BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

The Perspective of This Blog: Interdisciplinarity.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/interdisciplinarity
Is it Credible That Charles Dickens or Mark Twain Had Multiple Personality: Is Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D., the Writer of This Blog, the World’s Foremost Authority on Anything?

I am certainly not the foremost authority on Dickens, Twain, or any of the other famous novelists I discuss. And if you are a Dickens or Twain scholar, or you are a professor of literature, creative writing, and literary theory, or you are a successful novelist, then you certainly know much more about these things than I do.

Nor am I the world’s foremost expert on multiple personality. In my general psychiatric practice, I have diagnosed and treated literally dozens of patients who had multiple personality. But there are some psychiatrists, who, having specialized in multiple personality, and having seen literally hundreds of such patients, know more about it than I do.

The question is: Do any of the authorities who know more than I do about either literature or multiple personality, know as much as I do about both?

Most literary experts, including those with psychoanalytical interests, have only superficial knowledge of multiple personality. And most psychiatrists—including the relatively few with expertise in multiple personality—have not studied literature or writers with regard to multiple personality.

So although I am not one of the foremost experts in either literature or multiple personality, I am one of the few people in the world who knows enough about both fields to see how one relates to the other.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Mark Twain Says That Characters Write Themselves (Just Like The Alternate Personalities in Multiple Personality)

In “Mark Twain Tells the Secrets of Novelists” (New York American, 26 May 1907), elaborating on what was quoted in the December 23, 2013 post, Twain said:

“Authors rarely write books. They conceive them, but the books write themselves. This is practically true of all characteristics intended to be portrayed…

“I never deliberately sat down and ‘created’ a character in my life. I begin to write incidents out of real life. One of the persons I write about begins to talk [in] this way and [another] one [talks in] another [way], and pretty soon I find that these creatures of the imagination have developed into characters, and have for me a distinct personality. These are not ‘made.’ They just grow naturally out of the subject. That was the way Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and other characters came to exist. I couldn’t to save my life deliberately sit down and plan out a character according to a diagram. In fact, every book I ever wrote just wrote itself. I am really too lazy to sit down and plan and fret to ‘create’ a ‘character.’ If anybody wants any character ‘creating,’ they will have to go somewhere else for it.”

As noted in my post of August 21, 2013, “Where I’m Coming From,” this is the kind of thing, in interviews of recent novelists, that led me to research Dickens and start this blog.

What Twain and other novelists describe about how they get their characters is basically the same way that people with multiple personality get their alternate personalities: They do not deliberately and methodically create them. But out of some pressing need, and based on a known or imagined kind of person, the seemingly autonomous personalities, like Twain’s seemingly autonomous characters, magically materialize.

When Twain and other novelists tell us about this in interviews, hardly anyone really listens, including the interviewers. Of the many interviews that I have read and seen in which novelists confided such things, I have never known any interviewer to seriously pursue it.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience Concludes that Experience of the Presence of God is Mediated by Normal Multiple Personality

Published in 1902 and in print ever since, William James’s book is an enduring classic. But very few readers understand what James concluded, because they read his book from religious or philosophical interests, and they do not fully take into account that James was a psychologist of his time and that the subtitle of his book is A Study in Human Nature.

What was going on in the study of human nature in James’s time? In psychiatry, there was Pierre Janet’s report of patients with multiple personality. In psychology, people were excited about dissociative phenomena like automatic writing, which indicated that normal people had co-conscious or subconscious, secondary selves, of which the primary self was unaware.

(This was usually thought of as double, or dual, consciousness, rather than multiple consciousness, because of the popular book published by A. L. Wigan, M.D. in 1844, The Duality of the Mind, which was based on his idea that everyone had, in effect, two brains, the left and right cerebral hemispheres.)

In short, dual consciousness was considered the cutting edge of neuroscience in James’s time. (This insight was later eclipsed for much of the 20th century by Freud’s mistaken views, but revived in the 1970s as Freud’s influence waned, feminism helped society see childhood trauma, and multiple personality was re-discovered.)

James’s conclusion in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature [1901-1902] (New York, The Modern Library, 1994), on pages 555-557, is as follows:

“The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required…At the same time the theologian’s contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as ‘higher’; but…on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling…”

In other words, our subjective experience (and its religious interpretation) of our unrecognized second self is that it is not-me; it is something external to me; and it is of a higher nature, from a higher realm; i.e., a Higher Power, Supreme Being, God.

I hasten to add that William James, himself, was a religious believer. Therefore, he further reasoned that his psychological explanation of religious experience does not prove that God doesn’t exist. God may simply be using the human mind as a medium through which to communicate with humans.

The purpose of this post is to give one reason why I don’t believe that normal multiple personality is limited to novelists. It is a widespread, normal, psychological phenomenon, which I would guess is present in at least 30% of the general population. But I think that novelists are a good example. And, incidentally, as you probably know, William James was novelist Henry James’s older brother.

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Mark Twain: In Public, a Humorous “Liar”; In Private, “Absent-Minded”; The Inconsistencies and Memory Gaps of Multiple Personality 

In the New York Herald, 16 October 1900, Twain jokes about his relationship with the truth:

“Now, I have lied so much, in a genial, good-natured way, of course, that people won’t believe me when I speak the truth. I may add that I have stopped speaking the truth...I have found that when I speak the truth, I am not believed, and that I have never told a lie so big but that some one had sublime confidence in my veracity. I have, therefore, been forced by fate to adopt fiction as a medium of truth. Most liars lie for the love of the lie; I lie for the love of truth. I disseminate my true views by means of a series of apparently humorous and mendacious stories. If any man can do that, and finds that he can disseminate facts through the medium of falsehood, he should never speak the truth and I don’t.”

Is that clear?

In his private life, as noted in the post of December 10, 2013, his daughter, Susy, and his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, knew Twain as remarkably “absent-minded.”

In short, his humorous lying was his public cover story for his inconsistencies and memory gaps, signs of multiple personality (see posts of December 6 and 7, 2013).

