Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Ghost Suggests The Author’s Multiple Personality

At the beginning of the play, the ghost of Prince Hamlet’s deceased father, King Hamlet, is seen by four people: Hamlet, Horatio, and two sentries. The Ghost says that he was murdered and should be avenged. But is he telling the truth? Prince Hamlet must find out and take appropriate action.

Ghost Crucial in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

“Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most realistic, most modern tragedy…It is therefore remarkable, and perhaps not without a personal significance, that he should have made the supernatural element more prominent here than in any other of his dramas. The first act is a little play in itself, and the Ghost is the hero of it; 550 out of 850 lines are concerned with him…He is a character of the play in the fullest sense of the term. He retains a human heart, for all his stateliness, and there is more than a touch of pathos about his majestical figure…The Ghost is the linchpin of Hamlet; remove it and the play falls to pieces” (1, p. 52).

But was a Ghost really necessary?

Obviously, since Hamlet has been a hit for more than four hundred years, Shakespeare made the Ghost work. At the same time, I would agree with the above quotation in that his choice of a ghost as a crucial literary device is “perhaps not without a personal significance.”

Why is the ghost an odd choice for Hamlet? Not because ghosts are a bad literary device. Wilson makes an excellent case for the long history and wide appeal of ghosts (1). But, in my view, Shakespeare could have used a different literary device that dwarfs the history and appeal of ghosts: dreams. And, after all, even in Hamlet’s own “To be or not to be” soliloquy, death is associated not with ghosts, but with dreams.

Shakespeare could have used dreams instead of a ghost with little change in characters, costumes, or action. Instead of the four characters seeing a ghost, they could have all dreamed of King Hamlet’s spirit’s asking to be avenged, all dreaming on the same night (thus avoiding the possibility that one suggested the idea to the next). As we would see each man asleep in a darkened corner of the stage, the spirit of King Hamlet would take center stage, costumed and acting just as he does now as the ghost. Each dreamer could get up and speak with the spirit (just as he did the ghost) to dramatize his own version of the dream. (I don’t insist on any details. Obviously, Shakespeare could do it better than this rough sketch.)

The wider appeal of dreams

Whereas only a sizable minority of the Elizabethan audience would have completely believed in ghosts—and some in the audience would have scoffed—everyone had dreams and could imagine how they would feel if their father had died, supposedly of natural causes, but then they and three relatives or friends all had the same dream, in which father said that he’d been murdered, and couldn’t rest in peace until justice had been done.

Thus, though either ghosts or dreams would work, dreams are more universally familiar to almost any audience, and is the natural choice. So Shakespeare probably had some personal reason for choosing ghosts over dreams.

Ghosts, Characters, Alternate Personalities

Experiencing ghosts is similar to writers’ experience of their characters, and both ghosts and characters are, essentially, like experiencing alternate personalities. So if the writer had multiple personality, ghosts (rather than dreams) would be his natural choice.

Moreover, ghost stories, per se, are related to the theme of the double (the literary metaphor for multiple personality). For example, I found Henry James’s story “The Private Life”—discussed in my post on multiple personality’s host personality—in a book titled Ghost Stories (2). Also, in my post on dictionaries of literary terms, I noted that the USA dictionary had an entry for the double, but none for ghosts, while the two UK dictionaries had the reverse. Ghosts and doubles are two versions of similar things, but ghosts are more British.

In conclusion, ghosts are often metaphors and euphemisms for multiple personality, and if an author uses ghosts when he doesn’t have to, I would include that in what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.” According to Multiple Identity Literary Theory (the subject of this blog), a writer’s gratuitous use of things related to multiple personality probably reflects the author’s own psychology.

1. John Dover Wilson. What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge, The University Press, 1959.

2. Henry James. Ghost Stories: Henry James. Wordsworth Editions, 2001/2008.

Two Kinds of Novelists: Character Listeners and Character Impersonators

Character Listeners: Some novelists quoted in this blog—e.g., Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and William Faulkner—have said that listening to their characters tell their stories is a key aspect of their writing process. Morrison said that it is important to keep one’s characters under control so that they don’t run away with the story. King said that he listens to his characters, but then prunes what they have to say. Faulkner described a Rashomon situation in which various characters give their own versions of the story; what they say may evolve over time; or, at least, Faulkner’s understanding of what they tell him may evolve over time.

Character Impersonators: Other novelists—e.g., Philip Roth and Georges Simenon—have said that becoming or impersonating their characters is a key part of their writing process. Roth said that impersonating his characters was a pleasure and made the writing life worthwhile. Simenon said that it was so exhausting for him that he had to write relatively short novels, quickly.

These two approaches correspond to the two types of imaginary experiences in children, which I mentioned in a recent post: imaginary companions, in which the child converses with the fictional friend, and imaginary identities, in which the child impersonates the fictional identity.

