Goodby to the Mental Ward : THE FLOCK: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality, <i> By Joan Frances Casey with Lynn Wilson (Alfred A. Knopf: $22.95; 320 pp.)</i>

If you’ve been abused, going public takes courage. If you’ve been raped, betrayed and tortured, and then pulled yourself up through hell’s nine circles to create yourself from scratch, as has Joan Casey, ex-multiple personality, then going public takes almost superhuman courage. But writing needs its own kind of courage--the courage to express a personal myth through concrete detail. We readers want the drama, the pain and the irrefragable facts, and cruelly, perhaps, we don’t care what they cost.

From outside, being a multiple personality can be glamorously, morbidly fascinating. Some multiples--Sybil Dorsett (“Sybil”), Truddi Chase (“When Rabbit Howls”) and “Eve” (“The Three Faces of Eve”)--have even become pop icons. Who could forget Joanne Woodward, transforming from the meek goody-goody Eve White to the sexy strumpet Eve Black; or Sally Field’s Sybil ricocheting off her psychiatrist’s walls? The media myth is very strong.

From inside--well, that’s the problem. Multiples (at least the ones who talk) tend to be thoroughly damaged. Those who speak out have been psychoanalyzed, hypnotized and “integrated” practically to death, from a writer’s point of view. How tough it must be to remember, much less to convey, one’s experience. The psychological myth is so very, very strong.

Traumatized, unable to cope with their pain, multiples hypnotize themselves, goes the current theratalk, into their disorder. Each threat calls forth a different persona, gloriously angry, fearful, murderous, competent, heroic, godlike, healthy. The personae develop and begin to lead their own lives--misbehaving, ricocheting out of control. Unable to cope, the presenting persona seeks out a therapist who initially can’t believe that Lady Meek on the couch is a victim of a very rare disorder.

This is where “The Flock,” like most popular multiple-personality accounts, begins. Unfortunately, it is also almost where “The Flock” ends. Its psychological insights swallow its facts. Its primary voice, the intelligent, social Renee, is too disconnected from the heart of Casey’s pain; from Missy, the hurt little girl persona crouching in a corner; from Isis, the flamboyant bisexual; from Josie, who smashes her head against any available wall.

Naively, the publisher’s blurb claims that this is “the first clear, coherent, autobiographical book of its kind. The dramatic and emotionally charged memoirs of a remarkable young woman who experienced and triumphed over Multiple Personality Disorder.” Joan Casey, writer, shares this breathlessness, a certain Capitalization Of Her Condition which could hardly have been shared by Joan Casey, patient.

The reader wants less clarity, less coherence, less Renee, and more craziness, more disorder, more Honey, who housecleans till her thumbs drop off; more Jo II, who parrots what she thinks her therapist wants to hear till her therapist is (and I read between the lines) about ready to strangle her. If any Capitalization occurs, it should be of the Drama and the Emotion, and the Facts.

Like most multiples, Casey is bright and articulate, and was severely wronged by her parents at a tender age. Sitting in her therapist’s office, at her first sessions, she is suicidal, has no self-esteem and can communicate with others only through dissociation--”letting her inside out.” Her neurosis turns out not to be as severe as Sybil’s or Chase’s--fortunately for her, unfortunately for the reader. And Casey’s therapist, the mild, maternal and somewhat conservative Lynn Wilson, is nowhere near as dynamic in print as are the endearing, irritating, puzzled MPD shrinks we’ve come to expect from media mythology. So Casey, the writer, becomes of paramount importance. How will she convey her pain, her fragmentation? How will she portray her integration? Will she show us all the gory grue?

She will, alas, confine the grue to one area--her course of therapy. This is not necessarily a bad choice. MPD therapists tend to use some nutty, fascinating techniques. The literature includes entering into the patient’s fantasy world via separately treating each personality; hypnosis; and sometimes (if a personality is irreparably a bad seed) even exorcism. MPD patients will go to almost any length to protect their overwhelming pain, as they have already proven with the floridity of their disorder. And therapists often seem to escalate the problem before they “cure” it. There is much to mine in this particular lode.

Where “The Flock” does break ground, and it is good ground to break, is in its description, from journals, of a particularly controversial patient-therapist strategy--”reparenting.” The therapist as parent has been with us since Freud, but therapist Lynn Wilson took the idea literally. She transformed Casey’s therapy into the creation and dissolution of a surrogate family, starring Wilson as mother, her husband Gordon as father, and Casey as growing child.

Casey visited the couple’s cabin, worked on their boat, fed (metaphorically) at Lynn Wilson’s breast. When she cried, Lynn Wilson cuddled her. When she raged, she got appropriate discipline. When she went through therapeutic adolescence, Casey stormed at her therapeutic mom and rebelled from her therapeutic dad. This brought amusement from some of Lynn Wilson’s colleagues and rage from others, who accused her of “messianic counter-transference,” e.g. a sick involvement in her patient’s all-encompassing neurosis. But for Joan Casey, patient--and this is the bottom line--it worked.

For Joan Casey, writer, it was nearly fatal. The choice of sticking to journals is only good if you’re Anais Nin, willing to write almost anything on a daily basis, so long as it’s interesting, it’s aimed at an audience and it displays (however delicately and metaphysically) one’s bloody guts.

Joan Casey, patient, was not Nin; on a day-to-day basis she struggled for literal, not literary, survival. More important, she couldn’t go all the way. Even with her therapist’s notes, Joan Casey, writer, too often entraps herself in what her nicest personality, Renee, was willing to admit at the moment she wrote each specific entry.

“The way I see it,” writes Joan as Renee, “I was created to make the group successful in dealing with other people. I wouldn’t have done a very good job at that if I’d known that people had hurt the group in the past. I was even better than the others were at dealing with Nancy and Ray, because they weren’t my parents.”

Readers want to know exactly who hurt Joan in the past, and how. Autobiography promises a reader the experience of internally connected pain, connected perception--impossible for nice Renee, especially since she sticks so closely to her surrogate mother.

In “The Flock,” Casey shows plenty of a patient’s courage but not enough of a writer’s. The patient, overly loyal to her therapy, becomes the writer’s back-seat driver. Casey has good cause--her therapists ultimately died tragically, and “The Flock” becomes a living monument to their skill and caring--but in paying them homage, Casey shortchanges herself.

Good luck to her in her journey as a writer. If she proceeds with the degree of determination she had as a patient, on her next try she will surely succeed.