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

One of Mark Twain’s Other Identities is Interviewed a Month Later

Yesterday’s post was about an interview of Mark Twain in August 1895. In that interview, he spoke as one who was intimately familiar with the writing and subject matter of his books.

The following month, in “A Chat with Mark Twain” in the Sunday Times of Sydney, Australia on 22 September 1895, it says that the interview inevitably turned to the question of whether Twain had any favorite among his books. Twain replied:

“No, I don’t think that I have, because I haven’t read them—that is, I mean, most of them were written so long ago that I have now only a vague notion of what is in them.”

After a pause he added: “I think I prefer Huckleberry Finn, but I believe the family prefer The Prince and the Pauper.”

Of course, I know that many readers will insist that Twain was simply joking. However, I have experience interviewing people who have multiple personality. They are experts at covering up for their inability to recall things that they should recall but don't (because that information is known to another personality). They change the subject or make a joke of it so that you are distracted or feel foolish for pursuing the issue.

Monday, December 23, 2013

Mark Twain Says He Did Not Invent Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Most people assume that novelists invent and construct their characters through conscious, creative imagination. And they probably do invent some characters that way. But their major, most successful characters are said by novelists themselves to come to them mysteriously (Toni Morrison) or from memories of people they have known or read about (Mark Twain). 

In the post of October 26, 2013, “Toni Morrison and the Novelist’s Characters,” she was quoted as saying, in the context of discussing one of her major characters, “…many characters [come to me] rather full-fleshed and complete almost immediately, including [their] name.”

In an interview conducted by Lucius (Lute) Pease, published in the Portland Oregonian of 11 August 1895, Mark Twain said:

“Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were both real characters, but Tom Sawyer was not the real name of the former…Finn was the real name of the other boy, but I tacked on the Huckleberry…The characters were no creation of my own…

“I don’t believe an author, good, bad or indifferent, ever lived, who created a character. It was always drawn from his recollection of someone he had known…even when he is making no attempt to draw his character from life, when he is striving to create something different, even then, however ideal his drawing, he is yet unconsciously drawing from memory…

“In attempting to represent some character which he cannot recall, which he draws from what he thinks is his imagination, an author may often fall into the error of copying in part a character already drawn by another, a character which impressed itself upon his memory from some book. So he has made a picture of a picture with all his pains. We mortals can’t create, we can only copy. Some copies are good and some are bad.”

Scholarship may or may not support the idea that Twain copied Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn from life. The point here is that Twain did not subjectively experience his characters as having been invented by him, which is also true with Toni Morrison (see above), and which was also true with Dickens (June 2013 post).

The new character probably is, directly or indirectly, based on one or more real people or characters in books. But the theory of this blog is that the writer’s mind has taken those elements and molded them into an alternate personality with a mind of its own. And it is the latter that the novelist works with in writing the novel.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Mark Twain’s Conscience: A Child-Aged Alternate Personality

In an interview published in the August 17, 1890 edition of the New York Herald, Mark Twain said, “A conscience is like a child…be severe with it, argue with it, prevent it from coming to play with you at all hours and you will secure a good conscience. That is to say, a properly trained one…I think I have reduced mine to order. At least I haven’t heard from it for some time. Perhaps I’ve killed it through over severity. It’s wrong to kill a child, but in spite of all I have said a conscience differs from a child in many ways. Perhaps it is best when it’s dead.”

Of course, this is meant to be taken as a joke about how Twain is able to enjoy life by overcoming the inhibitions of conscience. But what struck me as very odd about this joke is his metaphor of conscience as a child. He could have made the same joke with conscience personified as an adult. Why did he personify conscience as a child?

When people discuss the origin of conscience, it is usually said that it comes from parents, society, and/or God. Have you ever heard any psychologist, sociologist, theologian, or anyone else say that conscience is an inner child?

Recall that in the December 14, 2013  post about Twain’s family calling him “Youth,” I inferred that they were talking about the youthful behavior of a child-aged alternate personality. So I am not surprised to find other evidence of a child-aged personality. Moreover, I have been arguing that Twain had multiple personality since the December 1, 2013 post. And in multiple personality, one of the most common types of alternate personality is the child-aged one, because multiple personality starts in childhood. Indeed, it is common for a person with multiple personality to have several child-aged alternate personalities.

Evidently, Twain found one of his child-aged alternate personalities to be annoyingly moralistic.

Monday, December 16, 2013

Multiple Identity Literary Theory is Antithetical To and Totally Rejects Freud’s or Lacan’s Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Literary Theory

Is the point of view presented in this blog found in any currently established literary theory? To find out, I bought Gregory Castle’s The Literary Theory Handbook (Wiley Blackwell, 2013), which is comprehensive and up-to-date.

I read the chapter on Psychoanalysis and could agree with nothing in it—from Freud to Lacan and others—nothing.

In the chapter on Trauma Studies, it is mentioned, in passing, that “trauma leads, as many psychologists attest, to dissociative personality disorders [i.e., multiple personality],” but no further mention of multiple personality follows.

I think that there is an automatic tendency to think that the views of a psychiatrist must be related to Freud, Lacan, etc. But my views do not agree with theirs, and, in essential ways, our views are antithetical (such as their belief in the unconscious, which I reject, in favor of the multiple, dissociated consciousness of multiple personalities).

It is a distinction with a real difference.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Mark Twain’s Wife and Father-in-Law Called Him “Youth,” Describing An Alternate Personality, Not a Term of Endearment

Mark Twain’s wife, who was ten years younger than he was, often called him “Youth.” Biographers and Twain himself have called this “a pet name,” but I disagree, because it is not a term of endearment. Lovers and spouses commonly refer to each other as “baby,” but not as “youth,” because the former says you are adorable, but the latter says you are immature.

Mark Twain said, “That word ‘Youth,’ as the reader has perhaps already guessed, was my wife’s pet name for me. It was gently satirical but also affectionate. I had certain mental and material peculiarities and customs proper to a much younger person than I was” (1, p. 99). In other words, he knew that he was loved, but he also knew the particular kind of behavior that “Youth” was referring to.

