Stephen King quoted on Writing: His voices, visions, trances; his becoming or observing autonomous characters; his cowriter muse and discovered stories

“…to be a writer…you have to imagine worlds that aren’t there…You’re hearing voices…As children…we’re told to distinguish between reality and those things. Adults will say, ‘You have an invisible friend, that’s nice, you’ll outgrow that.’ Writers don’t outgrow it” (1, p. 4).

“When I write as Richard Bachman [a pseudonym under which King wrote several novels], it opens up that part of my mind. It’s like a hypnotic suggestion that frees me to be somebody who is a little bit different…and it was fun to be somebody else for a while, in this case, Richard Bachman” (1, pp. 138-139).

“After writing more than a dozen novels, one thing hadn’t changed: Steve rarely provided detailed physical descriptions for the characters he created. ‘For me, the characters’ physical being is just not there. If I’m inside a character, I don’t see myself because I’m inside that person,’ he explained” (1, p. 147).

“[King] was by himself…he was thinking about getting high later…Then, out of the blue, came a voice that told him to reconsider. You don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to was the exact phrase he heard. ‘It’s like it wasn’t my voice,’ he said later” (1, pp. 159-160).

“There is a muse—traditionally, the muses were women, but mine’s a guy…He may not be much to look at, that muse guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty…” (2, pp. 144-145).

“You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted…I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible…I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and transcribe them, of course)…When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that…I believe it. And I do…Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world…My job [is to] watch what happens and then write it down…I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way…” (2, pp. 163-165).

“And if you do your job, your characters will come to life and start doing stuff on their own. I know that sounds a little creepy if you haven’t actually experienced it, but it’s terrific fun when it happens. And it will solve a lot of your problems, believe me” (2, p. 195).

“Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake. And that usually happens. If I sit down to write in the morning, in the beginning of that writing session and the ending of that session, I’m aware that I’m writing. I’m aware of my surroundings…But in the middle, the world is gone and I’m able to see better…I can remember finding that state for the first time and being delighted. It’s a little bit like finding a secret door in a room [or like Alice falling down a rabbit hole?] but not knowing exactly how you got in…And after doing that for a while it was a little bit like having a posthypnotic suggestion” (3, pp. 141-142).

All the above is characteristic of multiple personality (in this case, normal multiple personality). People with multiple personality may hear the voices of their autonomous, alternate personalities, or may see them, or may switch to become them. It all has similarities to hypnosis; indeed, one old theory of multiple personality is that it is a kind of self-hypnosis.

1. Lisa Rogak. Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King. New York, Thomas Dunne St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008.

2. Stephen King. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York, Scribner, 2000/2010.

3. Naomi Epel. Writers Dreaming. New York, Carol Southern Books, 1993.

Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, Dissociative Identity Disorder: Which of these has the highest prevalence in DSM-5, and higher than it had in DSM-IV?

Most psychiatrists, psychologists, science reporters, and members of the general public would get this question wrong. There is a myth that dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) was a fad diagnosis—beginning with the publication of Sybil in 1970s and lasting through the 1990s—but that now it has gone back to being rare. That is a myth, as is seen if you compare the figures for prevalence given in the last two editions of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-IV (1994) and DSM-5 (2013).

The prevalence figures for how common these conditions are in the general public are as follows:

DSM-IV (1994)

Schizophrenia: 0.5%—1.0%

Bipolar Disorder: 0.4%—1.6%

Dissociative Identity: too controversial to give a figure

DSM-5 (2013)

Schizophrenia: 0.3%—0.7%

Bipolar Disorder: 0.6%

Dissociative Identity: 1.5% (1.6% in males; 1.4% in females)

The above figures are not cast in stone, since various studies have different results, depending on where the studies were done and the methods used. The above figures are a consensus of experts based on all available studies. So just note the magnitude and trends.

Of the three conditions, multiple personality is the most common, and it is the only one whose trend is toward being both more and more certain.

Jane Austen’s Emma (post 2): Can a person love someone and not know it? How do I know it is possible and is related to multiple personality?

Can you both know something and not know it? It seems logically impossible. Although everyone has a little experience with that when they can’t remember a particular fact, but it comes back to them later, most people don’t have trouble accessing the fact that they love someone.

I learned that both knowing and not knowing is possible when I once asked a patient my usual screening question for multiple personality disorder—“Do you ever have memory gaps?”—and she answered, “No.” So I figured that she probably did not have it and moved on.

However, about six months later, in the course of my getting an update from her on her everyday life, I noted a discrepancy between something she mentioned and what she had told me previously. I was treating her in the psychiatric clinic of a hospital, and I assumed that she was getting all of her general medical care at the medical clinic of that same hospital (which was the hospital closest to where she lived), but now she made reference to attending the medical clinic at another hospital, and this took me by surprise. I asked for some verification, and she said that she kept the papers related to that treatment in a particular dresser drawer at home.

