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.