Authors: Debbie Nathan
Her behavior grew bizarre. Once, when her father took her for a ride and went into a store to buy something, he came back to the car to discover Shirley gone. He found her at a nearby playground; she said she couldn’t remember how she got there. At home, she got so manic that she started walking on the furniture. Her parents locked her in the house.
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In a few months she felt better. But she continued to muddle between Mankato and Nebraska, returning to school for a term, then relapsing and dropping out.
The minister tried to help her by getting her an English and art instructor position at an Adventist school in Nebraska. She didn’t yet have her bachelors degree, but World War II had created a teacher shortage. Women like her, with partial academic credits, could get provisional teaching certificates.
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As she got busy with her coreligionists, Shirley’s worst hysteria symptoms faded, but she was still skinny, achy, moody, and chronically angry with Mattie and quick to torment her. Her college friend Jean once paid a visit to the Masons and remembered that “Shirley was keeping cages of pet rats in her bedroom. Why? To irritate her mother, I think.”
In 1945 Mattie developed stomach problems and began seeing a general practitioner in Omaha. In late July Shirley accompanied her mother to
a medical appointment, and the doctor noticed that Shirley herself looked ill. He suggested she see psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur, who reputedly was working miracles with young women hysterics. An introductory appointment was made for August 1.
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There was instant mutual attraction. Dr. Wilbur came to therapy sessions in her Katharine Hepburn suits, a cigarette poised in her manicured hand. From late summer to December, Shirley had only five sessions with her new doctor: just one fifty-minute hour per month. Those smidgens of time helped her immensely, though. And they gave both women the chance to become fascinated with each other.
Connie took one look at shaky, anorexic Shirley—she was five-foot-three and weighed perhaps eighty-five pounds—and felt there was “something about her,” she would recall years later. She was a vision of Connie’s fantasied teenaged self, with the dark hair, the pallid skin and weed-like slenderness. And the ambition of this young, small-town Midwesterner! Most of Connie’s patients were unschooled girls who thought of little but marriage and having babies. But Shirley was passably schooled despite all her problems, and she was desperate for more education. Unhappily dependent on backward parents. Ever ready to deprecate herself even as she boasted constantly about her artistic talent.
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There but for fortune, Connie thought. What if she herself had followed her mother’s Christian Science dicta that doctors were useless and evil? What if she’d bowed her head after her miracle soap fell through and accepted her father’s pronouncement that she was too stupid for medical school? She might easily have ended up like this poor, struggling girl. Connie felt a pull toward Shirley. She wanted to help her fulfill her dreams.
And Shirley was taken with Connie. Lying on the office couch for an hour each month, she poured her heart out about abstract art, fiction, and Freud, without the slightest fear of shocking or annoying Dr. Wilbur. She could curse life and pity herself without being told she was a sinner. She could talk about her daydreams and fantasies, telling stories that weren’t true—about how she’d won an art contest at the Dodge County fair, for instance, even though in reality the fair didn’t have an art contest during the years she said she’d entered. She could be congratulated, consoled,
even coddled by an older woman who wasn’t her mother. Shirley felt like a happy child. She worshipped Dr. Wilbur as a little girl worships a parent. She decided she wanted to be a psychiatrist, just like Dr. Wilbur. She ruminated constantly about her new career plan.
As a diagnosed hysteric, Shirley was a prime candidate for Pentothal, Connie’s favorite treatment. But her Adventism prohibited such drugs. Connie gave Shirley mild sleeping pills for home use, but there would be no “truth serum” injections. Instead, she got pep talks similar to the “mind cure” techniques of the Christian Scientists.
Question the authority of your parents and your religion, Connie told Shirley over and over. Be your own person. Follow your dreams but learn to control your emotions. Shirley complained that she had trouble typing because she had a habit of constantly looking at her hands on the keyboard—possibly a remnant of her earlier obsession with germs. Connie told her to fix her gaze on the page rather than the typewriter. Shirley complied, and soon she no longer felt like checking her hands. She was tremendously grateful for Connie’s help.