When I made an issue of her attending the other clinic as something she had never told me before, she became flustered [she was switching back to her regular personality], and then [her regular personality] said she knew nothing about going to a medical clinic at another hospital. But I told her to look in a particular dresser drawer when she got home and tell me next time what she found.

At the next appointment, she said that she had been surprised to find papers from another hospital in the drawer I had told her to look. And then I asked her the same question I had asked her six months before, “Do you ever have memory gaps?” But now she said that she did, and that she had been having them since childhood. “Well, why didn’t you tell me that when I asked you six months ago?” And I’ll never forget her answer:

“I knew, but I didn’t know.” She knew it sounded ridiculous, but that was her truth.

Postscript: The Faulkner quote in the New York Times Book Review is taken out of context: He was trying to hide his alcoholism and multiple personality.

Yesterday’s post needs further explanation for those who don’t know about William Faulkner’s life and have not read my posts on him.

When Faulkner said that it was the writing, not the writer, that deserves attention, he was reacting with outrage against the plan of an investigative reporter to write a magazine article about him. He feared that two things would be found out.

First, he didn’t want the general public to know that he was an alcoholic. However, this was probably not his main fear, since his drinking was an open secret, and other famous writers had been known for drinking, too.

Second—related to his multiple personality, and probably his main worry—he feared it would become known that he had, on different occasions, given contradictory answers to personal questions. The most embarrassing example of this were the answers he had given about his war record. He knew that he had sometimes told stories that were not true. Additionally, he had a local reputation for sometimes behaving oddly and out-of-character.

I don’t know that Faulkner ever thought of himself as having multiple personality. Possibly all he knew was he had said and done things that later embarrassed him. He probably blamed some of it on his drinking. But some had happened when he was sober. So he didn’t want anyone investigating his personal life.

When Faulkner said to his daughter that nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children, his premise was that everybody does remember Shakespeare, himself. And in this case, he did approve of remembering the author and not just his work.

“Does a True Artist Care What His Audience Thinks?” (New York Times Book Review, June 28) quotes only one of William Faulkner’s multiple personalities

Ayana Mathis, bestselling novelist and Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, says that “In the end, a finished work is independent of the artist…A book in the world speaks for itself…William Faulkner said famously: ‘But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important.’ ”

The following is from my post of February 19, 2014:

“Who is Faulkner?” was one of the main questions asked at a conference in 1997 honoring Faulkner’s centenary (Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect. Edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2000). Pages 18-25 are by Professor of English, Noel Polk:

“…Who was William Faulkner? Only in that split, that bifurcation, which becomes a multiplication, can we hope to locate him…[Polk draws our attention to] a little-read piece [by Faulkner] called ‘Afternoon of a Cow,’ putatively written by one Ernest V. Trueblood, who tells us that he has been ‘writing Mr. Faulkner’s novels and short stories for years’…Ernest V. Trueblood is thus the architect of Faulkner’s literary mansion…The Faulkner-Trueblood split is a particularly interesting one, partly because Faulkner had used the Trueblood pseudonym very early in his career…The two Faulkners, the Faulkner Faulkner and the Trueblood Faulkner…lived side by side with each other, in the same household…The two Faulkners didn’t always live in harmony with each other, and perhaps came at times to hold each other in a kind of disdain or even contempt…Thus we have the Faulkner who could write powerful novels of racial injustice in Mississippi coexisting with the Faulkner who would shoot Negroes in the street to defend Mississippi against the United States…; the Faulkner who could write such powerful portraits of family dysfunction and the Faulkner who could tell his own daughter that nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children…”

Multiple Personality: “Scientific Skeptics” Correctly Conclude That It Exists and is Genuine, But Without Objective Observation, They Are Not Scientific

In yesterday’s post, I discussed the state of skepticism regarding multiple personality disorder: Emotional Skeptics dismiss it for no good reason, while Scientific Skeptics now admit that it is genuine, but they are unhappy with that fact and are sore losers.

What the self-styled Scientific Skeptics don’t understand is that they are not scientific. Science requires that when something is observable, it must be observed (and that variables be varied and controlled). They can perform armchair “science” forever, but until they, themselves, have objectively screened and evaluated people for multiple personality—until they actually observe and study it—they are not scientists, even though they like to think they are.

Of course, these skeptics haven’t even begun to address what this blog is about: normal multiple personality. They never heard of it. I estimate that 90% of novelists have it, and guess that 30% of the general public does, too. But I think that this would make the “scientific” skeptics emotional.

Scientific Skeptics now say that Multiple Personality “exists,” that it is “genuine,” and that it is “typically not faked or intentionally produced”

Emotional skeptics like Allen Frances, M.D., call multiple personality “bunk” and a “hoax” (see recent post). But scientific skeptics now acknowledge that multiple personality exists and is genuine.