I titled this post “two kinds of novelists,” but I really don’t know whether most novelists (or children) relate to their alternate personalities in only one of the two ways described above, exclusively; one way, predominantly; or both ways.

Failure is Our Muse—a New York Times Sunday Review essay on Writers—Fails to Address Muse

Stephen Marche says that “Three hundred thousand books are published in the United States every year. A few hundred, at most, could be called financial or creative successes. The majority of books by successful writers are failures.” He says that a writer’s greatest virtue may be persistence, but considering the likelihood of failure, it is a virtue almost “indistinguishable from stupidity.”

However, that’s not the worst of it, since even literary success may be ultimately attributable not to the writer, but to the writer’s muse (or, in Henry James’s phrase, “the madness of art”). And this is not just with “literary” novelists. A successful detective novelist may speak of discovering her books—that her future books may already have been written—since her muse always knows what’s going to happen next before she does.

The Madness of Art (1): Normal Child’s Mind, Normal Novelist’s Mind, and Normal Multiple Personality

To summarize prior posts:

The Child’s Mind (2)

—imaginary companions

—imaginary identities

—paracosm

The Novelist’s Mind

—interaction with autonomous characters

—becoming or impersonating characters

—creation of imaginary worlds

Normal Multiple Personality

—autonomous personalities interact

—switching to another personality

—the complex inner world where personalities live when they are not “out.”

What we accept as normal in a child—because children often don’t hide it—may, superficially, look like madness in an adult.

1. famous phrase of the novelist, Henry James

2. Marjorie Taylor. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Georges Simenon: The Novelist’s Creative Writing, Children’s Imaginary Companions, and Multiple Personality

According to conventional psychiatric opinion, multiple personality should not be confused with children’s imaginary companions, for several reasons. First, imaginary companions are common. Second, most children who have them are normal. Third, multiple personality involves not only talking with alternate personalities, but switching into and becoming the alternate personality.

In this blog, I have addressed the first two alleged differences by showing that novelists commonly have normal multiple personality. But what about the third alleged difference: switching into and becoming the alternate identity?

What conventional psychiatric opinion forgets about children’s imaginary companions is that there are two kinds. The second kind is called “imaginary identities” (1), in which children impersonate animals or people. The child does so with a strength and persistence that distinguish this from ordinary role playing; for example, a child who insists that he is Superman, day after day for months (1).

That is what Georges Simenon did with his main character when he wrote a novel (but he had less stamina than a child):

“All the day I am one of my characters…it is in this character’s skin I have to be. And it’s almost unbearable after five or six days. That is one of the reasons my novels are so short; after eleven days I can’t—it’s impossible. I have to—it’s physical. I am too tired” (2).

1. Marjorie Taylor. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.

2. Carvel Collins [interviewer]. “Georges Simenon: The Art of Fiction” (1955). In The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III. New York, Picador, 2008.

A Medical History of Alcoholic Blackouts Should Put Multiple Personality in the Differential Diagnosis (the list of diagnoses to be considered)

Amnesia for the period of time that a person was intoxicated is usually assumed to be alcohol-induced, which may be true in many cases. But it is a correlation, not necessarily cause and effect, since many young alcohol bingers, and many chronic alcoholics, never do get blackouts.

Researchers tend to attribute the failure of many drinkers to get blackouts to the possibility that they don’t drink enough in a short enough period of time, or to genetic differences. They may be right, but they should also consider that something else may cause the memory gaps.

A person with multiple personality, who has an alternate personality who drinks, might very well have amnesia for the period of time that the alcoholic alter was out and about. This would be even more likely if the amnesia were for behavior that was out-of-character.

In some cases, the out-of-character, regrettable behavior—for which the person has amnesia—may have taken place when the person had not been drinking, or at least had not been drinking that much. Many people would rather claim they had an alcoholic blackout than admit they just do things they don’t remember, which sounds crazy.

In the articles I’ve read about alcoholic blackouts, they never say whether the participants in the research have ever had memory gaps, even small ones, when they had not been drinking. I recommend that they ask, since a person with multiple personality, who has an alter who drinks, will also have other alters who don’t drink, causing “dry blackouts.”

But isn’t multiple personality too rare to consider? Well, according to DSM-5, multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder) occurs in 1.5% of the general population. And according to this blog, 90% of novelists, and perhaps 30% of the public, have what I call normal multiple personality, a high-functioning version.

Georges Simenon and William Faulkner: The Autonomy of Their Characters, The Essence of Multiple Personality

Why did Faulkner write a limited number of novels, each of which took him a considerable time to write, while Simenon wrote hundreds of novels, each of which was written in short order? Did Faulkner and Simenon choose to write these different ways? Or were their creative processes largely out of their control, and something to which they had to adjust?

We saw in a past post that Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury according to what his characters told him, and that he added a new ending fifteen years after he had finished the book, because, even after fifteen years, the characters of that book were still alive to him, and were still telling him their story.

