The Case of Mary Raynolds
On a Sunday Mary was found by her friends in a state of insensibility. When she recovered her consciousness, she found herself inexplicably blind and deaf. Few weeks later her hearing returned suddenly and all at once while her sight recovered slowly but eventually — fully. Three months later she had another episode of prolonged state of unconsciousness. One morning Mary was found sleeping way past her usual time of waking. It was impossible to awake her. She ended up sleeping for 18 hours. When she awoke her state was even more inexplicable than previously. She had lost all of her memories, the ability to read, write and even speak. As somebody who witnessed her awaking stated,
“All of the past that remained to her was the faculty of pronouncing a few words, and this seems to have been as purely instinctive as the wailings of an infant; for at first the words which she uttered were connected with no ideas in her mind.”
Mary Raynolds found herself thrown into the depths of her own mind. We will follow the story of her life and see how far the rabbit hole really goes. This is the case of Mary Raynolds.
The Journey
There are numerous mysteries in the case of Mary. First of all, why did she enter a Snow White level of sleep? Then there’s the mystery of her amnesia. Why did she lose her memories and the ability to express herself within a language? She didn’t lose her ability to walk, sing, cook, ride a horse, e.c.t. Why did she lose specifically her language skills?
We can pick up the story after the moment Mary woke up from her second episode. After waking up Mary had to relearn to speak, read and write. Language skills came back rather quickly. It isn’t sated exactly how quickly her ability to speak came back but you can deduce that it had to be a matter of days. On the other hand writing and reading took “a few weeks”. This is an important fact since it almost with certainty excludes brain injury as a possible explanation for her symptoms. Without this clue you might have hypothesized that Mary went on a walk, slipped, hit her head, lost her consciousness and injured her brain which lead to all of her symptoms. But the fact that she recovered so quickly excludes brain injury as a possibility, since a severe speech impairment alone would take months to years to recover from if the cause was neurological. Her brain isn’t damaged, her mind is.
Once she regained her ability to speak, it became apparent that Mary had changed. No amount of reminding of the past could get her to feel like her family was her family, her friends seemed foreign to her. Unlike language skills, familial bonds didn’t come back. But it wasn’t just her amnesia, people quickly noticed that Mary wasn’t herself. Her personality had changed as well. She used to be melancholy, reserved, preferred to spend time alone reading books and contemplating the Bible. But after the second episode she became the opposite. Instead of melancholy she was cheerful, instead of preferring to spend time alone she became gregarious. Her personality was totally and absolutely changed. Now we get our final mystery: why did her personality change?
Lucy the adventurer
I think we should get to know Mary after her second episode if we will stand any hope in understanding what exactly happened to her. Since Mary is a pretty much a new person after her second episode, I think it would be only fair to give her a name. Let’s call her Lucy. Lucy was as adventures as they come. She was sort of like Alice in the Wonderland. Lucy used to wake up in the morning and explore the surrounding land around the remote log cabin in which she lived with her family. Mary and therefor Lucy, lived in USA Pennsylvanian near Oil Creek back in early 18th century. Back then Oil Creek was still a frontier. Wild animals such as wolves, bears and rattlesnakes were numerous and if one wondered around then one was bound to run into one. Though Lucy wasn’t going to be frightened by a deadly, wild animal no matter how much her friends and family warned her. Lucy thought that they we’re trying to frighten her to cow her into staying home. The “black hog” story illustrates her fearlessness,
“As I was riding today along a narrow path a great black hog came out of the woods and stopped before me. I never saw such an impudent black hog before. It stood up on its hind feet and grinned and gnashed its teeth at me. I could not make the horse go on. I told him he was a fool to be frightened at a hog, and tried to whip him past, but he would not go and wanted to turn back. I told the hog to get out of the way, but he did not mind me. ‘Well, said I, if you won’t for words, I’ll try blows ;” so I got off and took a stick and walked up toward it. When I got pretty close by, it got down on all fours and walked away slowly and sullenly, stopping every few steps and looking back and grinning and growling. Then I got on my horse and rode on.”
Obviously it wasn’t a wild pig but a bear which she tried whip with a stick as one would a stubborn sheep. There was also an instance where Lucy tried to pick up a rattlesnake because she saw it as beautiful. She snagged it up by the tail but then fell and released it as a result. Further on, she saw the rattlesnake slither into a hole and as any sane person would do, she put her hand in the hole to fish it out. To her dismay the snake was too far inside to reach. Without a doubt, Lucy had no fear of deadly animals and no bear is going to stop Lucy from an adventure. As she responded to warnings of the dangers by her friends,
“I know you only want to frighten me and keep me at home, but you miss it, for I often see your bears and I am perfectly convinced that they are nothing more than black hogs.”
Peculiarities of Lucy
Lucy had some of the weirdest peculiarities. Lucy liked to play tricks on the people she lived with. The goal of them was to get the victims in as much trouble as she could in order to make her laugh. Unfortunately not a single example is given.