That “Youth” was not simply or primarily a marital term of endearment is confirmed by the fact that his father-in-law often called him “Youth,” too (1, p. 114).

In the context of Twain’s multiple personality (dissociative identity)—discussed in several posts earlier this month—we can now understand that “Youth” was a name coined by his family to describe Twain’s behavior when a brilliant, but immature, child-aged, alternate personality was out.

1. Clemens, Susy: Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain (by his thirteen-year-old daughter). Forward and Comments by Mark Twain. Edited with an Introduction by Charles Neider. Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, 1985.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Blog Demographics and Outlook After Six Months

I started this blog six months ago. It has been visited by a few thousand people from about thirty (30) countries. The most visits have come from the following ten countries:

—China
—Germany
—India
—Malaysia
—Philippines
—Russia
—South Korea
—Turkey
—United Kingdom
—United States (50%)

After six months, the blog is just getting started.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Mark Twain Had Both Excellent Memory and Absent-Mindedness: A Common Combination in Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

In previous posts (Dec. 1, 6, 7, 2013), I argued that Mark Twain had multiple personality. And I highlighted the issue of memory gaps, which is a key clue to multiple personality, since one personality may have amnesia for the periods of time that other personalities were out.

One way a memory gap can manifest itself is that the person does not remember something that you would expect him to remember, because that knowledge is known by a different personality than the personality who is out at the time. When this happens, if you don’t think of multiple personality, you are likely to shrug off this memory lapse as absent-mindedness.

For example, in Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by his thirteen-year-old daughter Susy Clemens (Doubleday, 1985), she says, “He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent minded!”

Meanwhile, Twain was also known for his excellent memory. As Ron Powers tells us in Mark Twain: A Life (New York, Free Press, 2005), Twain had powers of memory that were “legendary” and “prodigious.”

The following dramatic incident is from Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography, Volume 2, Chapter CXXVIII. The chapter is titled:

“Mark Twain’s Absent-Mindedness”

“…By no means was Mark Twain’s absent-mindedness a development of old age. On the [occasion] following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength…One day [he] set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of billiards. Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens had been there time and again. It was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. But when he reached the corner where the house…was in plain view he stopped. He did not recognize it…He stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned [home] and got the coachman…to show him the way.”

Evidently, the personality who played billiards was not the same personality who knew the way to Whitmore’s house.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Freud Neither Discovered Nor Understood The Unconscious: The Implications for Our Understanding of People and Literary Theory

The unconscious was discovered—and was a well-known, popular idea—before Freud was born. If you want to know the history, see Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, Basic Books, 1970).

In any case, “the unconscious” is a misnomer. I can explain why with an example from Freud’s book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he thinks that he is illustrating and proving the existence of the unconscious, but he is not.

Freud describes an incident in his office in which he accidentally knocked over an item on his desk. The remarkable thing, Freud emphasizes, is that he “accidentally” knocked over something of little value, when his desk was crowded with things of much greater value. Thus, it was actually a feat requiring considerable attention and dexterity to have knocked over only that trivial item, proving that it was really no accident, and that his “unconscious” must have guided his hand.

But if his “unconscious” was paying attention and guiding his hand, what sense does it make to call it unconscious? It was only unconscious from the point of view of the part of Freud’s mind that was doing the writing. It was not unconscious. It was dissociated consciousness. That is, it was conscious, but was compartmentalized and split off from Freud’s regular consciousness.

Let’s use common sense. Something is not unconscious just because I’m not conscious of it. I’m not conscious of your thoughts, but that doesn’t make your thoughts unconscious. It’s just that your conscious thoughts are inaccessible to me. Just like the part of Freud’s mind that guided his hand in the "accident" was inaccessible to the part of Freud’s mind doing the writing.

In short, Freud’s example illustrates that he had dual consciousness, and that one of them didn’t know what the other was thinking, but did see what the other had done.

So everyone who thinks and talks about the unconscious should stop doing so, and instead think and talk about dissociated consciousness, which means multiple personality (dissociative identity).

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Mark Twain’s Memory Gap (Dissociative Amnesia), a Clue to His Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

In yesterday’s post, I discussed that having a history of memory gaps is a key clue to having multiple personality. In my December 1, 2013 post, I argued that Mark Twain had multiple personality. So it would be nice if there were evidence that Mark Twain had memory gaps.

Coincidentally, I was just reading Twain’s nonfiction article, “Mental Telegraphy” (1878/1891), in which he talks about his belief in, and experience of, mental telepathy. I had looked up this article for two reasons. First, I knew that people who are prone to psychic experiences tend to score high on dissociative experience rating scales, and that people who score the highest on such scales are people with multiple personality. Which is not to say that all people with psychic experiences have multiple personality, but only that there is some overlap between these two groups. Second, I hoped that Twain’s article might include some mention of psychological experiences more directly related to multiple personality, such as memory gaps. I was not disappointed.

At the end of the “Postscript” section of his article on mental telegraphy, Twain describes a personal experience that he says brought him “to the conclusion that you can be asleep—at least wholly unconscious—for a time, and not suspect that it has happened…

“About a year ago I was standing on the porch one day, when I saw a man coming up the walk…I was looking straight at that man; he had got to within ten feet of the door…and suddenly he disappeared…I was unspeakably delighted. I had seen an apparition at last, with my own eyes, in broad daylight…”

Twain then went into his house and was shocked to find the man inside. Evidently, the man was not an apparition and had not disappeared, but had continued on his way to the front door, and had been let in.

“During at least sixty seconds that day I was asleep or at least totally unconscious, without suspecting it. In that interval the man came to my immediate vicinity, rang, stood there and waited, then entered and closed the door, and I did not see him and did not hear the door slam.”

This not only documents that Twain had memory gaps, but also illustrates why it may be difficult for a person who has had memory gaps to tell you about them. As Twain says, you can have a memory gap “and not suspect that it has happened.”

Twain had not known that he had had a memory gap until he saw the man inside his house and put two and two together. If the man had turned around and walked away, and had not been found inside the house, Twain would not have known that he had lost time.

