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.