Lucy would always keep her word. If she promised something then she would stick to every letter of her promise but not the spirit. One day her brother forbade Lucy to ride a horse over hills,
“You must not ride over the hills today.” She promised to obey, but so soon as he had gone out she got a horse and was gone all day. In the evening when she had returned, he said to her, “Did I not tell you not to ride today ?” “No.”“I certainly did.” “No, you did not; you told me not to ride over the hills, and I have not, but I have ridden through every valley I could find.” They were surrounded by hills, and there was only one way she could go to shun them, and that was along a little rivulet which passed near the house.”
In another instance Lucy was in bad health and her doctor told her that she could walk around but she must not go into any neighboring houses,
“The wily creature, however, would stand at their windows, and when asked to enter would say, “No the doctor says I must not, but he did not tell me I must not talk at the windows.”
Even a weirder peculiarity was her talking in her sleep. One might say, “Well, that’s not so weird, many people mumble something in their sleep.“ That is true, but how many of them go trough their plans for the next day in chronological order? Lucy in her sleep speaks a loud of her plans for the next day and she sticks to them unless the implementation of them is impaired by unexpected obstacles. Her friends would use this quark to try to prevent her from mischievous behavior. Lucy never could quite figure out how her friends knew all of her plans for the next day.
The last weird thing about Lucy was her sleeping and eating habits. She sometimes didn’t eat or sleep for 2 or 3 days and felt just fine. It perplexed her family and herself. The price of this had to be paid by Mary. Whenever Mary awoke from the state of Lucy, she was so sick and tired that she spent weeks in bed and sometimes she could hardly move a muscle.
Analysis of the case
There are a lot of facts in the case of Mary that don’t seam to have a rhyme or reason. For a while I didn’t even know where to start to untangle her case. Most case studies are written by a physician of one sort or another. Mary didn’t have one, additionally her case developed from the year 1811 (the year of the first episode) to 1854 (her death) — a time when psychology was in the phase of conception. Since the case study wasn’t written by a treating physician, we lack intimate knowledge of Mary. As if the case wasn’t difficult as it is, almost all of the descriptions of Mary are written based on memories of people that knew her. Memories tend to lack detail, reliability issue is less pronounced in this instance since there are multiple sources and there has been some cross-referencing done by Sir Weir Mitchell. Ultimately, what we get is bits and peaces of Mary from an outsiders perspective.
What we can say for sure is that Mary had dissociative identity disorder. Whenever Mary switched to Lucy or vice versa, which accrued without exception after the deep sleep, nether one had a sense of passage of time or memories of what had happened in the period while the other was at the steering wheel. Both of them felt as if they were teleported in the future. The case of Mary is a case of clear cut dissociative identity disorder for which she had all the symptoms:
1 ) the presence of two or more distinct personality states;
2) loss of identity as related to individual distinct personality states;
3) loss of one’s subjective experience of the passage of time;
4) degradation of a sense of self and consciousness.
Labeling people isn’t the same as understanding them. Declaring that Mary had DID is stating the obvious. It doesn’t answer any of my questions. Why did she enter a Snow White level of sleep? Why did she lose her memories and functional abilities of expressing herself within a language? Why did her personality change? After days of trying to figure out her case I was about to give up on any kind of explanation and just plead ignorance. There is just nothing substantial to go on…
Or is there? In my previous case study I looked at the case of Ann and Isabel. There are striking similarities between the cases. Both Ann and Mary was a marriage age girl in her early twenties, both had open personalities (open in the sense of Big Five model). Both were introverted and the most important similarity of them all — both of them were without a relationship. This changes everything…
What we now get is an angle of approach. I’m not sure how I didn’t notice it previously. Mary was a young girl living in the middle of nowhere. Girls have certain desires, if you know what I mean, which are hard to fulfill in the middle of the forest. That’s a possible inner conflict for which we have evidence. Weir Mitchell stated that from the age of 18 Mary had “occasional attacks of hysterical fits”. Hysterical being the key word. Hysteria as a medical diagnosis hasn’t been in use for quite a while but back in 19th century it was all the rage. Hysteria was a psychological condition that accompanied mostly women. Causes were hypothesized in a multitude ways but the treatment was more or less the same. The treatment was sexual satisfaction. Masturbation, sex and “medical stimulation of vagina” — we’re all treatments of hysteria. By the way “medical simulation of vagina” is process where physicians we’re sexually pleasing woman with their hands. Of course they didn’t see it as that but that’s a story for another time.
Mary was deeply religious. She liked to find a remote place where she could, “read her bible and practice her devotion.” The log cabin was also a resting place for men of the church who would inevitably share their wisdom with Mary. Christian doctrine is fairly strict on sexual expression. The only moral way to express you’re sexuality is by having sex within the bounds of a marriage. It’s paramount to keep in mind the fact that Mary lived in early 19th century when the Bible was taken seriously and the average person really believed in God. If the book says that anything sexual outside marriage is a sin, then that’s that. You can easily imagine Mary struggling with her own nature as a woman. Finding her own sexual desires, fantasies and thoughts morally repulsive. Et voilà we get an inner conflict. She has sexual desires she can’t fulfill. How could have Mary tried solving her conflict? The simplest solution would be repression. Repressing her morally unacceptable desires into oblivion. By repressing something you’re not getting rid of it, you’re moving it from a state of consciousness to the unconscious. The funny thing about the unconscious is… Well, Carl Gustav Jung said it best,
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct you’re life and you’ll call it fate.”