Even when people lose hours of time, they may not realize it, if, for example, they were at home, could have been taking a nap, and there is nothing to indicate what they were actually doing.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Two Keys to Diagnosis of Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity): The Person’s Puzzling Inconsistencies and Unreported Memory Gaps

Puzzling Inconsistencies
Real people are not perfectly consistent and predictable. So fiction writers make sure to add a little inconsistency and unpredictability to help turn a “flat” two-dimensional character into a “round” three-dimensional character.

Nevertheless, real people do not act randomly. They are fairly consistent and have reasonable predictability, which is the basis for our concept that a person has a personality.

So what should we make of it if a person has puzzling inconsistencies? One possibility is that we really don't know the person very well, and they have things going on in their life that we don't know about, and these things, once known, will easily explain the inconsistencies. But what if we do know the person very well and we still find their inconsistencies puzzling?

Unreported Memory Gaps
Most people assume that if a person had memory gaps they would complain about it. And that is a safe assumption if the memory gaps are something new. But what if the person has had memory gaps since childhood? It is part of the fabric of their life. It is nothing new. For all they know, everyone else has the same thing. And so it just seems to them like something that is best to ignore. If you don’t ask them about it, they will never tell you.

Most psychiatrists, like most other people, never ask about memory gaps:

Psychiatric News
American Psychiatric Association
Letter to the Editor
May 04, 2007

Mental Status Exam
Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D.

The standard mental status exam's assessment of memory has a blind spot. It doesn't ask patients if they've had recurrent sober memory gaps (dissociative amnesia), which is often the only clue that a patient might have dissociative identity disorder (DID). It leaves it to patients to raise the issue.

Why don't undiagnosed DID patients bring up the subject of their memory gaps? First, they don't know its clinical significance (that these might be times that other identities were "out"). Second, they are generally unaware that they've lost time, except when something embarrassing, confusing, or disturbing confronts them with the fact, and they don't like to think about it. Third, they're afraid that telling people they have memory gaps—periods of time they don't remember and when they're not in control of their own behavior—might make people think they're "crazy."

Why do clinicians need a "clue" (memory gaps) to the presence of DID? What's the mystery? When DID is present, isn't it obvious? If you've ever seen an interview of a known DID patient, weren't the switches from one identity to another something you couldn't miss?

Actually, what you see in such an interview is the postdiagnosis picture, not how DID presents. Prediagnosis, alternate identities usually answer to the patient's regular name, because they prefer to remain incognito. They lose that reticence once diagnosis has blown their cover, but all that you would have found prediagnosis (if you had inquired) were memory gaps.

Once you discover that your patient does have a history of memory gaps, you can ask about these episodes. For example, after some gaps, a patient finds poems. She agrees that nobody else could have written these poems (which she found among her personal papers), but she doesn't remember writing them; they don't express her views, and they're not even in her handwriting.

Keeping the interview focused on these poems will eventually cause a switch to the identity who wrote them. You might ask this identity why she writes poems, her age, and her name. If you then turn the focus away from the poems, or simply address the patient by her regular name, you will prompt a switch back to the regular identity, who has amnesia (a memory gap) for your conversation with the poetry-writing identity.

The standard mental status exam does not now, but should, screen for memory gaps (dissociative amnesia). Otherwise, when it comes to diagnosing DID, the clinician will be clueless.

Conclusion
If you find that a person has puzzling inconsistencies and previously unreported memory gaps, use your common sense and intelligence to find the reason and to account for these facts.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Mark Twain Had Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity), Say His Pen Name, Deathbed Confession, Van Wyck Brooks, and Twain’s Last Novel [this is the first of a series of posts on Mark Twain; to see them all, search Twain in this blog]

Samuel Clemens’s pen name, Mark Twain, proclaims his duality.

When he was near death, and literally on his deathbed, which made anything he spoke about a sort of deathbed confession, Twain spoke about “dual personalities” (1, p. 626).

Van Wyck Brooks—who, in the 1930s, won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize in history—was the first to say that Twain had multiple personality. In his 1920 book, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, Brooks said the following:

“…He never knew what to think of himself, he was of two minds all the time…He seems to exhibit himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious of extraordinary powers that make all the world and even the Almighty solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains…

“…It is perfectly evident what happened to Mark Twain at this moment [at age twelve, when his father died]: he became, and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism [sleepwalking] is the proof of it, a dual personality…The subject of dual personality was always, as we shall see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in childhood, susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mesmeric control, had shown from the outset a distinct tendency toward what is called dissociation of consciousness…” (2, pp. 35-61).

So people have long suspected that Mark Twain had multiple personality. And, contributing to that speculation, Twain did the same thing that Dickens had done with his last, posthumous novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (see June 2013 post): Twain wrote his own, last, posthumous, novel—No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (3)—about the same issue, multiple personality.

The story of the novel takes place in the year 1490, in Austria, where it is still the Middle Ages. A printing company—Twain worked as a printer before he became a writer—has its offices in a large castle. “One cold day…a most forlorn looking youth…appeared in the door…timid and humble…his clothes were coarse and old, ragged…lightly powdered with snow…the apparition” was seeking work. “What is your name?” they ask. He answers, “Number 44, New Series 864,962,” which is mysterious and strange.

So 44 is put to work. He learns printing surprisingly fast, at least in part because he can read the mind of the equally youthful printer who befriends him and who is the narrator of the story. But the other printers are offended by the way a vagabond has been allowed to join their profession. So they bully 44 and then go on strike to protest his employment. The strike threatens to bring the business to ruin.

To save the day, 44 creates living, breathing Duplicates of the striking printers. He explains to the narrator why this is possible:

“You know, of course, that you are not one person, but two. One is your Workaday-Self…the other is your Dream-Self…”

“But 44, these Duplicates are solid enough!”

“…we pulled them out of the Originals and gave them independent life.”

However, the duplicates—doubles, secret sharers, alternate personalities, call them what you will—are not happy about being incarnated and having to come out from the interior, hidden, dream-world, where they usually reside. They feel that their lives had been much better on the inside. They would have preferred to go back inside to the dream-world, where they had no constraints, and where the only limit to reality was their imagination.

