Writer’s Block: Is it Real? What is Being Blocked? Why Couldn’t George Bernard Shaw write a Great Novel? Why Do Some Novelists Drink?

What prompts this post is that writer’s block was mentioned in the last post (as being a specialty of Doris Lessing’s therapist, even though Lessing, herself, did not have it).

Judging by most books published about how to write a novel, you would think that writer’s block is impossible. They tell you what it takes to make good characters, plots, sentences, etc. What is there to get blocked? Nothing. It is all very rational, and if you don’t carry it out and produce a good novel, then you have not followed their advice or are a procrastinator.

So why was Nobel Prize winning playwright George Bernard Shaw a failure as a novelist? He tried it, decided he was not very good at it, and gave up. Evidently, you can be one of the greatest writers who ever lived, but still not have what it takes to be a successful novelist.

And why do some writers feel that they have to drink to tap their creativity? After all, the brain really doesn’t function as well when it is intoxicated.

This all makes sense according to Multiple Identity Literary Theory. What gets blocked in at least one form of writer’s block is access to, and/or the cooperation of, the writer’s alternate personalities. Some novelists use alcohol as a way to sedate their host personality and allow their other personalities to come forward. (Writers like Stephen King and Toni Morrison do not need alcohol, because they know how to access the world of their alternate personalities by using a form of self-hypnosis.) And if you don’t have multiple personality—perhaps that was Shaw’s problem—you might have superb writing skills, but still not be very good at writing novels.

Doris Lessing’s Multiple Personality: Already Known, but Unrecognized, Prior to Multiple Identity Literary Theory

Anyone who has read this month’s posts in their entirety knows not only that Doris Lessing had multiple personality, but that some of her family, friends, readers, scholars, and even the Nobel Prize committee must have already known this, too.

That is, they knew it, but they didn’t know that they knew it, because they had a false image of what multiple personality is like.

The false image of multiple personality (as previously discussed in this blog) is that:

1. it is extremely rare (actually, the normal version is relatively common),

2. it is usually overt (it is usually hidden and camouflaged), and

3. it is psychotic (it is not, and it’s normal version is compatible with a very high level of function; in fact, it is integral to the process of writing novels).

Multiple identity literary theory, as proposed and presented in this blog, is not encompassed by any other literary theory. In particular, it is not an extension of psychoanalytic literary theory. As previously discussed, multiple identity literary theory and psychoanalytic literary theory are antithetical, because they derive from rival and contradictory models of the mind.

A psychoanalytically-oriented therapist, per se, would be likely to miss a client’s multiple personality. This is illustrated in the life of Doris Lessing.

In Volume Two of Lessing’s autobiography, Lessing reports that she went to a psychoanalytically-oriented therapist, a “Mrs. Sussman (Mother Sugar in The Golden Notebook), because if I didn’t get some help, I would not survive. These days, everyone goes to a therapist, or is a therapist, but then no one did…And particularly communists did not go ‘into analysis’, for it was ‘reactionary’ by definition…I was so desperate I went. I went two or three times a week, for about three years. I think it saved me…Mrs. Sussman specialized in unblocking artists who were blocked, could not write or paint or compose. This is what she saw as her mission in life. But I did not suffer from a ‘block’. She wanted to discuss my work. I did not want to. I did not see the need for it. So she was perpetually frustrated, bringing up the subject, while I deflected her. Mrs. Sussman…gave me what I needed, which was support. Mostly support against my mother [who wanted to come and live with her].”

Mrs. Sussman was very helpful to Lessing, but as a psychoanalytically-oriented therapist, per se, she apparently never asked any questions that would have brought out the history of Tigger, etc. It was not something that she would have thought of or considered.

This is no insult or disparagement of Mrs. Sussman. I know from my own experience as a psychiatrist that prior to the time I learned about multiple personality—after I had been a psychiatrist for twelve years—I had been seeing some multiple personality patients literally for years without realizing it.

Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s “Hostess personality,” Described in Her Autobiography as the most overt Alternate Personality of her Multiple Personality

I quote from Volume One of Doris Lessing’s autobiography:

“I once thought of writing a book called My Alternate Lives…As in those cases of multiple personalities, where only slowly do the personalities inside a woman or man become aware of each other, the heroine of this book — me for argument’s sake — would slowly come to know that multiples of herself are living these other lives.”

“…the personality I call the Hostess…This Hostess personality, bright, helpful, attentive, receptive to what is expected, is very strong indeed. It is a protection, a shield, for the private self. How useful it has been, is now [1994], when being interviewed, photographed, a public person for public use. But behind all that friendly helpfulness was something else, the observer…never to be touched, tasted, felt, seen, by anyone else.”

At age 7, she adopted the name of the A. A. Milne character, Tigger, for one aspect of her hostess personality: “I was the fat and bouncy Tigger. I remained Tigger until I left Rhodesia…This personality was expected to be brash, jokey, clumsy, and always ready to be a good sport, that is, to laugh at herself, apologize, clown, confess inability. An extrovert. In that it was a protection for the person I really was, ‘Tigger’ was an aspect of the Hostess.”

“It was also Tigger who ran away, and joked about it afterwards.”

“How funny that hellfire nun became, when Tigger described her.”

“‘Tigger’ was in control, and I clowned and was pert and ‘clever’…”

“…the sad little girl who lived well hidden by the mask of ‘Tigger’…”

“It was ‘Tigger’ who saw me through…”

“For one term this teacher taught English Literature, and I wrote an essay, or rather ‘Tigger’ did — about her methods of teaching.”

“I was so afraid, and oh how Tigger jested.”

“I wrote a poem. [Poem quoted]. These verses are not here for their worth: they interest me. First, the writer was a fourteen year-old girl…but wait, that cannot be true. Some Ancient had moved in, taken temporary possession of that many-tenanted young mind. Then, it is he who takes moonpaths, he goes adventuring…I did not believe in the efficacy of the spell or rune…The poem comes from a different level of knowledge…” [Persons with multiple personality may have personalities who are of a different age or sex than the person.]

“I could truthfully say that I spent my adolescence in a sexual trance…But this is what I say when in that part of my mind marked Love. I could with equal truth say I spent my childhood, girlhood and youth in the world of books. Or, wandering about in the bush [in Africa], listening, and watching what went on. You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.” [In multiple personality, different personalities may have different memory banks, so that what the person remembers depends on which personality is in control and doing the remembering at that moment.]

“That year 1937 is described by me according to what memory-mode I am.”

“Recently I met a woman [who had replaced Lessing at a job when Lessing had left to get married. According to this woman, Lessing had been] a quiet and thoughtful person…I was glad to hear this, for what I remember is the chatty brightness of ‘Tigger’ — who was certainly the person who dealt with the social life that at once swept me away into drinking and dancing.” [This other woman had evidently known Lessing from a situation in which one of Lessing’s introverted personalities, and not her extroverted Tigger personality, was in control.]

“In the wedding photographs I look a jolly young matron. It was ‘Tigger’ who was getting married.”

[Some of Lessing’s other personalities were not cheerful like Tigger.] “This feeling of doom, of fatality, is a theme — perhaps the main one — in [my novel] Martha Quest. It was what had made me, and from my earliest childhood, repeat and repeat, ‘I will not, I simply will not.’"

“There were other activities. One was the sale of the Communist newspaper from Cape Town…At one point I was selling 112 dozen copies every week…Comrade Tigger was after all an attractive young woman.”

NOTE: All the above is from Volume One of Lessing’s autobiography, which was published in 1994 and covered years 1919 to 1949. Volume Two, published in 1997, covered 1949 to 1962, the year she published The Golden Notebook. Lessing (1919—2013) did not publish any further autobiography.

Each of the two volumes is about 400 pages. Why not publish one book of 800 pages? To make more money on two books than one? Because there was a natural division between her African years and her London years? Also because different personalities wrote each volume.

