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.