“There is little dispute that DID [dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder] ‘exists’…even…skeptical researchers believe that DID is ‘genuine’ in the sense that its signs and symptoms are typically not faked or intentionally produced…” (1, p. 122).

“The central question at stake therefore is not DID’s existence but rather its etiology…some researchers contend that DID is a spontaneously occurring consequence of childhood trauma, whereas others contend that it emerges primarily in response to suggestive therapist cuing, media influences, and broader sociocultural expectations” (1, p. 122).

Although these skeptics prefer the sociocognitive model to the trauma model, they have an open mind, because their sources of evidence for the sociocognitive model “do not imply, however, that DID can typically be created in vacuo by iatrogenic or sociocultural influences…Therefore, it seems plausible that iatrogenic and sociocultural influences often operate on a backdrop of preexisting psychopathology, life stressors, and genetic influences…[Moreover, their preference for the sociocognitive model] does not imply…that the [childhood trauma model] has been falsified or should be abandoned…Indeed, some important aspects of these two models may ultimately prove commensurable” (1, pp. 141-142).

In short, the only things that these skeptics are absolutely sure of is that multiple personality “exists,” that it is “genuine,” and that it is “typically not faked or intentionally produced.”

1. Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, Jeffrey M. Lohr (Editors). Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology, Second Edition. New York, The Guilford Press, 2015.

Jane Austen’s Emma: She had loved Mr. Knightley all along, but did not know it, because her love was conscious only to her alternate personality

In an article published by the Jane Austen Society of North America, Professor of English Bruce Stovel makes the case that “Emma Woodhouse is a split character, with two very different sides,” that she has a “split self,” and that she “often does not attend to, or become conscious of, thoughts and feelings that are in her mind…Most important, Emma is, unknown to herself, in love with Mr. Knightley from long before the novel starts.” Indeed, “Emma’s unacknowledged love for Mr. Knightley provides the novel with its comic plot, much as Elizabeth Bennet’s unconscious love for Mr. Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice and as Captain Wentworth’s unacknowledged love for Anne Elliot does in Persuasion” (1).

Emma’s two selves are acknowledged in this dialogue, in which Mr. Knightley says to Emma:

“I shall not scold you. I leave you to your own reflections.”

“Can you trust me with such flatterers?—Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?”

“Not your vain spirit, but your serious spirit.—If one leads you wrong, I am sure the other tells you of it.”

However, Emma, Knightley, and Professor Stovel never explicitly say whether they think that Emma has an ambivalent mixture of vanity and seriousness or a dissociation between a vain personality and a serious personality. In a mixture, there would be no issue of one part’s being unaware of what the other part thinks or feels. In a mixture, she would always have been aware that she loved Knightley, but would have been ambivalent about it. In contrast, in dissociation, one self may really not know what the other self thinks and feels. Multiple personality is also known as dissociative identity, because it entails such dissociation.

This romantic comedy scenario of lovers’ not realizing they are in love is interpreted differently depending on whether the reader has multiple personality. A reader who does not have it will think the scenario is a joke: how can people not know they are in love? A reader who does have multiple personality will consider the scenario to be ordinary psychology: of course things go on inside of which a person is not aware.

Emma’s love for Knightley had not been “unconscious,” except from the perspective of the host personality who was not co-conscious with the personality who loved him. The personality who had always loved him always knew it. That is why, once circumstances changed the balance of power among the personalities, allowing the personality who loved Knightley to come out and predominate, the change to loving him was quick. Emma was not finally learning to love him: behind the scenes, one of her personalities always had.

Writers write such multiple personality characters, because most writers are that way themselves. When writers comment that they will know what they think and feel when they see what they write, they are referring to the way that the thinking and feelings of their own alternate personalities come out from behind the scenes through their writing.

1. Bruce Stovel. “The New Emma in Emma.” Persuasions On-Line: V. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2007). http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/stovel-b.htm

Allen Frances, M.D.: His recent book calls multiple personality a hoax, but his previous book vouches for the validity of three cases. Why?

Since this blog has criticized the lack of relevant credentials of authors of two books skeptical of multiple personality, I want to emphasize that the real issue for credibility is not credentials, but relevant expertise.

Dr. Frances certainly has excellent credentials. Indeed, he was eminent enough in psychiatry to be made Chair of the task force that wrote the 4th edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-IV (1994). However, as I have explained in past posts—such as the one on the mental status examination—most psychiatrists have never learned how to make this diagnosis if there is a typical presentation, and will make it only if there is a “classic” presentation, which is atypical and happens rarely.

Be that as it may, what can explain the contradiction between Dr. Frances’s two books?

Recent Book

“MPD [multiple personality disorder] is probably no more than a metaphor…MPD presented a dilemma for me in my work as chair of…DSM-IV…I felt it was a hoax…and certainly not a legitimate mental disorder. For better and worse, I chose not to impose my view…even though I believed [multiple personality] was complete bunk (1, pp. 131-132).

