Bi-location? This is now termed splitting and dissociation I think. This seems another case of dissociation in this film, due to an accident committed by Esther in which her twin sister supposedly died. Fearful of severe punishment and distraught over the loss of her sister, Esther dissociates this act from her consciousness. It is then projected from herself onto some unknown who may have possessed a part of Emily’s soul released to the unknown person by Emily’s death. Esther being unable to cope with the death of her sister but wishing she had been the one to die, assumes Emily’s part of the personality. Esther’s fevers are re-enactments of her sister’s death. The unknown person is now possessed of Esther, the weaker personality. The unknown person being unable to cope with the content of Esther’s personality, acts out the incident over and over. She too, has been rendered unconscious by the possession and is unable to recall the original trauma. This is termed repetition compulsion or the compulsion to repeat the trauma.
These possessions are achieved when one soul, say the one possessed by a mother, is split into two parts by two daughters, not necessarily twins. The original personality might have been subjected to transferences and memories of some event in the past which has come to possess two offspring. The stronger personality has split off the negative content and it is now possessed by the weaker sister. The weaker sister, unable to manage the content, begins to act out that content, revealing the cause of a potentially criminal event, acting out a film the mother has seen, or simply the personality contains scenes of a farmer burning his field customary in farming communities. Thus the cause of the fire setting lies with the original personality, not the twins in this film who are victims of unresolved issues within the original personality.
Another possible scenario; Emily’s part of the original personality, I consider to be the masculine, became nothing more than an hallucination after Emily’s death, in which the dissociated part of the original trauma was still active in Esther’s mind and she now possessed both parts of the personality rather than one part. This is why we are shown her burned body at the end of the film. Esther was entrained to dissociate and project a part of the original personality onto her sister. She wanted to believe Emily was still alive.
Did she really intend killing her sister to possess the whole personality?
I was particularly interested in this film as I was a victim of such an incident, having set fire to the woods behind our home in Chesapeake, VA in 1964. This film also had me believing I killed my sister.
Pynoos, 1992a – “Associated features of post traumatic stress reactions include, guilt, grief, worry, about a significant other, and reactivation of symptoms associated with a previous life expectancy (Pynoos Nader, 1993)”. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, A Clinical Review, Distress, pg 79. Sidran Press.
I personally think some compulsions to repeat occur not just from our own personal infantile traumas but from the unresolved traumas of those of whom we are possessed such as our parents. It is true we are not all given a clean slate with which to start life.
The Borderline Personality, Schwartz-Salant
Transference, Countertransference, Heinrich Racker.
