Margaret Atwood, Henry James, and August Strindberg use different terms, but all say that fiction writers have multiple personality

In my post on Margaret Atwood and multiple personality, I quote her as saying that she and most fiction writers have two personalities, one that does the living (which I suppose would include interviews, letters, and other nonfiction) and one that does the creative writing.

In my post on Henry James and the host personality, I discuss his short story “The Private Life,” which is about a writer who has one personality who socializes (the host personality), while another personality is back in his apartment, busy writing.

In my last post on August Strindberg’s Inferno, I quote one of his biographers as saying how Strindberg spoke of having an “exoteric” personality (which would correspond to Atwood’s personality who does the living; and to the host personality) and an “esoteric” personality who delves into what James might mean by “the madness of art.”

August Strindberg’s Inferno: Paranoid Psychosis vs. Multiple Personality

Strindberg’s reputation as possibly being crazy is mainly based on his autobiographical novel, Inferno, which describes—page after page—his paranoid delusions in the mid-1890’s. (At the end of the novel, his own conclusion is that he had not been insane, but had experienced the hell-on-earth—the inferno—that people often have before they get religious understanding.)

Since many people with a true paranoid psychosis have a specific idea as to what or who is behind their suffering, the question I had while reading Inferno was, “What or who does Strindberg say is persecuting him?”

He repeatedly blames “the Powers.”

What or Who are “the Powers”?

“I…saw the Powers as one or a number of concrete, living, individualized personalities, who directed the course of events and the lives of human beings, consciously and hypostatically, as the theologians would put it” (1, p. 168)…the Powers…And what are their plans? The perfection of the human…(1, p. 259)…Powers…disciplinary spirits (demons) and spirits that instruct (spirits of inspiration)…”(1, p. 268).

In Inferno, most of the references to “the Powers” cite them as being behind Strindberg’s persecution. Yet, as the above quotations make clear, they are not simply persecutors. Indeed, he says at one point: “I had been reading the…pamphlet The Delight of Dying,” and he wanted to kill himself, but “The Powers refused me this one and only happiness, and I bowed to their will” (1, p. 172). This is not typical of paranoid psychosis.

In short, “the Powers” are “living, individualized personalities,” who may be either persecutors or protectors. And please note: In multiple personality, two of the most common types of alternate personality are persecutor personalities and protector personalities (2, pp. 108-110). All of which makes “the Powers” sound, not like a paranoid psychosis, but like multiple personality.

Exoteric vs. Esoteric

“During this period [covered by Inferno], Strindberg was fond of employing the occult [or theological] terms ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’. The exoteric is someone who is uninitiated and displays himself to the populace at large. Strindberg’s exoteric first person is the author who visits friends every day, writes cheerful letters and pursues his literary career…The esoteric Strindberg, however, was a secret figure, an initiate…It is—and this is important—the exoteric ego who keeps the diary and is not always able to keep up with what happens to its initiated Doppelgänger…Strindberg was listening with his inner ear and admitting his fantasies and dreams, which he did not confuse with the reality of his exoteric life…” (3, pp. 274-276).

In the above quotation, I don’t know that the biographer, Olof Lagercrantz, was thinking of Strindberg as having multiple personality, per se, but what he says is consistent with the possibility that Strindberg did have multiple personality, as are Strindberg’s “Powers.”

1. August Strindberg. Inferno and From An Occult Diary. Translation and Introduction by Mary Sandbach. Penguin Books, 1962/1979.

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

3. Olof Lagercrantz. August Strindberg. Translated by Anselm Hollo. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979/1984.

August Strindberg’s The Red Room: Change in Narrative Perspective indicates the Author’s Multiple Personality

I noted in my last post that Strindberg’s first literary recognition was for his novel, The Red Room, in which “the hero is split into three characters” (quoted on page 80 in Michael Meyer’s biography). Now that I’ve read the novel itself, I will try to clarify what this quote may have had in mind.

