Dean Koontz, said to feel that everyone has Multiple Personality, has it in at least three of his novels—Cold Fire, Mr. Murder, and Innocence

Biography

“Dean indicates, all of us may be schizophrenic (which is a misunderstanding of the term as a dual personality). Yet splitting ourselves into two minds allows us to cope with life better than if we were integrated.” (1, pp. 173).

Thus, according to his biographer, Dean Koontz feels that multiple personality is an aspect of normal psychology, that everyone has it, and that it helps people cope. Nevertheless, he has serious misgivings about it, as implied by the following anecdote:

“In this one bathroom, Gerda [his wife] and I kept finding folded twenty-dollar bills on the counter. We’d each think it was the other who was leaving it lying around. One day I asked her about it and she said, ‘I thought you were leaving them.’ Now, either we’re completely insane or something odd was happening there…It happened about a dozen times. It wasn’t a fortune. We never really figured out whether one or the other of us was just being forgetful, but it was more fun to tell it as a ghost story” (1, p. 210).

Since ordinary forgetting does not happen twelve times, the implication of this amusing anecdote is that the $20 bills had been left on the counter by someone’s alternate personality. “Insane” and “ghost story” may express his fear that normal multiple personality could become multiple personality disorder.

Cold Fire

The protagonist does have multiple personality, but it is literary multiple personality, like Dostoevsky’s The Double, in which the alternate personality is dramatized by giving it a separate physical existence.

In Cold Fire, the diagnosis is made by Jim Ironheart’s girlfriend, Holly, who says, “you’re a unique victim of multiple-personality syndrome because your power allows you to create physical existences for your other identities” (2, p. 271).

Mr. Murder

Martin Stillwater, a novelist, dictating a letter into a tape recorder, feels that he had “lost his concentration for only a few seconds,” but when he listens to the tape, he discovers that he has lost a full seven minutes. He “remembered none of it” (3, p. 13). He had lost time. He had amnesia.

He compared his episode of amnesia to what happened with a character in one of his novels. She had had “blackouts” or “fugues,” which, he explains, is “a serious personality dissociation” (3, p. 25). [Note: multiple personality, also known as dissociative identity, is a personality dissociation.]

Furthermore, his young daughter has noticed that there were times when “Daddy wasn’t Daddy” (3, p. 16).

Following the same literary convention used by Dostoevsky and Koontz, himself (see above), the alternate personality is then incarnated as a “doppelgänger” or “double” (3, p. 111) or, to be more modern, a clone. 

Innocence

This novel is much more subtle about multiple personality than the previous two. But multiple personality is a pervasive subtext in regard to mirrors, “Fogs,” and hiddenness.

According to his biographer, Dean Koontz has felt that people are split into two minds, one of which is “disgusting, ugly.” In this novel, these Jekyll and Hyde, alternate personalities, are personified as two types of people: the rare, innocent souls (e.g., Addison Goodheart, the narrator/protagonist) and the common, ugly souls, almost everyone else. Ironically, the latter misperceive Addison as looking horrifyingly ugly, because he is like a mirror to their own ugly souls, which they find so horrifying that they try to kill Addison at first sight.

Where did Dean Koontz get such an idea? Perhaps—like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sigmund Freud (see past posts)—Koontz, or someone he knows, has occasionally had a problem with mirrors. Some people with multiple personality have a problem with mirrors, because one personality may see an alternate personality when they look in the mirror.

A second way that multiple personality becomes a subtext in Innocence is in regard to “the Fogs and the Clears.” These are supernatural beings, seen by Addison Goodheart throughout the novel, but not seen by most people. Fogs are probably evil and Clears are possibly good, but otherwise their significance is never explained.

A Fog is described in Innocence as being like “an eel” (4, p. 90). Well, on page two of Cold Fire, the protagonist (who has multiple personality) “began to shudder, not because of the air-conditioning but because a series of inner chills swam through him, like a wriggling school of eels” (2, p. 2). So a Fog, according to Koontz, is the kind of thing that a person with multiple personality would experience.

