Three Questions for Visitors to this Blog about Multiple Identity Literary Theory

1. Is this theory compatible with what you know about writing and novelists?

2. Does this theory say anything new?

3. What is this theory’s greatest strength or weakness?

[These are not rhetorical questions. You are invited to submit comments.]

Multiple Identity Literary Theory

1. Perhaps 90% of fiction writers and 30% of the general public have normal multiple personality. It is more common in fiction writers, because it is an asset in that kind of work. Indeed, the cognitive talents evident in multiple personality—multiple consciousness, autonomous identities, imaginary worlds—are basic to how novels are written.

2. Normal multiple personality (not a mental illness) is distinguished from multiple personality disorder (the mental illness) in that the disorder involves significant distress and dysfunction, whereas the normal kind may be an asset; e.g., to write novels. Neither kind is a psychosis, because one or another identity is always in good touch with reality.

3. There are probably two factors that determine whether anyone gets multiple personality. The first factor is the natural talent for dissociation (trance-like states and dividedness of the self) often manifest in childhood by such phenomena as imaginary companions and imaginary worlds. Most children lose these abilities as they grow up, unless they have the second factor. The second factor is trauma (overwhelming experiences), either on multiple occasions or for an extended period of time. If the trauma occurs very young, is very severe, and there is inadequate emotional support, the result may be the disorder. If it occurs later in childhood, is less severe, and there is significant emotional support, then the normal version of multiple personality may result. If the first factor is very strong, then relatively ordinary kinds trauma may be sufficient to cause multiple personality, which explains why it may be present in as much as 30% of the general public. (The 90% and 30% figures are educated guesses.)

4. Thus, multiple personality starts in childhood, which is why one of the most common kinds of alternate personalities in adults with multiple personality is the child-aged alter, which, like Peter Pan, never grows up. Some alternate personalities originating in childhood do grow up. And other alternate personalities originate in adulthood (if the person already has multiple personality since childhood).

5. The best-known manifestation of normal multiple personality in novelists is autonomy of their characters. Their characters have a mind of their own and may disagree with the novelist’s regular personality. They are not constructed by the novelist, but just seem to appear. They may superficially resemble people the novelist has known or has heard of, but they are neither copies of those people nor methodical constructions by the novelist based on those people. They just come into being as autonomous psychological entities, like the alternate personalities in multiple personality. Their characteristics are usually not random: Like any alternate personality, they are usually suitable to the situations, feelings, and needs that are present at the time they come into being.

6. Many people with multiple personality have a regular so-called “host personality” (host, for short). When you don’t know that a person has multiple personality, this is the personality you think of as the person. It is the public relations personality, who does interviews. The host personality may have little or no knowledge of the other personalities, which are the “alternate personalities” (alters, for short). Indeed, the host may have amnesia, a memory gap, for any period of time that an alter has come out and temporarily taken over. (This is a generalization. Some hosts do know something about the system of alters.)

7. People with multiple personality disorder are famous (or notorious) for denying that they have multiple personality, especially when the host has amnesia for the others, while the others see themselves as other people, not alters. So you can talk to an alter, who will identify itself by name as being another person, and then talk to the host, who has no memory for the alter, and who therefore thinks that the idea of multiple personality is far-fetched. In general, multiple personality is hidden, not only from other people, but from the people with multiple personality, themselves.

8. People with normal multiple personality may have more self-awareness than people with the disorder. In the general public, this may take the form of a person’s knowing that they have retained an imaginary companion from childhood or that they have, for example, a guardian angel. Novelists are aware of their characters or their inner people, and may be aware of more than one writing self. They may converse with and interact with these other identities. Different identities may be in the driver’s seat at different times. This is most often during writing, but alters may also take part in everyday life (either incognito or under the guise of nicknames).

9. Although, to generalize, it probably is true that novelists with normal multiple personality have more awareness and co-consciousness among their identities than people with multiple personality disorder, I would not want to exaggerate the novelist’s self-awareness in this regard. Most novelists will not acknowledge—at least not for the public record—that they have multiple personality, even if you show them clear-cut evidence of it in their published writings. Maybe they can’t see it. Maybe they are just trying to protect their reputation. Maybe both.

10. Novelists often have their own way of putting themselves in the proper frame of mind to write. Some think of this as a sort of self-hypnosis. Others think of it simply as the way they get ready to write. What they may be doing is getting their host personality to step aside so they can access the world of their narrative and character identities.

11. In multiple identity theory, there is no “unconscious.” Rather, there is multiple consciousness: the separate, segregated consciousness of each identity. An analogy would be my consciousness vs. your consciousness. Since I can’t read your mind, I am not conscious of what you are thinking, but that doesn’t make your thoughts unconscious. In multiple personality, one identity may not be aware of another identity, but the other identity is aware of itself and is quite conscious.

