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.