The third way that multiple personality becomes a subtext of Innocence is the repeatedly emphasized fact that the protagonist lives a hidden existence. His home is a subterranean bunker during the day, he comes out only at night, and he goes only where people are unlikely to see him: because people would be so horrified by his appearance that they would feel compelled to kill him. Thus, hiddenness is a major theme in this novel.

Well, among clinicians familiar with multiple personality, perhaps the biggest cliché is that multiple personality is a condition of hiddenness. It is usually hidden from both the people who have it—i.e., from the host personality, who often has amnesia for the comings and goings of the alternate personalities—and from the people who know them, who may think of the person as having puzzling inconsistencies or out-of-character moods.

1. Katherine Ramsland. Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography. New York, HarperPrism, 1997.

2. Dean R. Koontz. Cold Fire. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991.

3. Dean Koontz. Mr. Murder. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993.

4. Dean Koontz. Innocence. New York, Bantam Books, 2014.

Robert B. Oxnam: An American Novelist and China Scholar with an Autobiography about His Life with Multiple Personality Disorder

In 1989, Robert B. Oxnam (1942- ), an eminent Asia Studies scholar, published the first of his two novels (1).

In 1990, he was diagnosed as having multiple personality disorder.

Note: Normal multiple personality, which is relatively common—I estimate that it occurs in 90% of novelists and 30% of the general public—does not need treatment. In contrast, multiple personality disorder, found in 1.5% of the general public (according to DSM-5), needs psychotherapy, due to distress and dysfunction. Normal multiple personality and multiple personality disorder have nothing to do with schizophrenia and are not psychoses.

In 2005, Oxnam published an autobiography about his life with multiple personality disorder (2), which was reviewed in The New York Times and featured on the CBS television news magazine, “60 Minutes.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/arts/01oxna.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0

Autobiography Mentions Novel

“Cinnabar was a mystery thriller featuring an unsuspecting Columbia University professor who inherits a mysterious red lacquer box from his dead wife that lures him into the swirling world of modern China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. 

“It seemed like a good idea—a mental break from my rigorous professional life and yet another way to bring China alive in an unconventional fashion—but, in retrospect, I have almost no memory of how the book emerged. All I remember is sitting down at the computer, over a few vacation periods and some long weekends, and transcribing what already seemed to be written. So Cinnabar was composed in a strange stupor, perhaps a prolonged series of my mysterious blank periods. At the time, it seemed odd, but not alarming.

“Nothing prepared me for the bombshells when the book reached the market. The reviews were lukewarm to outright hostile. Cinnabar was an embarrassing bomb in spite of my best intentions” (2, p. 37-38).

Gratuitous Multiple Personality

The novel, written before Oxnam was diagnosed, manifests its author’s multiple personality in the way that its caucasian American protagonist is given dual—American and Chinese—identities. This duality, which includes resorting to plastic surgery, is rationalized as a disguise to evade murderous villains. But the villains are not fooled by the disguise for even a second. So the dual identity was really unnecessary. It is gratuitous.

Gratuitous multiple personality in a novel—even if it is only metaphorical multiple personality, as here—may reflect the novelist’s own multiple personality. In this case, the novelist’s multiple personality is confirmed by his autobiography.

1. Robert B. Oxnam. Cinnabar: A Novel of China. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

2. Robert B. Oxnam. A Fractured Mind: My Life with Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, Hyperion, 2005.

Debbie Nathan’s Facebook Blog refers her readers to this blog, which has a post that challenges the validity of her book “Sybil Exposed.”

When I was searching something else today, I chanced upon Debbie Nathan’s Facebook Blog, which has the following post:

Debbie Nathan

July 21 · 

Here's an eccentric blog whose author likes juicy speculation about famous authors having alters. One biggie is Eugene O'Neill. Interesting, because Flora Schreiber, author of Sybil, was the lover of O'Neill's son Eugene Jr. for a few weeks before he committed suicide. For details on that 1950 affair in Woodstock, NY, see my book "Sybil Exposed." http://multiplewriters.blogspot.com/

I am not sure that “eccentric” is meant as a compliment, but “juicy speculation” might be, judging by her “juicy” reference to an affair that took place a few weeks before someone committed suicide.

Ms. Nathan is welcome to respond to the issues raised about her book in my post on this blog. I would be happy to publish her comments.