The novel’s initial “hero” or protagonist, Arvid Falk, does not have a split personality. What happens is that the novel’s perspective begins by being his, but, as the novel progresses, the point of view often switches among several characters. Indeed, the novel ends with our being told by another character how things turned out for Arvid, as though Arvid were no longer the main character, but just someone in the other character’s story.

The reason this happens is that the novelist has more than one narrative personality. These personalities differ, but they all want to publish, and tell the story their own way. Under these circumstances, there are three possibilities:

First, they can take turns, with one of them writing one novel, and another one writing another novel, all under the same name. Second, the different narrators can use pseudonyms and publish under their own names. Third—and this is what I found in Strindberg’s The Red Room—the different narrative personalities take turns within the same novel.

I first became aware of this third possibility when I once read a novel by an eminent contemporary novelist. I mention “eminent” and “contemporary” to indicate that what I’m describing in not an artifact of poor writing skills or of a bygone era.

In the first half of this contemporary novel, there was a heinous crime committed against the main character, and there was no doubt that the implied author condemned this despicable crime. However, in the second half of the novel, the main character became only a secondary character, hardly mentioned, while the criminal became the main character, who was now likable (and the sexual crime was virtually forgotten).

You might think that such a change could never happen, because it would stick out like a sore thumb. But the novelist was such a skillful writer, and this change in perspective and sensibility was so expertly glossed over, that reviews of the book never mentioned it.

Do you know of any other novels that change horses in midstream?

August Strindberg. The Red Room. Translated by Ellie Schleussner. London, Howard Latimer, 1913.

August Strindberg: Did he have Schizophrenia, Bipolar, Paranoia, Melancholia, Alcoholism, Toxic Poisoning, and/or Multiple Personality?

Strindberg (1849-1912), a Swedish novelist and playwright, was admired by his peers and the public, but rejected by the Swedish literary establishment.

He was a complex man with varied interests, including painting, history, religion, alchemy, the occult, hypnosis, linguistics (especially Hebrew and Chinese), Shakespeare, and Beethoven.

Married and divorced three times, he could be charming, but hard to live with. Indeed, he was often paranoid, and occasionally psychotic—e.g., thinking that people were trying to poison him—but there is no consensus regarding his psychiatric diagnosis.

Some published opinions favor schizophrenia or paranoia, but “hardly any Scandinavian psychiatrist writing today [1980] regards Strindberg as schizophrenic” (1, p. 357). Other opinions have included manic-depression, melancholia, alcoholism, and/or toxic poisoning (either from absinthe or the chemicals of his alchemy experiments) (1, p. 356-357).

In this post, I will highlight what I found most interesting in Strindberg: A Biography by Michael Meyer (1).

As a child, his first school was Klara. “It was preparation not for life but for hell…My worst dreams as an adult…were of finding myself back at Klara” where there was “much beating” and an “atmosphere of terror” (1, p. 10). [Multiple personality starts with traumatic experiences in childhood.]

In 1874, while rewriting his play Master Olof, he took a job as a librarian, which he was to hold for eight years. “To those who know him only through such works as The Father and Miss Julie, this may seem surprising, but there was another side to Strindberg, that of an insatiable reader and researcher into varied fields of knowledge, and to this aspect of him, working in a library must have been meat and drink” (1, p. 53).

At a stag party prior to his marriage in 1877, he “suddenly went berserk and broke some chairs.” When asked what pleasure he could find in this, Strindberg “meekly replied that he didn’t understand it himself. It had suddenly come over him like a frenzy” (1, pp. 75-76). [Out-of-character behavior that a person can’t account for, might be an alternate personality.]

His first literary recognition was for the novel, The Red Room, in which “the hero is split into three characters” (1, p. 80).

In 1881, he was having his book The Swedish People illustrated by the painter Carl Larsson, who said, “Strindberg was sweet and lovable, as he could be…Gradually I began to discover the brutal and unpleasant side of Strindberg’s nature…and plain ridiculous lies made me cautious and fearful of this demonic creature” (1, p. 91). [“Lying” may be the inconsistencies between personalities. Larsson’s use of the word “demonic” suggests that he felt Strindberg was sometimes possessed by an evil alternate personality.]