The Hostess personality — whether in its Tigger aspect or another aspect — is not even mentioned in Volume Two. Volume Two discusses The Golden Notebook, but nothing about multiple personality (see previous posts this month) is mentioned. The issue of compartmentalization is barely mentioned.

And we know that multiple personality, by whatever name, was an ongoing issue for Lessing even after she moved to London. As Carole Klein’s biography (2000) of Lessing notes: “In Landlocked [1965], volume four of Children of Violence, Martha Quest, tormented by her feelings of division, thinks of herself as a house with half a dozen rooms, an analogy Lessing has often made about her own personality. Martha saw each room in the house as full of people who did not really connect to the people in the other rooms, but only to her.”

Incidentally, we have evidence that people who knew Lessing well could tell when her Tigger personality was out and in control. As noted in the Klein biography, according to recollections obtained from witnesses by Lessing scholar Dee Seligman: When Lessing’s first son, John, six years old at the time, was visiting Lessing at the office, he headed for his mother’s desk, where she was typing, and said to her, “Hello, Tigger. How are you? I haven’t seen you for a while.”

So how can we account for the fact that this prominent issue in Volume One — which we know from her writing was an ongoing issue for Lessing — was completely ignored in Volume Two of her autobiography. Evidently, the teams of writing personalities who worked on Volume One and Volume Two were not the same. If it were only that she decided it was an embarrassing issue that she did not wish to pursue, she could have brushed it off in Volume Two with some brief mention. But the writing team for Volume Two was apparently unaware of the issue either as the Hostess personality for interviews or as a significant theme in The Golden Notebook.

Henry James and the “Host Personality”: the Alternate Personality in Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity) who does Interviews and Socializes

In my post of November 4, 2013, I mentioned Henry James’s short story, “The Private Life.” One of the characters is a writer, but the person who the other characters see in public is not the one who does the actual writing. While the other characters socialize with the writer’s public personality, the writer’s other personality, who actually does the writing, is back in his apartment busy writing.

This is the answer to the mystery of why the writer that the other characters see socially does not really know whether or not he has written certain things that he has promised. They think he is being evasive, but he really doesn’t know, because he is not the one who does the writing.

In this story, the writer’s two personalities are portrayed as two separate people, because that is the convention for how multiple personality is portrayed in ghost stories.

But that is only half the story. There is another character in this short story who is famous for being a brilliant conversationalist. He always knows just the right thing to say. However, it is eventually revealed that this brilliant conversationalist only exists in public, at social gatherings. In private, as only his wife knows, he disappears. In this ghost story, he becomes literally invisible in private.

In Henry James’s short story, both the writer’s public personality and the brilliant conversationalist are what is known in the psychiatric literature on multiple personality as a “host personality.” In multiple personality, there are 1. the regular, or host, personality, and 2. the alternate personalities. These are commonly referred to as the host and the alters.

So James’s short story makes two points about writers. First, writers have multiple personality. Second, when you are interviewing or just speaking to a writer (or anyone) who, unknown to you, has multiple personality, you are often speaking to the host personality, who may be turned off or asleep in private situations, and who may have no direct awareness of the existence or actions of the other personalities.

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (the Nobel Prize winner’s best-known novel) is about Multiple Personality, as Indicated by “the shape of the novel” and Different Handwritings

The Golden Notebook [1962] (Perennial Classics, 1999) is six hundred pages of complex literary fiction, but Doris Lessing, herself, gave us the key to what it is about. In her 1971 commentary, now included as an introduction to the novel, she draws our attention, first and foremost, to “the shape of the novel.”

The novel is divided into five sections, separated by four Notebooks (Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue) kept by the central character, Anna Wulf, a novelist. This highly divided structure represents, Lessing says, the “fragmentation” and “compartmentalisation” of identity. Toward the end of the novel, this dividedness reaches a climax of blatant multiple personality in Anna Wulf and Saul Green. But Anna’s “breakdown” remits—and she appears to heal and achieve a greater degree of “unity”—in the “Golden Notebook” and end of the novel.

