How Four Novelists Write: The Relationship of Dissociation, Self-Hypnosis, and Multiple Personality

Dissociation

The histories of multiple personality and hypnosis are intertwined. One of the oldest theories of multiple personality is that it is produced by self-hypnosis. One of the oldest theories of hypnosis is that it works by producing two independent, autonomous, consciousnesses; i.e., double consciousness, the regular consciousness and the hypnotic consciousness. 

An umbrella concept for both multiple personality and hypnosis is dissociation. It is a broad concept which can include everything from an altered state of consciousness (in which you don’t feel like your regular self) to distinctly divided or double consciousness. That is why the official psychiatric term for multiple personality disorder is “dissociative identity disorder,” which is classified as a “dissociative disorder.” Of course, in regard to novelists, I’m talking in this blog about the normal version of this, what I call “normal multiple personality.”

Four Novelists

John Barth: “So much of what we do in those hours when we’re actually making sentences, inventing characters and feeling our way through the threads of a plot, is hunch and feel—half unconscious and somewhat autohypnotic. Those rituals of getting ready to write seem to conduce a kind of trance state” (1, p. 44).

Sue Grafton: “All the humor in my books comes from Kinsey [her main character]. Some of the books get very funny because she’s very impish. In the process of writing I swear she’s standing looking over my shoulder going, Do this, do this, nudge nudge wink wink…She takes over and does something waggishly funny. It’s a fun process because she’s so helpful to me, whoever she is. Mostly it is a question of connecting with her inside of me instead of imagining her as a separate creature…In order to get in touch I have to block out ego…Sometimes I do this through meditation. Something as simple as self-hypnosis…” (1, pp. 69-70).

Stephen King: “Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake. And that usually happens. If I sit down to write in the morning, in the beginning of that writing session and the ending of that session, I’m aware that I’m writing. I’m aware of my surroundings…But in the middle, the world is gone and I’m able to see better…I can remember finding that state for the first time and being delighted. It’s a little bit like finding a secret door in a room but not knowing exactly how you got in…And after doing that for a while it was a little bit like having a posthypnotic suggestion” (1, pp. 141-142).

Anne Rice: "Writers vary so much. You have people who probably are intensely conscious of everything they’re writing and you have people like me who are definitely surrendering to a trancelike state in which things make sense without analysis…I don’t sit there conscious of striking keys and making words. I’m just seeing the action” (1, p. 212).

1. Naomi Epel. Writers Dreaming. New York, Carol Southern Books, 1993.