Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, and the Denial of Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity) Due To the Mistaken Belief That It is Crazy

Stephen King’s “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (Four Past Midnight, 1990) and The Dark Half (1989) both have novelists with multiple personality as their main characters. In The Dark Half, the alternate personality is ghost writer of the novelist’s more popular, violent books, written under a pseudonym, implying that novelists write under more than one name, because they have more than one personality who wants to publish.

King’s writing about more than one novelist who has multiple personality would seem to imply that King believes multiple personality is common among novelists. But the remarkable thing is, King never explicitly acknowledges that these characters have multiple personality. For example, in The Dark Half, he explains the novelist’s dark, violent, alternate personality as deriving from brain tissue retained from a twin who died in the womb. King never speaks of multiple personality, per se.

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If Diana Kindron’s essay (cited in a previous post) is right about the presence of a character with multiple personality in Toni Morrison’s Paradise, why are most readings and reviews of that book in denial of the issue? And why does Morrison have such a character, yet never, herself, discuss the issue of multiple personality?

We know from the Paris Review interview (quoted in a previous post) that Morrison relates to her characters as though they were autonomous, thinking beings (and that this is common among novelists). What can we call this phenomenon of autonomous characters other than some sort of multiple personality? We can’t call it imagining or pretending—since, when people imagine or pretend, they have a sense that they are the ones doing it and pulling the strings—whereas here we have something that is subjectively experienced as autonomous beings with minds of their own, which is the way people with multiple personality experience their alternate personalities. Thus, to acknowledge autonomous characters, but not acknowledge some sort of multiple personality, is denial.

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And why are Dickens scholars—including those who have read my essay about Dickens’s multiple personality (June 2013 post) and don’t dispute any of its facts—in denial?

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One of the main reasons for all this denial about multiple personality is the mistaken belief that people with multiple personality are crazy (psychotic), which results in the following fallacious syllogism:

FALSE—People with multiple personality are crazy. 

  TRUE—King, Morrison, Dickens, and most novelists are not crazy.

FALSE—Therefore, most novelists cannot have multiple personality.

In the June 2013 post about Dickens, I point out that even the mental illness, multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder)—which has nothing to do with schizophrenia—is not a psychosis. And most novelists are not mentally ill, and do not have multiple personality disorder, but only what I call “normal multiple personality.”

In short:

TRUE—People with multiple personality are not crazy.

TRUE—King, Morrison, Dickens, and most novelists are not crazy.

TRUE—Therefore, most novelists may have multiple personality, and not be embarrassed or in denial about it.