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.