Dickens, Multiple Personality, and Writers

By Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D.

The most influential essay about Charles Dickens (1812-1870) in the twentieth century—it changed his image from comic storyteller to serious novelist—was “Dickens: The Two Scrooges” in The Wound and the Bow (1941) by Edmund Wilson. Before Wilson, Dickens had been famous and beloved. After Wilson, Dickens was famous, beloved, respected, and studied. Yet, Wilson’s main conclusion, that Dickens had a split personality (“The Two Scrooges”), was ignored and forgotten.

     For example, George Orwell, reviewing Wilson’s book in The Observer (10 May 1942), started to acknowledge that “one is forced to believe in a sort of split personality…,” but then he was flippant and ignored the issue.

     More recently, Dickens scholars, having forgotten Wilson’s discovery, almost rediscover it. For example, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, in Knowing Dickens (2007), points to Dickens’s character splitting; characters in altered states of consciousness; changes in authorial sensibility; his wanting to have a “shadow” character as a motif for a magazine; and his visiting a mistress in the guise of another man. She says that his characters are “in love with their own transformational possibilities, the potential, yearned-for multiplicity of themselves.” She seems on the verge of rediscovering Dickens’s own multiplicity, but does not.

     Little Dorrit’s Shadows: Character and Contradiction in Dickens (1996) by Brian Rosenberg is another scholarly book that highlights Dickens’s dividedness. Rosenberg says that “Wilson himself would be shocked by the degree to which Dickens has come to be seen as self-divided.” But Wilson concluded that Dickens had a split personality, which is as self-divided as you can get.

     The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (1999) says that Wilson’s essay was “unquestionably the most influential single study of Dickens of the 20th century.” It says that Wilson portrayed Dickens as having “divided consciousness,” “divided character,” and a “divided self,” which is true, but these euphemisms obscure what Wilson meant, that Dickens had a split personality.

     In short, since the publication of Wilson’s essay, Dickens’s dividedness has become a cliché, but Wilson’s original conclusion, that Dickens had a split personality, has been ignored, forgotten, and obscured.

     After briefly summarizing Wilson’s argument, I will explore additional evidence that Dickens had a split personality, pausing at key points for notes about multiple personality, and concluding with what Dickens implies about other fiction writers.

     But first, let me sympathize with the reader.

________________________________________________________

You are skeptical that multiple personality exists. You should be skeptical, having never seen it. During my first dozen years as a psychiatrist, when I believed that I had never seen it, I was skeptical, too. But then, by chance, I discovered it in a patient I had been treating for years. It was only after I had seen the patient switch identities, and only after I had interviewed several of them, that I was convinced.

     In retrospect, I realized that I had seen these identities before, but they hadn’t previously acknowledged and identified themselves (giving their own names, etc.). In the past, I had shrugged off recurrent changes in the patient’s clothing styles, demeanor, and attitude as being simply fashion or mood.

     The regular identity, who now had memory gaps (amnesia) for my conversations with the other identities, and hardly even recalled the memory gaps (amnesia for the amnesia), was very skeptical of my new diagnosis.

     Thus, if psychiatrists like me (during my first dozen years in practice) are skeptical, and if even a good many people who have multiple personality disorder are skeptical, I expected that you would be skeptical, too. Any sensible person who hasn’t seen multiple personality would be.

     The fact that, for my first twelve years as a psychiatrist, I was seeing some patients who had multiple personality disorder (about 4% of my patients), but didn’t realize it, doesn’t mean that I’m stupid. It illustrates that multiple personality disorder is camouflaged and secretive. I’ll explain why that is, later.

You don’t want Dickens pathologized. I don’t pathologize Dickens, since I don’t see him as mentally ill. I see him as having multiple personality, as opposed to multiple personality disorder. Just as many more people have anxiety than have an anxiety disorder, many more people have multiple personality than have multiple personality disorder. (And, anyway, people who do have the disorder deserve respect.)

_________________________________________________________

     Wilson’s first step to his conclusion that Dickens had a split personality was to outline Dickens’s plan for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The climax of the novel was to be John Jasper’s confession to the murder of Edwin Drood. Most important, the confession was to be made by Jasper as though he were talking about someone else, thus revealing that Jasper had a split personality.