Previous Book

“We do not deny altogether the existence of Dissociative Identity Disorder [Multiple Personality Disorder] and together have seen what we believe to be three genuine cases…” (2, p. 287).

1. Allen Frances, M.D. Saving Normal. New York, William Morrow, 2013.

2. Allen Frances, M.D., Michael B. First, M.D. Am I Okay? New York, Touchstone, 1998/2000. 

E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: Characters are Alternate Personalities, who “arrive,” “mutiny,” “run away,” “get out of hand,” take “revenge”

“The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They ‘run away’, they ‘get out of hand’; they are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check they revenge themselves…” (1, p. 64).

I have previously quoted other novelists who have said the same things. That is the way novelists think, but you wouldn’t know it from any of the standard literary theories, or from taking any standard college course on literature or psychology.

“Characters arrive when evoked” means that they seem to come of their own accord when writers put themselves in their writing frame of mind, which Stephen King and Doris Lessing have described as trance or self-hypnosis.

Characters seem to have minds of their own, which is what is meant by the term “alternate personality.” As in multiple personality, writers may hear the voices of their characters in their head. And writers may sometimes even experience their characters as coming out.

But since the above does not cause the writer distress or dysfunction—on the contrary, it is part of a productive, creative process—it is normal multiple personality, not multiple personality disorder. Indeed, fiction writing may be therapeutic, and help keep the former from becoming the latter.

E. M. Forster. Aspects of the Novel [1927]. London, Hodder & Stroughton, 2012.

Multiple Personality: How do you know whether a person with an opinion about it knows what they are talking about? What credentials are relevant?

This is a subject that I discuss in the blog every so often, because uninformed opinions about multiple personality are still so common.

No Credentials, Acknowledged

Since multiple personality is a psychological condition, people who are not psychologists (PhD), psychiatrists (MD), or in a related mental health discipline, have no relevant formal credentials; for example, Ian Hacking (philosopher) and Debbie Nathan (journalist/writer). No matter how many facts they may seem to have, they may have never met anyone who has multiple personality, and they certainly have never made the diagnosis and worked with people who have multiple personality for an extensive period of time.

Misrepresentation of Credentials

I know of one popular book purporting to debunk multiple personality—this book prompted this post—whose page on the author’s credentials misrepresents them. From reading what it says, anyone would think that the author is a psychologist, but that is not true. Moreover, the blurbs on the back cover by real psychiatrists and psychologists make them, not to mention the publisher, complicit in the misrepresentation. And the author may never have even met anyone who has multiple personality, and certainly has never made the diagnosis and worked with people who have it for an extensive period of time.

Credentials, But No Relevant Expertise

If you wanted an opinion about cardiac surgery, would you ask a neurosurgeon? Of course not. Everyone knows that surgeons have different areas of expertise. The same is true in psychology and psychiatry. Many psychologists and psychiatrists have rarely or never diagnosed multiple personality, and have not worked with people who have it for an extensive period of time. This lack of relevant expertise probably includes the psychiatrists and psychologists who wrote the blurbs on the back cover of the above-mentioned book.

Nonacademic Credentials

The basic credential for having a worthwhile opinion about multiple personality is knowing people who have had multiple personality, and knowing them well for an extensive period of time. So if you, a family member, or a friend have had multiple personality, you may have a more worthwhile opinion about it than many psychiatrists and psychologists.

If you have not known people with multiple personality, you might still have a worthwhile opinion about it if you read this blog, because I am a psychiatrist who has known people with multiple personality for an extensive period of time.

Multiple Personality is Observable

Multiple personality is not a psychoanalytic interpretation. Psychiatric diagnosis abandoned psychoanalytic interpretations in 1980 with the third edition of the diagnostic manual, DSM-3. Since then, diagnosis has been based on observable signs and symptoms. These diagnostic criteria, in the latest edition of the manual, DSM-5, were quoted in a recent post. Multiple personality, with its relatively unique symptoms, is probably misdiagnosed less frequently than most other conditions.

In short, multiple personality is observable, so don’t be fooled by the opinions of people who have not observed it, up close, for an extensive period of time.

Sherwood Anderson (post 5) Winesburg, Ohio (post 2): From This Book of Short Stories, Two Tales Related to Children, Multiple Personality, and Fiction Writers

“Tandy”

What would happen if a young child were neglected, and did not think much of herself, since nobody else did, and then she suddenly is given the idea that she could be somebody, somebody else, someone who counts, someone who is so real that she has a name, Tandy? This tale seems like a story about how a little girl acquired an alternate personality named Tandy.

