Walt Whitman’s Multitudes and Jesus’s Legion: Both Suggest Multiple Personality, Not Demon Possession

Yesterday’s post with Walt Whitman’s famous quote:

I am large, I contain multitudes.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 

…reminds me of another:

And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”

—Mark 5:1-20

Walt Whitman: Do I contradict myself? I contain multitudes…of eidolons.

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

—from Song of Myself, Part 51

“…The body lurking there within thy body

…the real I myself…

An image, an eidolon.”

—from Eidolons

Whitman came to mind when I mentioned eidolons and containing multitudes (multiple personality) in the previous post on Helen of Troy.

Plato and Euripides say Helen of Troy had Multiple Personality

If multiple personality is a real, observable, psychological phenomenon—and not just a modern fad—it should be reflected in the history of literature, even in antiquity. And since multiple personality is often represented in literature by the theme of the double, it would be interesting to know how far back that theme goes.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey say that Helen really went to Troy. But there was another version of that story in Ancient Greece, one in which it was Helen’s double, and not Helen herself, who went to Troy.

Plato, in both his Phaedrus and Republic, cites Stesichorus’s Palinode, which is a recantation of Homer’s story that Helen went to Troy. According the Stesichorus version, which is dramatized in Euripides’ play, Helen, it was not Helen, herself, who went to Troy, but only her eidolon (ghost, shadow, image, phantom), which impersonated her.

“In 412/411 B.C.E. [Euripides] produced Helen, a play in which he takes up the theme of the eidolon, to dramatize two confrontations—the one in the mind of Menelaus between the true Helen and her fickle double, and the other between Helen herself and the image of her for which the Greeks and Trojans fought at Troy…Euripides’ Helen is the only surviving treatment of the phantom-Helen theme from antiquity…splitting Helen into her self and her image…Across the Greek world the disjunction between essence and phenomena was the chief topic of conversation among the philosophers and mathematicians, and one of the principal themes of Athenian tragedy. What plot more topical in late fifth-century Athens than the story of a woman divided into her real and her imaginary selves?” (1, pp. 8-9).

Of course, Plato and Euripides did not use the term “multiple personality,” but the theme of the double is close enough.

1. Austin, Norman. Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994.

Two Arguing Characters Named Philip Roth in Operation Shylock Flaunt Philip Roth’s Normal Multiple Personality

“Many host personalities…have some form of communication with…alters [alternate personalities]…although they are usually not aware [that this is multiple personality, per se]. The experience of the host personality is that he or she gets into arguments with himself or herself” (1, p. 82).

This kind of arguing between the host personality and alter personality is given literary form in Roth’s Operation Shylock, in which the protagonist, novelist “Philip Roth,” continually gets into arguments with his double, who is also named “Philip Roth” (nicknamed “Moishe Pipik").

Regular Roth says that he has long known about literary doubles, but thought it was just fiction. “…doubles, I thought, figure mainly in books, as fully materialized duplicates…fictions about the fictions of the self-divided,” like Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Golyadkin the First and Golyadkin the Second” (2, p. 115) in Dostoevsky’s The Double.

Gratuitous Personality-Switch

In a chapter titled “I Am Pipik,” the real Roth suddenly starts to think and act like the false Roth (nicknamed “Pipik”). “On I went, usurping the identity of the usurper who had usurped mine”…”On and on and on, obeying an impulse I did nothing to quash” (2, p. 156). Regular Roth feels like an innocent bystander as he is temporarily taken over and possessed by the Pipik personality.

This personality-switch might be misconstrued as having a literary justification, since it does create the potential for dramatically useful misunderstandings among certain characters. But the same thing could have been accomplished if the regular Roth had been described as only pretending to have his double’s attitudes. Instead, what is described is Pipik's personality taking over. It is a multiple personality type of personality-switch.

Significance of Gratuitous Personality-Switch

How did Roth come to write Operation Shylock? Did he decide to write a double story like Stevenson or Dostoevsky, but wanted to outdo those writers by naming both doubles after himself and subtitling the book “a confession”? Or was the reason more psychological? Does Roth, like other great novelists, have normal multiple personality?

As one approach to answering this question, I looked in Operation Shylock for things that were unnecessary in literary terms, things whose only reason for being there was that the author was personally familiar with it, and he was writing what he knew. And since there is no literary reason for the main character’s having the personality-switch just mentioned, I infer that the author’s reason for including it was that he was writing from personal experience. Which was probably why he was writing a story with two characters named after himself, and calling it “a confession,” in the first place.

