Robert Bromley Oxnam is a China scholar and former president of the Asia Society. He ran the society for more than a decade, and led financial-cultural tours of China for Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and former U.S. President George H. W. Bush. He also spent time on the Board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. He became well-known in the public media after his 2005 autobiography, A Fractured Mind, in which he revealed that he was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
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After an academic career as a China scholar, Oxnam presided over the Asia Society – the leading sponsor of cultural, educational and artistic contact between the United States and Asia – from 1981 to 1992.[1] He was frequently tapped by political leaders to help them figure out how to deal with the Chinese due to political unrest in China in the late 1980s. He accompanied former U.S. President George H. W. Bush as an on-the-ground adviser on a goodwill trip to China in the late 1990s.[2]
Oxnam was educated at Williams College (BA, 1964, Phi Beta Kappa) and then pursued graduate studies at Yale University (MA in Asian Studies, 1966, and Ph.D in Chinese history, 1969). He taught Asian history at Trinity College (Hartford, Conn.) from 1969-75. Then he joined the Asia Society as program director of its nationwide China Council, concurrently serving as the Society’s vice president and director of its Washington Center. In 1981, he became the Society’s third president, a position he held until 1992.
Oxnam is the author of several books on China, including Ruling from Horseback about 17th century Manchu rule, Dragon and Eagle on US-China relations (co-edited with Michel Oksenberg), and two novels about China, Cinnabar and Ming. He has also served as visiting professor at Columbia University and at Beijing University (graduate program at the School of International Studies). He was the anchorman for the MacNeill/Lehrer NewsHour nine-part series on China which aired twice in 1993-94.
Since 2008, Oxnam has embarked on a career as an artist, making unusual sculptures out of driftwood inspired by the ancient tradition of Chinese scholar's rocks. As of early 2011, he has had seven exhibitions in the greater New York area, and is slated to have international one-man shows in Spain (2011-12) and Beijing (late 2012).
Oxnam is married to Dr. Vishakha Desai, noted art historian and president of the Asia Society since 2004.
In his autobiography, Oxnam candidly admits that his life had a deeply troubling side, a rising set of psychological and addictive difficulties.
In the 1980s, he suffered from alcoholism and bulimia. He flew into frequent, irrational rages, and his first marriage soon fell apart. He saw a psychiatrist, but his problems – including blackouts – continued. According to his autobiography, several nights a week he performed what he calls his addiction ritual. "It required," Oxnam writes, "two packs of cigarettes, Polish sausage, a gallon of ice cream, a two-pound bag of peanuts, a bottle of scotch, and a pornographic movie on the VCR."
He would wake up with burns and scratches on his body, but had no idea what had caused them. He would find himself hanging around Grand Central Station in New York City, lost in the crowds in a kind of trance, and he would hear voices.
So, during the 1980s, in spite of seeing several therapists, Oxnam saw his inner problems getting worse with no solution and no diagnosis in sight.
And then in 1990, one day, what seemed like seconds after he had begun a session with his psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffrey Smith, the doctor informed Oxnam that their time was up. Smith said: "I spent this past fifty minutes talking with ... Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." Oxnam asked: "Tommy? Who's Tommy?”. Smith told Oxnam that he was suffering from dissociative identity disorder and had eleven independent identities. Oxnam eventually accepted the diagnosis.
Oxnam went about his business at the Asia Society, meeting and greeting the Dalai Lama and other dignitaries, and giving no hint of his private problems.
Although dissociative identity disorder has an entry in psychiatry's official manual, the DSM-IV, it is highly controversial. According to Joe Scroppo, a clinical psychologist and director of North Shore University Hospital's Forensic Psychiatry Program in Manhasset, New York, "I believe he believes he had all those separate personalities, but I don't think that's necessarily the way it is." According to Scroppo, therapists use multiple personality as a metaphor for a patient's mental state, and then both the patient and therapist begin to mistake the metaphor for reality.
However, Scroppo's view does not represent the view of the experts in the field. Those who are highly expert include Dr.Richard Kluft-- Clinical Perspectives On Multiple Personality Disorder, Dr.Ira Brenner--Psychic Trauma: Dynamics, Symptoms, and Treatment, Dr.Colin Ross--Moon Shadows: Stories of Trauma and Dissociation, Dr. Catherine Fine--Despine and The Evolution of Trauma, and Dr. Frank Putnam--The Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality, amongst many others who have understood that these different states of mind are very real. While representing a view shared by the other experts Dr. Brenner explains that under the pressure of extreme trauma many children have a "not me" response. The "not me" experience is simply an attempt to adapt to the horror by imagining that the trauma is not happening to themselves, but to an imaginary other. These others (or better put,states of mind) are then made concrete to where the individual comes to believe there are others within himself. The overt manifestations do not usually present themselves until some time after adolescence. If one reads Dr. Oxnam's book it illustrates, that this is not a mysterious condition, and in fact is easily understood.
Oxnam’s book, A Fractured Mind, My Life with Multiple Personality Disorder (Hyperion, 2005), has become a classic work for therapists and patients alike. The book takes the reader inside the mind of someone with severe dissociation as Oxnam encourages his inner voices to speak for themselves. Oxnam learns that severe dissociation results from severe childhood abuse, so horrendous that the child represses the awful memories and instead the child’s mind fractures into other personalities (often called “identities” or “alters”). Since the autobiography was published, Oxnam has been a frequent speaker at mental health seminars and conferences, emphasizing the fact that childhood abuse is a chronic problem in the US and around the world. He also observes that while most people do not have multiple personalities, many so-called normal people often report having widely different behaviors depending on time and place. In his book, he coined the phrase, “cohesive multiplicity,” not only as a way of thinking about dissociation therapy, but also as a way of thinking about mental health in general.