Malingering: Why it is so much easier to fake Schizophrenia—and most other conditions—than it is to fake Multiple Personality

Multiple personality can be faked, but it is harder to fake than schizophrenia or almost any other mental condition. Why do people think that multiple personality is easy to fake? Because they see it faked by actors in movies.

But the actor in a movie has a script. If the character has twenty personalities, then the writer probably made lists of the characteristics of each of the twenty personalities, so that the script did not inadvertently have any inconsistencies. If each of the twenty personalities has twenty unique characteristics (behavioral quirks, age, what they do and do not remember, etc.), then there are four hundred details about these personalities that have to be kept straight.

And the movie usually doesn’t provide a detailed backstory for each of the twenty personalities, but in real life each personality does have its own story, and a malingerer would have to keep these twenty backstories straight.

And each of the twenty personalities has a consistent relationship with each of the other nineteen personalities. Some are friends. Some are enemies. Some can read each others minds. Some can’t. Some never heard of each other. Etc. These relationships must be maintained with perfect consistency.

Now, compare the above with schizophrenia. The symptoms are relatively nonspecific. If you hear a voice, does what it says make sense, and is it consistent with what your voice said two weeks ago? It doesn’t matter. Inconsistency might even be seen as being more genuine. In short, the diagnosis of schizophrenia does not require any specific symptom or much consistency. All a malingerer has to do, essentially, is not make sense, sincerely. (I am not ridiculing schizophrenia. It is very serious. All I am saying is that it does not have to demonstrate the specificity, complexity, and consistency of multiple personality.)

Is it possible to fake multiple personality? Yes. Is it easy to fake? No. And it is much harder to fake than schizophrenia and most other conditions.

Pathognomonic Symptoms: Why Multiple Personality is a More Definite Condition than Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder

In my December 8, 2014 post, I pointed out that of three psychiatric diagnoses—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality—multiple personality is the most definite and specific condition, and is, in that regard, the least controversial.

There is no symptom of schizophrenia that is found only in schizophrenia. There is no symptom of bipolar disorder that is found only in bipolar disorder. But there are symptoms of multiple personality that are found only in multiple personality.

In other words, of the three conditions, multiple personality is the only one with any symptoms that are “pathognomonic,” defined as follows:

“Pathognomonic (often misspelled as pathognomic and sometimes as pathomnemonic) is a term, often used in medicine, that means characteristic for a particular disease. A pathognomonic sign is a particular sign whose presence means that a particular disease is present beyond any doubt. Labelling a sign or symptom "pathognomonic" represents a marked intensification of a "diagnostic" sign or symptom.

“While some findings may be classic, typical or highly suggestive in a certain condition, they may not occur uniquely in this condition and therefore may not directly imply a specific diagnosis. A pathognomonic sign or symptom has very high specificity but does not need to have high sensitivity: for example it can sometimes be absent in a certain disease, since the term only implies that, when it is present, the doctor instantly knows the patient's illness. The presence of a pathognomonic finding allows immediate diagnosis, since there are no other conditions in the differential diagnosis.” —Wikipedia

So if someone says that multiple personality is the most controversial psychiatric diagnosis, ask them, “Compared to what?” And if they say schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or most other psychiatric diagnoses, ask them, “Does it have any symptoms that are pathognomonic?" Multiple personality does.

Why Marcel Proust’s Title about Time Loss—In Search of Lost Time—Flags the Issue of Multiple Personality

The two most common clues that a person might have multiple personality are puzzling inconsistencies and memory gaps (time loss).

“During initial interviews of patients who later proved to have MPD [multiple personality disorder], I have noticed a recurring pattern: I find that it is difficult to obtain a coherent history. When I finish taking the history and start to write it down, it becomes apparent that much of the information is inconsistent or even contradictory…This reflects the fact that…memories of their life history are divided up among a number of alter personalities.