In 1884, Strindberg wrote, “I have discovered that I am not a realist. I write best when I hallucinate.” (“A prophetic remark,” the biographer adds, “for much of his greatest work was to be written in a more or less hallucinatory state of mind.”) Strindberg said, “I sit and write like a sleepwalker, and must not be awakened, or it may stop in the middle.” “If I go on a train or whatever I do my brain works ceaselessly, it grinds and grinds like a mill and I cannot make it stop. I find no rest till I have got it down on paper…I write and write and do not even read through what I have written” (1, pp. 127-129). [This reminds me of other writers quoted in this blog, who got their material from the autonomous consciousnesses within them.]

Strindberg has come to have a reputation as a venomous misogynist, because of the blatant misogyny of some of his writings. However, it is also true that “Strindberg’s sympathy with the movement for female emancipation was of long standing; it was part of his general sympathy for the oppressed” (1, p. 133). He apparently had both feminist and misogynist alternate personalities, but the latter got control of his writing.

In 1886, Strindberg had completed the third volume of his autobiography. He was going to get back to writing his next play, but he had lost his desire to write anything creative “until I have completed this pilgrimage through my tormented past…Simply being an artist nauseates me. My intelligence has developed from fantasising to thinking. The conjuring of voluntary hallucinations at one’s desk is like self-defilement. The novel and the theatre are only for women…Have been reading Tolstoy. Can anyone endure this unending female chatter?” (1, p. 158). [But he obviously had one or more other personality states who loved creative writing. Were any of them female?]

In January 1889, Strindberg read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. He found Poe, “who died in 1849, the year I was born,” to be a kindred spirit. The biographer observes that “Strindberg’s identification with Poe is not surprising…Poe…shared Strindberg’s interest in science, mesmerism and the occult…his combination of quarrelsomeness with elaborate courtesy, his mania for composition, and his belief, as expressed in The Fall of the House of Usher and William Wilson, in the division of personality” (1, p. 208).

“He does not remember next morning what he has done today; no longer knows even what he has written; creates everything under hypnosis; as soon as it is down on paper it has, as far as he is concerned, disappeared. By contrast, his head is always full of lucid and detailed plans of things he intends to write” (1, p. 270).

“One evening Strindberg was served soup as usual. He seemed much angered at this and asked loudly why he was served soup when we knew that he did not eat it. When we remarked that he had eaten soup up to now, he became so angry that he rose and left the room—returning, however, for the next course. Next day he was given no soup. He then asked irritably why he had been excluded from this course…” (1, p. 288). [One personality liked soup, but another personality didn’t, and these two personalities were unaware of each other.]

On Christmas Eve 1895, Strindberg was found “sitting alone in an enormous winter coat…the desk was bare save for a photograph of his children, and a revolver…Strindberg explained that since the age of seven he had suffered from a compulsion to kill himself…” (1, p. 312). [Multiple personality originates as a way to cope with childhood trauma. Perhaps he had a personality who originated at age seven, and had the idea to commit suicide as a way to escape a bad situation. However, there were evidently other personalities who had other ways of coping, since Strindberg died in 1912 of natural causes.]

Strindberg says, “I am now reading Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir [which involves doppelgängers; i.e., multiple personality] and every word is true” (1, p. 353).

“Perversely, however, he continued [in 1897] to regard himself…as a scientist [who had been very extensively involved with alchemy, etc., over the years] rather than as a creative writer…[but] during the next four years he would write no fewer than twenty plays, including several of his finest” (1, pp. 371-372). [Evidently the scientist and the creative writer were two different personalities.]

In 1899, while writing a play, Strindberg reported that he had reached the middle of Act 3 “without understanding how I got there,” and five days later: “Tomorrow I begin Act 5. Can you imagine! But it is like sleepwalking…” (1, p. 391). [Evidently, the writing and the reporting were done by two different personalities who were not co-conscious; that is, one has amnesia for what the other one does.]