Lessing says that “the essence of the book, the organization of it, everything in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalise.”

“This theme of ‘breakdown,’” says Lessing, “that sometimes when people ‘crack up’ it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions, has of course been written about by other people, as well as by me since then. But this is where…I first wrote about it. Here it is rougher, more close to experience…But nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because the book was instantly belittled, by friendly reviewers as well as hostile ones, as being about the sex war…”

However, Lessing, herself, does not fully understand her novel. She makes it sound as though, 1. most of the book does not describe multiple personality, per se, but only a bad habit of compartmentalization, that 2. if you compartmentalize, you run the risk of developing a temporary bout of multiple personality, but that 3. if you realize and decide that you must not compartmentalize, then your split personality may heal, and you can put all that behind you.

But the central character, Anna, who kept the Notebooks, had full-blown multiple personality all along and did not get over it.

The simplest proof that Anna had multiple personality all along is that, according to the novel, her four Notebooks were written in different handwritings. In my post of October 13, 2013, I give a link to a psychiatric journal article that provides objective documentation of 12 cases of multiple personality. One kind of objective documentation was to go back in the person’s life, to years before they ever saw a psychiatrist and before anyone had ever raised the idea of multiple personality, and find things like old diaries in which the person had used several, distinctly different handwritings.

Moreover, as readers of this blog know, multiple personality starts in childhood and it is usually hidden and camouflaged. So, if an adult who was never thought to have multiple personality has an emotional crisis that looks like blatant multiple personality, but then recovers from the crisis and no longer has any obvious alternate personalities, what has really happened is that a person with multiple personality since childhood has had a crisis in which their usually hidden personalities became temporarily overt, but then, after the crisis, the personalities reverted to their usual hiddenness and camouflage.

I recommend The Golden Notebook to readers of this blog, because it has some very realistic descriptions of multiple personality from the perspective of a person who has experienced it. (I don’t know how else Lessing would have known what she knew about it.) And it shows that multiple personality may be present in persons like Lessing who are not mentally ill and who are very high-functioning.

The Nobel Novelist [Doris Lessing] Spoke of Having Different “Levels”: Is this Common in Multiple Personality?

In yesterday's post, the mystery novelist told of having “several different people, or ‘I’s’ taking part.” In the same interview, she said that it can be “very frightening to write a story…soaked in emotions that you don’t recognize as your own,” emotions which come from a “different level.” Are “different levels” typical of multiple personality? They are. Let me explain.

Whenever I have initially discovered that a person has multiple personality, I usually meet and interview a handful of identities. But, eventually, I will find that this initial group of identities is not the person’s only group of identities. It is only one level, layer, group, realm, etc.

The members of this initial group or level of identities are more or less aware of each other. Most of them don’t have memory gaps when other members of their group are out. However, you find that the person still has some memory gaps, emotions, or behaviors that cannot be accounted for by any of these known identities. Also, when you ask this group of identities if there are any other identities outside of their group, they may tell you that there are rumors of others, or that they have noticed unaccounted for emotions, etc. In short, you will eventually find that there are other levels, layers, groups, or realms of identities.

So, when the Nobel novelist talks of emotions, etc., coming from “different levels,” she is describing a common situation in multiple personality.

The Nobel Novelist [Doris Lessing], In an Interview, Describes Multiple Personalities Located at Different “Levels” In Her Mind

On page 60 of the Nobel novelist’s best-known novel (see post of January 1, 2014), the main character, a novelist, says, “I know very well from what level in myself that novel [the novel the character had written] came from.”

The reason I took notice of the above is that the novelist also referred to “level” in an interview conducted two years after her Nobel novel was published, but which did not happen to mention that particular novel.

The interview did describe the one time in the novelist’s life that she had tried mescaline (peyote). What she described about that experience is very relevant to this blog, but only if what she described had general relevance to her thinking, and was not just unique to the drug experience.

