The Following Ignore How Novelists Think: Cognitive Psychology, Literary Critics, Literary Theory, Literature Professors, Author Interviews, Literary Biography

In the last post, I quoted award-winning novelist, Ursula K. Le Guin, on how novelists think (they think like people with multiple personality). Past posts have quoted other famous writers as saying much the same thing. Yet, textbooks on cognitive psychology, textbooks on literary criticism and theory, literature professors, author interviews, and literary biographies have little or nothing to say about it.

Two points: First, most of these famous novelists, most or all of the time, are NOT crazy. They are high-functioning, productive citizens. Second, it is extremely unlikely that novelists are the only people with a normal version of multiple personality. As previously discussed, 90% of novelists probably have it, but 30% of the general public may, too.

Ursula K. Le Guin says: Most Novelists have “an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality” since that is how they experience their characters

“I think most novelists are aware at times of containing multitudes, of having an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality Disorder, of not entirely subscribing to the commonsense notion of what constitutes a self…

“Now, to trust the story, what does that mean? To me, it means being willing not to have full control over the story as you write it…Deliberate, conscious control…is invaluable in the planning stage—before writing—and in the revision stage—after the first draft. During the actual composition it seems to be best if conscious intellectual control is relaxed…Aesthetic decisions are not rational; they’re made on a level that doesn’t coincide with rational consciousness. Thus, in fact, many artists feel they’re in something like a trance state while working, and that in that state they don’t make the decisions…

“Whether they invent the people they write about or borrow them from people they know, fiction writers generally agree that once these people become  characters in a story they have a life of their own, sometimes to the extent of escaping from the writer’s control and doing and saying things quite unexpected…They take on their own reality, which is not my reality, and the more they do so, the less I can or wish to control what they do or say…While writing, I may yield to my characters, trust them wholly to do and say what is right for the story…

“…I had a story to write when I found in my mind and body an imaginary person whom I could embody myself in, with whom I could identify strongly, deeply, bodily. It was so much like falling in love that maybe that’s what it was…for it’s an active, intense delight, to be able to live in the character night and day, have the character living in me…

“When I am working on a story that isn’t going to work, I make up people. I could describe them the way how-to-write books say to do…They don’t inhabit me, I don’t inhabit them. I don’t have them. They are bodiless. So I don’t have a story. But as soon as I make this inward connection with a character, I know it body and soul, I have that person, I am that person. To have the person (and with the person, mysteriously, comes the name) is to have the story…These people come only when they’re ready, and they do not answer a call…I have called this waiting ‘listening for a voice’…and then the voice…would come and speak through me. But it’s more than voice. It’s a bodily knowledge. Body is story; voice tells it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Boston, Shambhala, 2004.

Brain Blood Flow and Physiology Prove that Multiple Personality is Authentic: It cannot be explained by fantasy proneness, pretending, or suggestion

Simone Reinders AAT, Willemsen ATM, Vos HPJ, den Boer JA, Nijenhuis ERS (2012): Fact or Factitious? A Psychobiological Study of Authentic and Simulated Dissociative Identity States. PLoS ONE 7(7): 10.1371/annotation/4f2000ce-ff9e-48e8-8de0-893b67efa3a4. doi:10.1371

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0039279

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: A Female Alternate Personality (The One From the Last Post?) Participates in The Creative Writing Process

From the first two pages:

“The writer, an old man with a white mustache…was past sixty…but something inside him was altogether young…it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight…

“In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young…thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes…

“For an hour the procession…passed before the eyes of the old man, and then…he crept out of bed and began to write…”

Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio [1919]. A Norton Critical Edition, Edited by Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Sherwood Anderson’s The Man Who Became a Woman: He sees female alternate personality in mirror and becomes her for a while

Occasionally, people with multiple personality see one of their alternate personalities when they look in a mirror. On questionnaires to assess people for dissociative experiences—multiple personality, also known as dissociative identity disorder, is a dissociative disorder—one question is whether the person has ever looked in a mirror and it didn’t look like them.

In this 1923 short story, a man says that when he was young, he had had an “experience…that I am forced, by some feeling inside myself, to tell…It will be kind of like confession is…What I mean is, this story has been on my chest…even after I married…and was happy. Sometimes I even screamed out at night and so I said to myself, ‘I’ll write the dang story,’ and here goes…

“…And then I looked up and saw my own face in the old cracked looking-glass…It—I mean my own face—was white and pasty-looking, and for some reason, I can’t tell exactly why, it wasn’t my own face at all…I’ve thought about it a lot since and I can’t make it out…

“The point is that the face I saw in the looking-glass…wasn’t my own face at all but the face of a woman. It was a girl’s face, that’s what I mean. That’s what it was. It was a girl’s face, and a lonesome and scared girl too. She was just a kid at that…

“It was a puzzler! All my life, you see…I had been dreaming and thinking about women…So I had invented a kind of princess…And now I was that woman, or something like her, myself…

“I couldn’t, to save my life, scream or make any sound. Just why I couldn’t I don’t know. Could it be because at the time I was a woman, while at the same time I wasn’t a woman? It may be that I was too ashamed of having turned into a girl…I don’t know about that. It’s over my head…

“I screamed at last and the spell that was on me was broken…then I stood on my own feet again and I wasn’t a woman, or a young girl any more but a man and my own self…”

Search "mirror" and "mirrors" in this blog for related previous posts.

