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.