Multiple Personality—Not Crazy, Not Psychotic—may Not be recognized by a novelist in one of his own characters

Most novelists, book reviewers, literary critics, and professors of literature think of multiple personality as crazy and psychotic. But the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, DSM-5, does not categorize multiple personality as a psychotic disorder. Even way back before 1980, when earlier editions of the DSM were still using the term “neurosis,” multiple personality was categorized as a neurosis, not a psychosis.

Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, which I discussed in a recent post [April 24, 2014], is typical. In the novel itself, as well as in most literary criticism, Catherine Bourne—who is written as switching back and forth from one personality to another—is referred to, not as having multiple personality, but as being “crazy.”

For two reasons, I suspect that Hemingway did not recognize that his character had multiple personality. First, in terms of the novel itself, if Hemingway had been aware of it, I think that at least one of the other characters would have mentioned multiple personality, per se [but they didn't]. Second, in another novelist’s work, I once found a character who clearly had multiple personality—including personality switches with memory gaps—but book reviews had never mentioned it, and when I asked the novelist, himself, about it, he denied that the character had multiple personality, and claimed it was just ordinary psychology.

Someone who has it might think so.