Sherwood Anderson. “The Man Who Became a Woman,” from Horses and Men (1923). This short story is available online:

http://www.doczonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/enl.pdf

Sherwood Anderson’s Dissociative Fugue: He Traveled Four Days and Had Amnesia, Similar to the Real-Life Dissociative Fugue of Agatha Christie

See the two recent posts on Sherwood Anderson’s autobiography and on dissociative fugues. This is the second real-life dissociative fugue discussed in this blog. The first was Agatha Christie’s (see past posts). A fictional fugue has also been discussed, Flitcraft’s fugue in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (see past posts).

On November 28, 1912, Thanksgiving Day, Anderson and his employees went to work as usual, but his behavior was unusual. He told his secretary that he was going for a walk and that he did not know whether he would be back or not. He did not return to the office in Elyria, Ohio, and he did not come home that day or night, nor on Friday or Saturday or Sunday.

His so-called “Amnesia Letter” was postmarked from Cleveland on November 30. It was correctly addressed to his wife, but the biographer describes it as “the work of a person suffering severe mental and emotional stress.” The seven pages were “elliptic, dissociated, even surreal.” It includes four references to “his alter-ego T Powers.”

On Sunday, December 1, he entered a Cleveland drug store, where he told the pharmacist that he did not know where he was, where he had come from, or even what his name was. On being told it was Cleveland, he provided a pocket notebook, and someone who knew him in Cleveland was contacted. That person arranged for Anderson’s hospitalization.

“In his four-day escape from Elyria and its agonizing conflicts…Anderson was clearly undergoing what psychiatrists” call a “dissociative reaction…the more exact term…would seem to be ‘fugue’ ”… ‘fugue’ would seem to describe the 1907 breakdown as well, since in that incident too he left home and office and was found ‘wandering around in the woods.’”

On Monday, December 2, his wife visited him in the hospital. At first, he recognized her only with difficulty. However, after some sleep, he seemed to recover, was surprised to find himself in a hospital, and talked with her.

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What is important here about Anderson’s fugue is simply that he had one (actually, two, according to the biographer). In the psychiatric diagnostic manual, dissociative fugues are in the same chapter with other dissociative disorders, including dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality). And as I pointed out in my recent post on dissociative fugues, they are really a common, routine symptom of multiple personality.

But the routine mini-fugues and mini-amnesias of multiple personality are inconspicuous. It is usually only the person with multiple personality who knows when something has occurred that only he could have done, but he doesn’t remember doing it.

Walter B. Rideout. Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, Volume 1. Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, pp. 155-161.

Dissociative Fugue (Psychogenic Fugue): What is a fugue? Why is it “dissociative”? Why does a dissociative fugue imply multiple personality?

A classic fugue is when a person travels from where he is known to where he is unknown, and has amnesia for where he came from and who he is.

If such a person appears confused and is taken to the hospital emergency room, the doctor will round up the usual suspects: head trauma, drugs, epilepsy, dementia, malingering. If none of these is found, the condition will be diagnosed as having a psychological cause and called “dissociative fugue.”

If such a person had not appeared confused, because he had adopted a new identity, and if he is not found by people who know who he really is, he may start a new life under the new identity.

The fugue may or may not be precipitated by a known trauma or crisis. It may be brief or lengthy.

The old name for dissociative fugue was psychogenic fugue. It is now called “dissociative” fugue, because it is found in the chapter on Dissociative Disorders in the DSM, the psychiatric diagnostic manual.

The word “dissociative” refers to altered states of consciousness (like the trance state that novelists get into when they are writing) and/or mental dividedness and compartmentalization.

In the latest edition of the manual, dissociative fugue is considered a subtype of dissociative amnesia; that is, when a person with psychogenic amnesia travels. Another dissociative disorder is dissociative identity disorder, commonly known as multiple personality disorder.

Now, persons with multiple personality disorder frequently have fugues. It is a common symptom. To screen someone for multiple personality disorder, you might ask if they ever find themselves somewhere and not remember how they got there. This happens when personality A switches to personality B; B travels somewhere; B switches back to A; and A doesn’t know how he got there. A classic fugue might occur when B fails to switch back to A in a timely fashion.

So I suspect that many cases of so-called dissociative amnesia or dissociative fugue are the result of an incomplete diagnostic process. The doctor may have found a symptom of multiple personality without realizing it. Such a mistake is easy to make, because, as previously discussed, multiple personality is naturally hidden and secretive.

Added March 27, 2020: The reason that "Have you had memory gaps?" is a good screening question for multiple personality, is that people with multiple personality may commonly have mini-fugues. "Mini," because significant traveling is not a major feature. They just have a gap in memory for the time that an alternate personality took over. Indeed, they may not even have noticed the gap in their memory unless some embarrassment or comment by someone else brings it to their attention. Other people will usually not know when this is happening, because alternate personalities, in a person who has not been diagnosed, almost always go about their business incognito. Since such gaps usually have not caused a problem and have been going on since childhood, the person usually ignores them, may assume everyone has them, and will not raise the issue unless specifically asked. In short, a dissociative fugue is just one of multiple personality's routine memory gaps, but with major traveling.