“In most instances, the initial historical information will be obtained primarily from the host personality, who often has the least access to early historical information and experiences frequent gaps in the continuity of his or her existence…

“The inconsistencies become most apparent if the clinician returns at a later date to gather more information about a specific event. I have had the experience of obtaining three or four different and contradictory accounts of specific episodes from a patient…[this is the problem that William Faulkner had with interviews, as noted in past posts]

“Many multiples have developed compensatory behaviors to help them deal with missing information and gaps in memory…to aid in evading difficult questions or to distract the interviewer…

“In questioning patients about MPD, it is often wise to begin obliquely. I typically begin this part of the history by asking the patient about experiences of ‘time loss’…One patient, a certified public accountant, would report that he often lost 3 or 4 hours, only to find completed work sheets on his desk at the end of the day…

“Another area of genuine perplexity for many multiples is the fact that they do not remember many of the important events of their lives. They may know that they graduated from high school or college on a certain date, or that they were married, gave birth, won an award, or experienced some other noteworthy event, but they do not actually remember the experience” (1, pp. 72-76). What they actually remember depends on which personality you are talking to.

In short, the title of Proust’s novel, when it raises the issue of lost time, flags the issue of multiple personality.

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

Marcel Proust’s Concept of “Involuntary Memory”: What did he mean when he said that some of his memories felt involuntary?

Proust is often credited with coining the term “involuntary memory,” although he may have gotten the idea from the doctor who treated him when he was once hospitalized:

http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/chn/docpdf/walusinskimemory.pdf

The term “involuntary memory” makes me think of two senses in which memories could feel involuntary: first, the posttraumatic flashback, in which the memory feels like your own past experience, but it is intrusive and frightening, and second, a memory that does not feel like your own memory—it feels like it belongs to another self, who had had the original experience, and is now remembering it for your benefit.

Keeping in mind Proust’s concept of multiple selves (see previous post), he may have mostly meant involuntary memory of the second kind.

Marcel Proust’s Concept of Normal Multiple Personality, and How Alternate Personalities Can Come Forth With “Lost” Memories

“Marcel spoke about 'the different persons of whom I am composed.' Proust had already begun developing his concept of multiple selves” (1, pp. 73-74).

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, literature began giving subtler descriptions of the many facets of human personality, of their interplay, and the polypsychic structure of the human mind, as seen in the works of Pirandello, Joyce, Italo Svevo, Lenormand, Virginia Woolf, and above all in those of Marcel Proust…In a well-known description, the narrator told how, after being informed of the death of a woman, Albertine, the news was being understood successively by various parts of the personality…certain past egos may suddenly reappear, bringing forth a revival of the past. It is then one of our past egos that is in the foreground, living for us” (2, p. 167).

1. William C. Carter. Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000.

2. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York, Basic Books, 1970.

Can you tell a book by its title? Does the title of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time say what it is about? Is it about “losing time”: Amnesia?

“In Search of Lost Time” is a very peculiar title, because people usually refer to things that they don’t remember as things that they have forgotten.

“Losing time” is something else entirely.

People speak of “losing time” when their lack of memory goes beyond normal, ordinary forgetting. It is a way of saying that they have amnesia, because there is something that they should be able to remember, but they don’t.

Is “In Search of Lost Time” about someone who is trying to overcome amnesia? And if so, what is the medical or psychiatric cause of his amnesia?

Creative “Dreams” May Occur When Awake; Creativity Often Comes From a “Committee” (Alternate Personalities), Not the Regular (Host) Personality

“Stephen King says, ‘Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake.’ He describes being completely caught up in a fictional world as he types, and unaware of real objects and events around him. Author James Hall agrees: ‘I don’t see that the dream state that we have at night is that much different from the dream state that writers learn to put themselves into as they’re writing’” (1, pp. 188-189).

John Steinbeck wrote, “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it” (1, p. ix).

Robert Louis Stevenson goes on to speculate on the nature of the Committee: “Who are they then? My Brownies, who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well. For myself—what I call I, my conscious ego…—I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all…so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share…I am an excellent advisor, I pull back and cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I held the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table which is the worst of it” (1, pp. 64-65).

1. Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D. The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving—and How You Can Too. New York, Crown Publishers, 2001.

Dreams in Multiple Personality Disorder, Normal Multiple Personality, Novelists, and Characters

Some novelists have spoken of dreams as being part of their creative process. Some of these experiences may be actual dreams (verifiable by EEG). But when we hear a story about a creative insight or inspiration in a dream, we often can’t be sure whether it was a dream, or a dreamlike, experience. Some people have very vivid, dreamlike experiences.