“The contrast between Easter and The Dance of Death could hardly be more marked. Easter is a play of reconciliation and hope, The Dance of Death an expression of the blackest pessimism and hatred…[So how can we account for his writing both plays in the same month?] It was characteristic of him to alternate with bewildering rapidity between opposing moods…” (1, p. 408). [Bewildering for either the average person or a person with bipolar disorder, but routine for a person with multiple personality in which different personalities have different moods.]

In a short preface to A Dream Play, Strindberg explains: “In this dream play…The characters split, double, multiply…” (1, p. 431).

“Strindberg was buried on Sunday, 19 May [1912]. Despite the early hour, over ten thousand people followed his coffin to the cemetery, including representatives from the royal family (Prince Eugen), Parliament, the theatre, literature, the universities and, most numerous, the workers, marching under a hundred red banners…Only the Swedish Academy [which awards the Nobel Prize], as a contemporary bitterly noted, ‘gave no indication that it cared whether Strindberg were alive or dead’” (1, p. 568).

“If one makes it a test of great tragedy that it should survive translation, there have been only seven indisputably great tragic dramatists since the theatre began: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov” (1, p. 578).

I am impressed by Strindberg’s reputation as a great writer. And I have found numerous things in this biography that are consistent with multiple personality. However, his episodes of psychosis are not typical of multiple personality.

Did he have more than one condition: multiple personality and something else? Or did he have an alternate personality who originated in childhood, when he actually had been persecuted, and who continued to live in the past? I have much more reading to do before I come to any conclusions.

1. Michael Meyer. Strindberg: A Biography. New York, Random House, 1985.

Eugene O’Neill used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature to praise August Strindberg

“It is difficult to put into anything like adequate words the profound gratitude I feel for the greatest honor that my work could ever hope to attain, the award of the Nobel Prize…

“…the greatest happiness this occasion affords…is the opportunity it gives me to acknowledge…the debt my work owes to that greatest genius of all modern dramatists…August Strindberg…

“It was reading his plays…that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theatre myself…

“Of course, it will be no news to you in Sweden that my work owes much to the influence of Strindberg. That influence runs clearly through more than a few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see…

“…I am…proud of my debt to Strindberg…For me, he remains…the Master, still to this day more modern than any of us, still our leader. And it is my pride to imagine that perhaps his spirit, musing over this year’s Nobel award for literature, may smile with a little satisfaction, and find the follower not too unworthy of his Master.”

New York Times essay by Lev Grossman, “Finding My Voice in Fantasy,” fails to explain Writer’s Voice

Lev Grossman—author of the Magicians trilogy; and book critic for Time magazine—tells us he wrote fiction for seventeen years before discovering that “writing about magic felt like magic…I’d found my mother tongue. It turned out I did have a voice after all. I’d had it all along. I just wasn’t looking for it in the right place.” And that is how his essay ends.

But most Times readers will not understand all that he means by finding his “voice.” They will think that finding his “voice” in the fantasy genre means only that he found where his talent lies and what he loves. They will not suspect that he uses the word “voice” because he actually hears the voices of his characters. (I don’t know him. I’m only guessing, since that is what other great novelists have described about their own creative process.)

To repeat, novelists use the word “voice,” because they hear their characters’ voices. However, they don’t like to be too explicit about this when speaking to the general public, for fear that it might sound crazy. Fortunately, this kind of hearing voices is not crazy.

You can find my posts about the literary “voice” by searching (in this blog): 1.“writer’s voice,” 2.“childhood talents,” and 3.“child’s mind.”

To read what other great novelists have said about hearing the voices of their own characters, search individual novelists in this blog, such as Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Stephen King, and Toni Morrison.

The Ten Most Viewed Posts on Great Novelists have Multiple Personality

1. Dickens, Multiple Personality, and Writers (June 19, 2013), the blog’s first post. The title of this post was the original title of the blog.