“Manifold personality,” “mirrored fragments,” “so many speakers”

“Is there a more manifold personality in all the world. I don’t say divided. Divided is nothing. Even the goyim are divided. But inside every Jew there is a mob of Jews…[an] amassment of mirrored fragments…inside each Jew [are] so many speakers” (2, pp. 334-335). These gratuitous comments evidently reflect Roth’s subjective experience of normal multiple personality.

The Irrelevant Disclaimer

In conclusion, let me comment on the book’s disclaimer. The “Note to the Reader” says, “This book is a work of fiction…Any resemblance to actual…persons…is entirely coincidental. This confession is false” (2, p. 399).

But the disclaimer does not apply to the author’s psychology, since it explicitly states that the book is “a product of the author’s imagination” (2, p. 399).

And how does a person get multiple personality? Not from psychosis or demon possession. It is a product of the person’s imagination.

But don’t phrase it that way if you are talking to an alternate personality, unless you want to start an argument.

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

2. Philip Roth. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Novelist Philip Roth Appears to Imply Multiple Personality in 1981 Interview

Interviewer: I was just interested in what your idea of reading is.

Philip Roth: I read fiction to be freed from my own suffocatingly narrow perspective on life and to be lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not my own. It’s the same reason that I write.

According to Roth, when he writes, he is “lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not [his] own.” He doesn’t say that he imagines a point of view different from his own. He says he is lured into imaginative sympathy with a point of view that is not his own and is already fully developed. It is a narrative perspective just as distinct from his own as the narrative perspective of another writer, another person. But since we know, objectively, that it is not the perspective of another person, we would have to call it the fully developed narrative point of view of an alternate personality, which would be experienced as not his own.

Interviewer: [Asks if various of Roth’s characters represent Roth.]

Philip Roth: Am I Lonoff? Am I Zuckerman? Am I Portnoy? I could be, I suppose. I may yet be. But as of now I am nothing like so sharply delineated as a character in a book. I am still amorphous Roth.

When usually asked this question, as he often is, Roth typically gets on his high horse and answers the way he did when he was asked it earlier in this same interview, when he answered, “You should read my books as fiction…”

But here he appears to have switched to a different, less guarded, host personality (see blog glossary). This more “amorphous” host says that he is not Lonoff, Zuckerman, or Portnoy, but he could metamorphose or switch to being one of those other personalities, and he may yet do so.

Alain Finkielkraut (Interviewer). “Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur” (1981), in Philip Roth’s Reading Myself and Others. New York, Vintage International, 2001, pp. 98-110.

More on Novelist Philip Roth’s Concept of Impersonation and Sigmund Freud’s Misunderstanding of The Mind, The Double, and Literature

In The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (1), “distinguished Roth critics…reveal multiple and often contradictory Philip Roths” (p. 3) and discuss how this is reflected in his writings, which are known for alter egos, doubles, impersonations, alternate personalities; call them what you will.

First, I will quote brief quotes from Roth’s The Counterlife about his concept of impersonation, the subject of my last post. Second, I want to correct a major error about Freud made in Josh Cohen’s chapter, “Roth’s doubles” (1).

Impersonation (Alternate Personalities)

In The Counterlife, Roth’s alternate personality, Zuckerman, says:

“It’s all impersonation — in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through…What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required…” (1, p. 28).

Zuckernan addresses the illusion of “being oneself”:

“If there is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation — the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate” (1, p. 90).

In other words, since there is no single true self, you switch among various selves. Which one you switch to depends on which one works best in the situation. You have a permanent group of alternate personalities. There is an innate capacity to generate, maintain, and switch among, alternate personalities.

I think Roth exaggerates when he says (see last post) that everybody’s split (impersonates; has multiple personality). I’ve previously estimated that this is true of only 90% of novelists and 30% of the general public.

Freud’s Blind Spot

Cohen quotes Freud, in his essay “The Unconscious” as saying that “all the acts and manifestations which I notice in myself and do not know how to link up with the rest of my mental life must be judged as if they belonged to someone else: they are to be explained by a mental life ascribed to this other person.” Cohen says, “It is the idea of this ‘someone else’ that accounts for the abiding fascination in Freud…for the literary narratives of the double, in which a protagonist is shadowed by a duplicate self” (1, p. 83).

Unfortunately, in Freud’s “The Unconscious” (2), in the paragraph right after the one Cohen quotes, Freud goes on to deny the existence of this “other person” or the importance of known cases of multiple personality. On the contrary, Freud insists that there really is no such thing as dual or multiple consciousness (the basis of multiple personality), but only “the unconscious”; hence, the name of his essay. (He gives a contrived, clinically uninformed, silly explanation for the cases of multiple personality that he admits existed.)

