Mason's wife, exhausted, pretended the same. Often, one hears complaints from family members, like Mason's wife, that one must walk on eggshells around them. Once in place, it has a life of its own, in the most fascinating and frustrating sense of that phrase. And after an unpredictable interval of time, independently of anyone else's efforts or of changes in circumstance, it seemsto disappear. In the end, a switcher can seem to be simultaneously one's best friend and, in some peculiar, ineffable way, one's most terrible enemy.
Switchers tend to make other people very angry.
By virtue of the ambiguous picture they present, switchers invite us to project our own conflicts and ideas upon them. We see what we want to see, or what we need to see, in people who are ambiguous. We picture a well-groomed and appealing Dr. Jekyll and a hunched and craggy Mr. Hyde. And we have seen the dramatic outward transformations in The Three Faces of Eve , for which, in 1957, Joanne Woodward won the Academy Award for best actress. And this, even now, is what we expect of dissociative identity disorder.