Sherwood Anderson’s Autobiography A Story Teller’s Story:  He Makes a Tentative Self-Diagnosis of Multiple Personality

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) is mainly known today as having written Winesburg, Ohio, as having mentored William Faulkner, and as having had a dissociative fugue.

His 1924 autobiography is an attempt to understand himself. He does not succeed in regard to the fugue, about which he is sketchy and inconclusive. But he does describe a thought process [one that he says is common for him, unrelated to the fugue] that is indicative of multiple personality:

“What I mean is that my mind again did a thing it is always doing. It leaped away from the man sitting before me, confused him with the figures of other men. After I had left Edward [at the restaurant] I had walked about thinking my own thoughts. Shall I be able to explain what happened at that moment? In one instant I was thinking of the man now sitting before me and who had wanted to pay me a visit [another writer who wanted mentoring], of the ex-thief seen in the restaurant, of myself and my friend Edward, and of the old workman who used to come and stand at the kitchen door to talk with mother when I was a boy. 
      Thoughts went through my mind like voices talking” (1, p. 419).

All the above is going on in his mind, not in rapid succession, but “in one instant”; that is, simultaneously. Moreover, these were thoughts of persons of some sort, since only persons have voices and talk. However, since he is referring to these conversations as “thoughts”—not as real people or as due to some strange or outside force—it is not psychotic. In fact, these are typical kinds of voices heard by people with multiple personality; they are the voices of alternate personalities.

Did Anderson ever self-diagnose multiple personality? Tentatively, he did, when he was a noncombatant volunteer in the Spanish-American War: “Here was a life in which…One’s individuality became lost and…One’s body was a house in which lived two, three, perhaps ten or twelve personalities.” But once no longer under that stress, he found that it seemed “All gone now, that kind of imaginings, for the time anyway” (1, p. 272).

Perhaps he had not only heard their voices, but had seen the personalities, with his mind’s eye or as visions, which people with multiple personality are known to do. His experience in the army of having three to twelve personalities might be described as a “window of diagnosability,” when, under stress, the multiple personality became more overt, and looked more like most people expect.

Most of the time, multiple personality is camouflaged and hidden, and you have to know what questions to ask, including have there been any dissociative fugues.

1. Sherwood Anderson. A Story Teller’s Story [1924]. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Reading: What is it like for a person with multiple personality to read a novel? Would there be one reader or several? Would it depend on the story or genre?

Multiples (people with multiple personality) are different from each other. They have their own unique systems of alternate personalities. So there is no simple answer to the above questions.

The host personality (the one out in front on most social occasions) may or may not remember much of a novel that the person has read. It depends on whether the host was the reader or, if not, whether the host is co-conscious with the one or more alters (alternate personalities) who did do the reading.

Some hosts would not be able to tell me about a novel that the person had read, because they don’t read novels; it is so and so who does that. Or the host would have only a summary knowledge of the novel, which the actual readers had given the host to avoid social embarrassment.

Actually, if you are discussing a novel with a multiple, and if the host is not the one who reads novels, you will probably be talking to the alter who did read the novel, because which personality is out depends on what is being discussed. But if later you are talking to the host, you may find them at a loss if you suddenly bring up the novel.

Different alters may experience the novel differently. One may love it. Another may hate it. Another may find the theme or use of language interesting.

In most social situations, if you are discussing a novel, you won’t know that any of this is going on in the person with whom you are talking, because you won’t be aware that the person has multiple personality.

Who reads novels? Is “How many novels have you read in the past twelve months?” a valid way to screen people for multiple personality?

My last post, on literary critic, Harold Bloom, who is an avid reader, reminds me of a post from a year ago in which I speculated about what accounts for being an avid reader. (Search “avid readers.”)

I speculated that since most novels are written by people with multiple personality, then most avid readers of novels might also be people with multiple personality.

Whether that is true, or is true for some kinds of novels only, I don’t know.

Literary Critic Harold Bloom Says That Both He and Famous Writers are Possessed by Daemons, an Obsolete Theory for Multiple Personality

In a review of Harold Bloom’s The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime by Cynthia Ozick in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review, Professor Bloom is quoted as saying the following:

“The obscure being I could call Bloom’s daemon has known how it is done, and I have not. His true name (has he one?) I cannot discover, but I am grateful to him for teaching the classes, writing the books, enduring the mishaps and illnesses, and nurturing the fictions of continuity that sustain my 85th year.”

Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”: In Multiple Personality, “Persecutor Personalities” are Well-Known to Commit “Internal Homicides” in Apparent Suicides

Especially in view of the surprising popularity of my past post on this short story, I should elaborate on my interpretation: that what seems like a suicide may have been a “homicide” committed by an alternate personality against the host personality.

My interpretation is not a fanciful idea that I just made up for “To Room Nineteen.” I have worked with persecutor personalities in my treatment of patients with multiple personality, and they are common knowledge in the multiple personality literature:

“At least half or more of MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients have alter personalities who see themselves in diametric conflict with the host personality. This group of alter personalities, sometimes referred to as ‘internal persecutors,’ will sabotage the patient’s life and may inflict serious injury upon the body in attempts to harm or kill the host or other personalities. They may be responsible for episodes of self-mutilation or for ‘suicide’ attempts, which are actually ‘internal homicides’ as persecutor personalities attempt to maim or kill the host. The perceived degree of separateness that allows one personality to believe that it can kill another personality without endangering itself has been labeled a ‘pseudodelusion’ by Kluft and a form of ‘trance logic’ by Spiegel.