This is why neither Doris Lessing’s psychoanalyst (see past post) nor Philip Roth’s psychoanalyst (I’m guessing) recognized their multiple identities (or, as Roth would say, his impersonations). It was a major blind spot for Freud and psychoanalysis.

As I explained in my blog essay on Freud—who probably had multiple personality—the reason that Freud was interested in the literary double was Freud’s own obsession that he, himself, might have a real-life double.

I agree with Philip Roth that Freud is the “all-time influential misreader of imaginative literature” (1, p. 101).

1. Timothy Parrish (Editor). The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge University Press, 2007

2. Sigmund Freud. The Unconscious. Penguin Books, 2005.

Impersonation is Novelist Philip Roth’s Word for Normal Multiple Personality

Multi-award-winning novelist Philip Roth has said, “…everybody’s split…Everybody is full of cracks and fissures…Hiding them is sometimes taken for…not having them…It’s all the art of impersonation…That’s the fundamental novelistic gift…His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down…Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature…I am somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes. I am very much like somebody who spends all day writing” (1).

In short, Philip Roth’s concept of impersonation anticipates my concept of normal multiple personality (see blog glossary).

1. Hermione Lee. “Philip Roth: The Art of Fiction” (1984), in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV. New York, Picador, 2009, pp. 203-235.

When Novelists Tell the Truth, Nobody Believes Them (One Major Theme of this Blog)

Novelists are fiction writers, “professional liars,” as they sometimes like to joke. But they occasionally do tell the truth, sometimes to confidants (like Dickens to Forster and Dolby; see June 2013 post), sometimes in autobiographies and television interviews (like Sue Grafton; see posts). As Mark Twain said, when he told the truth, nobody believed him (see posts).

Part of the reason that novelists are not believed in regard to their normal multiple personality [see blog glossary] is that they like to preserve plausible deniability. They make it look like they could be joking. They don’t insist that you pay attention and believe what they are saying. They tentatively raise the issue, but let it drop, if the interviewer doesn’t want to hear it. Which was the point of my recent post dramatizing what would be likely to happen if a novelist said in an interview that he was only the host personality [see blog glossary].

Novelists will not be straightforward about their normal multiple personality until interviewers and literary critics are interested. As the saying goes, “It takes two people to tell the truth, one to tell it and one to hear it.”

One-Year-Old Blog has had Visitors from Forty Nations

While most visitors have come from China, France, Germany, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, and the USA (55%), thirty other countries have been showing increasing interest.

Please send your comments to each and every post that interests you from throughout the whole first year.

I value your knowledge and opinions.

Interview of the Novelist as a Host Personality

Interviewer: Is your main character based on you?

Novelist: Well, my main character does have certain things in common with me. We both live in this country.

Interviewer: As you’ve pointed out in several past interviews, there are distinct differences. For example, the character has acne and you never have.

Novelist: The character is, but at the same time is not, based on me, depending on how you define “me.” If by “me” you mean the one who does interviews, who has never had acne, whom you are speaking to now, then the character is certainly not based on me. However, if by “me” you mean an alternate personality who has always had skin problems, then…

Interviewer: So the character is not based on you.

Novelist: No. The character is not based on me.

Mirror Image or Literary Doubles: Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Multiple Personality’s Switching

When I see a title like The Metamorphosis (aka The Transformation), I think of the discussion of metamorphosis and transformation in textbooks of multiple personality. Only there it is called “switching,” meaning the metamorphosis or transformation of one personality to another.

“Switching is the process of changing from one alter personality to another and is a core behavioral phenomenon in MPD [multiple personality disorder]…Many therapists report that initially they were only vaguely aware that a patient was changing in some fashion…Eventually, many therapists report that they can tell which personality is ‘out’ from 50 paces…

“In many cases, the patient has learned to disguise or cover up switching behavior. Women will frequently turn their faces away, momentarily shield their faces with their hands, or let their hair fall over their faces during the moment of switching. An alternate personality may time its emergence so that the therapist is looking away or is otherwise distracted…

“In general, the alter personality present before the switch is replaced by another personality. In some cases, however, both personalities will be present simultaneously…The actual moment of switching can last from fractions of a second to several minutes or even longer in a few cases” (1).

The textbook discusses how the therapist must learn to note changes in facial expression, posture and body language, voice and speech, dress and grooming, emotion, thought processes, psychophysiological sensitivities to medications or alcohol, etc.

Would novelists who have normal multiple personality, and who experience switching, find Kafka threatening or inspirational?

Frank W. Putnam. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989, pp. 117-123.