12. Psychoanalysis, which believes in “the unconscious,” and not in multiple consciousness, cannot honestly account for how even one rare case of multiple personality could possibly ever exist. So any literary criticism having to do with multiple personality is not psychoanalytic. It is Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

Ernest Hemingway’s Pen Name and Catherine Bourne’s Alternate Personality were both called “Peter”

In the April 21, 2014 post, it was noted that Hemingway had once used the pen name “Peter Jackson.”

In the April 24, 2014 post, it was noted that, in The Garden of Eden, Catherine Bourne’s male alternate personality was named “Peter.”

In reading The Garden of Eden, it had seemed peculiar to me that Catherine’s male alternate personality, although a recurrent presence in the novel, was never again referred to by its name, “Peter.”

Evidently, Hemingway realized that using “Peter” was too personally revealing. But he didn’t get around to changing or deleting that single use of it. Or his alternate personality insisted that his name appear at least once.

In any case, that double use of the name “Peter” suggests the possibility that the character Catherine Bourne was based on [or written by] Hemingway’s alternate personality, Peter Jackson.

But I wouldn’t want to speculate on the details of how that worked.

Multiple Personality suggested by how Homer's Odysseus fooled the Cyclops, by The Trojan Horse, and by the Greek Gods

The end of yesterday’s post prompts me to speculate about multiple personality in Ancient Greece.

If Homer’s character, Odysseus, used a multiple personality trick to fool the Cyclops, that suggests Homer had multiple personality.

The Trojan Horse might be taken as a metaphor for multiple personality, with the people inside the horse representing the person’s hidden personalities.

The Greek Gods may have originated as the alternate personalities of various poets. The gods are heard as voices, just as alternate personalities often are. They influence from behind the scenes, just as alternate personalities often do. And sometimes they come out and handle things themselves, just as alternate personalities sometimes do.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Multiple Personality in Both His Fiction and His Real Life

In the history of "the double" (literary metaphor for multiple personality), before there was Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910), Henry James’s “The Private Life” (1892), Wilde's Dorian Gray (1890), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (1886), and Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), there was Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839).

Poe’s “double” story “William Wilson” is well known and was previously mentioned in this blog: in my November 7, 2013 essay on Freud, who was obsessed with the idea that he, himself, had a real-life double (which is one reason to think that Freud, himself, had multiple personality).

Unknown to most people, but well known to Poe scholars, is evidence of multiple personality in Poe’s real life. Poe scholars don’t take what they know as evidence of multiple personality, but I will explain why I think it is.

I quote from Kenneth Silverman’s biography, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (HarperCollins, 1991):

“Having created a sensation with 'The Raven,' Poe expanded in the Journal his recent assault on Longfellow, and became more talked about than ever. The Longfellow War, as it got to be known, began…when Willis’s newspaper published a lengthy letter by a purported acquaintance of Longfellow who signed himself Outis, the Greek word for 'Nobody.' With mild-mannered reasonableness, Outis turned aside Poe’s charges of plagiarism against Longfellow…

“Over the next month Poe published in the Journal no fewer than five rejoinders to Outis’s letter, mounting a siege of Longfellow that in modern editions runs to some fifty pages. Still more remarkably, the great likelihood is that with Willis’s aid Poe himself concocted the entire exchange…In fact, Outis was likely Poe himself, attacking himself under a pseudonym…

“Still more unaccountably, as Briggs assured Lowell, ‘Poe has, indeed, a very high admiration for Longfellow’…

“Such incompatible judgments suggest inner stress, some ‘crisis,’ as Elizabeth Barrett noticed. Poe gave her Drama of Exile his most important review in the Journal, in two substantial, strangely equivocal parts…Nonplussed at being both flogged and caressed, Barrett marveled at how Poe’s review embraced ‘the two extremes of laudation and reprehension, folded in on one another. You would have thought it had been written by a friend and foe, each stark mad with love and hate, and writing the alternate passages’.”

NOTE: In the Longfellow dispute, Poe was in conflict with a letter writer named “Outis” (Greek for “Nobody”). You might think that this name proves Poe was joking, and that he knew that his antagonist was pure fiction. But, in fact, it is evidence that Poe’s antagonist was an alternate personality:

“Many personality systems will have one or more ‘unnamed’ personalities. Sometimes these ‘unnamed’ alters [alternate personalities] use the same trick Ulysses pulled on the Cyclops: they go by the name ‘No one.’ When the therapist inquires as to who in the system is responsible for some behavior, he or she is told ‘No one.’ So the therapist should be prepared to inquire whether there is a personality known as ‘No one,' 'No name,’ or ‘Nobody’” (1, p. 117).

