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.