Glossary of Multiple Identity Literary Theory

normal multiple personality: a term coined by Multiple Identity Literary Theory to mean multiple personality that is not a mental illness, because it does not cause the person distress and/or dysfunction; because it may be an asset (e.g., to write novels); and because it is relatively common, estimated to occur in 90% of novelists and 30% of the general public.

multiple personality disorder: the mental illness in which a person has two or more identities; some identities are in conflict with, or are not aware of, each other, resulting in battles and memory gaps; and there is distress and/or dysfunction. The diagnostic category is Dissociative Disorders, which are not psychotic and have nothing to do with schizophrenia.

multiple personality: depending on context, may refer to either of the above. The term is used in this blog, because most people are familiar with it. (Multiple identity would be a better term, but it is not in common use.) Split personality is an informal synonym.

For example, a woman is a mother and a scientist. If these are ordinary roles, then when she is performing one role, she fully remembers and identifies with everything about her other role, too. However, if these are alternate identities, and she has multiple personality, then the mother identity and the scientist identity experience themselves as two separate people, who do not identify with each other, and who may or may not be aware of each other or know what each other thinks and does, since some identities are co-conscious and some are not. If the multiple personality causes her distress or dysfunction, it is a disorder; if not, it is normal.

dissociative identity disorder: Since 1994, this is the formal name for multiple personality disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, the DSM.

alter: short for alternate personality or alternate identity, usually in distinction to the host (see below). But alter may sometimes be used more generally to refer to any identity, including the host.

host: short for host personality or host identity. For example, in novelists, this would be the identity who does interviews. Sometimes the host is more than one identity. The host is also known as the regular personality or identity.

original personality or identity: The host or regular identity is often not the first or original one, who may actually be a minor player in the person’s current life.

the real person: Neither host nor alter nor original identity is the real person. The real person is all of them together, taken as a whole. Therefore, conflicts among the identities should be resolved through negotiation and cooperation, not war or divorce.

double, literary double, theme of the double: two (or more) characters in a story are not really individuals, but are alternate personalities, in what is, in effect, a multiple personality story. They may have the same appearance, as in Dostoevsky’s The Double, hence the term. Or they may look different, one transforming into the other, as in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde or Kafka’s Metamorphosis. "Double" is a literary synonym for alter (alternate personality). Literary versions of the double may include twin characters and character-splitting.

Multiple Identity Literary Theory: Most novelists have normal multiple personality and use it to write novels. For a more complete outline, see the April 28, 2014 post. This blog originated the theory, and it evolves with each post.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis: An Animal (Insect) Alter (Alternate Personality) in a Multiple Personality Story

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (1), a big insect, and “It was no dream” (1). This is how Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins.

The story has had numerous and divergent interpretations. However, it is indisputable and well known that Kafka’s Wedding Preparations in the Country contains an earlier, more psychologically-revealing version.

“The Metamorphosis (1915)…borrows heavily from Wedding Preparations. When Raban [a character in the latter] sent his ‘clothed body’ traveling in 1907, he famously wanted to remain in bed and metamorphose into a beetle…We learn in the opening paragraphs of The Metamorphosis that Samsa has worked as a traveling salesman for exactly five years: from precisely the time Kafka wrote most of Wedding Preparations, in 1907, to the year he began The Metamorphosis (1912)” (John Zilcosky) (1, p. 249).

“The image of the beetle first appears in Wedding Preparations in the Country…The hero of the novel, a young man named Raban…enjoys imagining that in order to avoid exertions and discomfort, he splits himself. His authentic self stays home in the form of a gigantic beetle resting in bed. His ‘clothed body,’ literally his façade, staggers out into the world to do the job” (Walter H. Sokol) (2, pp. 165-6).

from Wedding Preparations in the Country:

“And besides, can’t I do it the way I always did as a child when dangerous matters were involved? I don’t even have to go to the country myself, it isn’t necessary. I’ll send [only] my clothed body…For I, I am meanwhile lying in my bed, all covered up with a yellow-brown blanket…As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a June beetle, I think…The form of a big beetle, yes” (1, p. 67).

Note: “…the way I always did as a child when dangerous matters were involved.” Multiple personality starts in childhood as a dissociative (dividing the self) defense against traumatic experiences. He is saying that, when, as a child, he faced inescapable traumatic experiences, he would psychologically split, leaving an empty shell personality to deal with the trauma, while he imagined himself as a snug, safe, hidden bug. And that, as an adult, he would continue to switch into his bug personality when he had to face bad situations, leaving a sort of empty-suit personality to deal with the situation.

So I guess one day Kafka decided to use the insect personality as the main character of a story. Of course, the literary convention for a split personality or “double” story is to incarnate the alternate personality as a character in its own right, which, in this case, meant an actual insect (an unusually large one with human thoughts).