1. Putnam, Frank W. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

[Note added 8 pm: Putnam's literary reference should have been to how Odysseus fooled the Cyclops in Homer's Odyssey, not to the "Cyclops" episode in James Joyce's Ulysses.]

Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: The Multiple Personality Mostly Missed by Twenty-Five Years of Literary Criticism

The three main characters of Hemingway’s posthumous novel are David and Catherine Bourne, newlyweds, and Marita, whom they meet on their honeymoon, and who makes it a threesome.

David is a struggling, young novelist. Catherine is a beautiful, rich, 21-year-old, whose money lets them live better than David could otherwise. Marita is another beautiful, young heiress.

Both David and Catherine have multiple personality, but whereas his is constructively utilized and camouflaged by his work as a writer, hers is disruptive and makes her appear, at times, crazy. Indeed, hers creates most of the novel’s drama, while his could easily be overlooked, except for the fact that he acknowledges it:

“He had not known just how greatly he had been divided and separated because once he started to work he wrote from an inner core which could not be split nor even marked nor scratched. He knew about this and it was his strength since all the rest of him could be riven” (1, p. 183).

The only time we see his multiplicity become overt is when Catherine urges him to be the female, while she is the male, in some of their sexual relations. The text of these encounters does not make clear whether his switch to a female personality under those circumstances is anything more than erotic role-playing.

However, much later in the novel, David’s quoted thoughts (see above) clarify the nature of the sex-play encounters in retrospect. It had, indeed, been more than role-play. He had, in fact, subjectively experienced a switch to an alternate, female identity. Not to mention that there was a part of him, he-man though he was, that liked getting his hair done in an unmanly style (1, p. 84).

Toward the end of the novel, when David condemns Catherine for her devilish gender games, he says, “It was all crazy anyway. I’m sick of crazy things. You’re not the only one gets broken up” (1, p. 196). It’s hard to interpret the latter so that everyone would agree, but I take David to mean that Catherine is not the only one whose personality gets split. His does, too.

Later on that same page, Catherine says, “I’m everybody,” which could be taken for the raving of a lunatic. But I think Hemingway is expressing the thesis that Catherine’s multiple personality is just making manifest what is going on secretly with many people.

What is manifest in Catherine is made explicit on page 17 (1), when she says, “I’m Peter,” by which she declares that she has switched to a male alternate personality by that name. At first, the reader thinks that she is just role-playing, but she repeats so often, throughout the novel, that she “changes” from one identity to another, that she must be taken seriously as to her actual subjective experience. It is why both she, herself, and David often refer to her as being “crazy.”

I won’t try to specify how many personalities Catherine has. The text suggests at least three: one male, one “good girl,” and one “wild girl.” Is it one of these or some other one who says, “I’m the destructive type. And I’m going to destroy you” (1, p. 5)? I don’t know. All I can say is that Catherine’s attitudes are too diverse to be accounted for by just two personalities.

Before reading the novel, I read twenty-five years worth of literary criticism (2). Since the novel is mostly about what I discuss above (multiple personality), it is astounding to me how little the issue has been discussed: hardly at all. And when it is mentioned, the view taken is that gender-role games or androgyny can cause craziness such as a multiple personality: “Hemingway implies that, far from restoring an archetypal Edenic wholeness, androgyny carries with it the danger of a split personality” (2, p. 181).

However, multiple personality starts in childhood. Neither David nor Catherine got it from playing gender role games on their honeymoon. David says (see quote above) that he gets readily split, but that his work as a novelist holds him together. Catherine has no such thing to hold her together, but I am not as convinced as David and Marita that Catherine is that disturbed. She is young and has just learned the unfortunate, but practical lesson that most people with multiple personality learn: Keep it secret. Keep it to yourself. Things get complicated when you don’t.

1. Hemingway, Ernest. The Garden of Eden. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986.

2. Suzanne del Gizzo, Frederic J. Svoboda (Eds.). Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: Twenty-five Years of Criticism. Kent Ohio, The Kent State University Press, 2012.

Ernest Hemingway’s Twenty Nicknames and Two Pseudonyms: Were Any of Them The Names of Alternate Personalities?

I haven’t found that anyone has attached much importance to Hemingway’s nicknames and pseudonyms. So when I have found them mentioned, mostly online, I don’t have full confidence in their scholarship and accuracy.

Some of the names appear to have been applied not only to Hemingway, but to other people, too. Some may have been applied by someone, not acknowledged by Hemingway, and have no psychological significance.

And it may be that many people who have had multiple marriages, have been many places, and have known many people will accumulate this many nicknames. I don’t know.

Nevertheless, it strikes me as a large number of nicknames for one person to have, unless the person has multiple personality, in which case, that number of personalities would not be unusual.