Simenon, in contrast, says:

“Last night I was in a great hurry to sit down to this notebook for it seemed to me that I had a lot of things to write in it. Now, this morning…My ideas have evaporated…To some extent that’s the reason I have to write my novels so quickly. After a few days, what I call the state of grace threatens to abandon me, and my characters, whom I believed to be very much alive the day before, suddenly have become strangers” (1, p. 10).

With both novelists, the host personality telling us about his writing process would seem to be a kind of editor for what is told to him by autonomous intelligences (characters; alternate personalities). Whether the latter make themselves available to the host for years or days would seem to be their own prerogative and not the host’s.

One person’s having more than one independent, autonomous intelligence is the essence of multiple personality. People without multiple personality don’t have this type of subjective experience.

1. Georges Simenon. When I Was Old. Translated by Helen Eustis. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970/1.

Joshua Wolf Shenk in New York Times Sunday Review says Lone Genius is a Myth

He asks where creativity comes from. His answer is that it involves at least “two entities…even a single person and the voice inside her head…And when we listen to creative people…they often mention…having a conversation in their own minds…This phenomenon is so uncanny that the writer Elizabeth Gilbert has proposed that we return to the myth of the muses…”

When it comes to novelists, I would say that creativity comes from the lone genius with multiple personality.

Opioid Dissociation: Why a Person With Multiple Personality Would Abuse Morphine

Multiple personality is a way to cope with childhood trauma, which can have lifelong effects. However, it is not a perfect solution, hence some people do not just have normal multiple personality, but have multiple personality disorder.

Multiple personality disorder is known in the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-5, as dissociative identity disorder, and is classified as a dissociative disorder. Dissociation, in this context, means the use of psychological dividedness of the self to cope with posttraumatic anxiety.

Multiple personality is psychological dissociation. Opioid drugs, like morphine, tend to create chemical dissociation. The drugs don’t create multiple personality, but they do tend to distance the person from their posttraumatic anxieties and emotional pain by chemical amnesia, chemical emotional numbing, and a serene feeling (1).

Thus, some people with the aftereffects of childhood trauma cope by having multiple personality, some cope by abusing opioids, and some do both.

1. Eli Somer. “Opioid Use Disorder and Dissociation.” In Dell PF, O’Neil JA (Eds.), Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-5 and Beyond. New York, Routledge, 2009.

O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey: Three Reasons the Mother’s Multiple Personality is Missed by Readers, Theatregoers, and Literary Critics

First, there is the red herring of her drug abuse. The fact is, drugs can only mimic isolated components of multiple personality, such as amnesia (alcohol blackouts), changes in behavior (failure to control violent, sexual, or other impulses), and changes in mood (cheerfulness or sadness). Drugs cannot account for the kind of complex changes, back and forth—in sense of identity, memory, behavior, and orientation to past or present—that were depicted in Long Day’s Journey, as quoted in my last post.

Second, the mother’s alternate personalities did not identify themselves with different names. But the obvious reason is that nobody ever asked them who they are and what their name is.

Third, the mother’s behavior was so odd and peculiar that she may have appeared, at least to the intellect, as just plain crazy. But if she were really crazy—psychotic, delusional—then the end of the play, when she comes in carrying her wedding dress, would have struck the audience, and the family, as pitiful and bizarre, not poignant and endearing, as it does.

Unlike people with psychosis, people with multiple personality are emotionally engaging and involving. If O’Neill’s mother was depicted as truly crazy, the audience would feel that the author, especially in that last scene, was holding his crazy mother up to ridicule, and I don’t think the play would have won a Pulitzer and be considered O’Neill’s best.

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night: His Mother’s Multiple Personality

The main characters, based on the author and his family, are the mother, 54, a morphine addict; the father, 65, an alcoholic, and former matinee idol; the older son, 33, an alcoholic; and the younger son, 23, an alcoholic who aspires to be a writer. The mother has been previously hospitalized for strange behavior attributed to her drug addiction. The play describes a day in which she relapses.

Father and sons (and apparently the doctors) have presumed that the mother’s strange behavior is drug-induced, since the behavior is said to have started 23 years ago when she was given morphine for obstetric pain, and because it is thought to happen only when she abuses morphine.

Had she had such behavior even before taking morphine? Since childhood? Does the drug only make the strange behavior more conspicuous by tranquilizing her host personality and making it easer for her other personalities to come out? These questions, of course, were never asked.

Her behavior is often referred to as “strange.” This may be meant as a euphemism for crazy, but the fact is, that although her behavior is strange, it is not irrational. Each thing she says—however odd, out-of-character, anachronistic, inappropriate, and self-contradictory—is, in and of itself, rational.