2. Plot-Driven vs. Character-Driven: Why “Character-Driven”? (Feb. 23, 2014)

3. Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”: Was it Suicide or Murder? (March 14, 2014)

4. Bakhtin says Dostoevsky created the “polyphonic” novel. But wouldn’t that require a “polyphonic” (multiple personality) mind? (March 8, 2014)

5. The Sound and the Fury: William Faulkner’s Rashomon, written by four or five alternate personalities (Feb. 10, 2014)

6. Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity) Pervades Toni Morrison’s Novels (Oct. 23, 2013)

7. Stephen King’s and Toni Morrison’s Characters With Multiple Personality (Oct. 4, 2013)

8. Margaret Atwood on the Multiple Personality of Writers (Oct. 27, 2013)

9. Debbie Nathan’s Sybil Exposed: You Can’t Say a Case of Multiple Personality is Fake Unless You Know What the Real Thing Looks Like (April 18, 2014)

10. Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: The Multiple Personality Mostly Missed by Twenty-Five Years of Literary Criticism (April 24, 2014)

There have been 203 posts so far. Which posts have most interested you?

The Writer’s Chronicle Fails to Consider That Pseudonyms May Reflect An Author’s Multiple Personality

In the September 2014 issue, Ronald Goldfarb, in “Writing Under Another Name,” discusses the historical, social, commercial, and deceptive reasons that authors have used pseudonyms or pen names. The closest he comes to any psychological reason is when he quotes one writer as saying that she “wanted to escape from my own identity.”

Goldfarb assumes that fiction writers have only one psychological identity, and that a pseudonym is just another name for that same identity. As one example, he mentions that J. K. Rowling switched to a male pseudonym when her novels changed from Harry Potter to detective fiction. 

The problem is, Rowling initially claimed that she used a pseudonym so that her new book would be judged apart from her fame, on its own merit. But then she continued to use the pseudonym even after everyone knew.

And since her Harry Potter and detective fiction are such different genres, I can’t see why anyone would assume that they were written by the same mentality—unless you mistakenly thought that one identity is all that most fiction writers have.

In this regard, please see my April 26, 2014 post, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Multiple Personality in Both His Fiction and His Real Life”—search “Edgar Allan Poe” in this blog—for an example of when an author’s alternate personality used a pseudonym and got its letters-to-the-editor published.

Thus, in addition to the reasons that Goldfarb gives, I would add that authors use pseudonyms because they have more than one identity who wants to publish.

Is it plausible that a person with multiple personality, like Prince Hamlet, would commit murder?

Since I speculated in my last post that Prince Hamlet—who had multiple personality—murdered his father, you might wonder if real people, with real multiple personality, ever really commit murder.

Well, if you search “murderers” in this blog, you will find a post with a link to an article about twelve murderers who had multiple personality.

It is rare, but it does happen.

If it is rare, why did I provide a link to that article? Because those twelve cases, due to all the court-mandated investigations, were unusually well documented in regard to tracing the multiple personality all the way back to childhood.

Did Prince Hamlet Kill His Father and Frame His Uncle?

In my August 1, 2014 post, I speculated about Hamlet as though he were a real person. It allowed me to discuss relevant issues related to multiple personality.

Now, after re-reading that post, the possibility occurs to me that Hamlet killed his father (and that his uncle was innocent).

I don’t know if others have thought of this before, but I assume they must have, since the play has been discussed for more than four hundred years. I don’t know what motive the others gave.

My proposed motive has to do with the fact that people often develop multiple personality because of traumatic experiences in childhood. In some cases the parents are not to blame; in other cases they are.

So suppose King Hamlet had been an abusive father. This raises the possibility that Prince Hamlet had an alternate personality who took revenge.

If Hamlet was really out of town at the time of the murder—a good alibi—then he would have employed an assassin.

Today’s New York Times Book Review, “The Interpretation of Freud,” Which Says Freud Discovered The Unconscious, Ignores History

The history of the discovery of the unconscious is outlined in the post of earlier today.

I've addressed this previously in the blog. But it amazes me that Freud and psychoanalysis continue to be given credit for the discovery of the unconscious, when the history is so clear that it had been discovered by others before psychoanalysis existed.

(I've also previously discussed the fallacy of the concept of the unconscious—multiple dissociated consciousness is truer than conscious/unconscious—but that is another matter.)

The Unconscious was Already Discovered and Already Well-Known by the time Freud and Psychoanalysis Came Along

The following is from pages 311-318 in Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, Basic Books, 1970).