“Some persecutor personalities can be recognized as ‘introjects’ of the original abuser(s); others have evolved from original helper personalities into current persecutors. Typically, they strike a contemptuous or condescending attitude toward the therapist and often actively seek to undermine treatment. In spite of their history of hostile behavior toward the patient as a whole and their negative reactions toward the therapy, they can be won over and enlisted in the patient’s struggle to improve the quality of his or her life. In their anger, they contain much of the energy and strength that an MPD patient needs to survive and improve” (1, pp. 108-109).

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

The Intrinsic Hiddenness of Multiple Personality: Edith Wharton and Charles Dickens Were Taken Over By Storyteller Personalities in Private

As discussed in my recent post, when Edith Wharton was a little girl, she would not say that everyone should stop what they are doing and pay attention while she tells stories; rather, she would excuse herself and go to have her dissociative, storytelling experience in private. The reason is that it was not her Edith personality who was making up and telling the stories: an alternate personality was telling the stories to Edith, and it was a private communication.

Fortunately, her mother would often look through a crack in the door to see and hear what her little girl was doing, and so these episodes evidently became a family anecdote. Indeed, it is not clear from Wharton’s autobiography how much of these episodes she, herself, actually remembered, and how much she knew only indirectly, from her mother’s recollections.

Charles Dickens had similar episodes as an adult novelist. As reported toward the end of my Dickens essay (the first post in this blog), one of his daughters tells of when she had been convalescing from an illness, and he let her rest on the couch in his study while he was writing. She describes how he was taken over by his storytelling personalities.

The point is that multiple personality, by its very nature, is hidden and secretive. The myth that it is dramatic and histrionic is based on the fact that most people become aware of it only under atypical circumstances: either when the person is in an emotional crisis and the alternate personalities temporarily become overt, or when the person is demonstrating the condition for educational purposes. A few people with multiple personality do seek attention for it, but my first thought would be to consider the possibility that such a person were faking.

Now, after you have met and spoken with a person’s alternate personalities, and know them by name—when their cover is totally blown, so to speak—they may continue to be overt with you. But, otherwise, multiple personality, by its very nature, is hidden and secretive.

When Hamlet told the players to hold a “mirror” up to nature, Shakespeare was using a metaphor for multiple personality in his search for truth

Hamlet tells the players to be true to reality in their play-within-a-play by holding a “mirror" up to nature. But is using a mirror an apt metaphor for getting at the truth? Are not mirrors where vain people see what they want to see? Don’t mirrors reverse right and left? Would not a person searching for truth hold up a lamp, not a mirror?

To urge the players to show the real nature of life, a more apt metaphor would have been portrait. Hamlet might have told the players to paint, as ‘twere, a portrait of life. After all, a great portrait artist can show a person’s true character even better then a photograph. I appreciate that portraits can be flattering rather than truthful, but I am speaking of portraits at their best. Since a person is more likely to see the truth about others than about himself, a portrait is more likely than a mirror to tell the truth.

In a previous post on Hamlet, I asked why Shakespeare used the metaphor of a ghost, when a superior metaphor for his purposes might have been dreams. It turned out that the “ghost” was Hamlet’s alternate personality. Now in this post I ask why Shakespeare used mirrors as a metaphor for getting at the truth.

Perhaps the best-known multiple personality story in regard to mirrors is Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” but in this blog I have discussed mirrors and multiple personality mainly in connection with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story “Dialogue with a Mirror” and his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. I also mention mirrors in my essay arguing that Freud, himself, probably had multiple personality. The easiest way to access those posts is to search “mirror” in this blog.

Mirrors are a metaphor for multiple personality for two reasons. First, the image of a person in a mirror is like a “double” of that person, a second self. Second, in multiple personality, mirrors may be problematic, because when alternate personalities look in a mirror, they may or may not see a person who corresponds to their own self-image; for example, if a woman’s male alternate personality looks in a mirror and sees a woman, or if an adult’s child-aged alternate personality sees an adult.

In short, Hamlet features two metaphors for multiple personality: ghosts and mirrors. Shakespeare is saying that multiple personality is how he and other fiction writers find the truth.

Edith Wharton’s Autobiography: Her multiple personality began in early childhood, when a storytelling personality repeatedly took control

When Edith Wharton was a little girl (before she had learned how to read), she had episodes—highly pleasurable, but against her will—in which her consciousness and behavior were taken over: She “had to obey the furious Muse” (storyteller personality):

“The imagining of tales…had gone on in me since my first conscious moments; I cannot remember the time when I did not want to ‘make up’ stories…I had to have a book in my hand to ‘make up’ with, and from the first it had to be a certain sort of book. The page had to be closely printed, with rather heavy black type, and not much margin…

“…making up was ecstasy. At any moment the impulse might seize me; and then, if the book was in reach, I had only to walk the floor, turning the pages as I walked, to be swept off full sail on the sea of dreams. The fact that I could not read added to the completeness of the illusion…Parents and nurses, peeping at me through the cracks of doors (I always had to be alone to ‘make up’), noticed that I often held the book upside down, but that I never failed to turn the pages, and that I turned them at about the right pace for a person reading aloud as passionately and precipitately as was my habit.

