Freud would have a field day with Marshall Bruce Mathers III. Rapper extraordinaire, record-setting, multi-platinum recording artist, gay-hater, murder-fantasizer, rebel and creep: How did this onetime "Mork & Mindy" devotee become the venom-spitting hero of hip-hop?

First came the runty Marshall Mathers, a quiet, artistic kid bounced from school to school by his overprotective, slightly unhinged mother. Then came "M&M," later Eminem, the silver-tongued outcast who forsook fitting in with his white suburban classmates to concentrate on breaking into Detroit's overwhelmingly black rap scene. Finally, and most furiously, came Slim Shady, the vile, rhyme-sayin', bitch-slayin' MC out to even every score run up against his other selves.

Yet none of these personas has canceled the other out. While Slim Shady rakes in the cash by rapping about rape, drugs and murder, Eminem tries to explain that it's all just an act -- and 27-year-old Marshall Mathers struggles to hold together a world on the verge of being torn apart by the stress of success, run-ins with the law and, most recently, his wife's suicide attempt.

His 1999 album, "The Slim Shady LP," introduced the world to an implacable bleached-blond rapper who shot out his rhymes machine-gun style. It sold 3 million copies. His second album made him a sensation. "The Marshall Mathers LP" sold more than 5 million copies in its first month of release, becoming the fastest-selling hip-hop album of all time. MTV declared a weekend of "EmTV"; at the same time, some critics and gay groups began to take issue with the rank misogyny and homophobia permeating the album.

Eminem's defenders -- and Eminem himself -- say it's the Slim Shady character, not Mathers, who is the album's real culprit. But police arrested Mathers, not Slim Shady, June 4 in Warren, Mich. He'd found his wife, the former Kim Scott, in the parking lot of a nightclub, kissing an acquaintance. Eminem allegedly clocked the interloper with a 9mm pistol and threatened to kill him.

Eminem was arrested and faces an Aug. 31 preliminary hearing at which a Warren district court judge will decide whether there's enough evidence to send the case to trial. His alleged victim, John Guerra of nearby Mount Clemens, sued Eminem less than a week after the incident. As if he didn't have enough legal entanglements, Eminem has also agreed to stand trial in Pontiac, Mich., on charges he flashed his 9mm outside a car audio shop during an argument with an associate of a rival rap group, Insane Clown Posse. The prosecutor in the Warren case seeks at least a six-month sentence.

A few weeks after the throw-down in Warren, Kim Mathers attempted suicide -- just hours after Eminem finished the second of two performances in the Detroit area. Did she really want to end the life her husband had already snuffed out on both his albums? Did she want to leave the couple's 5-year-old daughter motherless? Kim Mathers isn't saying. All she told police who came to her rescue was, "There has got to be a better place than this." If nothing else, the incident was another reminder that the emotional horrors recounted in explicit detail on Eminem's albums may be more than mere shock art.

Just how Eminem feels about all of this is unclear, but a comment he made to the Detroit Free Press during the filming of the video for his in-your-face anthem "The Way I Am" might be apropos:

"Whenever something good happens, the bad always follows," he said. "That's the story of my life since the day I was born."

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Life was a struggle for Marshall even before he was born. His mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, says she married his father, Marshall Mathers Jr., when she was 15; less than three years later, she almost died delivering her first son at the end of a 73-hour labor.

"I went through a living hell," she said in a recent phone conversation, recalling the bald, cigar-smoking St. Joseph, Mo., doctor who charged $90 for prenatal visits, delivery and circumcision. Marshall was a small, sickly baby.

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