The moral of the story is that Mark Twain agreed with Margaret Atwood when she said that writers have multiple personality (Oct. 27, 2013 post).

1. Powers, Ron: Mark Twain: A Life. New York, Free Press, 2005.
2. Leary, Lewis (ed.): A Casebook on Mark Twain’s Wound. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1962.
3. Twain, Mark: No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969/1982. (This edition of the novel is the approved, authenticated text, according to the Center for Editions of American Authors, Modern Language Association of America.)

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

The Inconsistencies of Henry James’s "The Turn of the Screw" are Explained by Multiple Narrators (Multiple Personality; Dissociative Identity) and Multiple Identity Literary Theory

This famous short story has the beautiful sentences and brilliant observations for which Henry James is justly famous. Its use of language is another lesson of the master. So readers tend to make excuses for the story’s blatant inconsistencies (not ambiguity, inconsistencies).

What inconsistencies? Take, for example, the first six pages of the story, which sets up the situation: The narrator is attending a social gathering in which people are telling ghost stories, and one gentleman decides to read a first-person account written down by a governess many years ago. The rest is the governess’s story. The thing is, the six-page set-up is never mentioned again. And there is simply no good reason to use the first six pages of a short story for a set-up that is totally abandoned. It’s like the beginning and end of the story were written by two different people.

Then there is the inconsistency in characterization of the two young children, Flora and Miles, who are under the governess’s care. For most of the story, these children are described—over and over again—as exceptionally beautiful innocents. Yet, toward the end of the story, young Miles is portrayed as a willful, wily, calculating schemer; perhaps, you might rationalize, because Miles is possessed by the evil spirit that the governess has been seeing. But then Miles dies of fright like he is the innocent again. Was Miles a beautiful innocent or an ugly schemer? Was the governess hallucinating? The narrative is not simply ambiguous; it actively takes both sides of these issues.

Of course, a bright reader can rationalize these inconsistencies, or can say that, after all, James is known for his “ambiguity.” But if the story had not been written so beautifully by the brilliant Henry James, its unresolved inconsistencies would be considered amateurish mistakes.

So why would a great writer like Henry James produce such an incoherent narrative? The answer is that the story was written by more than one narrative voice. One narrator wanted the six-page set-up. Another narrator didn’t. One narrator sees children as beautiful innocents. Another narrator sees children as devilish schemers. One narrator thinks that the governess saw real ghosts. Another narrator thinks that’s nonsense. I don’t know how many narrators wrote this story, but its unresolved inconsistencies are the footprints of these narrators, and they are walking in different directions.

Readers of this blog can guess that by multiple narrators, I mean the normal multiple personality (dissociative identity) common among writers. This interpretation of The Turn of the Screw illustrates the use of Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

Without this theory to understand James, he is vulnerable to a much harsher critique. In fact, Jamesian scholars, with a book load of facts and analysis (1), accuse James of pervasive and serial duplicity, both moral (deceit) and literary (doubling), in both fiction and nonfiction. And they can’t explain it. 

1. Tredy D, Duperray A, Harding A (eds.): Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Pen Names, Pseudonyms, and Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity; Multiple Identity)

Ordinary nicknames are used to indicate the nature and closeness of a relationship; they are not about the person’s having distinctly different identities (with different self-image, behavior, mood, styles, values, and/or interests). In contrast, the names of alternate personalities indicate which identity (with its own self-image, behavior, mood, styles, values, and/or interests) you are talking about or talking to.

Pen names and pseudonyms are often claimed to serve no other purposes than to protect privacy, to have a different brand name for different genres, or to fool reviewers. But the real reason for their use may be that the writer has a non-writing identity and a writing identity, has more than one writing identity who wants to publish, and/or has different groups of character identities who are suitable for different genres.

Friday, November 15, 2013

J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan) and George du Maurier (Svengali): Two More Writers With Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity; Multiple Identity)

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is a multiple personality scenario, because it is about Peter and the lost boys who never grow up. In multiple personality, one of the most common types of alternate personality (alter) is the child-aged alter. Child-aged alters are child-aged, because they never grow up.

So I was not surprised to find that Barrie said he had an alternate personality who did his writing, named McConnachie, as reported in the New York Times of May 21, 1922. Google “JM Barrie McConnachie” to find the article.

According to Piers Dudgeon’s Neverland: J. M. Barrie, the du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of Peter Pan (New York, Pegasus Books, 2009), George du Maurier—author of Peter Ibbetson and Trilby, two best sellers, the latter with the famous character, Svengali; grandfather of novelist, Daphne du Maurier—“used to feel within himself two persons, the one serious, energetic, full of honest ambition and good purpose; the other a wastrel, reckless and careless, easily driven to the Devil.”

Perhaps related to also having a child-aged alter, George du Maurier had a psychological technique that he called "dreaming true." “ ‘Dreaming true’ was [George du Maurier’s] little secret. My grandpapa George developed the ability to ‘visit’ the past by dreaming true,” wrote Daphne. “He would lie back and in his mind’s eye become the child he once was, and he wrote about this ‘psychic’ ability too, in Peter Ibbetson.” Perhaps Daphne, herself, had been using a similar technique, when she wrote the opening line of her novel, Rebecca, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

“Dreaming true” is not the same as “lucid dreaming.” The latter refers to dreaming in which the dreamer knows he is dreaming and can direct the action of the dream. In contrast, George du Maurier describes dreaming true as being like reality, and not like dreams, in that you can’t fly or jump off cliffs, etc. In Peter Ibbetson, he describes it as a way to visit his true, actual past. Ibbetson could “turn myself into my old self, and thus be touched and caressed by those I had so loved.” Dreaming true sounds like a version of self-hypnotic age-regression. I think it's possible that hypnotic age regression involves switching to a child-age alter.

As literary tidbits, I may mention that J. M. Barrie named Peter Pan after George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson. Ibbetson’s “never never land” became Neverland in Peter Pan. Barrie even bought a St. Bernard dog and called him Porthos after Peter Ibbetson’s dog. It is also surprising to learn that an early title for Peter Pan had been “The Boy Who Hated Mothers.” And the character Peter Pan had been originally intended to be “a demon boy, villain of the story.”