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When Connie announced she would soon be leaving Omaha to become a psychoanalyst—perhaps in Detroit, not far from where she’d attended medical school—Shirley was distraught.
Connie had no option but to reconfigure her life, because the soldiers were coming home. For her part, she was not only losing her job—she was also fighting with her husband, whose career looked as promising at the war’s end as Connie’s was becoming shaky.
The summer Connie met Shirley, Henry Wilbur had just been offered the dentistry professorship at University of Louisville’s medical school, in Kentucky. Connie’s pink slip in Omaha must have seemed like a blessing to him.
Connie felt torn. Not only were her husband and boss telling her to stop working, but American psychoanalysts whom Connie highly respected had begun stressing—in popular magazines and professional liter-ature—that childless women with careers were emasculating, unfeminine, and neurotic. Even so, as she recalled years later, she began to explore the possibility of getting a divorce.
Meanwhile, Shirley thought about Connie all the time. It seems likely that she had developed a relationship with her doctor that Freudians call
“transference”—an unconscious projection onto the therapist of deep-seated feelings which the patient harbors for important people from her past. During therapy with Connie and at home later, Shirley began yearning for the unlimited attention from Dr. Wilbur that she got from Mattie, her classmates, and the school nurse. She daydreamed about Dr. Wilbur. She wondered whether Dr. Wilbur really cared for her. How could she make her see what she felt? How could she get Dr. Wilbur to stay in Omaha?
Then, as Shirley would remember decades later, she was gripped by an idea for impressing Dr. Wilbur that was half conscious, half unconscious. One day in late 1945, before going to her psychotherapy appointment, she busied herself making block prints, holding a sharp knife to etch the lineoleum tiles used in the process. While cutting she found herself “dwelling morbidly” on Dr. Wilbur’s imminent departure. Suddenly the knife slipped. It cut Shirley’s hand so deeply that it hit an artery, and a geyser of blood shot out. She pressed hard on her hand, improvising a tourniquet as she ran to her mother’s doctor’s office, which was a few blocks from her house. He stanched the wound and wrapped it with gauze. It started to throb something fierce. Looking and feeling like a war casualty, Shirley proceeded to Dr. Wilbur’s office, in the same building.
There she had what doctors today would call a panic attack, and a rather theatrical one at that. She flew off her chair, rushed blindly to the office window, and pounded on the unbreakable glass with her bloody, bandaged hand. Amazed, Connie grabbed Shirley and sat her down. She thought her patient had just suffered a seizure, though in this case it didn’t have an organic cause, the way epilepsy did. Connie believed it was psychogenic—brought on by emotional disturbance, and that Shirley needed psychiatric hospitalization. Connie worked on the locked mental ward of Clarkson Hospital, and she suggested Shirley check herself in for several weeks. That way, the doctor and the patient could do therapy daily.
Shirley was delighted. As though preparing for a stay at an art colony instead of Omaha’s equivalent of an insane asylum, she started planning which sort of colored pencils and paper to take with her.
Her parents were aghast. Walter worried about mind-bending drugs and lobotomies. The Masons told Shirley they would send her to an Adventist psychiatric facility instead. But Shirley wanted only Dr. Wilbur,
and they hit an impasse as summer turned to fall and winter. The Masons argued and argued. Shirley did not go to the hospital.
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Instead, she continued seeing Connie once a month. Connie made useful suggestions: get out of the house more, do some teaching—maybe not full time, because too many hours might be overly tiring, but at least part time. Shirley followed her advice, teaching high school at the local Adventist academy, and doing a fine job of it.
But, just as she had developed a transference toward Connie, Connie apparently developed a countertransference—unconsciously projecting onto Shirley the deep-seated feelings
she
had for key people in
her
life.