“There was something almost ritualistic in the performance. The call came regularly and imperiously; and though, when it caught me at inconvenient moments, I would struggle against it conscientiously—for I was beginning to be a very conscientious little girl—the struggle was always a losing one. I had to obey the furious Muse; and there are deplorable tales of my abandoning the ‘nice’ playmates who had been invited to ‘spend the day’, and rushing to my mother with the desperate cry: ‘Mamma, you must go and entertain that little girl for me. I’ve got to make up” (1, pp. 33-35).

Many years later, as a successful novelist, writing her autobiography, Edith Wharton says:

“No picture of myself would be more than a profile if it failed to give some account of the teeming visions which, ever since my small-childhood…have incessantly peopled my inner world…

“What I mean to try for is the observation of that strange moment when the vaguely adumbrated characters whose adventures one is preparing to record are suddenly there, themselves, in the flesh, in possession of one, and in command of one’s voice and hand. It is there that the central mystery lies…

“My impression is that, among English and American novelists, few are greatly interested in these deeper processes of their art…

“…my characters always appear with their names…I often wonder how the novelist whose people arrive without names manages to establish relations with them!…

“…what I want to try to capture is an impression of the elusive moment when these people who haunt my brain actually begin to speak within me with their own voices…as soon as the dialogue begins, I become merely a recording instrument…my hand [has] only to set down what these…people say to each other in a language, and with arguments, that appear to be all their own…

“…the process…takes place in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness…is as real and as tangible as my encounters with my friends and neighbors, often more so, though on an entirely different plane…and my two lives, divided between these equally real yet totally unrelated worlds, have gone on thus, side by side, equally absorbing, but wholly isolated from each other, ever since in my infancy I ‘read stories’ aloud to myself [out of a book] which I generally held upside down” (1, pp. 197-205).

Novelists and other people with normal multiple personality have a different kind of imagination than people who do not have multiple personality. They intellectually recognize it as being subjective, but they experience it as being more real than real, and as involving other people or selves. What they call those other people or selves—muse, alter ego, shadow, character, voice, god, dialogic or polyphonic imagination, unconscious, spirit, guide, etc.—is culturally determined. But whatever they call them, they have the essential features of alternate personalities.

1. Edith Wharton. A Backward Glance [1933]. An Autobiography. New York, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1998.

The blog “Normal Novelists have Multiple Personality” is two years old: Why was it started and why is it read around the world by a smart few?

Growing up, after my cowboy and athlete phases, I wanted to be a novelist, possibly because we had a set of Charles Dickens. But my practical models for adulthood were my father and mother’s brother, who had been roommates at medical school. So in college, besides premedical courses, I took a combined major of psychology and philosophy. And after medical school, I specialized in psychiatry. I thought that psychology, philosophy, medicine, and psychiatry would help me to understand the human mind and condition, and, eventually, to write a great novel.

As a psychiatrist, my most eye-opening clinical experience has been multiple personality, which I didn’t diagnose until I had been in practice for twelve years. The reason for the long delay was that, like most psychiatrists, I had been taught almost nothing about it in medical school and psychiatric residency, and, in the typical case, the symptoms are camouflaged and hidden from both doctor and patient (as I explain elsewhere in this blog). Fortunately, it becomes clearly observable—without using drugs or hypnosis—once you learn about it, which I finally did.

During the years prior to my learning about multiple personality, I had occasionally read newspaper and magazine interviews of novelists. And when they spoke, as they often did, of hearing the voice of, and of interacting with, their characters—whom they described as having minds of their own—I had always thought that they were joking. But now that I had seen multiple personality and understood what it was, I realized that these novelists were describing multiple personality, the only difference being that it was a nonclinical form of it. To repeat: What novelists commonly describe about their interactions with their characters is, in itself, a sufficient proof of this blog’s thesis, that normal novelists have multiple personality.

So I decided to look more closely at a specific novelist. And since, when I was a boy, my family had had that set of Dickens, I naturally chose him. The result was the first post of this blog, “Dickens, Multiple Personality, and Writers” (June 2013), which was also the blog’s original title. But I did not decide to write this blog until I had the following experience.

For years, I had occasionally read books on writing. And now I was reading two nonfiction books, and also one novel, by a contemporary novelist. I was startled to find that one of the nonfiction books contained an essay written in the first person by an alternate personality, who spoke of the novelist as someone else. And then I found that the other nonfiction book contained comments by two alternate personalities on how they controlled different aspects of the novelist’s writing. And then I found that the novel contained a character who had obvious, but unacknowledged, multiple personality.

In an email exchange between me and the novelist, first the novelist pretended that the essay was a joke; then the novelist declined to comment on the passages I quoted from the other nonfiction book, passages that had clearly been written by alternate narrative personalities commenting on their own contribution to the writing process; and then the novelist said that the character in the novel—who had changes of personality associated with episodes of amnesia (without any medical condition or intoxication to explain the amnesia)—did not have multiple personality, but was just exhibiting, based on the novelist’s own life experience, “ordinary psychology.” (To the novelist, classic multiple personality was ordinary psychology.)