“In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the philosophical concept of the unconscious, as taught by Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, was extremely popular, and most contemporary philosophers admitted the existence of an unconscious mental life…

“The assumption that a part of psychic life escapes man’s conscious knowledge had been held for centuries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it attracted more attention; in the nineteenth [it was] one of the most highly debated problems…

“It was Leibniz [1704] who proposed the first theory of the unconscious mind supported by purely psychological arguments…

“A new experimental approach was devised by Chevreul [1833] who was able to show that the movements of the divining rod and the pendulum resulted from unconscious muscular movements of the subject caused by unconscious thoughts. Chevreul extended his research to the movements of the ‘turning tables’: it is not the ‘spirits,’ he said, who are moving the tables, but the unconscious muscular movements of the participants; the alleged messages of the ‘spirits’ are the expression of unconscious thoughts of the medium…

“The clinical approach to the exploration of the unconscious had largely been utilized during the entire nineteenth century, since a great part of the work of magnetizers and hypnotists was basically a clinical investigation of the unconscious…

“In France the interest in such research was renewed after Charles Richet’s publication of 1875. In the early 1880’s, when Charcot and Bernheim initiated the clinical study of hypnosis a continuous flow of research and publications began to emerge. The state of the problem of the unconscious…was sketched by Hericourt in a survey published in 1889, stating that the unconscious activity of the mind is a scientific truth established beyond any doubt…As everyday manifestations of the unconscious life, Hericourt mentions habits and instinct, forgotten memories, occurring spontaneously in the mind, problems being solved during sleep, unconscious movements that have psychological content and meaning, and unaccountable feelings of sympathy and antipathy…Other proofs of the activity of the unconscious are found in hysteria, mediumism, and automatic writing…a kind of estrangement may occur and the unconscious then organizes itself in the form of a ‘second personality’…

“…by the year 1900 four different aspects of the activity of the unconscious had been demonstrated: the conservative, dissolutive, creative, and mythopoetic.The conservative functions were recognized as being the recording of a great number of memories, even of unconscious perceptions, that have been stored away and of which the conscious individual knows nothing at all. There were case histories of patients who during a fever spoke a language that they had learned as young children and completely forgotten…The dissolutive functions of the unconscious [included] posthypnotic suggestion. There were also the facts investigated by Charcot, Binet, Janet, Delboeuf, and Myers. Around 1895, the assumption that disturbing tendencies were forced into the unconscious was a matter of course…The creative function of the unconscious had been emphasized by the Romantics…The mythopoetic function…In this conception the unconscious seems to be continually concerned with creating fictions and myths…”

In short, the unconscious was an old and well-known idea before psychoanalysis existed.

When Wordsworth said “Poetry is…emotion recollected in tranquillity,” He Referred to His Multiple Personality

Compare William Wordsworth’s famous saying from his preface to Lyrical Ballads [2nd ed., 1800]:

“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

…to the lines I recently quoted from his autobiographical poem, The Prelude:

“A tranquillising spirit presses now

On my corporeal frame, so wide appears

The vacancy between me and those days

Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

That musing on them, often do I seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

And of some other Being.”

He is saying that one of his beings, the one with a tranquil consciousness, is aware of itself, but also aware of another of his beings with its own separate consciousness, the one who originated in his “school-time” (the heading of that section of The Prelude), who apparently is more emotional.

It is hard to be sure how many “beings” with “consciousness”—i.e., alternate personalities—are being referenced. Is the “tranquillising spirit” the same one as “me,” or a separate one who “presses” on “me”? Are any of these personalities Wordsworth’s regular, social, host personality?

All I can say is that he describes having multiple personality, and that he uses it to write poetry.

Wordsworth footnote:

I almost did not write the last post, because the first time I read those lines from Wordsworth’s Prelude, I misread them.

At first, I thought he was making the trivial point that he had seen things differently when he was younger. But rereading, I realized that he was not making that trivial point.