Whether dream or dreamlike, it may be a message from an alternate personality (alter) to the host personality (host), as seen in the following:

Dream as Clue to Multiple Personality

A person who was not yet in therapy, but who knew that she “lost time” (had memory gaps, amnesia) and heard voices (which later proved to be the voices of her alternate personalities, aka alters), had the following dream:

“I was sitting in a photo booth trying to get it to take a picture of me, but all the pictures that came out showed other people—or at least faint outlines of other people. In the mirror, where you see what will come out, the face kept changing, like ghosts” (1, p. 72).

Dream as Message from Alter to Host

In multiple personality, the host personality usually doesn’t know about the multiple personality. The dream quoted above could have been a message from an alternate personality to the host personality, if an alter had wanted to begin to inform the host about the multiple personality.

As an alter of another person said, “I show her [the host personality] images a lot, even while she’s awake, of memories and things I feel and want to do. But she sees them best if I show them to her while she’s dreaming” (1, p. 77).

Mistaking Real Life for a Dream

A woman with no cats had recurring “nightmares” involving cats. When she awoke from one of these “dreams,” she was surprised to find “the velour jogging suit in which she slept covered with cat hair” (1, p. 72). The real life activity of one her alters had previously been mistaken for a dream.

Dreams of Novelists and Characters

Since most novelists have a normal version of multiple personality, the above may help to understand the dreams, and dreamlike experiences, of novelists and their characters.

1. Deirdre Barrett. “Dreams in Multiple Personality Disorder,” pages 68-81 in Trauma and Dreams, edited by Deirdre Barrett. Harvard University Press, 1996.

Why are characters in novels called “characters” and not “personalities” (which would reveal that novels are about multiple personalities)?

Why should it be that writers refer to their “characters” and not to their “personalities”?

No doubt there is some kind of linguistic or historical argument that could be made to justify “characters” instead of “personalities,” but, obviously, it would be a rationalization.

The Host Personality: Differences Between Normal Multiple Personality in Novelists and Multiple Personality Disorder seen Clinically

Normal Multiple Personality

In this blog, the host personality (“host,” for short) is the personality who is good at doing interviews and dealing with the public. 

Some novelists don’t have a host personality. For example, as discussed previously, William Faulkner didn’t have one. Different personalities would be in control in different interviews, resulting in his giving different answers to the same questions, which was embarrassing. His lack of a good host personality was the reason he didn’t like to do interviews.

Some novelists have host personalities who are really a host committee, composed of several personalities who work in coordination. For example, as previously discussed, Doris Lessing spoke of having different aspects of her “Hostess.”

The novelist’s host personality may know—perhaps only vaguely or indirectly—that, inside, there are autonomous characters, alter egos, narrators, or other people of one sort or another. But the host will rarely think of this as multiple personality—unless they have read this blog, and even then, they probably won’t think they have multiple personality, because, in spite of what this blog says, they think that multiple personality would be crazy. And they are well-functioning, successful, and obviously not (or at least not very) crazy. They will usually think of their alters, not as alters, but as private aspects of their creativity, even though some of their alters may occasionally come out and participate in real life.

Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

Clinically, the host personality is usually the personality who seeks psychiatric treatment, but not treatment for MPD, because the host usually doesn’t know that there are alternate personalities (alters), since the host has amnesia (a memory gap) for when alters come out, and often doesn’t even remember the memory gaps (“amnesia for their amnesia”).

If the host does know about the alters—from voices in their head or things that alters have done when they came out—the host usually fears the alters and fights against their coming out, since the host experiences it as a loss of control, when embarrassing things happen. The host rarely thinks of the presence of the alters as multiple personality, per se, but rather as a sign or danger that they might be, or might go, crazy. And in their view, it is the worst type of crazy, in which people, literally, do not know what they are doing.

Occasionally, the person with normal multiple personality may have a major life stress or an emotional crisis, and temporarily have multiple personality disorder, like the main character in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, whose alternate personality kept making him compose “letters” in his head. But Herzog recovered without treatment, and thought of it as just having had some sort of “spell.”