In real life, have there actually been people who had multiple personality disorder, whose alternate personalities included animal alters? Yes (3). (The cases cited involved people with multiple personality disorder, ones who had histories of extreme trauma, not all the memories of which could be corroborated, as opposed to normal multiple personality, which is discussed in this blog. But the point here is only that people can have animal alters, and there is no doubt about that.)

In conclusion, I have analyzed Kafka’s Metamorphosis from the perspective of Multiple Identity Literary Theory, and found that it is a multiple personality, theme-of-the-double type of story. As has often been the case in this blog, I have used facts that were already known and accepted, but whose significance in terms of multiple personality had not been fully appreciated.

1. Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis. Translated and edited by Stanley Corngold. New York, Modern Library, 1972/2013

2. Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis. Translated and edited by Stanley Corngold. New York, Bantam Classic, 1972/2004.

3. Hendrickson KM, McCarty T, Goodwin JM. “Animal Alters: Case Reports.” Dissociation, Vol III, No. 4 (Dec 1990), pp. 218-221.

Robot Alternate Personalities (Robot Alters) and Animal Alternate Personalities (Animal Alters)

In my post of May 16, 2014, I quoted a list of common types of alternate personalities, but that list was not complete and comprehensive, since the possible kinds of alternate personalities are only limited by the human imagination.

In particular, I want to mention robot alternate personalities and animal alternate personalities, because “robot alters” (1) are relevant to yesterday’s post on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” and “animal alters” (1) may be relevant to future posts.

You recall that, in “The Sandman,” the characters Olympia, certainly, and Nathaniel, very probably, were revealed to be automatons; that is, robots. And you may have wondered why I included automatons or robots in my accounting of characters who counted as alternate personalities.

So I want to make it clear that some people with multiple personality have been known to have robot alters (and, for future reference, animal alters).

1. Kluft RP, Fine CG: Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder. Washington DC, American Psychiatric Press, 1993, p. 69.

E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman and Sigmund Freud’s Literary Analysis: Freud Ignores Multiple Personality

On the back cover of the edition of Hoffmann’s short stories that I used, it says: “A lawyer by day and creator of a world of fantasy by night, Hoffmann (1776-1822) lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence. Many of the characters in his stories are subject to a similar split personality” (1).

However, in this case, the idea of “Jekyll and Hyde”—two personalities—is an understatement.

In Hoffmann’s famous short story “The Sandman,” if you count all the characters who are either “doubles” of each other or automatons, you find that five of the characters are alternate personalities: Nathaniel, his father, Coppelius, Coppola, and Olympia.

The Sandman

When Nathaniel was a child, his mother used to send him to bed by announcing, “The sandman is coming,” by which she meant that it was bedtime and he would soon be sleepy. However, the old nursemaid told him that the sandman kidnaps children and gouges out their eyes.

While lying in bed, Nathaniel hears a man visiting his father’s room, recurrently. He wonders if it is the sandman and sneaks in to look. He discovers it is the lawyer Coppelius, and that the two men are creating automatons. Indeed, Coppelius wants to use Nathaniel’s eyes for that purpose.

A year later, in one of these nocturnal visits by Coppelius to Nathaniel’s father, there is an explosion, his father is killed, and Coppelius disappears.

Years later, when Nathaniel is a college student, he meets Coppola, a salesman of optical products, and at first he could swear that Coppola is really Coppelius in disguise. But his physics professor assures him that Coppola and Coppelius are two different people.

The physics professor has a strange daughter, Olympia. Nathaniel thinks she is beautiful, but somehow lifeless. However, when he looks at her through a telescope bought from Coppola, she looks full of life and quite attracted to him. He becomes obsessed and in love with her.

But Nathaniel eventually discovers that Coppola and Coppelius are the same person, and that person, together with the professor, have created Olympia, who is an automaton. Nathaniel becomes insane and dies. The last line of the story describes Nathaniel’s personality as having been “inwardly riven.”

Five Characters as Alternate Personalities

Nathaniel had been described, as a child, as having his limbs screwed on and off by Coppelius. Nathaniel’s father had been described as looking like Coppelius. Coppola is Coppelius’s double. Olympia [is an automaton and her] eyes are said to have been Nathaniel’s. And when Nathaniel is insane at the end, his crazy speech is mechanical, like an automaton whose mechanism has broken. 

So with five characters who are “doubles” or automatons, this is not just a “double” story, but a “multiple” story, a multiple personality story, through and through.

Analysis in Freud’s “The Uncanny”

Freud’s essay on what evokes a feeling of the uncanny—a frightening, disorienting feeling from something unfamiliar—highlights Hoffmann’s writings. “Hoffmann is in literature the unrivaled master of conjuring up the uncanny…” and his “themes are all concerned with the idea of a ‘double’ in every shape and degree” (2). And of all Hoffmann’s writings, Freud chooses “The Sandman” as his prime example. He discusses it at length.