Her use of the word “level,” not only in her discussion of the drug experience, but also in her non-drug writing (her novel, quoted above) shows that what she said in the interview revealed something generally true about her mind. To quote from the interview:

“I took one dose [of mescaline] out of curiosity…There were several different people, or ‘I’s’ taking part…Several people were talking and in different voices throughout the process—it took three or four hours—…[including the voice of a] philosophic baby, a creature who argued steadily with God…”

“Yes, but who created all this? Who made it up?”

“It wasn’t me, the normal ‘I' who conducts her life.”

“And of course, this question of I, who am I, what different levels there are inside of us, is very relevant to writing, to the process of creative writing about which we know nothing whatsoever. Every writer feels when he, she, hits a different level. A certain kind of writing or emotion comes from it. But you don’t know who it is who lives there…That is a literary question, a problem to interest writers…”

Nobel Prize Novel Opens With Two Friends Who, Apparently, Are Alternate Personalities, in a Scenario Typical of Cases of Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

The novel I referred to in the post of January 1, 2014 begins with the meeting of two friends. Ms. A says, “But do you know something? I discovered while you were away that for a lot of people you and I are practically interchangeable?”

“You’ve only just understood that?” said Ms. B.

They go on to discuss how distinctly different they are from each other in personality and personal appearance. Yet a woman they both know, who is more connected to Ms. B, has, in the latter’s absence, been talking with Ms. A, as if Ms. A and Ms. B were “interchangeable.”

This is a typical experience for two alternate personalities of a person with multiple personality. To them, they are obviously different from each other, and they can’t understand why other people don’t seem to see it. For example, they think they look quite different from each other, and they don’t realize that other people see the same body for both of them.

Where did the author learn this about alternate personalities in multiple personality? After all, when this novel was written, around 1960, there were few readily available nonfiction books that would have described it. So was the author describing her own alternate personalities?

Freud Always Said He Was Proving “The Unconscious,” But He Was Really Proving Dual Consciousness (the Simplest Form of Multiple Personality)

In my post earlier today, I quoted Freud as acknowledging that “the unconscious” was discovered by others before his time. The illustration he gave was post-hypnotic suggestion. That is, if you give someone who is hypnotized a suggestion to do something after they come out of hypnosis, and they come out of hypnosis and do it without knowing why they do it, or perhaps even without even noticing that they are doing it, then they are, Freud would have us believe, demonstrating their “unconscious.” But that, I will explain, is ridiculous.

Let’s say you hypnotize someone and suggest to them that, after they come out of hypnosis, every time you say the word “blue” they will raise their right thumb and cross their left leg over their right leg, and every time you say the word “red” they will raise their left index finger and cross their right leg over their left leg. And after they come out of hypnosis, while you engage them in casual conversation about current events, you use the cue words and they behave as suggested. After this goes on for some time, you ask them about the odd behavior, and they either hadn’t noticed it, or they noticed it and didn't care, or they come up with some ingenious explanation for the behavior having nothing to do with hypnosis. It was this type of scenario that Freud was talking about as being a demonstration of “the unconscious.”

However, people can carry out such behavior only if they 1. remember what you told them to do while they were in hypnosis, then 2. listen very carefully for the cue words, and then 3. purposely carry out the behavior. This complex scenario requires conscious attention from start to finish. The fact that the part of the mind which was “asleep” during the hypnosis is unaware of it, means only that the person’s mind has two segregated and independent states of consciousness, with one of them unaware of the other; in other words, dual consciousness.

How Freud Tricked You into Being Skeptical about Multiple Personality even if You are Not Interested in his Psychoanalytic Theories

Freud may be out of fashion—or perhaps never was in fashion with you—but some of his ideas may be thought of as conventional wisdom, even by you.

Part of conventional wisdom is that Freud discovered the unconscious, which Freud acknowledged was untrue: “Incidentally, even in the days before psychoanalysis, hypnotic experiments, especially post-hypnotic suggestion, provided concrete demonstrations of the existence and mode of operation of the psychic unconscious” (1, p. 52). However, many people still, routinely, give Freud credit for discovering the unconscious. It is one of the main reasons people think that he was a genius (even if they ridicule some of his other theories).