Nicknames: Papa, Oinbones, Hemingstein, Champ, Ernestoic, Tattie, Tiny, Wax Puppy, Ernie, Hem, Hemmy, Wemedge, Nesto, Porthos, Butch, The Old Brute, Ernestino, Bumby, Old Master, Mahatma.

Pen Names: Peter Jackson, John Hadley

[Search "Hemingway" in this blog to read the other posts about him.]

How to Prove that a Psychologist or Psychiatrist is Incompetent

If you ever want to challenge the competence of psychiatrists (M.D.) or psychologists (Ph.D.), ask them how often they diagnose Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), which is when people think they have a physical deformity, but they really don’t.

According to the diagnostic manual, DSM-5, BDD is more common than schizophrenia, which means that psychiatrists and psychologists who rarely or never make this diagnosis have frequently missed this diagnosis. And if they frequently miss the diagnosis of a disorder that is more common than schizophrenia, they must be incompetent.

Why do most psychiatrists and psychologists miss this diagnosis? There are two reasons. First, BDD is barely mentioned in their training. Second, people who have BDD rarely mention it to their psychologist or psychiatrist. (When they want help with their alleged physical deformity, they go to a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon.)

Psychologists and psychiatrists frequently miss the diagnosis of multiple personality for the same two reasons: little training, and patients who have multiple personality rarely mention it. How common is multiple personality? According to DSM-5, multiple personality is more common than schizophrenia, just as we saw for BDD.

Both BDD and multiple personality are hidden disorders, but the latter is even more hidden than the former. A person with BDD may not volunteer the (alleged) fact that they have a physical deformity, but if you ask whether they do, they will know that they do and readily admit it.

In contrast, if you ask a person with multiple personality whether they have multiple personality, they will deny it, although the host personality and the alternate personalities will say “no” for different reasons: the host personality doesn’t know about it due to amnesia, while the others think they are not alternate personalities, but different people.

So now you know how to prove that psychologists and psychiatrists are incompetent. For if they keep missing diagnoses which the DSM says are more common than schizophrenia, they must be.

Debbie Nathan’s Sybil Exposed: You Can’t Say a Case of Multiple Personality is Fake Unless You Know What the Real Thing Looks Like

For people who attack the validity of multiple personality, a favorite target is the bestseller Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber (Henry Regnery, 1973). They like to say that multiple personality was very rare before that book—and the movie based on it—and that it started a public fad and a psychiatric misadventure. Then Debbie Nathan published Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case (Free Press, 2011), which purported to prove that the case was a total fraud.

Note: Neither Debbie Nathan nor those psychiatrists who denounce multiple personality say that there has never been a valid case of multiple personality. No, they say that valid cases are very rare, but that they do exist. So the first question that arises about Sybil Exposed is whether its conclusions are supported by any psychiatrist who has actually diagnosed and treated some of those valid cases. After all, to know that something is a fake, you have to know what the real thing looks like.

Debbie Nathan did consult the late Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a psychiatrist who was a colleague of Sybil’s primary psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur. Indeed, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who was an expert on hypnosis, actually saw Sybil and even used her as a subject for demonstrations of hypnosis. And what did he conclude? Dr. Herbert Spiegel concluded that Sybil did not have multiple personality. But had he, himself, ever seen any of those rare valid cases of multiple personality, so that he could compare and tell the difference? Sybil Exposed does not claim that he had ever seen any cases.

Debbie Nathan did not consult Dr. Herbert Spiegel’s son, Dr. David Spiegel. Why consult him? Dr. David Spiegel definitely has seen valid cases. In fact, he was the chief psychiatrist who wrote the sections on multiple personality in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, the DSM—in both DSM-4 (1994) and DSM-5 (2013). And besides his having a truly expert opinion about multiple personality, he probably knows whether his father was unbiased regarding multiple personality.

Another thing that undermines its own credibility is that Sybil Exposed describes the diagnosis as originating with the patient, and as having taken the psychiatrist by surprise: see pages 89-92. Page 92 even makes the point that Sybil could not have been faking multiple personality based on something that she had read, because she had child-aged alternate personalities, and any cases that she might have read about would have had only adult alternate personalities.

But what about certain subsequent occasions when Sybil told her psychiatrist, Dr. Wilbur, and also Dr. Herbert Spiegel, that she had made it all up? Here is where it pays to have had some actual experience with valid cases of multiple personality. Such patients (or at least their host personality) are notorious for denying their diagnosis even when it is blatant. For example, I recall one session in which a patient of mine switched into an alternate personality, who conversed with me at some length, and then switched back to her regular, host personality. The latter, who had no memory of what had just taken place, considered the idea that she had multiple personality to be far-fetched. (No hypnosis or drugs were used.)

