It is my thesis that Joseph Smith's childhood operations and the events surrounding his brother's death had a dramatic impact on Joseph's adult behavior, playing a major role in making him different from other men. In making this case, it will be necessary to explore what is known of the impact emotional traumas and surgical operations have on the fantasies of children and on the sorts of lasting symptoms of those fantasies can produce. Joseph Smith's actual operations will be viewed from this author's vantage point as a practicing surgeon. . . .

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As a surgeon, this author can say that Lucy's description of Joseph's behavior is so atypical of a seven-year-old boy facing a surgical assault that one is tempted to dismiss the entire narrative out of hand. However, it is possible that her portrayal of Joseph as a brave victim may have had a grain of validity, but only under a very special condition. It is typical of children who suffer repeated bouts of terrible trauma that they may enter a kind of trance or "self-hypnosis" that protects against the emotional experience of the horror. A kind of depersonalization supervenes so that the event is experienced as though it were being viewed from the outside. Lucy's narrative suggests that his may have been Joseph's maiden voyage into "dissociation." There would be many more.

Although it cannot be known how successful Joseph's dissociation was in blotting out the pain, there is inferential evidence in the later biographical record that some measure of a struggle ensued that Lucy's departure prevented her from witnessing. Joseph, Sr. no doubt tried to help the medical students restrain his son's savage struggling out of some sense of embarrassment at his son's conduct. Any parent would have done so (and most still do). But to Joseph, any such actions on his father's part would easily have confirmed to him his father's central complicity in the act. Had his father guessed those private fantasies? Why else could he be helping to inflict such unspeakable punishment? His father and his father's "friends" were extracting their final punishment—the one he had dreaded the most and the one he "probably deserved."

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The aftermath must have doubled the hurt. As soon as Joseph could travel, his parents sent him away! . . . Whether his parents sent him away for his health or theirs, one might expect the effect to have been the same on this brutally traumatized boy. The absence of the familiarity and affection of his family was to be one more crashing blow that his mortally wounded psyche would have to endure. Surely a very different boy returned from Salem [Massachusetts].

It was probably in his exile at the seashore that the fantasies began, projected from within by an unspeakable horror he could not recall. As will be seen, these included huge, violent fantasies. Fantasies of wars. Fantasies of people in chaos who escape to the seashore. Fantasies of magic swords that dismember heads and arms. Fantasies of sons overthrowing fathers, princes killing kings, righteous killing unrighteous. Fantasies of towers, trees, serpents, flaming swords, pillars, cigar-shaped boats, sickles, and "stiff-necked" people. Fantasies of evil men brought to humiliation by young heroes. Fantasies of good fathers and evil fathers, of faithful women and whores. Fantasies of good armies and bad armies pushing one another to-and-fro like battles of ants. Fantasies of betrayal. Fantasies of darkness, of magic stones that light up the darkness. Fantasies of good white people and evil black people, of good white people becoming evil black people. Fantasies of princes being "bound with cords," of "blood on garments," of maggots eating flesh. Fantasies of destroying angels with drawn swords. The fantasies would flood out of his unconscious in hundreds of repetitive dreams and nightmares, in daydreams, in random sequences, in play, in speech, and in silence. They took over the inner life of Joseph Smith, Jr. as automatic pilot takes over an aircraft. In this state he limped into his future.

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As suggested previously, Joseph likely did not remember the horror of the final operation. Or, at least, he did not remember it as Lucy's mind did. The experience did not likely exist in what is called conscious memory. In other words, Joseph seems to have demonstrated amnesia for the events of at least the final operation.

Amnesia is not so much a loss of memory as a separation of a memory into a different realm of the mind, where it becomes "dissociated" from conscious thought and unavailable to be "thought about." But the repression of such memories from the conscious sphere is never complete. The memories, instead, tend to burst out at times of stress that are in some way reminiscent of the original event. The forgotten memories also harbor an explosive energy that ensures that their reappearance will be loaded with emotion. . . .

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In this sense, dissociation may be regarded as an important defense of Joseph's mind. It allowed his mind to "flee" what his body was experiencing. . . .

Joseph Smith, Jr. demonstrated a range of symptoms all his life that suggest he had a dissociated memory of at least part of the horrors of his childhood operations hiding in amnesia in his mind. . . .

A distinction might be made between two different manifestations of dissociation, as they are both seen in contemporary clinical situations as well as in Joseph's own life. The first was involuntary and served as a defense against pain. This manifestation was presumably a patter that had been "learned," at least in part, through the repetitive nature of his childhood operations. Through this process he was dissociated from the stressful reality of the present. But Joseph seems also to have trained himself to use his capacity for dissociation at will in a kind of volitional self-hypnosis. This trancelike state evidently became a principal source of his creativity, presumably because of the horrible richness of content lurking in its dissociated sphere. Willing himself to tap into it was Joseph's key to distinction among men. And the plausible belief that this sphere existed above rather than within has made its impact on history.

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This is not to say that Joseph's psychic life was dull—much the contrary. As is now known of the behavior of traumatized children, Joseph quite likely filled his leisurely moments with visualizations of the event in many forms. His trauma probably became reenacted in play and in dreams through endless visual images. Indeed, his mother reported that during his teen years he would regale his family with vivid stories of imaginary characters for hours as the hidden memory propelled his creative instincts. But the themes remained narrow—themes of helplessness, of ugly and unanticipated death in huge numbers, of betrayal, of the randomness of the world, of trauma, of swords, of shame, of dismemberment, of blood on garments, and of evil-father representations. These themes never changed. And the play didn't stop around age twelve, as typically is the case with the majority of children, but continued into adulthood. That is the way it is with traumatized children. The play became contagious and drew others into its orbit. That feature, too, is eerily common in the games of traumatized children. And of course, along with many other writers, Joseph expressed his trauma in literary fashion. . . .

At times in Joseph's dissociated "world apart," his fantasies seemed to flood over him, propelling him into a trancelike state. He shared that trait with others who have suffered trauma in childhood, with vivid hallucinations often accompanying these trances. Such episodes are typically difficult for onlookers to describe, but there is no mistaking their occurrence.

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Since The Book of Mormon is unquestionably a religious book, it should be expected to contain religious thematic material. However, there has been little to this point in the story of what in the Western tradition would usually pass for religion. It is indeed true that Joseph Smith, Jr. would write a religious book and attribute it to his translation of those plates he claimed to have found in a stone box on Hill Cumorah. To discover how this religious theme became the framework over which Joseph draped his sublimated fantasies, another digression needs to be made.

This digression leads back to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, six miles north of Joseph's fateful boyhood home in Lebanon. Dr. Nathan Smith, the doctor who performed surgery on young Joseph Smith, Jr., taught his medical students in a room at the north end of Dartmouth Hall, still a central edifice of the campus. Through the west windows of that room he could look a few yards away to the site of Old College Hall, where his colleague Professor John Smith taught. . . .

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Sitting in the classroom and listening to this lecture in 1789 was a young student, Ethan Smith, who would be graduated the following year. . . . While in Poultney [Vermont] in 1823 he wrote and published the most unusual of his several religious books. This volume, View of the Hebrews; or the Ten Tribes of Israel in America, instantly became a very popular volume across New England and the frontier.