Case Material: “Alice”

I come apart. The analyst in me hovers in the consulting space with this quietly composed, demure woman, an experienced art teacher, evangelical Christian fugitive, and my long term analysand. But the rest of me breaks into other psychological elements, thoughts and feelings that connect with one or more of Alice's ardent emotional parts (EPs1): CareTaker Girl, defiant and enduring, who chronicles and painfully suffers the brutality of her predatory grandfather and domineering mother; Lindy, a tender, imaginative, but often terrified two-year-old; Always Crying Girl, frozen in a state of perpetual sadness and inconsolable weeping; and “RP”, an effervescent eight-year-old, whose exuberance, insatiable curiosity and rambunctious need for love often lead her into rogue excesses.

These EPs have gradually come into focus out of Alice's “fogginess”—the term she first used for her confused dissociated states—following the appearance in a dream of a dynamic little girl who started producing weekly drawings that were brought by Alice into our sessions.

I'm with a little girl. She's drawing pictures. The images start going by faster, and it all becomes convoluted and chaotic. The pictures become about the stories of her mother and grandmother and their suicides …

Over the next 15 months, CareTaker Girl, as the prolific inner artist came to be known, made dozens of black line sketches depicting herself and other females being victimized in chilling scenes of abandonment, incarceration and violence. While contrary to the dream narrative Alice did not lose her mother or grandmother to suicide, in the very first drawings of her inner experiences (see Figure 1), the mother is strung up and killed. Initially, we see her holding an infant in her arms (top left), but she subsequently hangs from the ceiling and expires, abandoning the bundled child on the floor of the grandparents' bedroom. In parallel with this inner trauma, Alice was outwardly forsaken at home, both as the butt of fami