“Until she was seven years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unused road…Her father gave her but little attention and her mother was dead…

“A stranger came to Winesburg and saw in the child what the father did not see…

“He looked hard at the child and began to address her, paying no more attention to the father. ‘There is a woman coming,’ he said…‘I have missed her, you see. She did not come in my time. You may be the woman…

“ ‘I know about her…I know about her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one. Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy…It is the quality of being strong to be loved…

“ ‘Dare to be strong and courageous…Be brave enough to dare to be loved…Be Tandy’…

[Her father, Tom Hard] “spoke his daughter’s [real] name [which is never mentioned in the story] and she began to weep. ‘I don’t want to be called that,’ she declared…‘I want to be Tandy. I want to be Tandy. I want to be Tandy Hard,’ she cried, shaking her head and sobbing…’ ” (1, pp. 78-80).

“Loneliness”

This is the story of an artist who develops multiple personality to deal with the loneliness of not being understood. It is not a realistic story in that the multiple personality starts in adulthood, whereas real multiple personality starts in childhood, like in the above story about “Tandy.” Nevertheless, this story is relevant, because the narrator equates multiple personality with the minds of writers…

“…Enoch Robinson…stopped inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of locking the door. He began to think that enough people had visited him, that he did not need people any more. With quick imagination he began to invent his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men and women among whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though every one Enoch Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of himself, something he could mould and change to suit his own fancy…

“They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain…” (1, pp. 93-94).

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

Disney-Pixar and Pete Docter’s animated movie “Inside Out”: Is it about a young girl’s various emotions or about her normal multiple personality?

“The story takes place mostly in the head of an 11-year-old girl named Riley…The real action…unfolds among Riley’s personified feelings…Riley’s brain is controlled by five busy, contentious emotions: Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, and Joy” (A. O. Scott, New York Times, June 19, 2015). Each of these characters looks different and has its own voice. The five voices in Riley’s head are furnished by five different actors: three women and two men.

In multiple personality, it is quite common for each of the various alternate personalities (alters) to have its predominant emotion, its own tone of voice, and its own self-image. It is also common to have personalities of the opposite sex. And the alters are sometimes visualized by the person or heard as voices in the person’s head. Moreover, one of the main ways to distinguish voices of alters from ordinary thoughts (talking to oneself) is that alters argue with the person (host personality) and among themselves. They are, as A. O. Scott puts it, “contentious.” They have minds of their own.

In contrast, persons without multiple personality do not hear voices arguing in their head.

Since Riley does not have significant distress and/or dysfunction from her multiple personality—in fact, it is helpful to her—she has normal multiple personality (as opposed to multiple personality disorder).

Thus, one of the themes of this movie is that normal multiple personality is a good thing and may help people cope.

Lewis Carroll (post 6), Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (post 3): Illustrating three features of multiple personality—amnesia, made behavior, anonymity

Amnesia

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know…I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then…I  ca’n’t explain myself, I’m afraid…because I’m not myself…and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing…I can’t remember things as I used…” (1, p. 47-49).

Different identities have different memory banks, so that any one identity will have memory gaps (amnesia) for the time periods that other, non-coconscious identities were in control.

Made Behavior

“Alice [who was invisible to the tiny King] looked on with great interest as the King…began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him. The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy… ‘My dear! [he said to the Queen]…[the pencil] writes all manner of things I don’t intend…” (1, p. 147).

In multiple personality, it is sometimes possible for one identity, who is behind the scenes, to pull the strings, so to speak, of the identity who is out. This is not only an example of made behavior, but of one-way co-consciousness. The identity behind the scenes is co-conscious with the identity who is out and writing, but the latter is not co-conscious with the former.

Anonymity

“This must be the wood,” [Alice] said thoughtfully to herself, “where things have no names…She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood…“Then it really has happened, after all! And now, who am I?” (1, pp. 176-177).

In multiple personality, it is common to find that some identities have no name. So, as a practical matter, you and the identity may agree on a name to call them; e.g., if they have an outstanding trait—a characteristic emotion, attitude, interest, talent, etc.—you may use that trait as their nickname.

As was discussed in one of the past posts on Edgar Allan Poe, he had a real-life alternate personality whose name was “No Name.” It sometimes happens that an alternate identity will call itself “Nobody” so that when you inquire as to who was responsible for some particular behavior, the person will reply, “Nobody.”

1. Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Lewis Carroll (post 5), Alice in Wonderland (post 2): her being “two people” in her everyday life indicates Alice’s multiple personality

What was Alice really like? When she was not dreaming of being down a rabbit hole, what kind of person was she? She is revealed to have had multiple personality. But since the revelation is camouflaged with the word “pretend,” many readers may not understand what they are being told.

“She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. ‘But it’s no use now,’ thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person’ " (1, p. 18).

If you are unfamiliar with multiple personality, you will be puzzled by what is being described, so when you get to the words “pretending” and “pretend,” you give a sigh of relief, and lump it with her dreamworld fantasy. But what is being described above is not part of Alice’s dream. It is about what she is like in her everyday life.