Rather, he is saying that, now, as an adult, he is subjectively aware of two distinct, conscious Beings within him, one of which originated in, and relates to, his childhood; in other words, a child-aged alternate personality (the most common kind of alternate personality, because multiple personality starts in childhood).

Multiple consciousness—each with its own sense of “I”—is the essence of multiple personality. And that is what Wordsworth is describing.

William Wordsworth on his “Two Consciousnesses” and “other Being”

It is natural to believe that everyone has the same sense of self that you do. If you have a single sense of self, then you may suspect that anyone who claims otherwise is joking, lying, or crazy. If you have a multiple sense of self, then you may suspect that anyone who claims otherwise is lying or in denial.

So you might find it interesting to show the following quotation to people you know and get their reactions.

It is from Wordsworth’s The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem, Book Second, School-time (1850 version):

A tranquillising spirit presses now

On my corporeal frame, so wide appears

The vacancy between me and those days

Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

That musing on them, often do I seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

And of some other Being.

Wordsworth J, Abrams MH, Gill S (Eds). William Wordsworth The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception; Recent Critical Essays. New York, WW Norton, 1979.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey, Literary Criticism, Literary Madness, and Psychosis vs. Multiple Personality

As discussed in past posts, both Hamlet and the mother in Long Day’s Journey have multiple personality, which is missed by most literary critics and English professors.

Those who have suspected Hamlet’s multiple personality usually cite his changeability and inconsistence. And I applaud them, since one clue to the possible presence of multiple personality is, indeed, a puzzling inconsistency.

However, as noted in a recent post, the strongest evidence for Hamlet’s multiple personality is his hallucination of the Ghost in the bedroom scene, since that type of hallucination is seen only in multiple personality.

But, you might wonder, if that’s true, why hasn’t it been noted before by other psychiatrists? The reason is that most of those other psychiatrists were psychoanalysts. And, as I’ve explained in many posts, Freud and psychoanalytic literary theory have a blind spot for multiple personality.

So, am I saying that literary critics and literature professors should learn about multiple personality? After all, they are not psychiatrists. Isn’t it sufficient for them to speak of literary “madness” and leave it at that?

At the very least, I would urge them to distinguish between two types of “madness” in literature: psychosis vs. multiple personality.

Psychosis (which includes schizophrenia) means having hallucinations and/or delusions, together with an inability to understand why these perceptions and beliefs are not shared by everybody else; in short, an inability to test reality.

Thus, when novelists hallucinate, impersonate, and/or converse with, their characters, it is not psychosis, because novelists—even though, like Toni Morrison, they may describe such experiences as “more real then real”—know very well that it is subjective.

Multiple personality is like the relationship between novelists and their characters, and so it is not psychotic. However, I would distinguish between normal multiple personality and multiple personality disorder. The former may simply be an asset (e.g., in writing novels), but the latter has significant distress and dysfunction, and might benefit from psychotherapy.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet says Multiple Personality is the Madness that Makes Sense, and a Mirror to the Writer’s Mind

In this fourth post on Hamlet, I reflect on its two main lessons for this blog.

“Madness” that Makes Sense

Prince Hamlet called him a tedious old fool, because he hadn’t heard Polonius’s perceptive comment: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” Which means that If you look beyond multiple personality’s apparent craziness, it makes sense.

For example, what could seem crazier than when Hamlet’s mother realized (Act 3, Scene 4) that he was seeing and hearing someone who wasn’t there? Yet, if she had known what the voice was saying, she would have found it rational and compassionate (at least toward her).

And if Hamlet’s multiple personality was typical, it would have made even more sense to her if she had interviewed the alternate personality and traced its history back to his childhood, where it originated as a sensible way for Hamlet to cope with a traumatic situation. (I know about typical multiple personality from clinical experience with real people.)

Mirror to the Writer’s Mind

How did Shakespeare come to write a character like Hamlet who had multiple personality?

He certainly didn’t get it from reading Sybil or seeing the movie.

I can’t think of any way other than his personal familiarity with it—he had multiple personality—especially in view of all the other great writers discussed in this blog who had it, too.