     Wilson then pointed to the surprising similarity between Dickens and Jasper,  especially in the way they both switched back and forth between good and evil attitudes. Indeed, Dickens was the model for Jasper, and Jasper represented Dickens. Wilson concluded by saying that since Dickens died before he could finish the novel, Dickens never had the chance “to dramatize himself,” by which Wilson meant that the revelation of Jasper’s split personality would have dramatized and revealed Dickens’s own split personality.

     As other evidence will confirm, Wilson’s conclusion was correct, but why could Wilson see this, while so many other readers and scholars have not? Did Wilson, himself, have multiple personality? Some people did claim that his personality changed when he drank. Or did Wilson know someone with a split personality? This question led me to Carol Brightman’s Writing Dangerously (1992), a biography of the American novelist and critic, Mary McCarthy, who was married to Wilson at that time. Brightman reports that McCarthy had a split personality since she was twelve years old. To put that in perspective, Brightman says that “a Jekyll and Hyde drama [is] far from unusual among writers.”

     Now, beyond Wilson’s argument that Dickens, like Jasper, had a dark side, what evidence is there that Dickens had a split personality? To begin where Wilson left off, there are two additional connections between Dickens and Jasper; first, that Dickens used the same unusual word to describe the minds of Jasper, David Copperfield, and Pip (the latter two being Dickens’s most obviously autobiographical characters), and second, that Dickens, himself, had the same kind of divided consciousness that he planned to use in Jasper’s confession to reveal that Jasper had a split personality. Let me tell you what I’m referring to.

     At the beginning of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, there are various ways that Dickens foreshadows the revelation that John Jasper had a split personality; for example, Jasper switches back and forth between two contradictory sets of attitudes. Another foreshadowing is Dickens’s description of Jasper as having a “scattered consciousness,” which makes it noteworthy that in David Copperfield, David is described at one point as having “scattered senses,” and in Great Expectations, Pip is described as having “scattered wits.” Since Dickens used a “scattered” mind to foreshadow a character with a split personality, this implies that not only Jasper, but also Dickens’s alter egos David and Pip were, in Dickens’s view, dissociative.

____________________________________________________

Terminology: “Split personality” is the informal term. “Multiple personality disorder” is the old diagnostic term—and still the most widely understood term—for what is now called “dissociative identity disorder” and is classified as a “dissociative disorder” by the  American Psychiatric Association. Dissociation is the subjective experience of having more than one “I,” self, or consciousness (which some think of as divided consciousness and others think of as multiple consciousness). Of course, there is really only one person, and that person is not possessed; it is all psychological. Also note that multiple personality disorder is not a psychosis and has nothing to do with schizophrenia.

Theory: Multiple personality disorder has its onset in childhood. It is a way for a child to cope with a series of inescapable traumatic experiences. Once established, it tends to continue indefinitely, long after the trauma is over. The prognosis may be worse the more severe the trauma and the younger the age at which it occurs. Thus, if the trauma is in later childhood, doesn’t last too long, and, especially, if there is someone who is emotionally supportive, the result may be multiple personality rather than multiple personality disorder.

     Many children have a normal tendency to dissociate into multiple identities: imaginary companions or playmates. This is not multiple personality disorder, because it is not being used as a way to cope with serious trauma, and there are no memory gaps (amnesia) for what the imaginary companions do (although, in later years, the child may forget having had imaginary companions, and we know about it only because the parents recall).

     Dickens’s split personality may have begun at age twelve, when, for a number of months, he was abandoned by his parents and sent to work in a rat-infested factory, making it appear to him that his educational, social, and economic prospects had been permanently ruined; at least, that is how he later remembered it.

     Memory gaps (amnesia for the periods of time when other identities are “out”) are characteristic of multiple personality disorder. But some identities are co-conscious, and do not have amnesia for each other. Multiple personality (in comparison to multiple personality disorder) probably has more cooperation among the identities and more co-consciousness, but this difference has not been studied. So it is possible that multiple personality (in contrast to multiple personality disorder) does not require amnesia.

     People with multiple personality disorder tend not to volunteer the fact that they have memory gaps. They try not to think about it. You have to ask them specifically. I don’t know that anyone ever asked Dickens. So in that regard my diagnosis of him would be incomplete if I were alleging that he had the disorder, per se (which I am not).

     Some experts would say that amnesia is not essential to diagnose the disorder, and that the reason it is required in the latest edition of the diagnostic manual (DSM-5), is not that amnesia is present in all valid cases, but that it is present in the vast majority of valid cases.