In her dream fantasy, she has been shrunk in size, but size matters in regard to  the “two people” of her everyday life, because they are regular kinds of people with regular bodies.

One of those two people has, on occasion, scolded the other one so severely as to bring her to tears, which is as hard to do for a person without multiple personality as is trying to tickle yourself.

Similarly, a person without multiple personality does not try “to box her own ears” for having cheated herself in a game of croquet.

So in the above context, what “pretending” and “pretend” mean is that Alice, like most people with multiple personality, knows that her second self is a subjective reality: in the same way that novelists know that their characters—who sometimes seem “more real than real” to them (to quote Toni Morrison)—are not real to everyone else.

Perhaps the easiest way to recognize when a person is talking about alternate personalities is when the selves argue:

“Many host personalities already have some form of communication with the other alters [alternate personalities] when they present for treatment, although they are usually not aware of what is actually happening. The experience of the host personality is that he or she gets into arguments with himself or herself” (2, p. 82).

The clinician learns that the arguments are not just a person talking to himself, but are arguments with other personalities, when the clinician later has conversations with the other personalities and hears their side.

1. Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

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

Multiple Personality: The way that novelists experience their characters fulfills Diagnostic Criteria A & B, but not C in DSM-5 (the psychiatric diagnostic manual)

“Dissociative Identity Disorder

[Multiple Personality Disorder]

Diagnostic Criteria

A. Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession. The disruption in identity involves marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition and/or sensory-motor functioning. These signs and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual.

B. Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting.

C. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” (1, p. 292).

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013

In other words…

A. There are two or more identities, each with it own sense of self, its own sense of being able to think for itself, and its own characteristic pattern of emotions, behavior, awareness, etc. The existence and characteristics of these identities may be known only to the person, and reported by the person, or, if alternate identities come out, their characteristic thinking and behavior may be observed by others.

B. Some identities are aware of each other (co-conscious), but other identities are not. In the case of two identities who are not co-conscious, the period of time that one of them is in control or comes out will be experienced by the other identity as a memory gap.

C. Multiple personality is considered a mental illness only if it causes significant distress and/or dysfunction.

Comment

Once you understand the above, you realize that the diagnostic criteria for multiple personality are fulfilled when a novelist experiences a character who has a mind, etc., of its own, especially if the novelist sometimes switches into being the character, or, as novelist Philip Roth puts it, “impersonates” the character (search “Philip Roth”). But since, for most novelists, their multiple personality does not fulfill Criterion C, it cannot be considered a disorder (mental illness).

When a person fulfills criteria A and B, but the multiple personality is actually an asset rather than a liability—e.g., in writing novels—then I call it normal multiple personality (as opposed to multiple personality disorder).

Added November 18, 2019: What does it mean for a fiction writer to feel that a voice, character, or narrator in the writer's head has a mind of its own? It means that the voice, character, or narrator seems to have thoughts that the writer's regular personality does not recall thinking, which is a memory gap (criterion B in the diagnostic criteria). Also see: https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf

Novelists, Literary Critics, Readers of Novels: Please add your own comments to this exciting blog about novelists and their multiple personalities…

90% of novelists and 30% of the general public have a normal version of multiple personality. Novelists use their multiple personality in their writing process; for example, having characters with minds of their own. A novelist may also have alternate narrator personalities who attend to different aspects of their writing process or to different genres (sometimes under pseudonyms).

A novelist’s alternate personalities, including ones who are not directly related to writing, may also participate in the novelist’s everyday life, but this is usually covert: When alternate personalities come out, they do so either incognito or camouflaged, under the guise of nicknames, pseudonyms, pursuing a special interest, socializing with a different circle of friends, drinking or drugs, or being in a particular mood.

It may be difficult for the novelist and people who know them to realize this is going on, because the novelist’s regular “host” personality may have memory gaps for some of their alternate personalities, while people who know the novelist may mistake, and shrug off, alternate personalities as just personal quirks, odd moods, “absent-mindedness”—search “absent-mindedness” for a post on Mark Twain—or just typical behavior for a creative artist.

But if, at such times, you asked the novelist, not as a criticism, but with empathy and in all seriousness, “Who are you?” you might find out (if the alternate personality trusted you sufficiently).

This post is a request for you to submit your comments by clicking “comments” after this, or any other, post. Please do.

A sincere question about the novelist’s characters: What could explain the novelist’s experience of characters who have minds of their own?

Imagination?

But novelists say that characters have their own ideas and imagination, different from the novelist’s, which is what is meant by a character’s having a mind of its own.

The unconscious?

But the character and novelist are conscious of each other.

Artistic Inspiration?

But what explains characters having their own inspirations?

Metaphor or Joke?

But many novelists truly experience some of their characters as having minds of their own.

