Twenty-Eight Highlights and Brief Notes

1. The idea that novelists have a split personality (multiple personality) has been suspected in the literary community for at least 150 years, said Margaret Atwood.

2. The split personality of Charles Dickens was first pointed out in 1939/41 by Edmund Wilson.

3. The split personality of Mark Twain was first pointed out in 1920 by Van Wyck Brooks.

4. Posts on Dickens and Twain support this with additional facts.

5. Multiple personality in novelists, which they use in their writing process, has been generally ignored by psychologists who study creativity, by literature professors and literary theory, and by psychiatry (which is interested only in multiple personality disorder and does not recognize normal multiple personality).

6. Freud, who himself probably had multiple personality, neither discovered nor understood the unconscious, which, anyway, doesn’t exist. What Freud called “the unconscious” is really multiple consciousness (with one consciousness unaware of what the other consciousness is thinking.)

7. The practical difference between these two views is that people who think in terms of the unconscious cannot understand how multiple personality could possibly exist. But even Freud grudgingly acknowledged that it does exist. 

8. And since psychoanalytic literary theory derives from the mistaken “unconscious” perspective, it is antithetical to multiple identity literary theory, which is newly proposed in this blog.

9. Since being “possessed” has now been recognized to be multiple personality disorder by the official psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM-5), it is clear that multiple personality disorder has been known since Biblical times (making it one of the oldest and most established psychiatric disorders) and that Jesus may have been its first therapist (Mark 5:1-20).

10. Normal religious experience may be based on dual consciousness (William James), which is the psychological foundation and simplest form of normal multiple personality.

11. Novelists commonly acknowledge that they experience their characters as having minds of their own. This subjective experience of having more than one personified, independent-minded, psychological entity is the essence of multiple personality.

12. Normal multiple personality—in contrast to the mental disorder, and by virtue of its having more cooperation among the identities—does not cause the person serious distress or dysfunction; indeed, it may be an asset (e.g., to write novels).

13. Dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder, the mental illness) is present in 1.5% of the general population (according to DSM-5), which would make it twice as common as schizophrenia. And although you sometimes hear multiple personality referred to as a “controversial diagnosis,” it is actually more specific and clearly defined than schizophrenia.

14. Normal multiple personality is present in up to 30% of the general public and 90% of novelists (these figures are educated guesses).

15. In the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-5, dissociative identity disorder is in the chapter on Dissociative Disorders, which are not psychotic. Schizophrenia, a psychosis, is in a different chapter and is in a completely different diagnostic category.

16. Dissociative identity disorder (aka multiple personality disorder) is considered to be mainly a psychological disorder—originating in childhood as a way to cope with trauma—and is treated with specific psychotherapy. In contrast, schizophrenia is considered to be mainly a biological disorder whose primary treatment is medication.

17.  Multiple personality is usually hidden and camouflaged. Often the only clues that a person might have it are that they have a puzzling inconsistency (because, without your realizing it, you are meeting, or seeing the effects of, different personalities) and memory gaps (when one personality has no memory of what another personality did). Moreover, you are mostly meeting the “host personality,” who may know very little about the other personalities. (See also Henry James and Doris Lessing, below, about the host personality.) However, once it is diagnosed or recognized, and the personalities see that hiding is futile and you are no threat, they may become quite overt and you can speak with each of them.

18.  In literary criticism, the term alter ego is used in two ways. First, if the author is writing a philosophical novel with a character who is expressing the author’s philosophical views, that character may be referred to as the author’s alter ego, in the sense of being the author’s spokesperson. Second, if the author has a character who has certain superficial similarities to the author, and, perhaps, is a recurring character in that author’s novels, that character may also be referred to as the author’s alter ego. But in this latter case, alter ego is a euphemism for a character who is an alternate personality with a mind of its own. Examples of the latter would be Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.

19.  Toni Morrison and Stephen King illustrate the same three basic components of the process of writing novels: First, alter one’s state of consciousness. Second, experience autonomous characters (alternate personalities) coming forward. Third, control and prune the characters.

20.  Rashomon may have originated when the author decided not to control or prune the characters (alternate personalities), but rather to let them each tell the story from their own perspective.

21. The post “Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz” discusses that it is not just the characters who may be alternate personalities. The narrator may be an alternate personality.

22. Indeed, when an alternate personality not only wants to take over the narration, but wants to publish on its own, this may take the form of an author’s publishing under a pseudonym.

23. Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” is a short story about how multiple personality is used to write fiction.

24. Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” is not ambiguous. It is inconsistent, probably due to multiple narrator personalities who didn’t get their act together.

25. Henry James’s “The Private Life” is about multiple personality’s “host personality.”

26. Doris Lessing, in her autobiography, said that among her personalities was a “Hostess.”

27. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey and Me (2013), according to what Grafton stated in an interview, reveals that she has “several personalities.”

28. A post on J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan pointed out that the story of a boy “who never grows up” is not about immaturity, but about multiple personality, since people with multiple personality usually have one or more child-aged alternate personalities who never grow up. And especially since NBC television in the USA has plans for a live broadcast of Peter Pan this coming Christmas holiday season, I expect to discuss Barrie further, including his writer alternate personality, whom Barrie called “McConnachie.”