Multiple Personality is Not Freudian: At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were two rival schools of psychoanalysis led by Pierre Janet (dissociation) and Sigmund Freud (repression). Janet’s psychological defense of dissociation segregates threatening things into one or more other conscious identities; whereas, Freud’s repression is said to bury threatening things in the unconscious.

     In dissociation, there is no unconscious, only segregated states of consciousness. There are no “repressed memories,” since all memories have always been remembered by one or another of the identities.

     Since multiple personality disorder entails Janet’s dissociation, it was rarely diagnosed during the years that Freud’s school prevailed. The Freudian model of a single consciousness makes multiple personality disorder seem logically impossible. Thus, if you feel that the existence of multiple personality disorder is illogical and impossible, you’re being Freudian.

     So how did Freud and his single-consciousness model account for the known cases of multiple personality disorder? One identity could be conscious at a time? But in multiple personality disorder, it is common for two or more identities to be conscious at any given time. Clearly not Freudian.

___________________________________________________

     The second connection between Dickens and Jasper is found in Charles Dickens As I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America (1866-1870) by George Dolby, Dickens’s secretary, tour manager, and friend. Remember that Jasper’s split personality was to be revealed by his confessing to the murder as if he thought someone else had done it. Well, not in reference to Jasper, but just reflecting on his experience traveling with Dickens, Dolby reports that Dickens “had a singular habit, too, of regarding his own books as the production of someone else, and would almost refer to them as such.”

     To appreciate that Dickens wasn’t joking, you need to know that Dolby’s book is a hagiography about the great Charles Dickens, a national treasure, and so Dolby would have been very reluctant to mention any peculiar habit at all. When Dickens repeatedly (it was a “habit”) talked of his books as though they had been written by someone else, if there had been any possibility at all that Dickens was joking, Dolby would have been delighted to report it as an example of the great man’s sense of humor. So Dolby must have been quite certain that Dickens wasn’t joking.

     Of course, Dickens had not been saying this to everyone. On most occasions, with most people, Dickens referred to his novels as his own. Why, then, was there this very peculiar contradiction between what he said to Dolby and what he said to most everybody else? Apparently, being out on the road with Dolby on these long, arduous reading tours brought out a personality state that was not usually out in social situations, and which saw things differently.

     Additional perspective on Dickens is found in The Life of Charles Dickens (1873-74), the fourteen-hundred page biography by John Forster, Dickens’s best friend and confidante. Dickens confides that “every word said by his characters was distinctly heard by him.” [Note: People with multiple personality may hear their other identities speak, usually inside their head, but not necessarily.] About writing his novels, Dickens confides, “I really don’t invent it—really do not—but see it, and write it down.”

     Dickens saw and heard his characters as if they were real, autonomous people with minds and lives of their own. If you had asked Dickens, he would have said that he knew his characters must be the product of his imagination (multiple personality is not a psychosis), but that he experienced them as being real people whom he witnessed and did not invent. 

     Forster, in defending Dickens against people who thought that his hearing his characters’ voices was insane, makes a point about novelists in general. He tells the story of how Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), after writing The Bride of Lammermoor, couldn’t remember what he had written [like a person with multiple personality who has dissociative amnesia for something that one of his other personalities has done]. Forster’s point was that all these great novelists are strange, so it must be genius and creativity, and not insanity. 

     But Forster admits that Dickens’s thinking and behavior were sometimes such that, for example, in 1840, there were rumors that Dickens was under treatment in an asylum for insanity. So how do we know that Dickens didn’t have schizophrenia or manic-depressive (bipolar) psychosis?

     He didn’t have schizophrenia, because a person with schizophrenia who has true schizophrenic hallucinations (not under control by modern medicines) is not conducting the kind of full and productive life that Dickens was. Regarding bipolar or other mood disorders, the relevant fact is that Dickens’s psychotic-like symptoms were not confined to times of extreme moods. So we are left with a discrepancy: psychotic-like symptoms in a person whose general level of function was not psychotic.

