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.