Now, Sybil’s allegations that, as a child, she had been tortured by a psychotic mother, are another matter. Memories, especially implausible ones, need corroboration before they can be accepted as historical reality, as opposed to emotional reality or fantasy. But let me mention the statistics of child abuse to make a final point.

Debbie Nathan and other professional debunkers are very impressed by the statistics that before Sybil the diagnosis of multiple personality was rare, but after Sybil it was much more common. They conclude that Sybil provoked a fad, since how else can something that is true and valid suddenly go from rare cases to thousands of cases?

Well, the fact is that if you had looked up child abuse in a psychiatric textbook published in 1970, you would have read that child abuse happens to one out a million children: literally, only one out a million children. But since then, we have learned that child abuse happens to more than one out of every hundred children. Thus, suddenly, child abuse was said to be more than ten thousand times as common as we thought it was. Certainly, there have been some false cases, but would Debbie Nathan argue that the big jump in child abuse statistics was just a fad, and that it really happens to only one child out of a million? Of course not. So the argument that the jump in multiple personality cases could not have been real represents a misunderstanding of epidemiology and statistics.

In short, when someone claims to debunk assertions that someone has multiple personality, ask whether the debunker, or the authorities they quote, have had first-hand experience of the subject. Since they don’t deny that there are at least some valid cases, ask them if they have personal experience with the diagnosis and treatment of such valid cases. If not, then however expert they might be on other matters, they have undermined their own credibility with regard to multiple personality.

You can’t proclaim that a case of multiple personality is a fake unless you know what the real thing looks like, which most people—including most psychiatrists and most debunkers—don’t.

Psychoanalysis: A Perspective That May Hamper Your Ability to Understand a Person Who Has Multiple Personality

This post discusses Robert J. Stoller’s Splitting: A Case of Female Masculinity. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1973 (Foreword 1997), 393 pages. The book begins:

“What would convince a biologically normal woman that she had a penis?…This is a book about Mrs. G…and the pieces into which she was split…Mrs. G broke almost all of society’s rules. She did what she did to survive…If this required a penis, she acquired one; if it meant creating a second personality, she did…Then, because she wanted help, Mrs. G became a patient at UCLA. I want to tell you what happened.”

Dr. Stoller treated Mrs. G for many years, during which he identified two alternate personalities, “Charlie” and “Carrie,” which Mrs. G had had since childhood (more than twenty-five years before he met her). He saw Mrs. G as split and fragmented, but, to him, multiple personality was only one of a dozen psychiatric diagnoses that Mrs. G had been given over the years, and, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, it was just one of her defenses, not her primary condition.

What is most valuable in this book for readers of this blog are the transcripts of psychotherapy sessions that Dr. Stoller had with Mrs. G.: Dr. Stoller often doesn't know—and doesn't know that he doesn’t know—to what personality he is talking at any given time.

For example, in the chapter on her father, “Mrs. G” tells Dr. Stoller about what a great guy her father was; then on the next page she explains that her father was horrible; and then on the next page she says she doesn’t recall much about him. Dr. Stoller doesn’t realize that the “Mrs. G” of these sessions includes at least three different alternate personalities whom he has never identified.

In many of the book’s transcripts, Mrs. G comes across as smart and well-related. But in some transcripts, she is disjointed and “crazy.” It seems to me that Dr. Stoller is trying to tell it like it was, but that he is also asking for pity, as if he were saying: Look what I had to contend with! This woman could be very crazy! What he apparently didn’t understand is that Mrs. G appears to have had at least a dozen personalities, and when they would all try to talk at once, it would sound disjointed and crazy.

Mrs. G would often mention that, between sessions, she had had episodes of being “crazy.” Dr. Stoller rarely clarifies to what she is referring. In a person with multiple personality, there are many possibilities, including: feeling “crazy” if she has had amnesia for periods of times and so has done things that she doesn’t recall doing; or feeling “crazy” if she has felt like a child when she has switched to a child-aged personality (she is in her thirties); or feeling “crazy” if she experiences emotions or impulses from, or hears the voices of, other personalities, but doesn’t understand that this is what was happening. When Mrs. G mentions to Dr. Stoller that she has felt “crazy,” he is never able to clarify these sources of her distress. Not to mention that her “penis” probably belonged to one of her personalities.

My point here is not to criticize Dr. Stoller personally. This may have been his first multiple personality patient. And the first modern textbook on multiple personality would not be published for another sixteen years (1). I think that Dr. Stoller was very bright and dedicated.

My point is that Dr. Stoller’s psychoanalytic training and perspective—including the concept of “splitting”—blinded him to the probability that Mrs. G had multiple personality disorder as her primary condition. There are some psychoanalysts who are experts in multiple personality, but they are exceptions.