In any case, and in short, J. M. Barrie and George du Maurier are two more famous writers with issues of multiple personality and dissociative identity.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer”: A Short Story About the Use of Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity) To Write Fiction

The story is narrated in the first person by a young ship’s captain, who, having just taken command of a new ship (a blank page), is at sea. The captain (writer) is suddenly confronted with a man (a character) who seems to come out of nowhere (having fled another ship after killing someone). The captain hides the man in his cabin until the ship nears an island where the fugitive character can live after the story is over.

Once the character introduces himself (“My name is Leggatt”), he is never again referred to by name. Instead, the captain refers to him—over and over again, throughout the story—as follows: “It was…as though I had been faced by my own reflection in…a…mirror,” “my double,” “my double,” “my double,” “ghost,” “my double,” “other self,” “my double,” “my other self,” “my double,” “my secret self,” “a ghost,” “my double,” “my second self,” “my second self,” “my double,” “my secret double,” “my second self,” “my second self,” “my very own self,” “my double,” “my second self,” “the secret stranger,” “my other self,” and “my second self.” 

If the story had been primarily about a fugitive who is given a second chance, it would not have been titled “The Secret Sharer.” The story is about a writer, just starting out on a new writing voyage, who suddenly meets a character. And the character, we are repeatedly and endlessly told, is actually another personality state of the writer. That is, the writer has, and uses, multiple personality to create the narrative.

To refer to a person who has multiple personality as a “secret sharer” is very appropriate, since multiple personality is, normally, hidden and secret. Conrad’s insight is that fiction writers, in their use of multiple personality to write fiction, are secret sharers.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

DSM-5 Says Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity) is More Common Than Schizophrenia

American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

Prevalence (in the general population)
Schizophrenia: 0.3%—0.7%
Dissociative Identity Disorder: 1.5%

Multiple personality is two to five times as common as schizophrenia.

So why is it, then, that schizophrenia is a common diagnosis by most psychiatrists, but that most psychiatrists (and other mental health professionals) go through their whole professional lives without ever diagnosing multiple personality, leading most psychiatrists (and others) to think that multiple personality is rare, and leading some psychiatrists (and others), including some of the most eminent, to think that multiple personality is “bunk”?

I answered that question in the first post of this blog (June 2013). In short, multiple personality is a condition that is designed to keep secrets, and to keep itself secret—it becomes obvious only after diagnosis, when the cat is out of the bag, so to speak—and most mental health professionals have never been taught how to make the diagnosis.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Freud Had Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

The “confession”

In his May 14, 1922 letter to Arthur Schnitzler (a Viennese physician who had become an eminent playwright), Sigmund Freud wrote:

“I shall make you a confession…which you will kindly…keep to yourself and not share with either friend or stranger. I have been struggling with the question of why I have never, in all these years, made any effort to meet you…The answer to this question contains what appears to me as too intimate a confession. I think I have avoided you out of a kind of fear of finding my own double [Doppelgänger Scheu]” (1).

The German word for a person’s double, doppelgänger, has eerie, supernatural connotations (1), and Freud, in his article on the “uncanny,” had described a double as being “a thing of terror” (4). Moreover, as long as twenty years earlier, on his way to Naples in 1902, Freud, after reporting that he had met his double—it is not clear to what or to whom he was then referring as his double—commented, “Does this signify Verdere Napoli e poi morire [See Naples and die]?” (2, vol. 2, p. 21). In short, for many years of his life, and seriously enough to involve phobic avoidance of meeting someone and remarks about death, Freud was worried that he might have a second self, a double. The question, of course, is why he would have a worry like that.

Further along in his letter to Schnitzler, Freud tried to rationalize his fear that the playwright might be his double by arguing that there was an “uncanny” similarity between his own psychology and that which he perceived in Schnitzler’s plays. Others have argued that there was a remarkable similarity between the two men’s lives (1); or that Freud’s thinking of several literary figures as showing signs of possibly being his double—it was a preoccupation with having a double, not a fixation on Schnitzler—was a defense “against accepting responsibility for creative inspirations” (5); or that Freud was “narcissistic” (6). But neither similarities nor defenses nor narcissism can explain why Freud thought that Schnitzler or anyone else had even the remotest possibility of being his double, because, after all, there is no such thing in real life.

A double is only a figure of speech. It is a literary concretization and embodiment of what, clinically, would be a second self in a case of dual personality (7, p. 162). In double stories, the primary character is paired with his or her double character—who may be portrayed as a separate person, or as a reversible transformation of the primary character, or as a hallucination or specter, or as any kind of materialized alter ego that the author can imagine—either as a way of dramatizing the primary character’s psychological and moral conflicts or simply as an entertaining plot device. An example is Poe’s classic tale, “William Wilson” (8), which reaches a climax when the depraved Mr. Wilson attempts to stab to death his infuriatingly ethical double, only to find himself bleeding to death of self-inflicted wounds as he belatedly becomes aware of the large mirror opposite him.

In a footnote to an article in which he takes up the subject of the double, Freud relates the following personal experience:

“I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance” (4).

This kind of mirror double is an item that appears on two dissociative experience rating scales: “Some people have the experience of looking in a mirror and not recognizing themselves” (9). “I have found myself staring intently at myself in the mirror as though looking at a stranger” (10). The people who score the highest on these scales are those with multiple personality.

Thus, our first clue as to what kind of experiences could have predisposed Freud to think in terms of having a double was a dissociative experience. (Multiple personality—aka dissociative identity—is a dissociative disorder.) But it was not the kind of dissociative experience that would have made Freud think that he might actually have a double walking the earth. What kind of experience might have made him think that?

Freud must have been accused of doing things that he couldn’t recall doing, leading him to suspect that there must be someone who could be mistaken for him—a double—who was responsible. That Freud was worried about having a double for many years, suggests that, over the years, he had had multiple episodes of being accused of doing things that, as far as he knew, he hadn’t done.