Her switches from one personality to another are described, for example, in Act Three:

“There is at times an uncanny gay, free youthfulness in her manner, as if in spirit she were released to become again, simply and without self-consciousness, the naive, happy, chattering schoolgirl of her convent days.”

[This child-aged alternate personality is oriented to a time in the past, and is not “out” or involved in such current events as the filling of a prescription for morphine, which another personality and her maid had done that day.]

Maid—The way the man in the drugstore acted when I took in the prescription for you [the mother was waiting outside in the car]. The impidence of him!

Mother—(with stubborn blankness) What are you talking about? What drugstore? What prescription?

[The child-age personality has amnesia for the period of time that the prescription was filled. As the conversation proceeds, the mother switches back and forth between child-aged and present-oriented personalities, which is confusing to the maid, who suspects the mother has taken some of the medicine, and that it’s making her “act funny.”]

Mother—(dreamily) It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you were happy is real. (She pauses—then as if her words had been an evocation which called back happiness she changes in her whole manner and facial expression. She looks younger. There is a quality of an innocent convent girl about her, and she smiles shyly.)

[Later in the conversation, when the mother says she’s not hungry…]

Maid—You ought to eat something, Ma’am. It’s a queer medicine if if takes away your appetite.

Mother—…What medicine? I don’t know what you mean. [She has switched back to the child-aged alter, who is not aware of taking drugs. Then…]

“She suddenly loses all the girlish quality and is an aging, cynically sad, embittered woman.”

Mother—(bitterly) You’re a sentimental fool…[Another personality is now speaking to the girlish personality, who had been telling how she fell in love with her future husband, a successful actor.] What is so wonderful about that first meeting between a silly romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol? You were much happier before you knew he existed, in the Convent when you used to pray to the Blessed Virgin…You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words!

[Is this personality a nun, or the personality now grown up from childhood who had wanted to become a nun? In any case, this personality condemns both the personality who fell in love with the matinee idol and the other personality who is now a “dope fiend.” She hears the men returning to the house (probably from drinking), and says,]

Mother—Why are they coming back? They don’t want to. And I’d much rather be alone. (Suddenly her whole manner changes. She becomes pathetically relieved and eager.) Oh, I’m so glad they’ve come! I’ve been so horribly lonely!

Clearly, what is “strange” and confusing about the mother’s behavior is the way she keeps switching from one personality to another. And it is highly likely that this has been going on—but less conspicuously—since childhood, when she had one personality who wanted to be a nun, one who wanted to be a concert pianist, one who fell in love with a matinee idol, etc.

In any case, neither morphine nor any other drug causes (or cures) multiple personality. However, almost any drug or substance can affect one alternate personality (alter) more than another, and by doing so, affect the balance of power among alters, so that alters who would ordinarily remain behind the scenes, come out on the stage and thrust themselves into the action, which can be strange and confusing.

Eugene O’Neill. Complete Plays 1932-1943. The Library of America, 1988.

Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End: Its Gratuitous Multiple Personality Suggests the Author’s Personal Experience

Days Without End (1934) (1) begins in John Loving’s private office, where he is writing a novel. John, and his alternate personality, Loving, are played by two different actors. The actor playing Loving wears a mask, which looks like John, but has a scornful, mocking expression.

John and Loving—who see and hear each other—discuss the plot of the novel, until Bill Eliot, John Loving’s business partner, enters the office. Eliot, and all the rest of the characters in the play, do not see or hear Loving (only John and the audience do).

The protagonist’s dramatized, split personality continues throughout the play until the last page, at which point John accepts God, his alternate personality dies, and John becomes John Loving.

The play has been reviewed three ways. The first approach is to mostly ignore the split personality, and to focus instead on the other issues which occupy the characters: marital infidelity, belief in God, and love. The second approach is to denounce the split personality as a stupid gimmick. The third approach is to recognize the split personality as “a hallmark” of O’Neill’s plays, and as part of “the tradition of the split character in modern American and British drama” (2).

Days Without End is “patently autobiographical”; it describes O’Neill’s “own spiritual-intellectual peregrinations”; and John Loving “is a persona for the playwright” (3). But if the play is patently autobiographical, why don’t any of the reviewers infer that O’Neill had multiple personality?

The main thing that strikes me about this play is that the multiple personality of the protagonist is totally unnecessary, unless that was the main issue that O’Neill wanted to dramatize. If it wasn’t, then it is one more example of what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality,” which is multiple personality that is included in works of fiction for no other reason than that it was part of the author’s personal experience.

One last comment. O’Neill ends the play by killing off the alternate personality, as though alters were demons and the way to deal with them is exorcism. Alters are not demons. They are part of the person’s total personality. Cooperation or integration may work. But alters that you think you have exorcised are just lying low.

1. Eugene O’Neill. Complete Plays 1932-1943. The Library of America, 1988.

2. Albert Wertheim. “Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End and the Tradition of the Split Character in Modern American and British Drama,” in Frederick Wilkins (Ed.), The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, Vol. VI, No. 3, Winter, 1982.