After all the above, I felt I had to do something. But what?

The reaction I had gotten to my Dickens essay from Dickens scholars was that they could not dispute my facts about Dickens, but since they had no experience with multiple personality, they could not be convinced about that. And the contemporary novelist had shown me that novelists would not be any more receptive to the issue than the literary scholars.

Should I publish something for people who did know about multiple personality? The problem is, most mental health professionals who do have clinical experience with multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative identity disorder) have never heard of, and are not interested in, normal multiple personality, the subject of this blog. And they have never read novels or studied novelists with multiple personality in mind.

Since there was hardly any audience for my thesis in either the literary world or in psychiatry, I decided that it would be futile to pursue traditional publication. But why, then, write a blog?

There are several advantages to a blog. First, you waste no time on getting it published. You sign up with a host like Google Blogger and it costs nothing (except if you choose to advertise, which I do, as noted below). Second, a realistic expectation as to how many people would buy a book by an unknown author on this subject is a few thousand, if you are lucky. And this blog has been read by that many people, and counting. Third, a traditional book or ebook would, probably, be soon forgotten. But since a blog is ongoing, when the time eventually comes that there is an audience for my thesis—possibly as a result of the blog’s persistence—the blog will be there to take advantage of that opportunity. Fourth, the blog is a format that suits me.

As I mentioned, I do advertise this blog. Initially, I advertised in literary publications, but that was a waste of money. I have also tried direct communication. But I found that most literary scholars and novelists are just not interested in what I have to say. So I advertise this blog with Google Ads, which is why the blog has been visited from over fifty countries around the world.

My blog is hosted by Google Blogger, and my only connection with social media is Google Plus. Every time I make a new post, a link to it appears on my computer screen if I Google the subject matter mentioned in the post’s title. I hope I am correct in assuming that the same link to my blog appears on the screens of others with Google Plus if they happen to be searching that subject using Google. I imagine that I could get links to my blog on more screens if I were involved with more social media, but I’m not.

The blog has been visited more than thirty thousand times, but I’ve read that 90% of visits to most blogs are by people who look for a few seconds and leave. Moreover, the posts almost never get any comments. So I infer that relatively few people read the blog regularly and take it seriously. I think the reason is that most literary people don’t relate to the psychiatry, and most psychiatric people who treat multiple personality don’t relate to the blog’s thesis that many normal people have multiple personality. In short, my blog has a very smart, but very small, worldwide audience.

However, as mentioned in the last post, it took five years for people to notice the Wright brothers, and this blog is only two years old.

David McCullogh’s The Wright Brothers: How Long Does It Take For People to Look Up and Believe Their Own Eyes? In That Case, Nearly Five Years.

Their first flight was on December 17, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, which was followed by more than 150 flights in 1904 and 1905.

“Shockingly, their achievement drew almost no notice until 1906, when Scientific American acknowledged the brothers by challenging their honesty—if they had really flown, the magazine suggested, reporters would have let the world know by now…

“It was not until the spring of 1908 that the Wrights were able to capture the attention of their own country…” (Daniel Okrent, “The Aviators,” The New York Times Book Review, May 10, 2015).

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: Why did Lily Bart have no emotional connection with the first man in her life, her father? What was the trauma?

This novel is the story of Lily Bart’s self-sabotaged attempts to make a connection with some man and get married. As discussed in the last post, she was sabotaged by her alternate personalities: she had multiple personality. And that suggests a traumatic childhood, but the reader is not told what had happened.

“It was a relief to Lily when her father died” (Book I, Chapter III). Why? Superficially, it was because he had declared financial ruin and the family was in turmoil. But the reader is given to understand that Lily had never had a good emotional connection with her father. Why was that?

We are told that “Lily seldom saw her father by daylight. All day he was ‘down town’; and in winter it was long after nightfall when she heard his fagged step on the stairs and his hand on the school-room door. He would kiss her in silence, and ask one or two questions of the nurse or governess…In summer, when he joined them for a Sunday at Newport or Southampton, he was even more effaced and silent than in winter…Generally, however, Mrs. Bart and Lily went to Europe for the summer, and…for the most part he was never mentioned or thought of…”

Now, when her father opened the school-room door, why didn’t Lily’s behavior show that she was glad to see him? Why didn’t she throw her arms around his neck and kiss him? And why did her mother take Lily away from her father at every opportunity, where they would never mention or think of him?

Had Lily been abused by her father? Had Lily’s mother been abused in her own childhood, and was she raising Lily accordingly? Had Lily’s father been traumatized in his childhood, making him incapable of emotional attachments? Had Lily been abused or traumatized by someone or something other than her parents? All the reader can infer from Lily’s multiple personality is that something traumatic had happened.

Judging from Edith Wharton’s creative process, quoted in my April 25, 2015 post, she may not have realized that Lily had multiple personality, and may not have known what the trauma was, either.

Lily Bart’s Multiple Selves (Alternate Personalities) in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth prevent her marrying, because they are at cross-purposes

“Miss Bart…had a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another” (1, p. 101).

“She might have married more than once—the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of existence—but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from it” (1, p. 123).

“That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic” (1, p. 148). 

