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.”