3. John Henry Raleigh. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, p. 6.

How Different are Alternate Personalities (Alters), and Would You Realize It Was Multiple Personality if the Differences Were Obvious?

In my previous post about suspecting multiple personality from photographs, I said that alternate personalities may differ from each other in their facial expressions, body language, and dress. They may also differ in in speech, values, self-image, knowledge, skills, memories, names, etc. But how different are they?

Differences among alters may range from subtle to obvious. However, if you never think in terms of multiple personality, then even obvious differences may fail to make you realize that the person has multiple personality, as I’ll illustrate below.

I would compare subtle differences to the “tell” in the card game of poker. The poker “tell” is a small bit of behavior by which a player betrays that he thinks his current hand of cards is either strong or weak. Players try to avoid having tells by keeping a neutral “poker face.”

In multiple personality, when differences in dress between alters are subtle, the “tell” which indicates that a particular personality is out may be, for example, the wearing of a certain piece of jewelry, or not wearing any jewelry at all. It could be any little thing.

When differences are more obvious, it could, for example, be wearing bright colors (when the person usually dresses more conservatively). I once had a patient who occasionally came to appointments wearing bright colors, which I always assumed meant that she was a little manic. However, subsequently, when I discovered that she had multiple personality, I found that there was a particular alter—with her own name, separate memory bank, etc.—who wasn’t manic, but always dressed in bright colors.

In short, whether differences among alters are subtle or obvious, if you never consider multiple personality, you are likely to do what I always did: ignore subtle differences, and attribute obvious changes in behavior or dress to something else, such as eccentricity, fashion, histrionics, drinking, or moods.

Suspecting Multiple Personality From Photographs

People with multiple personality look like anybody else. You can’t tell anyone has multiple personality just by looking at them (or a picture of them).

And even if a person you know does have multiple personality, you may always be meeting the same personality each time you see them. Because which personality is “out” at any given time depends on the particular kind of situation it is, and you may always be seeing the person in the same situation (golf, fishing, a faculty meeting, etc.). Indeed, you, yourself, are a particular type of situation, and so the same personality may always come out with you.

Nevertheless, since different personalities do differ from each other in their facial expressions, body language, and clothing choices, you can see such differences if you have a lot of photographs of a person.

Of course, if they are a king or queen, and all the pictures you have show them in their king or queen persona, that won’t tell you anything. Or if they have one particular personality who always comes out when anyone is taking pictures, this approach may not work.

You want candid photos in diverse situations.

Examine the photos in detail regarding their facial expressions, body language, and dress. Or simply look at the pictures intuitively. You may suspect multiple personality if the pictures look like they could be of a good actor, who was playing distinctly different characters. The pictures of most people are more consistent.

Could Novelists Declare That They Have Multiple Personality and Be Believed?

That’s an interesting question, but it assumes that novelists know they have multiple personality, and I’m not sure they do. I have quoted and cited some novelists who would seem to know it, but do they really? Indeed, how could anyone with multiple personality know that they had it?

In multiple personality, some personalities are aware of other personalities and some aren’t. So how could the latter ones know that they had multiple personality? Well, in the case of writers, couldn’t they see that things are written that they didn’t write or originate? The problem is, most personalities pay attention to only their own business, and if they ever tried to think too hard about what other personalities did, it would only precipitate a switch to those other personalities, end the inquiry, and give them a headache.

What about the personalities who are co-conscious with other personalities, and who are aware that they’re not alone? Don’t these personalities know that they have multiple personality? No, not really. Each of these personalities feels like a person in his or her own right. That’s their opinion. Don’t they realize that they all share the same body, and that what happens to one happens to all? Often they don’t.

Well, anyway, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that novelists did realize that they had multiple personality, and decided to tell everyone. Would anyone believe them? I would, but I don’t know anyone else.

Student of Literature and Expert on Alcoholism Says Writers are Chameleons, Wear Masks, and Have Multiple Personalities

The back flap of Alcohol and the Writer (1988) by Donald W. Goodwin, M.D., says that medicine was Dr. Goodwin’s second career choice. His undergraduate degree was in English, following which he spent four years as an editor and columnist in New York, where he studied writing under Lionel Trilling and W. H. Auden. Only later did he go to medical school.

After becoming a psychiatrist, he published books on alcoholism, psychiatric diagnosis, and the relationship between alcoholism and affective disorders (depression and bipolar). He not only didn’t publish any books on multiple personality, but he may not have ever learned how to make the diagnosis (note “so-called” in the quote below).