Why Prince Hamlet said he would Pretend to be Crazy, and Why he was Indecisive even after Confirming his Uncle’s Guilt

Hamlet implies that he will be pretending to be crazy as part of his plan to find the truth about his father’s death (and then, if appropriate, take revenge). But I don’t believe that was the reason, since his crazy behavior would only draw attention, and cause people to investigate what he was up to. And if he were to kill his uncle in revenge, his reputation as being crazy would undermine his credibility and prevent his getting the crown.

In my last post, I cited evidence that Hamlet had multiple personality. If he did, he had had it since childhood, because multiple personality has a childhood onset. But the condition is usually hidden and camouflaged, because in most people the alternate personalities (alters) develop an equilibrium and a system to get along, and they don’t like people to know about them and interfere.

However, if there is a life crisis—such as father suddenly dying under suspicious circumstances and mother quickly remarrying—this would, temporarily, disturb that equilibrium. If there were one personality who emulated and identified with father, then that alter in particular would be quite upset. And so alters who for many years had been quite content to remain behind the scenes would start to come “out” and make Hamlet look crazy.

Realizing that something like this was happening, Hamlet’s regular, host personality worried that everyone might come to think that he was crazy. He told Horatio and a few others that he would only be pretending to be crazy so that they would not lose faith in him, and so that if he were ever locked away for being crazy, there would be some people on his side to get him out.

Hamlet was indecisive because different personalities differed. For example, one alter, who identified with his late father, would want revenge. A second alter might have thought that his father was a tyrant and a bully, and got what he deserved. A third alter may have believed in nonviolence. And other alters may not have concerned themselves with, or even been aware of, such matters.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 3, Sc 4): The Ghost—Rational, Person-Like, Seen/Heard only by Hamlet—His Alternate Personality

My last post argued that Shakespeare’s gratuitous, unnecessary use of a ghost at the beginning of the play was in itself suggestive of the author’s multiple personality. My argument is bolstered in Act 3, Scene 4, when it is revealed—to anyone who knows about multiple personality—that the Ghost is not really a ghost, but is one of Hamlet’s alternate personalities.

The scene is a meeting between Prince Hamlet and his mother, Queen Gertrude. When the Ghost enters, Hamlet sees and hears it, but his mother does not. She takes his hallucination as clear evidence that he is psychotic. But her diagnosis is incorrect, since she doesn’t understand the difference between hallucinations in psychosis and hallucinations in multiple personality.

“The hallucinatory voices of MPD [multiple personality disorder] often carry on lengthy discussions that seem coherent and logical to the patient. This ‘secondary process’ [rational] quality can help to distinguish them from the more ‘primary process’ [irrational] voices reported by schizophrenic patients…MPD patients may also [visually] hallucinate their alter personalities as separate people existing outside of their bodies” (1, p. 62).

Let me give a real-life example of that kind of hallucination from one of the great novelists who had multiple personality, Charles Dickens, previously quoted in this blog. As recorded in Forster’s biography, Dickens tells about a vision he had when he was once on the road to Canterbury, was nearing the house called Gadshill-place, and he thought he saw, standing by the road, a strange young boy:

“Holloa!” said I [Dickens], to the very queer small boy, “where do you live?”

“At Chatham,” says he.

“What do you do there?” says I.

“I go to school,” says he.

    I took him up [into his carriage] in a moment, and we went on [Dickens recalls]. Presently, the very queer small boy says, “This is Gads-hill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran away.”

“You know something about Falstaff, eh?” said I.

“All about him,” said the very queer small boy. “I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!”

“You admire that house?” said I.

“Bless you, sir,” said the very queer small boy, “when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now I am nine, I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it. Though that’s impossible!” said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his might.

    I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy [Dickens recalls]; for that house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true (2, pp. 4-5).

Thus, Dickens, in real life, conversed with a “ghost,” which was actually a child-aged alternate personality.

And so it is that people who are not psychotic, but do have multiple personality, may very well have the kind of experience with “ghosts” that Hamlet does.

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

2. John Forster. The Life of Charles Dickens. Vol. I. London, Chapman and Hall, 1874.