Moreover, the fact that he didn’t think he might have done what he was accused of, but had forgotten it, indicates that, if he had had amnesia for doing things, he also had amnesia for his amnesia; that is, he was not aware of having had memory gaps for the periods of time he was supposed to have done things. Possibly the closest Freud ever came to realizing that he could dissociate completely was the time he recognized that he had had “odd states of mind not intelligible to consciousness” (11). Most often, his awareness of having had an episode of amnesia would be limited to a vague sense that time had passed like a “confused dream” (see below).

Amnesia

A famous example of Freud’s having been accused of something that he couldn’t recall was the allegation that he had been exposed to the ideas of Pierre Janet during the time that Freud was in Paris—October 1885 to February 1886—to study under the great neurologist and medical hypnotist, Jean-Martin Charcot.

This charge was so distressing to Freud that even many years later, when he was eighty years old, and Janet (three years younger) inquired if he could make a courtesy call, Freud refused to see him. “No, I will not see Janet,” Freud said. “I could not refrain from reproaching him with having behaved unfairly to psychoanalysis and also to me personally and having never corrected it. He was stupid enough to say that the idea of a sexual etiology for the neuroses could only arise in the atmosphere of a town like Vienna. Then when the libel was spread by French writers that I had listened to his lectures and stolen his ideas he could with a word have put an end to such talk, since I actually never saw him or heard his name in the Charcot time…” (2, vol. 3 pp. 213-214).

Freud was consistent and insistent on the latter point, as can be seen in a private letter (12) and in his autobiography, where he said, “I should therefore like to say explicitly that during the whole of my visit to the Salpetriere Janet’s name was never so much as mentioned” (13). That this was not just a distortion of memory that came after his bitter rivalry with Janet had developed, is indicated by the fact that Janet’s name appears neither in Freud’s contemporaneous report on his Paris studies (14) nor, apparently, in any of his letters from that time. So, if, despite Freud’s version, Janet actually had been a factor on the Paris scene during the time Freud was there, then that fact would have had to have registered in a dissociated part of Freud’s mind, since his regular frame of mind would seem to have had no knowledge of it.

The fact is, a paper written by Pierre Janet was read at a meeting of the Societe de Psychologie Physiologique in Paris on November 30, 1885 (7, p. 338; 15). Although it is not certain that Janet himself was present at the reading of his paper (7), and I have no documentation of Freud’s attendance, there are three reasons to think that Freud would have attended. First, the meeting was chaired by Charcot, whom Freud had gone to Paris to study under, and in honor of whom Freud was later to name his first son. Second, the general subject of the paper was hypnosis, one of the main things that Freud had gone to Paris to learn more about, and a subject that remained one of his chief interests for several years. Third, the specific subject of the paper was Janet’s experiment about whether it was possible to exert hypnotic influence from a great distance; that is, telepathically.

How personally interesting this lecture would have been to Freud at that time can be seen from the the following. Freud wrote, “During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city [Paris]—I was a young man at the time [29 years old]—I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice; I then noted down the exact moment of the hallucination and made anxious enquiries of those at home about what had happened at that time. Nothing had happened…I must however confess that in the last few years [the early 1920s] I have had a few remarkable experiences which might easily have been explained on the hypothesis of telepathic thought-transference” (16). For these reasons, then, the burden of proof is on anyone who would contend that Freud didn’t attend the reading of Janet’s paper, or that Freud never even heard Janet’s name mentioned during the Charcot time.

In a December 3, 1885 letter from Paris, Freud makes certain remarks that seem to be merely “waxing very poetical” (17) in the context of the letter alone, but which take on additional meaning in the context of his use, in later years, of the word “uncanny” to talk about doubles and Schnitzler (see above), and in the context of his evident dissociative amnesia for Janet’s November 30th lecture. Toward the beginning of the letter, he says Paris “and its inhabitants strike me as uncanny; the people seem to me of a different species from ourselves; I feel they are all possessed of a thousand demons.” And toward the end of the letter, he says that he wishes he were back with his loved ones, because “Paris is simply one long confused dream, and I shall be very glad to wake up” (17).

Freud’s experiences of amnesia were not limited by time or place. Fifteen years later (1900) and far from Paris, at the last meeting of his dying friendship with Wilhelm Fliess, Freud spoke of the theory of bisexuality as though he were proposing a new idea, when in fact, Fliess had proposed that idea to Freud back in 1897, and Freud had spoken of the importance of Fliess’s idea in correspondence of 1898 and 1899. Freud’s inability to recall the history of the idea—a week later, memory about it returned—was as Jones (Freud’s friend and authorized biographer) said, “A very severe case of amnesia!” (2, vol. 1, pp. 314-315). Another, and most ironic, example of amnesia, was Freud’s writing about dissociation itself (though he avoids calling it by its name) as something “entirely new” (18). Was this the same Freud who had once spoken of “splitting of the mind and dissociation of the personality” as having originally been at the center of his position (19)?

 “two different intellectual states in myself”

In his letter of March 2, 1899, Freud wrote: “I can very clearly distinguish two different intellectual states in myself. In the first I pay very careful attention to everything that my patients tell me and have new ideas during the work itself, but outside it [the therapeutic work] cannot think and can do no other work [while in this intellectual state]. In the other [intellectual state] I draw conclusions, make notes, have interest to spare for other things…” (22). This seems to be the private basis for one of Freud’s well-known recommendations for psychoanalytic technique; namely, that the analyst should initially listen to the patient with “evenly hovering attention” (2, vol. 2, p. 234) and not make interpretations or take notes.

But why is it that Freud “cannot think and can do no other work” (other than listen to his patients) while in the first of the two states? Is psychoanalytic treatment the only situation in which intuitive, noncritical attention can be employed? Hardly. So Freud is not describing a mere attitude or mode of attention (which could be employed at will and in a variety of situations), but a distinct and independent frame of mind that has somehow developed its own style and mission.