I don’t want to continue with my theory—that novelists have a normal version of multiple personality—if you have another, equally good or better, theory.

So, please, click the word “comments” in the gray area at the end of this post, and give your explanation for characters who have minds of their own.

Harvard’s Psychology textbook (post 4) does not mean that all psychologists are uninformed about dissociation and dissociative disorders

As discussed in my three prior posts, the editors of Harvard’s Psychology textbook (1) do not recognize signs of multiple personality, distort the meaning of prevalence statistics, and hide the fact that Harvard’s greatest psychologist, William James, endorsed the validity of multiple personality.

If Harvard’s psychology textbook is representative of what is being taught in most colleges, then college psychology students are being given propaganda against dissociation and the dissociative disorders.

However, I don’t want anyone to mistake this as a psychiatry vs. psychology issue. Most psychiatrists are just as uninformed about multiple personality. In a past post, I explained why the mental status examination taught in most psychiatric residency training programs almost guarantees that a clinician will miss the diagnosis. No, this is not a psychiatrist vs. psychologist issue at all.

The fact is, many of the leading experts on dissociation are psychologists. Indeed, most of the contributors to one of the best books are psychologists (2).

1. Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert, Daniel M. Wegner. Psychology, Second Edition. New York, Worth Publishers, 2011.

2. Paul F. Dell, John A. O’Neil (Editors). Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond. New York, Routledge, 2009.

Harvard’s Psychology textbook (post 3) reveres William James, but hides and omits James’s validation of dissociative fugue and multiple personality

The recent Harvard psychology textbook cites William James (1842-1910) on twenty-six different pages, spread throughout the text, beginning on page one. He is evidently the Harvard psychologist of whom Harvard is most proud. “His landmark book—The Principles of Psychology—is still widely read and remains one of the most influential books ever written on the subject” (1, p. 2).

However, there are two pages in the recent Harvard textbook on which James is not mentioned: page 572, devoted to dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality) and page 573, devoted to dissociative amnesia and dissociative fugue. This is strange, since two whole pages of James’s The Principles of Psychology are devoted to James’s study and treatment of Ansel Bourne (2, p. 391-392).

“Ansel Bourne was a famous 19th-century psychology case due to his experience of a probable dissociative fugue. The case, among the first ever documented, remains of interest as an example of multiple personality and amnesia. Among the doctors who treated Bourne was William James…” —Wikipedia

Indeed, James devotes twenty-seven pages of his “landmark book” to cases which involve alterations of the self, including fifteen pages on “alternating personality” (2, pp. 378-393).

William James concludes that “The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting” (2, p. 401).

1. Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert, Daniel M. Wegner. Psychology, Second Edition. New York, Worth Publishers, 2011.

2. William James. The Principles of Psychology, Volume One [1890]. New York, Dover Publications, 1950.

Harvard Psychology Textbook (post 2) calls multiple personality disorder “rare” at .5% to 1% of the general population (1.5 to 3 million cases in USA, 35 to 70 million worldwide)

“Prior to 1970, DID [dissociative identity disorder] was considered rare, with only about 100 cases reported in the professional literature worldwide. However, since that time, the number of reported cases grew enormously until the late 1990s—and then oddly shrank again. Recent estimates are that between .5% and 1% of the general population suffers from the disorder…The strange transition of DID—from a rare disorder to a minor epidemic and back again—has raised concerns that the disorder is a matter of faking or fashion” (1, p. 572).

Yes, you read the above correctly: “from a rare disorder to a minor epidemic and back again.” That equates 100 cases worldwide with .5%—1% of the general population. And if we take the more conservative figure, 0.5%, and if the USA has about 300,000,000 people and there are about 7,000,000,000 people worldwide, that means 1,500,000 people in the USA and 35,000,000 people worldwide are estimated to have multiple personality disorder.

And that is only the disorder, multiple personality disorder: 1.5 million in the USA and 35 million worldwide are conservative estimates of the number of people who have the disorder, meaning that they have distress and/or dysfunction from their multiple personality.

But just as there are many more people who have anxiety than have an anxiety disorder, there are many more people who have multiple personality than have multiple personality disorder. This blog is not about the disorder. It is about normal multiple personality, as exemplified by novelists.

1. Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert, Daniel M. Wegner. Psychology, Second Edition. New York, Worth Publishers, 2011.

Harvard Psychology textbook shows lack of knowledge about multiple personality in regard to a woman who saw another person in the mirror

Harvard Psychology Textbook

“The Self: Personality in the Mirror

Imagine that you wake up tomorrow morning, drag yourself into the bathroom, look into the mirror, and don’t recognize the face looking back at you…The woman, married for 30 years and the mother of two grown children, one day began to respond to her mirror image as if it were a different person. She talked to and challenged the person in the mirror. When there was no response, she tried to attack it as if it were an intruder. Her husband, shaken by this bizarre behavior, brought her to the neurologist, who was gradually able to convince her that the image in the mirror was in fact herself” (1, p. 492).