Nevertheless, Dr. Stoller’s book is valuable and fascinating—I recommend it—especially if you read it as though you were doing a literary analysis, and ask yourself: Does “Mrs. G” always talk like she is one and the same character?

1. Putnam FW. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

Do Literary Critics, Book Reviews, Creative Writing Programs, Departments of English & Comparative Literature know that Psychoanalytic Literary Theory became obsolete in 1980?

Prior to 1980, DSM-1 and DSM-2—the first and second editions of the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association—employed psychoanalytic terminology such as “neurosis,” which reflected the fact that the Freudian model of the mind was accepted in those days. In contrast, there has been no psychoanalytic terminology used in DSM-3 (1980), DSM-4 (1994), and DSM-5 (2013), which reflects the fact that the Freudian model became obsolete in 1980. 

In the pre-1980 Freudian era, multiple personality did not appear in the DSM under that name: it was classified as a subtype of “Hysterical neurosis.” But in 1980, with the publication of DSM-3, psychoanalytic terminology was eliminated, and there was no longer any “Hysterical neurosis.” Instead, there was now a category called “Dissociative Disorders,” which included multiple personality disorder (renamed “dissociative identity disorder” in DSM-4).

So as of 1980, the Freudian era was over, and the psychoanalytic model of the mind became obsolete. Of all the disorders in the DSM, this paradigm shift had the greatest implications for multiple personality, because multiple personality and psychoanalytic theory are antithetical:

“Dissociative multiplicity is a persona non grata in the psychoanalytic mainstream…Dissociation is present in the very early Freud, but then he abandoned it soon after. It came to be dismissed as prepsychoanalytic, and was relegated to the status of a historical curiosity or mistake. Freud went on to elaborate his entire oeuvre, followed by Klein and the postkleinians, Bowlby and attachment theory, the various Lacanian schools, Kohut and self psychology, and the interpersonal school. Psychoanalysis has managed to do all this while leaving dissociation out of the picture…the reincorporation of dissociation within psychoanalysis is a major challenge” (1).

The basic reason that psychoanalytic theory and multiple personality are antithetical is that the former assumes that every person has a single consciousness, while the latter assumes that some people have multiple consciousness. In his final years, Freud started to speak of “splitting of the ego,” but it was too little, too late.

All this means that current textbooks of literary theory are living in a pre-1980 time warp. They include psychoanalytic literary theory at some length, but almost nothing about dissociation and multiple personality. So I would recommend that they update with Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the subject of this blog.

1. Dell PF, O’Neil JA (Editors). Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond. Routledge, 2009, 864 pages.

Creating Imaginary Worlds in Childhood (“Paracosm”): One of Two Cognitive Talents from Childhood used by Adult Novelists and in Multiple Personality

The two cognitive talents from childhood that are used by adult novelists and in multiple personality are imaginary companions and paracosm (imaginary worlds). The latter is the subject of The Development of Imagination: The Private Worlds of Childhood by David Cohen and Stephen A. MacKeith (Routledge, 1991). Most of the book is a description of the paracosms of normal children who create imaginary worlds because they enjoy it.

“One of the earliest instances recorded of children making up such a world is that of the four Bronte children. Charlotte and Branwell, Emily and Anne Bronte lived with their widowed father…In June 1826 their father gave them a set of toy soldiers and this gift sparked into being Verdopolis, the great Glass Town, which later blossomed into the country of Angria. Charlotte and Branwell became completely absorbed in the elaboration of Angria…Branwell tended to develop the political and military side of Angria while Charlotte concentrated on the personalities and relationships of the chief characters. In time, Anne and Emily created a world of their own, Gondal, leaving Angria to the elder two…Unlike the imaginary worlds of most children, that of the Brontes survived into their adulthood.”

According to Cohen and MacKeith, paracosms can start as young as age 3. Most start between 7 and 12. Few start after age 13.

“Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, had a childhood paracosm, as did W. H. Auden, the poet…and various authors, such as Thomas de Quincey, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and C. S. Lewis.”

It is part of Multiple Identity Literary Theory that novelists and others with multiple personality make use of these two cognitive talents—imaginary companions and paracosm—from childhood. It is also part of my theory that this type of thinking is present in perhaps 30% of the general public, which is perhaps why video games in which people create imaginary worlds are popular. Did the people who create and enjoy such games have paracosms as children?

Ernest Hemingway: Misunderstood by Psychoanalytic Literary Theory, whose "Splitting of the Ego" ignores Multiple Personality

Judging by Prof. Carl P. Eby’s Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood (State University of New York Press, 1999), it has been much discussed by biographers that Hemingway had a sister about one and a half years older, that his mother wished that he and his sister had been identical twin girls, and that, for his first seven years, Hemingway’s mother had him wear dresses and hair styles that were identical to his sister’s.

