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.