So I was gratified to find the following among Dr. Goodwin’s concluding comments in Alcohol and the Writer (pp. 193-194), where he discusses that writers tend to be loners:

“People with so-called multiple personalities are said to be loners regardless of the personality they assume. The writers in this book can all be said to have multiple personalities: they were chameleons, always changing, particularly when drunk…Drunk or sober, they wore different masks for different occasions. Nobody could be nicer, or crueler than the writers in this book.”

Dr. Goodwin may never have detected multiple personalities in his patients, but he found it to be common in his study of writers.

Multiple Personality May Hide Behind Alcohol Abuse

Let’s say that someone has reported episodes of out-of-character behavior; for example, the person has acted violent or promiscuous or spendthrift or suicidal or crazy. Furthermore, these episodes have occurred only when the person was drinking, and there was amnesia for the episodes afterwards. (They know about the incidents from partial memory, circumstantial evidence, or witnesses.)

What happened? Uninhibited behavior during alcoholic blackouts? Is alcohol abuse the person’s only problem?

They might have two problems, alcohol abuse and multiple personality, if the latter includes an alternate personality who drinks.

If the problem is only alcohol abuse, then the person really doesn’t have any memory of the episodes, since the toxic effect of alcohol on the brain prevented any memories from being formed in the first place. [added July 11, 2014: Some books do say that memories of true alcohol blackouts, by definition, are not recoverable. But it may not be true. And if it is really not that uncommon for blackout memories to be recoverable—such as during the next time the person drinks, or just spontaneously after a period of time—then either "state-dependent memory" can easily happen apart from multiple personality or multiple personality hides behind alcohol abuse more often than I thought. So I will come back to this issue after reading more about alcoholic blackouts.]

But in multiple personality, the amnesia is only from the perspective of the person’s non-drinking personality. The alternate personality who drinks, and who was in control at those times, remembers everything.

Incidentally, when you interview anyone who gives a history of alcoholic blackouts, you should ask them if they’ve ever had either out-of-character behavior or amnesia when they weren’t drinking. (True alcoholic blackouts happen only during intoxication.) And when you ask, emphasize that you want to know about even small, tiny “blackouts” that happened when they weren’t drinking, since they might think that small ones don’t count. They do.

Nonalcoholic memory gaps are a primary clue to the presence of multiple personality. Of course, nonalcoholic memory gaps would be due to alternate personalities other than the one who drinks. (It is rare for a person with multiple personality to have only two personalities.)

In short, alcohol is sometimes blamed for the out-of-character behavior and/or amnesia that is really caused by unsuspected, hidden, multiple personality.

Subject Index

Choose subject and search it.

Abusive husband

Marital abuse
Acting

Transformative Acting
Acting, Theory of
Actors

Afraid of you

Alcohol abuse

Alcoholic blackout
Alcoholism

Allegorical Multiple Personality
Alter
Altered state of consciousness

Alter ego

Altered identity
Alternate personality

Alternate personalities
Alternate personalities as spies

Alternate personalities not necessarily villains

Alternating
Alternative facts

Alternative realities

Always vs. Never
American Journal of Psychiatry
American Psychological Association

Amnesia

Animal alter

Anna O
Anniversary
Anorexia Nervosa
Anxiety
Apology

Argue

Argues with himself

Arguing

Argument
Art of the novel

Artificial intelligence
Atheism
Attractiveness
Author Attribution

Authors

Author's Mind
Authorial intent
Authoritative
Autofiction

Autohypnosis
Bad names

Believed Lies

Beside oneself

Bible
Bipolar disorder
Bisexuality
Bisexuality, Parallel
Bisexuality, Serial
Blackouts
Blindness
Blog is brilliant

Blog mystery

Blog's Tenth Anniversary

Booker Prize

Sympathy for Book Reviewers
Brain

Burying the lead

CAP, Character Alternate Personality

Caution

CHALLENGE

Chameleon

Chapters, Non-Sequential
Character-Driven
Character impersonators
Character listeners

Characters

Characters suddenly appear
Child-aged alternate personality

Child alter
Childhood trauma

Childlike

Christmas carol
Clues

Clueless

Co-consciousness
Cognitive psychology
Combat trauma

Comments
Comorbidity

Compartmentalization
Con man
Confidence man
Confusion [as hypnosis or literary technique]

Contact their characters

Conscience
Conscious/unconscious

Conspiracies

Conventional wisdom

Cryptomnesia
Multiple consciousness
Multiple dissociated consciousness
Controversy, Controversial

Crazy

Crazy Joke

Creative artist
Creative process
Creativity
Credentials
Credibility
Criticism, expressive

Dangers in interviewing
Daemon
Death, reversible

Debunk

Deception
Denial
Depersonalization
Diagnosis

Intuitive Diagnosis
Diagnostic Criteria

Diagnostic Fads

Diagnostic Manual Misleads
Diaries

Dictionaries of Literary Terms
Difficult to understand
Traits vs. Disorders
Puzzling disorientation
Dissimulation
Dissociation

Dissociate
Dissociative Experience Checklists

Dissociative fugue
Dissociative identity
Dissociative identity, history of
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)
Dissociative Identity Trait (DIT)

Diversity

Dividedness
Do fiction writers have alternate personalities?