When I read this, at first I thought it was a joke, and that for some reason the editors of this textbook were doing a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.” But no, they had evidently not read either Poe or the literature on multiple personality.

Multiple Personality Textbook

“MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror. They may see themselves as having hair, eyes, or skin of a different color, or as being of the opposite sex. In some instances, these alterations of perception of self are so disturbing that the individuals may phobically avoid mirrors. They may describe seeing themselves sequentially change into several different people while looking into a mirror” (2, p. 62).

Added 7/22/20: However, since the woman was relatively old when this apparently happened for the first time (multiple personality begins in childhood), I suppose it was more likely a neurological problem in her case, but multiple personality should still be considered if brain scans proved normal.

Comment

I had recently looked for a psychology textbook associated with a reputable college. I wanted to see the level of knowledge about multiple personality. The single page in this textbook that is devoted to dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality) (1, p. 572) cherry picks skeptical opinions, and does not indicate that the person who wrote that page had had any clinical experience with multiple personality.

I was happily surprised to find the above paragraph on “personality in the mirror” in another chapter of the textbook, a chapter supposedly having nothing to do with multiple personality. It is perfect, since I have discussed mirrors in regard to multiple personality so often in this blog.

Now, if there is anything that this general psychology textbook is less interested in than multiple personality, it is the psychology of creativity. Indeed, the authors’ attitude toward this aspect of psychology is epitomized on the page opposite the title page, where they make a comment about the art on the textbook’s cover: “Well, it’s art, so we really don’t have to explain it.”

The art depicts two human figures who are puzzlingly interconnected. It is the theme of the double, an artistic metaphor for multiple personality.

1. Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert, Daniel M. Wegner. Psychology, Second Edition. New York, Worth Publishers, 2011.

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

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Why Alice’s Changes in Size and Magical Mirror make these Multiple Personality Stories

Having discussed the author’s multiple personality in three posts—back in April of 2014 (search “Lewis Carroll” in this blog)—it’s about time I discussed Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

This post is a quick look at the two tales’ most famous features, Alice’s changes in size and her magical mirror.

Alice Gets Smaller and Bigger

Since multiple personality starts in childhood, most adult multiples have alternate personalities (alters) who range in age from early childhood to the person’s actual age (and sometimes older). For example, a person aged thirty-five might have alters aged 3, 5, 9, 14, 17, 23, 28, and several who are 35.

Each alter has its own self-image consistent with its age. So a three-year-old alter will experience itself as much smaller than a 35-year-old alter. Indeed, one way that you occasionally learn that a person has multiple personality is when they confide an experience that they find very puzzling: “Sometimes I get small.”

Looking-Glass (Mirrors)

Three days ago, in my first post on Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child, and in many previous posts, I have discussed mirrors in multiple personality (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog). Sometimes multiples see their alters when they look in the mirror. Mirrors are a gateway into their world of multiple personality. So whenever a character experiences anything unusual with mirrors, think of multiple personality.

Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (Post 3): Round characters? No. Character-driven? Maybe. Multiple personality makes it a literary novel.

Once you know Bride’s and Booker’s childhood traumas, their behavior is predictable. They are not very “round” characters. They are two-dimensional representatives of the lasting effects of childhood trauma. So if this is a literary novel—and it is—what makes it so?

In the first post, I noted two manifestations of Bride’s multiple personality: her amnesia episodes and her body metamorphoses (see Kafka posts). Another indication of multiple personality is at the beginning of the novel when Booker says to Bride, “You not the woman I want.” And she puzzlingly replies, “Neither am I.” Her reply is never explained. His remark is eventually explained on the basis of his childhood trauma, but I have a different explanation.

When Booker says, “You not the woman I want,” he is reacting to her not being the same personality he had fallen in love with. Her reply, “Neither am I”—about which Bride says to the reader, “I still don’t know why I said that. It just popped out of my mouth”—is a reply from yet another of her alternate personalities.

Other examples of multiple personality in this novel involve Booker and Sofia. Booker is described as being inhabited by his deceased brother’s personality. And Sofia’s sudden change from meek to savage is a realistic portrayal of a personality switch in multiple personality disorder (as opposed to normal multiple personality).

Thus, multiple personality pervades this novel, as it does a number of Morrison’s novels (see past posts). And she is not alone. Other writers discussed in this blog have unrecognized, unacknowledged multiple personality in their novels, too. Is it just coincidence that all these literary novels have multiple personality, or are they considered literary novels, because they do have multiple personality?

When a text has unacknowledged multiple personality, the characters and story appear to have—in a way, they do have—profound, mysterious, depth. And the author seems to be—in a way, is—some kind of oracle. Perhaps this is part of what is meant by literary novel.