The explanation is that she has multiple selves who are at cross-purposes with each other. Little is known about these selves, and it is difficult to know which are the same, but referred to by different names, and which are distinct, but there may be more, perhaps many more, than two of them, variously referred to as “captive,” “free-spirit,” “frightened self,” “insistent voice,” “abhorrent being,” “Furies,” speaking in an “altered voice,” “anguished self,” “a hundred different points of consciousness…this legion of insurgent nerves…sentinels” (see below).

“There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free-spirit quivered for flight…Was it love, she wondered…” (1, p. 52).

“It was as if the eager current of her being had been checked by a sudden obstacle which drove it back upon itself. She looked at him helplessly, like a hurt or frightened child: this real self of hers, which he had the faculty of drawing out of the depths, was so little accustomed to go alone!” (1, p. 75).

“But all the while another self was sharpening her to vigilance, whispering the terrified warning that every word and gesture must be measured” (1, p. 114).

“…the frightened self in her was dragging the other down…Whence the strength came to her she knew not; but an insistent voice warned her that she must leave the house openly…She seemed a stranger to herself, or rather there were two selves in her, the one she had always known, and a new abhorrent being to which it found itself chained…Yes, the Furies might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the dark corners, and now they were awake and the iron clang of their wings was in her brain…” (1, pp. 116-117).

“Then [Lily Bart] lifted her eyes to his and went on in an altered voice… ‘There is some one I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you—we are sure to see each other again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room’ ” (1, p. 240).

“Sleep was what she wanted…The little bottle was at her bedside…but as soon as she had lain down every nerve started once more into separate wakefulness…her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered…She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness was possible…a hundred different points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could still this legion of insurgent nerves?…She raised herself in bed and swallowed the contents of the glass; then blew out the candle and lay down…Tonight the drug seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts” (1, pp. 250-251).

1. Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth [1905]. A Norton Critical Edition, Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. New York, WW Norton & Company, 1990.

Multiple Selves: When characters in a novel have a multiple, split, or divided sense of self, it means that they have multiple personality

Multiple selves are the sense of self of each of the person’s multiple personalities. Do not confuse multiple selves with multiple roles. Everyone has multiple roles, but only persons—or characters in a novel—who have multiple personality will have the subjective experience of multiple selves.

SENSE of SELF:  The Subjective Side of Personality

“sense of self an individual’s feeling of identity, uniqueness, and self-direction. See also…sense of identity” (1, p. 837).

“sense of identity awareness of being a separate and distinct person. See identity” (1, p. 837).

“identity an individual’s sense of self…Identity involves a sense of continuity: the feeling that one is the same person today that one was yesterday or last year…and the feeling that one’s memories, purposes, values, and experiences belong to the self” (1, p. 463).

PERSONALITY: The Objective Side of Sense of Self 

“personality the configuration of characteristics and behavior that comprises an individual’s unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns” (1, p. 689).

ROLE: A Person’s Superficial Change to Fit Situations

role a coherent set of behaviors expected of an individual in a specific position within a group or social setting…individuals’ actions are regulated by the part they play in the social setting rather than by their personal predilections or inclinations” (1, p. 804).

1. American Psychological Association. APA Dictionary of Psychology. Gary R. VandenBos, PhD, Editor in Chief. Washington DC, American Psychological Association, 2007.

Evidence of Huck Finn’s multiple personality in his self-contradictory—not ambivalent or hypocritical—attitudes about freeing Jim

Many readers have been disappointed with Huck, when, in the last part of the novel, he says he truly believes that he would go to hell for freeing Jim, and when he plays games with Tom while Jim remains literally in chains and fearful for his life. It appears that Huck is a racist at heart, either by ambivalence or hypocrisy.

But there is a third possibility.

If Huck were ambivalent about freeing Jim, he would honestly like to free Jim, but he would not want to become estranged from all his friends and family who believe in slavery, and he would not want to get lynched. People are ambivalent when they are pulled in different directions by conflicting interests.

If Huck were a hypocrite, he would say he wants to free Jim, but he would know that he really didn’t want to, in his heart.

But Huck is neither ambivalent nor hypocritical. He wants to free Jim and he doesn’t want to free Jim. He wants both, honestly, in his heart. How can such self-contradiction be possible?

True self-contradiction is possible only in multiple personality, when one personality honestly thinks one way and another personality honestly thinks another way, and the two ways are incompatible and contradictory.

Where did Mark Twain get the idea for Huck Finn to have nine names: “Huck” and eight aliases? Nine names for one child needs explaining.

As I said in the last post, Huckleberry Finn is a multiple personality scenario: a boy copes with child abuse by adopting alternate identities. Why would one runaway boy have eight different aliases or pseudonyms unless he had multiple personality?

Most novelists—Twain included (see past posts)—do not construct their major characters. Major characters “arrive,” and once they “come alive” to the novelist, are experienced as more or less autonomous people.

So it was probably Huck who told Twain that he had nine names.

“Why do you need nine names?” Twain asked Huck.

“Because ‘Huck’—we—are really nine people,” and he introduced the others.

Twain thought the public would never buy it. And after all, it was his novel. But he needed Huck. So they compromised.

“You can use the nine names,” said Twain, “but you all must pass as one person, as far as the readers are concerned. Act like one person who is just pretending.”

Well, Huck had no problem with that, since he was the group’s host and spokesman, and they frequently passed for one person, anyway.