And consider Freud’s image of “evenly hovering attention”: That is the point of view frequently described by people undergoing trauma (e.g., rape, surgery, a near-death experience), when a dissociated ego state seems to be observing the situation from above. If we now juxtapose Freud’s first intellectual state with its “evenly-hovering attention,” it suggests that that personality state originated in a traumatic situation, such as being a captive audience for the primal scene. If Freud repeatedly witnessed parental intercourse due to his family’s occupying a single room during his first few years (6), then while little Sigmund lay in bed, wishing to dissociate himself from the disturbing event, a less judgmental ego state may have split off and hovered over the prima scene. Many years later, this same intellectual state may have hovered over his patients as they lay on the couch recalling their own traumatic experiences.

Two of Freud’s selves astonish each other

In 1936, Freud wrote: “You know that the aim of my scientific work was to throw light upon unusual, abnormal or pathological manifestations of the mind…During the last few years, a phenomenon of this sort, which I myself experienced a generation ago, in 1904, and which I had never understood, has kept on recurring to my mind.”

He described his actual experience as follows: “When finally…I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around upon the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!’ To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression to the remark was divided, far more sharply than was usually noticeable, from another person who took cognizance of the remark; and both were astonished, though not by the same thing. The first behaved as though he were obliged, under the impact of an unequivocal observation, to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful…The second person, on the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt…” (21).

Freud began to analyze his experience in terms of depersonalization, a subject, he said, that “leads us on to the extraordinary condition of ‘double conscience’ [dual consciousness], which is more correctly described as ‘split personality’. But all of this is so obscure and has been so little mastered scientifically that I must refrain form talking about it any more to you” (21). And so he leaves the shadows of dissociation (where the issue is) to look for the key under the Oedipal lamppost (where it is easier for him to see).

Freud’s abandonment of dissociation

As Freud had once acknowledged, the original cornerstone of psychoanalysis had been dissociation: “It was [Charcot’s] pupil, Pierre Janet, who first attempted a deeper approach to the peculiar psychical processes present in hysteria, and [Breurer and I] followed his example when we took the splitting of the mind and dissociation of the personality as the centre of our position” (19).

So why didn’t the center hold? First, because Janet had gotten there first, and if Freud were to establish himself as the father of the true psychoanalysis, he would have to abandon Janet’s dissociation in favor of his own defense mechanism of repression. Both Janet and Freud accepted the fact that people could have things in their mind that they weren’t aware of. This had been discovered, and was well known, long before either Janet or Freud had been born; it had been clearly demonstrated by hypnosis. But in Freud’s theory, a person was not aware of something because it was repressed into the “unconscious.” While in Janet’s dissociation, the regular consciousness became unaware of something, not because it was unconscious, but because it was dissociated into an alternate consciousness. This is most clearly seen in cases of multiple personality.

Whose view, Janet’s or Freud’s, has stood the test of time? Suffice it to say that since 1980, the official psychiatric diagnostic manual (the DSM) has had a chapter on dissociative disorders, but no chapter on repression disorders.

Why did Freud take the wrong road? Not only because he wanted to establish himself as father of his own school of psychoanalysis. But because he, himself, had dissociative symptoms, probably even multiple personality. And he had trouble with mirrors.

REFERENCES

1. Kupper HI, Rollman-Branch HS: Freud and Schnitzler—(Doppelganger). J Am Psychoanal Assoc 1959; 7:109-126
2. Jones E: The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. New York, Basic Books, 1953-57
3. [reference used in previous version omitted]
4. Freud S: The ‘Uncanny’ (1919), Complete Psychological Works, standard ed, vol 17. London, Hogarth Press, 1955
5. Kanzer M: Freud and his literary doubles (1976), in Freud and His Self-Analysis. Edited by Kanzer M, Glenn J. New York, Jason Aronson, 1979
6. Glenn J: Narcissistic aspects of Freud and his doubles, Freud and His Self-Analysis. Edited by Kanzer M, Glenn J. New York, Jason Aronson, 1979
7. Ellenberger HF: The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York, Basic Books, 1970
8. Poe EA: William Wilson (1839), in The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by Peithman S. New York, Avenel Books, 1986
9. Bernstein EM, Putnam FW: Development, reliability, and validity of a dissociation scale. J Nerv Meant Dis 1986; 174:727-735
10. Riley KC: Measurement of dissociation. J Nerv Ment Dis 1988; 176;449-450
11. Freud S: Letter 65 (1897), in The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. Edited by Bonaparte M, Freud A, Kris E. Translated by Mosbacher E, Strachey J. New York, Basis Books, 1954
12. Bennet EA: The Freud-Janet controversy: an unpublished letter. Brit Med J 1965; 2 Jan:52-53
13. Freud S: An autobiographical study (1925), in Complete Psychological Works, standard ed, vol 20, p 13. London, Hogarth Press, 1959
14. Freud S: Report on my studies in Paris and Berlin (1886), Complete Psychological Works, standard ed, vol 1. London Hogarth Press, 1959
15. Kopell BS: Pierre Janet’s description of hypnotic sleep provoked from a distance. J Hist Behav Sci 1968; 4:119-131
16. Freud S: The psychopathology of everyday life (1901 and later editions), in Complete Psychological Works, standard ed, vol 6. London, Hogarth Press, 1960, p. 261
17. Freud S: Letter 87, in Letters of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Freud EL. Translated by Stern T, Stern J. New York, Basic Books, 1975
18. Freud S: Splitting of the ego in the process of defence (1940), in Complete Psychological Works, standard ed, vol 23. London, Hogarth Press, 1964
19. Freud S: Second Lecture of five lectures on psycho-analysis (1910), in Complete Psychological Works, standard ed, vol 11. London, Hogarth Press, 1957
20. Freud S: Letter 106, in The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. Edited by Bonaparte M, Freud A, Kris E. Translated by Mosbacher E, Strachey J. New York, Basic Books, 1954
21. Freud S: A disturbance of memory on the acropolis (1936), in Complete Psychological Works, standard ed, vol 22. London, Hogarth Press, 1964
22. Freud S: Letter 70, the The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. Edited by Bonaparte M, Freud A, Kris E. Translated by Mosbacher E, Strachey J. New York, Basic Books, 1954