In the case studies of DIP there’s 3 common components. First is predisposition, the second is repression and the third — a tragic event. We have already noted her predisposition to it and the axis of repression but we’re still misting the traumatic event in Mary’s life that’s the direct cause the split. Usually it’s the easiest part to find since tragic events tend to stand out. The issue with finding Mary’s tragic event is that she was introverted which means that her struggles are more likely to be internal and we have accounts only of her external endeavors.
It’s one of those situations where the answer is obvious if you look at it from the right perspective. Mary experienced her first state of deep sleep in a remote place where she went to read her Bible and practice her devotion. The whole fact of Mary becoming unconscious and sleeping for 18 hours without any response to the outside world is a fact that can’t be brushed off. Have you ever slept for 18 h? Do you know anyone who has? And have you been so asleep that nothing could wake you up? A state of that sort is straight out of a fairy tale. Or maybe it’s the other way round. At the beginning I characterized her deep sleep as Snow White level of sleep and I did so because it’s the same sort of “sleep”. When Snow White eats the poisoned apple she falls asleep, sleep so deep that nothing could awake her, just like Mary. There’s an interesting parallel for eating the apple as well. Since at least the time of Jesus eating an apple from the tree of knowledge has been a symbolic representation of the possible pitfalls of knowledge. Many people have created misery for themselves by acting on incomplete knowledge that contradicts their instincts. Mary was reading her Bible i.e biting into the apple from the tree of knowledge when she fell into deep sleep. The traumatic event that most likely was the direct cause that led to her split was hiding in plain sight. It was the first deep sleep she experienced.
Once she awoke from her first episode she couldn’t hear or see. There are no plausible physiological cause for the lose of both and even if there were, there’s defiantly no explanation for the miraculous return of both. If the origin is psychosomatic then there should be a compensatory element in the onset of the problem. The unconscious mind tends to be symbolic, just think about dreams. Mary gained knowledge trough reading books, especially the Bible and by listening to pastors that often stooped at their log cabin. If she were to lose sight and hearing then she would be cut off from the poisoned apple and she would be forced to face her nature. She would have to face the fact that she has a sexual side and that she has to do something about it. If she were to continue repressing her sexual side then it would make sense for something more dramatic to happen…
Birth of Lucy
The questions we’re left with are why did Mary lost her memories and language skills after the second episode? And why did her personality change? In cases of disassociation the split-off personality tends to have a compensatory function. If my hypothesis is right and Mary was indeed repressing her sexuality then we would expect Lucy to be with a personality that would give her a better change of finding a partner. That’s exactly what we see in Lucy. She’s adventurous and gregarious — a perfect combination for meeting new people. If you move around the world meeting new people you’re bound to run into one you can make a relationship with.
Amnesia and the loss of language skills, make sense if we assume my hypothesis of sexual repression inspired by knowledge. If it truly was knowledge that caused her to repress her sexuality then losing memories which would include knowledge about sex being a naughty thing, would ensure the newcomer to be unpoisoned. Further on, if one wasn’t able to nether speak, read or write then one couldn’t gain knowledge contained in the Bible and one wouldn’t be poisoned again, at least as long as one remained illiterate. Indeed, Lucy had no knowledge of the Bible. Lucy’s mother tried to encourage her to take care of her household duties by using a character from the Bible and it didn’t go as planned,
“She told me that Paul said those who would not work must not eat. I told her it made no matter of difference to me what Paul said, I was not going to work for Paul or any other person. I did not know who Paul was, for I had no knowledge of the Bible at that time more than of anything else.”
Even her peculiarities are aimed at making fun of knowledge contained in language. Her following the letter of her promises but not the spirit shows how easy it is to play with language to twist even a good thing into something wicked. Her speaking in her sleep, again a fact that can be easily ignored, but how many people do you know that go trough their plans of the day in chronological order every night in their sleep? That is, just super weird. But it fit’s the theme of mocking knowledge contain in the word. By talking in her sleep the spoken word got in the way of her goals, just as the knowledge contained in the written word got Mary in this mess in the first place.
The end of Mary
Lucy’s first appearance continued for 5 weeks, after which Mary awoke with no sense of passage of time or memories of what had happened. Mary and Lucy continued alternating for the next 15 years. It was obvious that Lucy was the stronger one. She existed for a longer period of time and she was more energetic then Mary. At the age of 35 Lucy awoke and lived in this state for 25 years after which she died at the age of 61.
The ultimate consequence of Mary’s case was her drowning into her own mind. The fact of Lucy’s appearance upset Mary and made her even more isolated, she saw the appearance of Lucy as divine providence. In the case of Ann she had help from a psychiatrist Charles Cory who encouraged a productive relationships between the split personalities which in practice meant incorporating parts of the other. For Mary a prince never came and nether did a kiss that would awake her.
