Afterlife Read Free

spite of her avowed intention of helping her granddaughter, it was Sarah Jackson herself who was in need of help. She was tormented by guilt feelings about her own life — particularly about how badly she had treated her daughter Elizabeth, Sarah’s mother. Elizabeth had developed into an unhappy, neurotic girl, who had in turn treated her own daughter badly. And Sarah’s relations with her mother were a strange duplicate of Elizabeth’s relations with
her
mother. Both mothers had greatly preferred their son to their daughter, and had taught the daughter that men were everything and women nothing. The grandmother had become fully aware of all this by the time she died, which is why she now felt that she had to help her granddaughter. Instead of helping, she had made things worse; Sarah was frightened and confused by the voice inside her, and was becoming desperate.
    Now grandmother Jackson was ‘out in the open’ things became much easier. She was able to give the psychiatrists invaluable information about Sarah’s family background. And although Sarah was at first astonished to realise that her grandmother was speaking through her, she gradually learned to accept it, and began to achieve deeper insight into her problems. At the end of two months she was cured. The grandmother remained a ‘possessing presence’, but now Sarah understood it she was no longer afraid; in fact, it gave her a sense of comfort to feel that her grandmother was a vaguely beneficent presence in the background of her life.
    The reader’s reaction to this story is probably much the same as my own, when I first read it in the typescript of Adam Crabtree’s
Multiple Man:
that there must be some purely psychological explanation. Sarah had known her grandmother as a child; perhaps she had heard the story about the fire from her own lips. Perhaps she recognised how similar her mother’s problems had been to her own. And her unconscious mind had ‘re-told’ her the story as a rationalisation of her own sufferings … But the more I read of Crabtree’s book (which his publishers had sent to me, asking if I would write an introduction) the more I saw that such explanations are unacceptable. He goes on to recount another eight cases from his practice, each one involving some type of ‘possession’. And after the third or fourth case, the unconscious mind explanation had begun to wear very thin. A social worker named Susan was unable to sustain any normal relationship with a male, and recognised, correctly, that this was due to some deep resentment towards her father. Crabtree was able to speak to her father — who had died in a car crash — just as he spoke to Sarah’s grandmother, and he learned that he had been sexually obsessed with his daughter. Until she was sixteen, he had crept into her bedroom after she was asleep and had fondled her genitals. On some unconscious level, she was aware of what was happening. She recognised his desire for her, and treated him with contempt, behaving provocatively and exercising her new-found sexual power to make him squirm. The contempt spread into her relations with boyfriends and caused problems. When her father died in the car crash, he was drawn to his daughter as a ‘place of refuge’, and she was vulnerable to him because of the sexual interference. Once ‘inside’ her, he was in a condition of ‘foggy sleep’, unaware of his identity or his present position. Crabtree patiently explained to Susan’s father that he was actually dead, and that he ought to leave his daughter alone. And one day, he simply failed to appear at the therapeutic session; Susan experienced a sense of relief and freedom.
    I found one case particularly fascinating and intriguing; it concerned a university professor called Art, whose first marriage had been unsuccessful, and who was about to embark on a second. He was beginning to experience a deep reluctance to go through with the marriage, and he associated this with