Elena Ferrante: A Novelist Who Writes Under a Pseudonym and Refuses to Reveal Her Real Identity

I first heard of her only today in the New York Times article, “Scant Clues To a Secret Identity: The Pseudonymous Elena Ferrante Discusses Her Feminist Potboilers.” The author is known only by her pseudonym. She never makes personal appearances. Her interviews are conducted in writing.

It is as if Mark Twain had never made public appearances, and had refused to reveal his real identity, Samuel Clemens.

EW: Why are you living out the bold decision to write under a pseudonym?

ELENA FERRANTE: Anyone who writes knows that the most complicated thing is the rendering of events and characters in such a way that they are not realistic but real. In order for this to happen it is necessary to believe in the story one is working on. I gave my name to the narrator to make my job easier. Elena is, in fact, the name that I feel is most mine. Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.

—Email interview by Karen Valby, Sept. 5, 2014, in Entertainment Weekly

Now, to say her “entire identity is in the books I write” is, if you’ll excuse the pun, double talk. She is no more completely Elena Ferrante than Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain.

However, if she has multiple personality, and one of her personalities is named Elena Ferrante, and if the above is an interview of that personality, then, from that personality’s point of view, what she says could make sense.

But, since most novelists have multiple personality (a nonpathological version), why can’t this novelist deal with the public using her real name, like most other novelists? Probably because most novelists—e.g., Doris Lessing, see past posts—have a host personality to do interviews. The host personality uses the person’s real name and knows enough about both the writings and the person’s personal life to handle most questions. And, evidently, this novelist does not have a good host personality.

Nevertheless, why can’t the Elena Ferrante personality do in-person interviews and simply refuse to discuss personal matters? Apparently, what she looks like is an issue. Alternate personalities have their own self-image, and Elena Ferrante may have a self-image (e.g., as to age) that differs markedly from what other people expect. Based on how long she’s been publishing, etc., other people may expect that she’s middle-aged. But the Elena Ferrante personality may honestly see herself as being, let’s say, age twenty, and so she fears that when people see she is only twenty, that could be a problem.

Let me again emphasize that I just heard of this novelist, and I’m not in a position to address the issues of this novelist specifically. Host personality and personal appearance may, or may not, be the best explanations here. My main point is that something or other related to multiple personality may explain why she doesn’t do personal appearances or say who she really is.

Or maybe she doesn’t want an ex-husband to find her. That could be the explanation, but it is not the subject of this blog.

Spells and Spellbound: Multiple Personality is implied by “Spell,” as in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, and by “Spellbound,” as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield

Spell: Saul Bellow’s Herzog

As I noted in a recent post on Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Mr. Herzog explains his disturbed thinking by saying that he had been under a “spell.” What is a spell?

“A spell, charm, hex or incantation is a set of words, spoken or unspoken (prayer). Casting a spell is considered by its user to invoke some magical effect. Historical attestations exist for the use of some variety of incantations in many cultures around the world.” —Wikipedia

Thus, a spell, per se, implies that two minds are involved, the mind that casts the spell and the mind that is put under the spell. The spell that Herzog was under was not cast by a mind from outside: it was cast by a mind that was inside him, an alternate personality.

Spellbound: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield

As I noted in a recent post, Mr. Wakefield is described as being “spell-bound.” As in Bellow’s Herzog, there is no outside person casting a spell.

A famous use of the word “spellbound” is the title of a movie:

“Spellbound is a 1945 American psychological mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock…Dr. Petersen soon realizes, by comparing handwriting, that this man is an impostor and not the real Dr. Edwardes…He suffers from massive amnesia and does not know who he is…This incident had caused him to develop amnesia…He also remembers that his real name is John Ballantyne.” —Wikipedia

Thus, to be “spellbound” may mean that an alternate personality or identity is not only exerting influence from inside (as in “spell” above), but that the alternate personality has come out, taken control, and temporarily replaced the person’s regular identity in everyday life.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield: A multiple personality story in which a husband’s regular personality disappears, but returns after twenty years

The narrator says that he once read a story in some old magazine or newspaper about a married couple—the Wakefields—who lived in London. “The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upwards of twenty years,” at which point he returned home with no explanation. The narrator invites the reader to join him in imagining this scenario.