Do novelists think they are crazy?
Donald Trump Paradox

Don't believe in the diagnosis

Doppelganger

Double

Double consciousness
Double-minded
Double nature
Doublethink
Dreams
Drugs

DSM-5
Dual Consciousness
Dual Personality
Eidolon
ego alien
egodystonic
egosyntonic
Empathy
Engaging
Entangling
Epilepsy
Erotomania

Everyday Life
Euphemisms (for multiple personality)
Existentialism

Expertise
Expert Opinion
Expressive Criticism
Expressive Theory

Eyebrows (fashion and psychology)
Eye-roll (related to hypnosis)

Eye-rolling
Facing reality

Fact-check
Failure to diagnose
Familiar
Famous people

Fantasy proneness
Fantasy world

Fear

Feel normal
Fiction writers
Do fiction writers have alternate personalities?
Fictional universe

Fill the tank
First and middle names
First-person plural self-reference (Nosism)

Flagrant Lies
Folklore
Forensic Graphology
Frankenstein
Free will

Freud tricked you
From India to the Planet Mars

Fugues

Dissociative fugue

Geisha

Gender identity
Genius
Ghost

Give the author credit for insight
Girl, Interrupted

Glossary
Graphology

Gratuitous multiple personality
Greek Chorus

Guardian angel
Guide
Gurdjieffian

Visual hallucinations
Hallucination
Hamlet
Handwriting

Hearing voices
Hearing Voices Movement

Heathcliff's Eyebrows
Hedgehog and Fox

He heard himself say
Hero of opposite sex

High-functioning multiple personality
History of multiple personality (dissociative identity)

Hoax

Host personality

Host personality facade
How to write a novel

How can multiple personality be like a novel?
Human nature
Humpty Dumpty

Hypocrites
Hypnosis
Hypnosis induction technique

Altered Identity
Illeism (third-person self-reference)

Illusion of independent agency

Imaginary companions
Imaginary identities
Imaginary playmates
Imagination

Imaginations
Impersonation
Impostor

Impostor Syndrome

Incompetent

Inner Child

Inner Critic

Inner self
Inner Reading Voices (IRVs)

Intended meaning

Interdisciplinarity

Intrapersonal communication

Inner voices
Internal dialogue
Internal homicide
Interviewing novelists
Interviewing voices

Interviews

Interviewing

Intriguing

Intuitive Diagnosis
Iowa Writers' Workshop

ISSTD
Italicized
Italics

Italicized Voices

ITALICS
Jane Eyre

Jesus Cures Legion

Joan of Arc

Joke
Journals
Laura
Judging novels
Juvenilia
King's College London

Legion

Lensa AI app
Literary critics
Literary criticism
Literary fiction
Literary movements
Literary novel

Literary review standards

Literary prizes
Lolita
Losing time

Loud Thoughts

Lies

Lying

Lying Double-Talk
"Madame Bovary, c'est moi"
Madness
The Madwoman in the Attic
Made actions
Made behavior
Magical realism
Malingering
The Maltese Falcon

The Mapping Memoir

Marital abuse

Mark 5:1-20

Marriage
Meaningless quirk of memory

Mediumship
Memoir

Memory

Memory in multiple personality has advantages
Involuntary memory

Memory gap
Mental disorder

Mental retardation
Mental Status Examination (MSE)
Mentally Well

Metafiction
Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis
Metaphors

Method acting

Mind's Eye

Minds of their own

Mirror

Misdiagnosis
Model of Mind

Modern Art and Literature
Monotheism

More real than real
Morphine

Mrs. March

Multi-gender compromise

Multi-imagination

Multimagination
Multiperspectivity

Multiple Identities

Multiple Identity Literary Theory
Multiple Identity Theory

Multiple imagination

Multiple names

Multiple narrators

Multiple Personality Order

Multiple Personality May Run in Families

Multiple personality, definition of
Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
Multiple Personality, First-Half
Multiple personality, gratuitous
Multiple personality, history of
Multiple personality idiosyncrasy

Multiple personality is not crazy
Multiple personality myths
Multiple personality, Seven faces of
Multiple personality synonyms
Multiple Personality Trait (MPT)

Multiple personality, two keys to diagnosis
Multiple personality, unacknowledged
Multiple personality, unintentional
Multiple points of view
Multiple reality
Multiple voices
Multiplex narrative structure

Multiplicity, three degrees of
Murderers
Muse

Mutism

Mystery
Mutism
Mythology
Mythopoetic
Myths
Myth about Multiple Personality
Nameless
Nameless narrator

Namelessness

Names, Tricky
Narrative Multiple Personality
Narrative Structure

Narrative Time Travel
NAP, Narrator Alternate Personality

Narrator, Plural
Narrator, Unreliable

Narrators, Multiple

Narrators, Multiple Capricious
Neurological

Neglect

New York Times

Nobel Novelist

Nobel Prize

Noise

Nonbinary

Non-binary gender
Nonfiction books

"Normal" is obsolete
Nosism (first-person plural self-reference)

Not crazy

The novelist as voice hearer

Novelists

Novelists tell the truth
Novels autobiographical
Novels, judging
Novels of ideas
Novels, meaning of

Objective documentation

O.C.D.

