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.