Since Mr. Wakefield is described as acting on impulse—his long disappearance is not premeditated—how did he support himself? He apparently had no job and did not draw on preexisting financial resources. After he buys a new wig and clothes that were not his usual fashion, “Wakefield is another man.”  Moreover, “Wakefield is spell-bound.”

My interpretation is that Wakefield had a switch between personalities, and that his alternate personality was in control, most of the time, for twenty years. If he actually did move out of his home, then the alternate personality, unknown to regular Wakefield, had arranged the finances. But it could be that Wakefield moved out only figuratively speaking. One day, suddenly, his wife may have found that her husband was no longer his regular self. But his regular self finally did return after twenty years.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Wakefield” [1835]. In Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selected Tales and Sketches. Third Edition with Introduction by Hyatt H. Waggoner. New York, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1950/1970, pp. 164-173.

Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, Multiple Personality: Objectively, Not Emotionally, Multiple Personality is the Least Controversial Psychiatric Diagnosis

Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder

For more than a hundred years—and now as much as ever—there has been a scientific controversy as to whether schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are, or are not, different diseases. The four main reasons for the controversy are:

1. genetics: studies show a large overlap for bipolar and schizophrenia.

2. medication: many of the same medicines are used to treat both.

3. heterogeneous symptoms: two persons diagnosed with schizophrenia may be quite different from each other; this may also be true of two persons diagnosed as bipolar.

4. overlap of symptoms: persons diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder may have many of the same symptoms. This is sometimes such a problem that an intermediate diagnosis, schizoaffective disorder, is used.

Why, then, don’t news stories about schizophrenia begin: “In the latest study of schizophrenia, one of the most controversial diagnoses in psychiatry…”? The reason is that it is a controversy, about which, very few people get emotional.

Multiple Personality

In contrast to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the symptoms used to diagnose multiple personality are not found in any other psychiatric disorder.

And whereas schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have been recognized clinical entities, reported in the medical literature, for about a hundred years, multiple personality has been a recognized clinical entity, reported in the medical literature, for at least two hundred years.

This is not to say that what is now called schizophrenia and bipolar disorder did not always exist. They probably did—although some historians dispute that they did—but they had not been considered distinct diagnoses.

And this is not to say that multiple personality has only existed for two hundred years. Previously called demon or spirit possession, it had been known since antiquity.

“Controversial”

So the next time you hear multiple personality referred to as “the most controversial diagnosis in psychiatry,” you should think, “The most controversial? Compared to what?”

And you should be aware of how the word “controversy” is being used. It is being used to refer to the fact that the issue makes some people emotional.

Who will agree, publicly, that great novelists have multiple personality? A Novelist? Scholar? Therapist? Person who knew a novelist? From what country?

To me, one of the most interesting things about writing this blog is the question of who will be first to agree, publicly, with its thesis. And when?

Will it be a novelist? Or have novelists concluded that the public isn’t ready. After all, when a few of them—in novels, nonfiction, and interviews—have virtually announced that they have multiple personality, the public has ignored them and acted like it doesn’t want to know.

Will it be a scholar? Or do scholars think that multiple personality is too controversial, that the label would devalue the object of their scholarship, and that they would only anger and/or be ridiculed by their colleagues?

Will it be a mental health professional who has treated novelists? Probably not, since most psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers are as ignorant about multiple personality, and as unable to recognize and diagnose it, as I used to be during my first twelve years in psychiatric practice. Besides, there is the issue of confidentiality, which must be honored.

Will it be the friend or family of a novelist? Or have they failed to recognize the multiple personality? And even if they have recognized it, would they be breaking a confidence? I don’t want anyone to break a confidence.

What country will the person come from? At first, this blog was visited mostly from the USA; then by 50% from the USA; but now mostly from other countries around the world. Although the USA has the biggest reputation, psychiatrically, for recognizing multiple personality, there are other countries whose culture is more accepting of the idea that people are, psychologically or spiritually, multiple or divided.

In any case, I will continue to read various novelists for this blog, since most of the books are enjoyable and teach me something I hadn't known.