As a result, Eby argues, Hemingway had a hair fetish and a splitting of the ego into male and female halves. “Hemingway’s split-off feminine half was apparently confined to the night…,” since “this half of his ego only surfaced in the day at the risk of ‘spooking him shitless.’”

Prof. Eby’s book is a very good discussion of the way the above issues pervade Hemingway’s novels. Unfortunately, Eby’s Freudian psychoanalytic theoretical framework misses the forest for the trees. As I have discussed previously: In the early 20^th century, Freud was a rival of Pierre Janet to see who would be considered the father of psychoanalysis. Freud had the better campaign organization and won the popularity contest. But since Janet’s theory of dissociation could account for multiple personality, while Freud’s theory of the mind could not explain it (and therefore ignored it), anyone using Freudian psychoanalytic theory, like Prof. Eby, tends to ignore the issue of multiple personality.

Lewis Carroll (post #3): The Mysterious, Self-Contradictory Inconsistency of Multiple Personality, including Carroll’s Child-Aged Alternate Personalities

One of the hallmarks of multiple personality is that—when a person has it, but you don’t know it—you can’t get a coherent picture of them, because, unknown to you, their various personalities differ from each other in such things as attitudes, values, age, or even gender.

A good biography of such a person is Jenny Woolf’s The Mystery of Lewis Carroll (New York, St. Martins Press, 2010). Woolf’s main conclusion is that she likes Carroll—as she has, since, as a child, she read about Alice’s adventures—but that he is a mystery, because he is “self-contradictory.”

One of the perennial controversies about Carroll is the nature of his relationship with the young girls to whom he liked to tell entertaining stories and of whom he liked to take pictures. The issue is traditionally framed as the peculiar, if not perverted, interest of an adult man in little girls.

But if Carroll had multiple personality, the personality who was interested in little girls may not have been either adult or male. Since, needless to say, I have not had the opportunity to interview Carroll when he was in that frame of mind, I can only go by circumstantial evidence. I quote from The Mystery of Lewis Carroll:

“His niece, Irene Dodgson Jacques, looking back to her childhood, remembered [Carroll] sitting beside her on the carpet happily playing with a marvelous bear that opened and closed its mouth as it spoke.”

“[Carroll] in his toy-strewn college rooms was perfectly recognizable as the youth who had loved creating puppet stories for his little brothers and sisters…”

“There have been many condescending remarks made about this characteristic of his, as though a love of childish things somehow prevented him from being a proper adult. Virginia Woolf thought that childhood had lodged within Carroll ‘whole and entire’…”

Not all the young children Carroll played with were girls. For example, there was “Bert Coote, whom he met when Coote was 10. ‘My sister and I were regular young imps,’ Coote recalled later, ‘and nothing delighted us more than to give imitations…but we never gave imitations of Lewis Carroll…he was one of us, and never a grown up pretending to be a child...’”

So, psychologically speaking, the situation may not have been an adult man interested in little girls. And the inconsistency between his adult and child-aged personalities would have made him seem self-contradictory. Other of his inconsistencies included his attitudes toward sex and religion. Sometimes he was the ultimate prude, but other times he wasn’t. Sometimes he was the unquestioning believer, but other times he was wasn’t. Different personalities differed.

Many people have their moral ambivalence or even hypocrisy, but Carroll was known for his unusually marked degree of sincere, but contradictory attitudes. Which is how people come across when they have multiple personality, but when you haven’t knowingly interviewed the various personalities, and you don’t know that this is what is going on.

Lewis Carroll, Stephen King, Toni Morrison use Trance, Self-Hypnosis, Altered State of Consciousness to Contact their Characters

In his Preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll explains that, when he writes, he is able to contact his characters by entering either 1. an “eerie” state “in which, while conscious of actual surroundings, he is also conscious of the presence” of his characters, or 2. “a form of trance, in which, while unconscious of actual surroundings” he is conscious of his characters.

Other fiction writers use other terms. Stephen King calls it “autohypnosis.” Toni Morrison has no particular term for it, but says that all writers have a ritual to alter their consciousness as their first step in getting ready to write. (Search “three things” to find the September 17, 2013 post in this blog, regarding King and Morrison.)

What are Carroll, King, Morrison, and other fiction writers doing? Why are they, by whatever name, using self-hypnosis to contact their characters? The explanation is on page 222 of Frank W. Putnam’s Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (New York, Guilford Press, 1989):

“The principal advantage of hypnosis in diagnosis is that it diminishes the host personality’s suppression of other [personalities] and thereby allows [other personalities] to emerge who might otherwise be unable to break through the host’s resistance.” [Search “host personality” in this blog for my post on Henry James and the concept of host personality.]