Freud also knew that his concept of a single consciousness and an unconscious was illogical, but he used sophistry to reject his own logic. Freud said, “This process of deduction—applied to our own person despite inner resistance—leads not to the discovery of an unconscious, but, strictly speaking, to the postulation of another, second consciousness within us…an unconscious consciousness…Second, analysis shows that the various latent psychic processes we infer enjoy a great degree of mutual independence, as if they stood in no relation to and knew nothing of each other. We would therefore need to be prepared to postulate not only a second consciousness within us, but also a third, fourth, perhaps an unlimited series of states of consciousness, all unknown both to ourselves and to each other…[However,] analytical research reveals that some of these latent processes have characteristics and peculiarities that appear alien, even incredible, to us, and stand in complete contrast to the known attributes of consciousness…[And besides,] the known cases of ‘double conscience’ (split consciousness) [dual or multiple personality] do not contradict our theory. They can most accurately be described as cases of a splitting of the psychic activity into two groups, with the same consciousness alternating between two sites” (p. 53-4).

In other words, Freud says that it is logical to infer, not an unconscious, but dual or multiple consciousness. But then he refuses to follow logic. Why? His reason is that these other conscious entities may have peculiar attitudes. (A silly reason.) And what of known cases of multiple personalty? He says that one consciousness can alternate its attention between different groups of psychic activity. (Is Freud really ignorant of the fact that, in multiple personality, it is common and routine for more than one personality to be conscious at the same time?)

In short: 1. Freud and his followers have known very well that he did not discover the unconscious, but if the public wants to believe that he did, which is one of the main reasons that people think of him as a genius, Freud and his followers might admit the truth in a technical paper, but would not go out of their way to correct the public’s mistaken impression. 2. Freud, himself, saw that multiple consciousness (and therefore, multiple personality) was the logical view. He had to reject logic and use sophistry to support the idea of a single consciousness and unconscious. 3. Freud was either clinically ignorant about multiple personality or he pretended to be so, or the personality who was writing his paper was not the personality who knew better.

In conclusion, Freud, erroneously, made “the unconscious” conventional wisdom, and if you accept that conventional wisdom, and believe that there is an unconscious—as opposed to multiple, segregated, consciousness—then you can’t understand how anyone could really have multiple personality. But Freud was wrong, and I think that he—at least one of his multiple personalities (November 7, 2013 post)—knew it.

1. Freud, Sigmund: The Unconscious. Translated by Graham Franklin with an Introduction by Mark Cousins. Penguin Books, 2005.

When Novels Feature Literary Doubles and Multiplying of Personality, Do Literature Professors Ever Infer That The Novelist [Doris Lessing] Might Have Had Multiple Personality?

I just read a book chapter about the best-known novel of a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, but in this post, I don’t want to make an issue of the specific novelist, novel, or English professor, except to say that the latter is a leading scholar on this writer.

The professor says that from first sentence to last, this novel involves “doubling and multiplying of personality,” and is filled with “literary doubles,” “multiplicity of personality,” “doubling, multiplication and interchanging of the self,” “split and merging selves,” and other complex variations of doubling and multiplicity. Moreover, in chapters devoted to other novels by the same writer, the professor finds that they, too, feature doubling.

Yet nowhere in this whole book, devoted in large part to this one novelist’s literary doubling, does the professor ever raise the issue of multiple personality, per se. I could understand this if the novels had been published either early or late in the 20^th century, when multiple personality was a popular subject. Then it would have been understandable for a novelist to take up the subject. But these novels were published mid-century, when multiple personality was thought to be so rare as to be almost nonexistent.

So this novelist must have had personal reasons for being so preoccupied with doubling and multiplicity in those years. And I don’t mean that these personal reasons would detract from the novelist’s achievement. Just the opposite. If a novelist had multiple personality, and won the Nobel Prize, other novelists might want to look into it.