Glossary of Types of Persons: Singles, Individuals, Dividuals, Dissociatives, and Multiples

[Note: Search "host personality" to see a more useful glossary.]

Singles: In the multiple personality literature, persons who have one, and only one, “I” (personality, identity, self). This one “I” plays all the person’s various roles in life and experiences all the person’s various moods. People without multiple personality are referred to as “singles” or “singletons.”

Individuals: In common usage, an individual is a single person (as opposed to a group of people), or a person who is undivided.

Dividuals: A dividual—in anthropological or religious literature—is a person who has a divided sense of personhood. Most dictionaries omit the word or label it as being archaic and not in general use.

Dissociatives: An occasionally used, informal term for persons with one of the psychiatric dissociative disorders; for example, dissociative identity disorder (the official DSM-5 diagnostic manual term for what was formerly called multiple personality disorder).

Multiples: The most common term for persons with multiple personality. A person with multiple personality is “a multiple.”

NOTE: This blog distinguishes between multiple personality disorder (a mental illness affecting about 1.5% of the general population) and normal multiple personality (the kind of multiple personality that is estimated to be present in 90% of novelists and 30% of the general population).

Peter Pan, on NBC-TV, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2014, makes this a good time to read the four posts on its creator, J. M. Barrie.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, Neither Real Life Nor a Dream, is a Parable of Fiction Writers’ “More Real Than Real” Inner World

At the end of Hawthorne’s much-analyzed short story, the narrator asks, “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? Be it so if you will; but alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown.” For he could not rid himself of the idea that all the apparently righteous people of his community were, secretly, in league with the Devil. This idea was so powerful that it cast a shadow over the rest of his days, so that even “…his dying hour was gloom” (1, pp. 149-163).

Most interpretations of this short story are prejudiced by the narrator’s suggestion that there are two, and only two, possibilities: Either young Goodman Brown had a dream or it was a real-life experience. I say neither. And as Sherlock Holmes has often said:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Dreams

Readers, it is true, may not know if a story is a dream or not until they have evaluated clues or are told. But characters, who are under contract to mimic real people, have no such difficulty. Characters, like real people, won’t realize it’s a dream while they are still dreaming, or before they are wide awake, but, once completely awake, they, like real people, find dreams obvious. After all, they wake up in bed (or in some sleeping position); their dreams quickly fade from memory unless they write them down or make some other special effort; and all of the magical flying and non sequiturs to their real life are obviously unreal, in retrospect.

Real Life

Aside from the fact that the Devil is only a literary metaphor—evil is real, but not Satan—it is quite clear that various things happen in this story that couldn’t be real. Moreover, subsequent to the experience, young Goodman Brown does not lead his life as though he thought it had been objectively real. He doesn’t flee or fight or investigate. But it had seemed real; in a way, more real than real.

“More Real Than Real”

What is neither a dream nor real, but feels, in the words of Nobel Prize novelist, Toni Morrison, “more real than real”? According to Morrison, it is novelists’ subjective experience of their characters and stories. Or, as I would say, it is the way people with multiple personality experience their alternate personalities.

Young Goodman Brown is a parable about fiction writers’ “more real than real” creative subjective experience.

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Young Goodman Brown” [1835]. In Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selected Tales and Sketches. Third Edition with Introductions by Hyatt H. Waggoner. New York, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1950/1970.

Novelist Saul Bellow Experienced His Deceased Friends as Aspects of Himself: Was this a Cognitive Ability Related to the Genesis of Characters?

I am continuing to read Bellow’s biography, which includes the following interesting statement:

“The deaths of contemporaries bring home the fact of one’s own mortality—in Bellow’s case, the process of mourning was intensified by his habit of experiencing his dead friends as aspects of himself” (1, p. 378).

Rather than apply the label introjective identification and leave it at that, I am wondering if this helps explain the genesis of a novelist’s characters.

Various novelists have said that characters in their novels may start as people they have known, but are not really copies of those people. Perhaps these other people serve as a stimulus for a personality-generator in the novelist’s mind, which produces a new personality to serve as a character.

New personalities that don’t serve as characters would be just “aspects of himself.”

1. James Atlas. Bellow: A Biography. New York, Random House, 2000.