In other words, self-hypnosis is used to access characters in the same way that hypnosis is used to access alternate personalities, because characters are alternate personalities, and novelists have a literary form of multiple personality.

J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, probably had Multiple Personality

Multiple personality’s childhood onset explains why it has a child’s way of thinking: imaginary companions and imaginary worlds (paracosm). Any adult who has created imaginary characters and worlds—especially when richly detailed, ultra-romantic, and/or fantastic—is likely to have had multiple personality.

Since these fictional characters and worlds are experienced as having minds of their own and as having actually existed, the writer, as Dickens put it, subjectively feels that he “didn’t invent it” (see June 2013 post).

And as J. R. R. Tolkien said, “They arose in my mind as ‘given’ things…always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’” (1, p. 100).

If Tolkien had multiple personality, it would not be surprising if his characters had it, too. At least one does: Smeagol-Gollum.

Now, a writer’s multiple personality may or may not extend beyond his writing and into his relations with real people. Was Tolkien’s multiple personality ever evident in real life? The following suggests that it was:

“During his undergraduate days Tolkien developed his childhood interest in painting and drawing and began to show some skill at it, chiefly in the sketching of landscapes. He also paid a great deal of attention to handwriting and calligraphy, and became accomplished in many styles of manuscript. This interest was a combination of his enthusiasm for words and his artist’s eye, but it also reflected his many-sided personality, for as someone who knew him during these years remarked (with only slight exaggeration): ‘He had a different style of handwriting for each of his friends’” (1, p. 65).

Writing in different handwritings (under circumstances in which there is no reason to suspect that a person is faking) is often indicative of multiple personality.

1. Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. [First published in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin, 1977.]

Lewis Carroll and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson as Alternate Personalities

Charles Dodgson (1832-1898) and Lewis Carroll were distinctly different personalities. But conventional wisdom is that Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was simply the pen name of Charles Dodgson, mathematician.

The only biography that dissents from conventional wisdom is The Life of Lewis Carroll by Langford Reed (London, W. & G. Foyle, 1932), which says that Dodgson had a split personality. Reed reports that Carroll’s illustrators and child friends could tell when he switched from one personality to the other.

According to illustrator Harry Furniss, illustrator Sir John Tenniel “refused to illustrate any more of Lewis Carroll’s works after Through the Looking Glass, and held very unfavorable views on what he called the ‘pretentiousness’ and ‘obstinacy’ of the Dodgson part of him. When he heard that Furniss was proposing to illustrate Sylvie and Bruno, he warned him in the following words: ‘I’ll give you a week, old chap; you will never be able to put up with the fellow any longer. He is impossible!”

But Furniss was able to work with him: “We worked together for seven years, and a kindlier man than Lewis Carroll never existed. Dodgson, the mathematician, was less acceptable. He subjected every illustration, when finished, to a minute examination under the magnifying glass. He would take a square inch of the drawing, count the lines I had made in that space and compare their number with those in a square inch of illustration for ‘Alice’ made by Tenniel! And, in due course, I would receive a long essay on the subject from Dodgson the mathematician…”

A woman who had known Carroll when she was a child actress, a Miss Bowman, recalled one occasion when: “Uncle Charles was so impressed by the realistic model of a little dog…that, in a moment the academic Dodgson, intent on geographical instruction [they were at a Panorama of Niagara Falls which was being exhibited in London], became effaced by the whimsical Carroll, who began relating to me a wonderful story about the dog which, he said, was really alive but trained to stand motionless for hours…Suddenly he began to stammer and looking round in some alarm I saw that a dozen grown-ups and children had gathered around and were listening with every appearance of amused interest. And it was not Mr. Carroll, but a very confused Mr. Dodgson who took me by the hand and led me quickly from the scene…”

Thus, some people were quite aware of his switches from one personality to the other. Did either of these personalities have amnesia, a memory gap, for the period of time that the other personality had been “out”? Evidently, since Carroll had a reputation for “absent-mindedness” [also see posts on Mark Twain’s absent-mindedness]:

“The absent-mindedness mentioned by Miss Beringer is further illustrated by the rather well-known story which relates how the subject of this biography once went to London to dine with a gentleman to whom he had only recently been introduced. Next morning he was stopped by this individual, while walking in the street. ‘I beg  your pardon,’ said Lewis Carroll, ‘but you have the advantage of me. I do not remember ever having seen you before.” “That is very strange,’ was the reply, ‘for I was your host last night!’”

So some people actually saw and recognized that Carroll would switch personalities, and he even had memory gaps as a consequence—Lewis Carroll had multiple personality—but that is not what you will read elsewhere.