The point here is what Freud does not say. He never mentions multiple personality as a cause for a feeling of the uncanny, as an issue in Hoffmann’s writings, or as related to the theme of the double. The issue of multiple personality never occurs to him. Because Freud, himself, had multiple personality (see post of November 7, 2013), was in denial, and his theories couldn’t account for there being such a thing as multiple personality, even rarely.

Aside from multiple personality’s connection with the theme of the double and Hoffmann’s writings, why should Freud have mentioned it in an essay on the uncanny?

The Uncanniness of Multiple Personality

“When we work with patients with multiple personality disorder, our sense of reality is challenged…the patient has a single human body, but it appears to be the vehicle for the behavior (or ‘lives’) of extremely different persons, many of whom may not even know each other. We have stepped ‘behind the looking glass’…We cannot even identify one personality as the person who is the patient…It is strange, uncanny…” (3).

The Inadequacy of Psychoanalytic Theory

Freud, himself, couldn’t see the relevance of multiple personality to the theme of the double. So whenever “the double” or split personality or multiple personality is at issue, think of Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

1. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Tales of Hoffmann. Selected and Translated with an Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books, 1982.

2. Sigmund Freud. “The Uncanny” (1919) in On Creativity and the Unconscious: The Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, and Religion. Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 1958/2009.

3. Richard E. Hicks, M.D. “Discussion: A Clinician’s Perspective,” in Richard P. Kluft, M.D., Ph.D. (Ed.), Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality. Washington D.C., American Psychiatric Press, 1985, p. 247.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” A Feminist’s Story of Multiple Personality

In this short story, a young married mother feels sick, but says that her physician husband does not take her seriously. “You see he does not believe I am sick!” For he has told her that she has only a “temporary nervous depression” for which he is prescribing a rest-cure in which she is “absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again.” “Personally,” she says, “I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”

So the nature of her condition is confusing. She says that she cries all the time, is too nervous to care for her baby, has had a poor appetite, and has just not been able to handle things. Is this postpartum depression? But she feels that work, excitement, and a change would do her good. Is she a victim of the patriarchy? What’s going on here?

And then there is her room with the yellow wallpaper, which is oppressive to her in both sight and smell. Moreover, she sees eyes and a creeping woman in the wallpaper.  But, as she also says, “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.” And she sympathizes with, and wants to set free, the one or more women in the wallpaper. In fact, she’s not upset when the woman or women in the wallpaper come out and creep about. She speaks of restraining them if they were to try to go away.

As these hallucinations and delusions progress, she says that she actually feels less sick. “I’m feeling ever so much better!” Indeed, the story ends triumphantly, with the woman in the wallpaper having come out and taken over the narration of the story. “I’ve come out at last” and “you can’t put me back!” [This reminds me of the ending of Dostoevsky's The Double, when the double has triumphantly taken over, and the regular self is being taken to the mental hospital.]

Thus, the story has described a woman who has two (or more) personalities. The first one hates the yellow color of the wallpaper. The second one—who says, “I don’t want to go outside…for outside…everything is green instead of yellow”—prefers the color yellow.

The problem with a diagnosis of psychosis—whether postpartum, schizophrenic, or patriarchal oppression—is that none of these psychoses involves switches in personality. Only multiple personality does. [And to generalize, whenever you see a person with psychotic symptoms, but whose overall thinking and functioning in life are not psychotic, consider the possibility of multiple personality, which is not psychotic, but may superficially look psychotic.]

Moreover, the story suggests that this woman’s potential and capacity for such experiences has been present since childhood. “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store.” [As discussed previously in this blog, multiple personality has a childhood onset.]

So this is a story about a woman with multiple personality who has a crisis due to a patriarchal society and a family life that she found oppressive, and due to an alternate personality who had been waiting for an opportunity to come out.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “The Yellow Wallpaper” [1892] in The Book of Doppelgängers: Featuring stories from famous authors of the weird, edited by Robert Sterling. Doylestown Pennsylvania, Betancourt & Co., 2003.

J. M. Barrie’s The House of Fear Hints How To Unmask His Incognito Alternate Personalities

Lady Cynthia Asquith (1887-1960), an English writer, was the personal secretary and close friend of Sir James Barrie (1860-1937) for his last twenty years. His will gave her the copyright to all his works except Peter Pan, whose copyright he had given to support a hospital. Asquith described Barrie’s personality as follows:

“…an extraordinarily plural personality” (1, p. 18).

“No pen could convey how widely Barrie varies” (1, p. 22).

“As always, he was fluctuating, unpredictable” (1, p. 141).