     This type of discrepancy may be seen in multiple personality. Such persons may be able to hear and see their alternate identities; that is, they may have hallucinations. And when one of their identities is “out” (but incognito, as noted below), and we, without realizing it, are talking to an identity (some of whom have a quite imaginative view of reality), they can seem almost psychotic. So when I see a person who has psychotic symptoms, but somehow doesn’t seem psychotic, I consider the possibility of multiple personality, and try to clarify whom, in terms of identity, I’ve been talking to. Of course, since this is not a psychosis, I should also find that at least one of the person’s identities is always in perfect touch with reality. If all this sounds like it can get complicated, you’re right. Like a novel with many characters. Or, let’s just say, life.

     In any case, why didn’t Dolby, Forster, and everyone else see that Dickens had multiple personality? Doesn’t such a person dramatically and obviously switch from one easily identifiable personality to another? No, that is very rare. It is usually seen only after diagnosis (which makes hiding and secrecy futile), especially for demonstration purposes. Ordinarily, when alternate personalities do come out, they do so incognito, passing for the regular identity by answering to the person’s regular name. In many cases, the alternate personalities rarely come out, at least where and when they might be seen. It is characteristic of undiagnosed multiple personality that it is very secretive.

_________________________________________

     Why is multiple personality disorder intrinsically secretive? Why does it actively try to evade diagnosis? Because it is designed to keep certain traumatic memories out of the regular self’s awareness by putting them in the separate memory banks of other identities (and, to know of the other identity’s existence is to risk knowing about the hidden memories).

     Once other identities are established (not just to hold memories, but to have different attitudes and behaviors that represent different ways of coping), these identities don’t want the regular self to know about them and to interfere with their comings and goings. If any outsider, like you or me, were to see what was going on, we might reveal it to the regular self and undermine the whole defense.

     The regular self is usually the least in the know. And the other identities (who see themselves as people, not “identities”) don’t want anyone else to know, especially psychiatrists, who they fear will try to kill them off.

     Actually, psychiatrists don’t try to kill off the identities, since they are all parts of the person’s personality. The initial goal of therapy is greater cooperation among the identities (turning multiple personality disorder into multiple personality). Sometimes therapy results in the complete integration of all the identities into one multifaceted identity, but often cooperation is all that is practical or wanted.

_____________________________________________________

So multiple personality is usually not obvious. But since most people want to see something dramatic, let me end with a famous episode (famous to Dickens scholars) from My Father as I Recall Him (1885/1896) by Mamie Dickens. It was an occasion when, convalescing from an illness, she was allowed to rest quietly on a sofa in Dickens’s study while he was writing. She describes how Dickens would repeatedly get up from his desk and engage in various behaviors, such as “extraordinary facial contortions” or “talking rapidly in a low voice,” often looking in a mirror, but sometimes looking in her direction without seeing her. And then each time he would return to his desk to continue writing. She says that each time he got up he “had actually become in action...the creature of his pen.”

     Was Dickens only acting out the parts? Mamie Dickens may have thought so. But when we take what she described together with what Dolby and Forster reported (see above), this is the most probable scenario: Dickens stood up from his desk as one of his character personalities came out, while the writer personality went inside, and from inside, watched and listened to the story that the character personality was telling. And then the character personality went back inside as the writer personality came out, sat back down at his desk, and resumed writing.

____________________________________________________

Amnesia Scenario: Another novelist became ill with gallstones, jaundice, and bouts of severe abdominal pain. The pain was treated with medication that could impair memory. In multiple personality, pain and drugs may affect one identity much more than they affect another identity. In this case, the pain and drugs may have had little effect on the identities who produced the stories, but may have, temporarily, incapacited and put to sleep the writer identity, since, for the first time, the novelist dictated his novel to secretaries instead of doing the writing himself. After the novel had been completed and the illness had remitted, one of the secretaries got into a conversation with the novelist, and was astounded to find that the novelist (writer identity) could not remember the story of the novel he had just completed. But why should the writer identity remember it? He had slept through it. This novelist’s remarkable amnesia for The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) is reported in Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837/1902).

_____________________________________________________

     Since each person with multiple personality is unique, and has unique identities, who have their own unique way of doing things, what Mamie Dickens described does not happen, in precisely that way, in any other novelist’s study. But when novelists say, as many do, that their characters talk to them and have minds of their own, consider the possibility that they are not joking. And since one of the most famous and beloved novelists, Charles Dickens, secretly and covertly had a creative, highly productive version of mulitple personality—and since there is no reason to assume that he was different from most other novelists in that regard—consider that this might possibly be true of your favorite novelist, too.

                                                         #    #    #