If you have a better explanation for why one runaway child needed so many names, please submit your comment.

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn says childhood trauma causes multiple personality, a century before psychiatrists knew it, but what about Jim? 

Huck escapes his father’s child abuse by adopting alternate identities, which is the multiple personality scenario. So Huckleberry Finn is a multiple personality story.

However, once you realize that this novel is a fictionalized version of a boy with multiple personality, the most interesting questions that remain are not about Huck, but about Jim: Is Jim one of Huck’s personalities—a good-father personality? (Alternate personalities think they are real people, and they often want to be set free to live their own lives as they see fit.) Or is Jim a separate person, a man with his own alternate personalities?

But before discussing Jim, let me briefly quote how psychiatry came to see multiple personality as a way to cope with childhood trauma.

“MPD [multiple personality disorder] appears to be a psychobiological response to a relatively specific set of [traumatic] experiences occurring within a circumscribed developmental window [childhood]…

“The first explanations of multiple personality assumed a supernatural etiology such as spirit possession or reincarnation. These explanations were popular during the period from about 1800 to the turn of the century…During the period from about 1880 to the mid-1920s, physiological explanations…were invoked in conjunction with the then newly discovered lateralization of cerebral functions [right brain, left brain]…During the half century from about 1920 to 1970…psychological explanations (e.g., role playing and iatrogenic creation by hypnosis) were commonly offered explanations…The linkage between childhood trauma and MPD has slowly emerged in the clinical literature over the last 100 years, although this association is obvious to any clinician who has worked with several cases…It was not until the 1970s that the first reports clearly connecting MPD to childhood trauma began to appear…The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) survey of 100 MPD cases found that 97% of all MPD patients reported experiencing significant trauma in childhood…

[Types of childhood trauma reported in cases of MPD have included] “sexual abuse and physical abuse…extreme neglect…witness to violent death…extreme poverty…confinement abuses…such as tying the child up; locking the child in closets, cellars, or trunks… emotional abuse…ridicule, demeanment, and denigration were often systematically inflicted…Even when actual physical abuse was not inflicted, the children may have been ceaselessly intimidated by threats of violent punishments…Valued possessions and even pets may have been destroyed in front of the children as an example of what was going to happen to them…[medical conditions with] sustained pain or debilitating injury…confined to a series of body casts…underwent repeated surgery…near-death experiences” (1, pp. 45-50).

In short, multiple personality is a way to cope with traumatic experiences in childhood. However, since only a certain percentage of children have sufficient imagination to create alternate identities, only a fraction of traumatized children develop multiple personality.

Now, as Toni Morrison says, “If the emotional environment into which Twain places his protagonist is dangerous, then the leading question the novel poses for me is, What does Huck need to live without terror, melancholy and suicidal thoughts? The answer, of course, is Jim…

“Twain’s black characters were most certainly based on real people. His nonfiction observations of and comments on ‘actual’ blacks are full of references to their guilelessness, intelligence, creativity, wit, caring, etc…

“Huck’s desire for a father who is adviser and trustworthy companion is universal, but he also needs something more: a father whom, unlike his own, he can control. No white man can serve all three functions…Only a black male slave can deliver all Huck desires…” (2, pp. 387-390).

I agree with Morrison, but take it a step further, and infer that Jim would make an excellent alternate personality for Huck—not alternate in the sense of one or the other being out at any one time, but in the sense of an imaginary companion, a protector/companion personality, with whom Huck is co-conscious.

It is no obstacle to this interpretation that the novel portrays Jim as a separate person. For it is common in fiction to incarnate alternate personalities as if they were real people; e.g., in Dostoevsky’s The Double and Dean Koontz’s Cold Fire.

However, an equally valid interpretation is that Jim truly is a real, separate person. But this would not divorce Jim from the issue of multiple personality. For he, too—as a slave, if for no other reason—has had a traumatic childhood. And his superstitious beliefs suggest that he is highly imaginative. So I infer that “Jim” (the slave) is not his only personality.

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

2. Toni Morrison. “This Amazing, Troubling Book” [1996], in Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Edited by Thomas Cooley. A Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition. New York, WW Norton & Company, 1999, pp. 385-392.

Saul Bellow: Martin Amis, Sam Tanenhaus, James Parker, Francine Prose in New York Times Book Review don’t know Bellow had multiple personality

Tomorrow’s Book Review, prompted by a new biography and a new book of collected nonfiction, has four essays about Saul Bellow. But there is no mention of Bellow’s multiple personality, discussed previously in six posts, which you can access by searching “Saul Bellow” in this blog:

Nov. 15, 2014: Bellow credits an alternate personality as his co-writer

Nov. 17, 2014: Bellow discusses Herzog and himself in regard to multiple personality

Nov. 26, 2014: In Herzog, both Madeleine and Herzog have multiple personality

Nov. 28, 2014: Bellow’s Doppelgänger Pseudonym and Paradoxical Memory

Nov. 29, 2014: Bellow writes as slave of alternate personalities

Dec. 9, 2014: “Spell” in Herzog

Bellow did not use the term “multiple personality,” but what he said about himself and wrote in Herzog amounts to the same thing.

Reading what I quote Bellow as saying, you may think, “Don’t be silly, that’s just how novelists are.” True, and that’s the point of this blog.