identities. Her cheek bones move, her eyes change shape. She also radiates energy which can jam electrical equipment and blow out light-bulbs. None of this is too difficult for me to deal with—my own mother's eyes change colour radically depending on her mood, and I've known more than one person who can't wear a digital watch—but the fictional structure of the book necessarily throws some of its wilder claims into question. Add to this the fact that the closing section is given over to a story told by one of the Troops, a mysterious and poetic Irishman named Ean, who seems to transcend time and space and to predate Chase's birth by at least a century, and it is easy to feel that as a non-fiction book When Rabbit Howls is structurally compromised.

Still, it can't be easy for 92 people to write a book by committee, and this is the structure they chose. It is through this structure that the duel stories of Chase's childhood and her journey through therapy emerge. The woman who comes to therapy says that she has only five memories of her whole life. She also says, "I don't believe I have what most people would call emotions or feelings—just an awful fear, a guilt I can't define, and a sense of impending doom." It becomes clear that most of her memories are held by her other selves, each created to deal with a particular set of traumas or to serve a given purpose. Many of them are children, like the Rabbit of the title, who was created to experience pain on behalf of those among the Troops who could not stomach it. Others are adults with various skills and identities, like Mean Joe, the large black man who serves as protector of the vulnerable Troop members, or Sister Mary Catherine, a nun who detests the sexuality of some of the more wanton girls among their number. Still others are dead, unable to continue living after a particularly foul piece of treatment. They are represented by their mirror images. The  woman becomes aware of the Troops as they emerge to write or tell their stories. Then, once they have receded, another member of the Troop Formation, called the Weaver, weaves a barrier in place to prevent the woman's access to the damaging realities of her past.

Slowly, Stanley comes to understand that the woman he thinks of as his client is not at all the original Truddi Chase, but just another created identity; she is an empty shell designed to operate in the world without the memories of the abuse or pain which the others hold. She is not the first-born, who is either asleep or dead, and who has been so since an act of penetration at the age of two. She is, it transpires, nothing more than a vacant puppet who does and thinks only as instructed by the Troops.

This is a deeply disturbing idea, more disturbing for me than this book's repulsive descriptions of child abuse and bestiality. It raises questions about the idea of the self that go well beyond the symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder. How many times have I found myself doing something I could never have predicted I would do, or watched myself behaving with a cruelty or anger that seems to come from elsewhere? If Truddi Chase is out at the far end of a continuum, at a point where the self is totally fragmented, it is nonetheless easy to see echoes of her condition in anyone's life. We all suppress inconvenient and painful memories and alter our body language and voice unconsciously in different situations. I can go a whole day without really interrogating my motivations for anything I have done. Even as I write this I have the sense that I am taking dictation. A key difference might be that most of us can make a story of our lives in which we work to blur the contradictions so that it sounds like the tale of a single individual. This for the Troops was an impossibility, such was the extremity of their experience and the outcome of their coping mechanisms.

Which raises the question, Where did they come from? How were the Troops created? Nobody has an answer to this, and it is another troubling element of When Rabbit Howls that Chase, or the woman, was totally unaware of her other personalities until she entered therapy with Phillips and began work on the manuscript. Dissociative Identity Disorder is a controversial diagnosis to put it lightly, and it does seem a little uncomfortable that throughout the book the Troops emerge under or following sessions of hypnosis. Could it be that the act of remembering—the process of creating the narrative—called many of these persons into being?  Could this process at least have made more concrete something which was previously abstract?

At whatever point it happened, each of the Troops were born in order to make sense of, or survive, something unbearable. It may well be that they existed fully formed long in advance of discovery. But it seems at least plausible that the fully fledged indentities and names of the Troops may have come into existence in response to the need to articulate through language the hidden rage and horror which the fragmented aspects of Truddi Chase had always held. Thus the Troops could be partially the product of the story they tell. This is not to question the reality of Chase's multiple persons (which would be an incredible arrogance), but ask whether, at one stage or another, the dire need to articulate a story might have been the foundation for the way in which that reality was experienced, understood and expressed.