“At…times…apparently neither consciously depressed nor annoyed, he would just fade out—perhaps tell one funny, very funny, story, and then subside into silence—Trappist silence—for the rest of the dinner” (1, p. 150).

“Barrie is unpredictable” (1, p. 163).

Of course, readers of this blog know that a person’s puzzling inconsistence may be a clue to the presence of multiple personality.

Barrie’s hint about his multiple personality, and the way Asquith could unmask it, were in one of his plays that he read to her:

“Another evening, I remember Barrie reading to me one of the very few recently ‘slung-off’ one-act plays he thought worth keeping. This was The Fight for Mr Lapraik [renamed The House of Fear], a terrifying drama about the struggle between the forces of Good and Evil for the possession of one more or less average man. At first, Barrie read dispassionately; then, suddenly kindling, dramatically, and in an utterly different voice for each character. The effect was unforgettably eerie…I can’t describe the disquieting tricks he played with face and voice, nor how both visibly and audibly he split himself into the two Mr Lapraiks…this singularly uncomfortable play had been suggested to him by a dream of his own…This nightmare sense of some sinister, furtive being lurking about his flat, determined to oust and supplant him, remained with him after he awoke…” (1, p. 26-27).

Barrie’s play, plus an article about it, are available online:

The House of Fear by J. M. Barrie

http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol27/iss1/3

"J. M. Barrie’s Jekyll and Hyde Drama: Lifting the Curtain on The House of Fear" by R.D.S. Jack

http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol27/iss1/4

In the play, Mrs. Lapraik has to distinguish between her real husband and his look-alike double. She succeeds in doing so by asking the man about things that her real husband would know, but that an impostor would not.

Therefore, when Cynthia Asquith would observe puzzling, unpredictable, distinct changes in Barrie’s behavior, she could have done something similar to what Mrs. Lapraik did. That is, when Barrie was behaving one way, she could have asked him about something that had been said or done while he had been behaving another way. If these different behaviors indicated different personalities, then he might have amnesia for what she asked him about. [But she evidently missed the hint and never questioned him in this way.]

One other episode Asquith mentions that is suggestive of multiple personality was when Barrie had “writer’s cramp,” and he had to change writing from right hand to left. Barrie told her:

“I’m going to take to writing with my left hand. It shouldn’t be as difficult for me as for others for I have really been ambidextrous all my life. In fact, I was naturally left-handed, but was compelled to use my right hand at school…It isn’t so difficult as you might fancy to write with the left hand, but it’s the dickens to think down the left side. It doesn’t even know the names of my works…” (1, p. 45).

In multiple personality, one personality may be right-handed and another personality may be left-handed.

1. Cynthia Asquith. Portrait of Barrie. New York, E. P. Dutton, 1955.

How much do novelists know about how their novels are written?

Certainly more than I do. For example, they know how to coax characters to come forward, take on a life of their own, and work with them.

But where do their characters come from? Are they from inner, creative realms where stories already exist? Is there a limited number, or more than novelists would imagine? Is there any way for novelists to find out?

Perhaps novelists could follow the same procedure they use to encourage characters to come forward, but instead of looking for characters, per se, they could look to see if there are other narrator and editor personalities, and if there are any wise and knowledgeable personalities who could serve as guides to their inner world and their personality system.

Would their creative process be jeopardized? Probably just the opposite. The best writers probably know more about their various personalities, and more about how to work with their personality system, than lesser writers do.

If I am wrong, I hope novelists will tell me.

Who’s Writing This? Fifty-Five Writers Joke About Having Multiple Personality

From the back cover…

“Who is really controlling the pen? Editor Daniel Halpern was profoundly curious about the creative process—so he asked fifty-five world-renowned writers to briefly muse on ‘the fictional persona behind the scenes,’ the alter(ed) ego who takes over when there is true literary work to be done.”

The fifty-five writers…

Jorge Luis Borges, Diane Ackerman, Edward Albee, Max Apple, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Frank Bidart, Roy Blount Jr., Paul Bowles, Harold Brodkey, Cecil Brown, Rosellen Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Frank Conroy, Guy Davenport, John Fowles, Paula Fox, William H. Gass, Gail Godwin, Edward Gorey, Allan Gurganus, Jim Harrison, John Hawkes, Mark Helprin, Alice Hoffman, Maureen Howard, Evan Hunter, Diane Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Ward Just, Ivan Klima, Ed Koren, Elmore Leonard, Romulus Linney, William Matthews, Peter Mayle, Leonard Michaels, James A. Michener, Arthur Miller, Czeslaw Milosz, Mary Morris, Thylias Moss, Joyce Carol Oates, Edna O’Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Darryl Pinckney, Francine Prose, Henry Roth, James Salter, Josef Skvorecky, Jane Smiley, Susan Sontag, Paul Theroux, Scott Turow, John Updike, Helen Vendler

In the context of yesterday’s post about the meaning of mirrors in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the only quote I will make from Who’s Writing This? is by Edward Albee:

“I look at myself in the mirror and see I am not looking back at myself. I am seeing him. I am seeing him looking at me…”

Daniel Halpern (Editor). Who’s Writing This? Fifty-Five Writers on Humor, Courage, Self-Loathing, and the Creative Process. Harper Perennial, 1995.

