Couched in Lusty Mind Games, Thriller Is Out to Make Charts : DISSOCIATED STATES, <i> by Leonard Simon</i> ; Bantam; $21.95, 336 pages

This book is a guilty pleasure--a psychological thriller that’s nearly impossible to put down, yet leaves you feeling empty and irritated afterward, as if you’d just watched a TV “Movie of the Week” when you were really in the mood for Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.”

Written by a practicing New York psychoanalyst who was formerly on the faculty of both City University and Rutgers, the novel serves up all the latest and most lurid cliches of incest, murder, infidelity, multiple-personality disorder, Oedipal madness and courtroom drama.

The plot is a clever one: Jake and Claire are New York psychoanalysts married to each other. Each gets a mysterious new patient. They soon discover that he’s the same man--a murderer who was sexually abused by his father, kills only married couples and suffers from multiple-personality disorder.

For Jake he’s Arthur Moss, an emotionally dead businessman with inexplicable headaches; for Claire he’s Adam Maliver, a sensitive artist suffering from depression. But Arthur and Adam are just two among a whole bedlam of personalities inside the “real” man, Felix Kiehl.

Kiehl functions as the core personality, and he happens to be a financial and computer genius who has registered each of his multiples with a different Social Security number and investment broker. All have made killings in the stock market; Kiehl is so rich he can play out his game of murder at his leisure.

Claire and Jake, in contrast, are typical Manhattan shrinks who live on the Upper West Side and spend weekends in the Hamptons playing tennis. Claire’s a straight Freudian, Jake an eclectic therapist. Their 10-year marriage is in trouble and nearly breaks under the stress of being stalked by Kiehl, who sees in every couple he murders a surrogate mother and father. Before they know it, Claire and Jake are on opposite sides of a national courtroom drama, where Kiehl is being tried for murder as well as his astounding white-collar crimes.

It is in jail and in court that “Dissociated States” begins to wallow in the maudlin stuff of supermarket tabloids. Claire treats Kiehl before the trial, experimenting with hypnosis on the spur of the moment. It’s an instant success and makes Claire wonder: Does he really have multiple-personality disorder? Or is it the best twist on the insanity plea she’s ever run across? Out tumble personalities like Maura, a woman-child who asks Claire,

“ ‘Do all men have those things?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ Claire said.

‘Those things they poke with.’

‘Do you mean penises?’

‘Do all men hurt children with them?’ ”

One of the reasons Claire risks treating the mad and murderous Kiehl is that she’s got a crush on his gorgeous high-stakes lawyer, Mary Buchanan. “(Claire’s) clearest feeling was that she was in love. It didn’t frighten her . . . she’d been analyzed well enough to know those buried corners of herself.”

Buchanan, in turn, is as cold as the killer she’s defending, a woman whose “goal in life is to poison everything” because as a young, troubled woman she was “manipulated by a psychiatrist and used by him for anything he chose. . . .”

And, just to add spice to the Oedipal stew, Claire has been having an affair with her teacher, analyst Max Dorfmann, for 10 years: “It was no secret that she was the daughter he never had. It was no secret that he made up for the neglect of her alcoholic father. The secret was how well it worked.”

In this book, wherever there’s a father or a father figure, there’s sex and murder.

Even a lay reader, one who has never laid down on a therapist’s couch, is going to wonder. If this were a psychoanalyst’s comic revenge on a profession that has exasperated and exhausted him, it might fly. But Simon’s sendup of psychology is both sloppy and self-indulgent, even for a commercial thriller. As a professional he must know that multiple-personality disorder is a rare clinical entity; that we are in the midst of an enormous crisis in therapy because therapists are now being sued for using questionable hypnotic techniques--techniques in which they’ve been poorly or never trained--to “unearth” memories of sexual abuse and nonexistent multiple personalities. The disorder has become a darling of pop culture, and Simon knows it.

It’s annoying at best to see a psychoanalyst running as fast and hard as he can after a potential bestseller without bothering to portray the psyche with the least dollop of realism. This is a thriller that expertly pumps you up and ultimately leaves you deflated.