Novelists Use Multiple Personality

Many normal people have more than one psychological self, or, what I call, "normal multiple personality" (not just multiple roles). This fact is not new, but most people are not familiar with it. For a good, popular science, review, see:

Multiplicity by Rita Carter. Little Brown, 2008

This fairly common, normal proclivity of the mind is not a mental illness and does not need treatment.
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The relatively few people who do have this to such an extent that it causes distress and/or dysfunction and is, therefore, a mental illness, and does need psychotherapy—1.5% of the general public, according to DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) (2013)—may, nevertheless, be successful:

I Am More than One: How Women with Dissociative Identity Disorder Have Found Success in Life and Work by Jane Wegscheider Hyman. McGraw Hill, 2007.
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In any case, Dickens’s normal multiple personality is interesting for two reasons:

1. He was so successful, and still is, with his books in print, movies made of them, world-wide reading clubs, numerous biographies, Dickens scholars and academic studies, Dickens web sites, and the celebration of his 200th birthday last year.
2. His success was not in spite of multiple personality, but, in part, because of it, since it was integral to his creative process (as discussed in the June 2013 post of this blog).

In short, many people have normal multiple personality, but novelists use it professionally.

Where I’m Coming From

by Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D.

As a boy, I wanted to be a heroic cowboy, a famous athlete, and a great novelist. Cowboys were big on TV and in the movies. I played sports nearly every day with my friends. And though my parents never read fiction, we had a complete set of the novels of Charles Dickens. I even read a few of them in high school and took a couple of courses on creative writing.

       However, I could never see how people wrote novels. Stories didn’t come to me. I’ve read books by novelists and others about writing, but they never really explained it to my satisfaction. Whenever the newspaper or TV had an interview of a novelist, I read it or watched.

       Meanwhile, I went to college, then medical school, and specialized in psychiatry. (I figured that if I ever wrote a novel, knowledge of the mind would be useful.) After being a psychiatrist for twelve years, I discovered multiple personality in a number of patients, and that became an interest of mine.

       As I continued to read and watch interviews of novelists, I noticed a curious thing. They kept mentioning that their characters had minds of their own. At first, I thought they were joking, but eventually it became clear that they were just being candid and that this was a common experience.

       Actually, I was shocked that the novelists were saying this, because it is the essence of multiple personality. I couldn’t conceive of how all these novelists could have it, or see any practical way for me to pursue the issue. Then, in the course of reading a contemporary novelist’s nonfiction, I chanced upon clear-cut evidence of multiple personality, and I now felt that I had to do something.

       So I chose the most famous novelist I could think of, Charles Dickens, and looked to see what I could find. The result is my essay, “Dickens, Multiple Personality, and Writers,” the main post of this blog.

       I wouldn’t have written about my findings if I had not found an old essay about Dickens, published back in 1941, that had already concluded he had multiple personality, especially since that essay is celebrated in Dickens scholarship. I thought that if Dickens’s multiple personality had already been discovered, but forgotten, I just had to remind everyone, they would accept it, and see its significance.

       How naive.

Why is multiple personality (aka dissociative identity)

so common in all forms of literature?

from the Bible's “My name is Legion; for we are many” (portrayed as demon possession)

 http://www.ewtn.com/vbible/search.asp?abbr=mark&ch=5&bv1=1&ev1=20

to the derivatives of Legion in popular culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_in_popular_culture

to popular literature in various media

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder_in_popular_culture 

Because normal multiple personality is relatively common, especially among the people who do the writing:

http://www.aywi.org/writers/2011/11/multiple-personality-disorder-among-authors/

http://jamigold.com/2012/01/multiple-personality-disorder-no-im-a-writer/ 

http://www.msauret.com/multiple-personality-disorder-autho/

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A Study of Fifty Writers…

The Illusion of Independent Agency:

Do adult fiction writers experience their

characters as having minds of their own?

Marjorie Taylor, Sara D. Hodges, Adele Kohanyi

Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/4/2521/files/2013/03/Taylor-Hodges-Kohanyi_2003-2b6wdel.pdf

Yes, ninety-two percent of the fifty fiction writers did experience that. They interacted with, and heard the voices of, their characters. They provided dramatic examples of characters who not only composed their own life histories, but also attempted to take control of the plot away from the writer. Some of the characters were even experienced by the writers as “leaving the pages of the writers’ stories to inhabit the writers’ everyday worlds (e.g., wandering around the house).”

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Three Degrees of Multiplicity

by Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D.

1. Multiple Roles, Not Multiple Personality

Like most people, she has many roles in life. She is a scientist, musician, wife, aunt, friend, daughter, writer, breast-feeding mother, golfer, churchgoer, and painter, among other things. When she is at her lab, if you ask her about being a nursing mother, she identifies with being both a nursing mother and a scientist. Indeed, she always identifies with all of her roles, because she has the same memory bank and identity no matter which role she is engaged in at the moment. In short, she has one multifaceted “I,” which adapts to all of her roles.

2. Normal Multiple Personality

A different woman with the same roles (see above) is at her own lab. If you ask her about being a nursing mother, she may or may not remember or know about that. In any case, she does not identify with doing that. It is done by someone else. However, she won’t tell you that, since she knows it would sound crazy. (In fact, neither multiple personality nor multiple personality disorder is a psychosis.)

You can’t tell by looking at her that this is going on. The essence of multiple personality is not its outward behavior.  The essence is the subjective experience of having more than one “I” or consciousness, with each self having a mind of its own.

While it is dramatic to see an identity come out and wander around the house (see study, above), most of the life of the identities in multiple personality takes place inside, behind the scenes, as is most common for the characters of a novelist. 

As you can see from the study of fifty fiction writers, multiple personality is surprisingly common and often constructive. It is not a mental disorder in most cases.

3. Multiple Personality Disorder

Multiple personality becomes multiple personality disorder, a mental illness, if and when it causes the person a significant amount of distress or dysfunction.

Fortunately, the distress and dysfunction may be resolved — changing multiple personality disorder into normal multiple personality — if the identities can learn to cooperate. Unfortunately, this childhood onset disorder is usually not diagnosed until adulthood, by which time the identities may be quite set in their ways and in conflict.

Writing novels is not something that every person can do, but for those who can, it may be a good lifestyle for helping the identities to cooperate. Novels take all kinds of characters, interests, skills, and imagination, which means that there is something for every kind of identity to contribute.

One cause of “writer’s block” may be a temporary breakdown in the identities’ cooperation.

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