Octopus
The Odyssey
Oedipus the King

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Survey of 181 Writers
Opinion Poll

Opioid
Original personality
Out-of-character behavior

Paracosm

Parentification
Parents of novelists
Parts

Bad Parts
Pathognomonic

Patrick Melrose Novel

Pen name, pseudonyms
Persecutor personalities
Persona, personae
Personal appearance
Personal identity

Pessoa Syndrome
Phantoms
Philosophical fiction
Photographs

Photographer
Plagiarism

Plot-driven

Plural narrator
point of view

Politicians
Polytheism

Popular psychology
Possession (being possessed)
Pretentiousness

Prevalence

Profound or childlike
Prolific writers

Proof
Prostitution
Pseudonyms
Psychedelics
Psychiatry residency training programs

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic Literary Theory
Psychology, Cognitive

Psychological depth
Psychopathy
Psychosis

PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder)
Publishers
Puppets (a type of fictional character)

Puzzling people

Puzzling politicians

Qualified to make a Psychiatric Diagnosis?

Qualified to Interpret Literature?

Questions
Quirk of memory

Racism
Rarity
Rashomon

"Reacher said nothing"

Readers
Readers, avid
Reading comprehension

Reading fiction
Reading habits, global
Reading process

Rebranding
Resurrection
Reversible death
Round character
Rumpelstiltskin

Scapegoats

Scattered
Schizophrenia
Screen [for multiple personality]

Secretiveness
Seizure
Seizure-like

Selective mutism
Self-blurbing

Self-contradictory
Self-cutting
Self-harm

Self-hypnosis
Self-mutilation
Selves, Multiple
Seven faces of multiple personality
Sex ratio
Sexual orientation
Sexual Stereotyping
Shakespeare
Shapeshifting

Shocking
Singers

Singular they

Sitting duck syndrome
Six Myths
You should be skeptical

Skepticism
Skeptics
Slavery
Sleep
Sleepwalking
Sleepwalking scene [Macbeth]
Committee of sleep
Snow White
Somnambulism

Sociopath

Sorcerer's Apprentice
Speculative Fiction
Spells, Spellbound
Spirit possession

Split identities
Split Inconsistent Narrative

Statue

STIGMA
Story of O
Story-telling

Study of Fifty Writers

Stunt Fiction
Stylometry
Subcreation
Subjectively Experienced Metaphors
Submit essays

Subpersonality

Superior novelists
Suicide

Surprisingly common

Survey of 181 Writers

Sybil

Sybil Exposed

Synesthesia

Synesthetes

Synonyms [of multiple personality]
Switch (personalities)

Switching

Talents [childhood]

Talking to yourself
Telepathy

Temporary benefits
Ten Commandments

Theme of the double
Theme of the multiple
Theory, expressive
Theory, multiple identity literary
The spread

They think, therefore they are
Third-person self-reference (Illeism)

Three things [novelists do]

Loud Thoughts

Times Book Review
Time Travel
Traits vs. Disorders

Trance

Trans
Transformation

Transformative acting

Transgender

Transgender and/or Multiple Personality

Transgender health
Transsexualism
Trauma, childhood

Trickster

Tricky names
The Trinity
True vs. Useful

TRUTH MAY BE STRANGER THAN FICTION

Twins

Twitter
Identical Twins

Two-Headed Writers

Uber
Unacknowledged multiple personality

Unlabelled multiple personality scenario

Uncanny
The unconscious

Unconscious content

Unintentional Symptoms
Conscious/unconscious
Unreadable

Unreliable
Unreliability
Unreliable narrator
Vampirism

The Varieties of Religious Experience

Ventriloquism

Video game

Visitation Dream

Visions

Visitors

Visitors' Fearful Silence
Visual hallucinations

Voice in your head

Voice hearer

Voice, literary

Voice, writer’s
Voices, interviewing

Italicized Voices
Voices, Living with
Waking-dreams

Wall Street Journal
Warning to psychiatrists and psychologists

What are your reasons for visiting this site?
What does a person with multiple personality look like?

Where I’m coming from

Who’s Writing This?

Window of Diagnosability

The Winner

Wisdom

Witness Protection
Worldbuilding

Writers

Writer’s block

Writer's "madness"

The Writer’s Chronicle