Decoding Macondo’s Mirrors in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: Metaphor for Multiple Personality

Why is Macondo a “city of mirrors”? What does that mean? The question is what mirrors meant to Garcia Marquez, not what they mean to you or me.

In his short story, “Dialogue with the Mirror” (discussed in my post of 19 May 2014) mirrors meant multiple personality. Did Garcia Marquez use the same metaphor in One Hundred Years of Solitude? Let’s see.

Dialogue with the Mirror

“…his twin brother, with his frothy brush, had begun to cover his chin with blue-white coolness, letting his left hand move — he imitated him with the right — with smoothness and precision…he raised his right arm (left arm) to the level of his right ear (left ear), making the observation along the way that nothing should turn out to be as difficult as shaving oneself the way the image in the mirror was doing…But the aesthete in him…overcame the mathematician…and the mathematician and the aesthete were at peace now…With precision and deftness — the mathematician and the artist showed their teeth — he brought the razor backward (forward) and forward (backward) up to the corner of this mouth to the right (left), while with his left hand (right hand) he smoothed his skin, facilitating in that way the passage of the metal edge, from front (back) to back (front), and up (up) and down, finishing — both panting — the simultaneous work…He…closed his eyes…while there in the mirror, a face just like his contemplated him…” (1).

One Hundred Years of Solitude

“That night, at dinner, the supposed Aureliano Segundo broke his bread with his right hand and drank his soup with his left. His twin brother, the supposed Jose Arcadio Segundo, broke his bread with his left hand and drank his soup with his right. So precise was their coordination that they did not look like two brothers sitting opposite each other but like a trick with mirrors” (2, p. 172).

Like the trick with a mirror in his short story, “Dialogue with the Mirror,” about multiple personality. Thus, ten years later, in his masterpiece novel, Garcia Marquez refers us back to his use of that metaphor in his short story.

In the novel, mirrors are associated with Macondo, a town, and its houses.  So it is worth keeping two things in mind. First, One Hundred Years of Solitude evolved from Garcia Marquez’s earlier attempt at a novel, which he had titled, “The House.” Second, a house—or, on a larger scale, an apartment building—is a common metaphor for multiple personality.

The house is a common metaphor for multiple personality, because it makes it easy to visualize the various individuals, or families, of tenants (alternate personalities) living in separate rooms or apartments. As in multiple personality, some of the tenants are aware of, and communicate with, each other. But some tenants are unaware of each other. And some may keep totally to themselves and live in solitude.

The novel’s reference to Macondo as “the city of mirrors” (2, p. 417) is found at the climax—in fact, in the very last sentence—when the often mentioned, secret documents have finally been fully translated and decoded. Indeed, the process of this final revelation is referred to as the documents' having become like “a speaking mirror” (2, p. 416).

The mirror metaphor in One Hundred Years of Solitude is used from the beginning. As early as page 24, we read that “Jose Arcadio Buendia did not succeed in deciphering the dream of houses with mirror walls until the day he discovered ice” (2). (But ice does not explain it and turns out to have been only a red herring.)

The mirror metaphor is continued on page 139 when Jose Arcadio Buendia dreams that he was going “from room to room, as in a gallery of parallel mirrors” (2). So the novel has the mirror metaphor for multiple personality from start to finish. But does the novel refer to multiple personality in any other way?

The novel’s other references to multiple personality include the following three: First, on pages 66-67 (2), Aureliano has a dissociative fugue, typical of multiple personality, in which he finds himself somewhere without being able to remember how he got there. Second, Colonel Aureliano Buendia is puzzled to find that orders are being carried out by his soldiers, orders supposedly given by him, but which he does not remember giving, so that “He felt scattered about, multiplied…” (2, p. 166). Third, in regard to the twins, Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo, it is found that when one of them is given a glass of lemonade, the other one knows whether it needs sugar (2, p. 182) (which would be easy to explain if they were really two alternate personalities in the same body).

In short, Macondo is Garcia Marquez’s mind, which is a house or city of mirrors (multiple personality).

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Collected Stories. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.

2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.