Psychiatrists nowadays constantly warn each other about the dangers of unexamined, uncontrolled countertransference. A married male doctor develops erotic feelings toward a female patient who seems to worship him. Her behavior reflects the babyish way she acted toward her father to get attention from him when she was a child in a family of many siblings who competed for his time. As for the therapist, his patient reminds him of his younger sister, who worshipped him when he was sickly little boy and made him feel strong. As a psychiatrist, he ought to be helping the patient analyze her transference so she can stop feeling compelled to act like a baby. But the doctor’s need to keep a baby girl in his psychic life impedes his therapeutic work.
Connie seems to have been swamped by the transference/countertransference dynamic between herself and Shirley. Instead of recognizing the patient’s feelings toward her and staying emotionally neutral, she encouraged what Shirley later called her “crush” on Dr. Wilbur. Years after their first meeting, Connie would admit that she felt as though Shirley was her daughter.
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To sustain that feeling, she apparently set out to depose Mattie Mason from Shirley’s affections.
Connie started giving Shirley reading assignments, and much of the material was about nasty, devouring mothers. One recommendation was the popular play
The Silver Cord
, about a young woman scientist and her new husband, who is dominated by an absurdly smothering mother. Connie also began confiding in Shirley about her life, stretching back to years long preceding the start of Shirley’s therapy. She talked about her mentor from medical school days, Robert Dieterle—the doctor who made the film of the teenaged hysterics acting like babies.
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Connie probably also discussed Dieterle’s young woman patient with the dual selves, because she told Shirley to read psychologist Morton Prince’s
Dissociation of a Personality.
First published in 1905, it described a prim, quiet young Boston woman whose pseudonym was Miss Christine Beauchamp. She had a childlike, troublemaker alter self, Sally, who loved to wander to other cities without Miss Beauchamp’s knowledge. Shirley also read about Miss Beauchamp’s memories being altered, and the way that she “lost time.”
Shirley hadn’t gotten far in the 569 pages of
Dissociation of a Personality
when the book started to trouble her. Dr. Prince always did his therapy with Miss Beauchamp by hypnotizing her, and hypnosis was strongly forbidden among Seventh-Day Adventists. Ellen G. White had outlawed it years ago, back when critics were dismissing her as a charlatan who was going into trances due to hypnosis rather than because she was receiving inspired messages from God. Shirley was repulsed. For her, allowing oneself to be hypnotized was as sinful as masturbating. At the same time she may have felt titillated, especially when she read about the undivided attention Dr. Prince paid his patient’s multiple personalities.
Shirley never went to the hospital’s psychiatric ward. In November 1945, she came down with a bronchial infection and was too sick to keep her therapy appointment. Mattie picked up the phone and pretended to call Connie’s office to reschedule, but in fact she was furtively pressing the disconnect button at the same time she was dialing. As a result, Shirley missed her appointment without canceling in advance, though she thought she had canceled.
But the faux pas barely registered with Connie, who was manically trying to keep her position in Omaha. She was also talking to divorce lawyers. And she was strategizing about how to send her things—and herself—out of Nebraska. By Christmas it was clear she would be laid off, and when Shirley and her mother visited the office on December 26 to refill Shirley’s sleeping pill prescription, Connie brushed past with barely a hello.
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Shirley understood then that her beloved doctor really was leaving. She would have to carry on in life by herself. And she did, with great success. Nine years would pass before she went into therapy again. The second time around would also involve Connie’s treatment. It would prove to be disastrous.
F
OR FLORA AND HER CONTEMPORARIES
in the 1940s, Madison Avenue was the Wall Street of advertising, material plenty, and the hot media, radio. A generation earlier, back when radio had been a brand new technology, the government had vowed to turn it into a public utility to inform and educate the nation. Instead, within the next two decades the air waves were almost wholly privatized and commercialized, by NBC, CBS, and other networks. Radio had saturated American homes by the time Flora was in college, Connie Wilbur was in medical school, and a teenage Shirley Mason was moping around in Dodge Center. Audiences heard newscasts, roundtable political discussions, and the president’s fireside chats. But they were also inundated with pop music, comedians, quiz shows, and soap operas.