Novelists keep journals and have “waking-dreams” so that alternate personalities, who are usually not co-conscious, can communicate

In multiple personality, many alternate personalities are not co-conscious (they are not aware of each other). Or, they may have one-way awareness: “B” is aware of “A,” but “A” is not aware of “B.” Or, they may have indirect knowledge: “C” has seen books bearing “A’s” name. Or, personalities may just want to express themselves.

There are several ways for an alternate personality to send a message. If “B” hates “A’s” necktie, “B” can throw it out, but that is dysfunctional. A better way is for “B” to verbalize his complaint, which “A” will experience as a voice in his head or a loud thought.

Since novelists may be keeping a journal anyway—to collect and work on things of potential use in their writing—“B” can make an entry in the journal for “A” to see. Seeing the entry, “A” might realize that he has an alternate personality, but most novelists probably think of it as a message from their “unconscious” or “shadow,” a new character, or their literary muse.

When voices and journal-entries do not suffice, the novelist may have a “waking-dream,” in which they meet the alternate personality and see what the alternate personality wants them to see. The novelist calls this a “waking-dream” rather than a hallucination, since sane people have dreams and crazy people have hallucinations, and they are clearly sane, just creative.

Henry James called it “the madness of art.”

Stephen King’s New York Times essay asks “Can a Novelist Be Too Productive?” But he should discuss “all the clamoring voices” in his head, etc.

He says, “This is not a roundabout way of justifying my own prolificacy…I can say, with complete honesty, that I never had any choice…There were days—I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating—when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane.”

My post of June 29, 2015, titled…

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

…raises the issues he should be addressing.

I addressed prolificacy in my post of July 22, 2014—contrasting Geoges Simenon and William Faulkner—but I’m sure King could say more about it.

Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges and I” describes his own real-life, normal version of multiple personality, but literary critics think it is philosophy or a joke

Borges (1899-1986), according to Wikipedia, was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator. In 1955, about the same time he became completely blind, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961, he came to international attention when he shared a literary prize with Samuel Beckett. His work embraces the “character of unreality in all literature.” In the words of Nobel Prize novelist J. M. Coetzee, Borges, “more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.”

However, since Borges’s writing includes many avowed literary hoaxes, he had the same problem as Mark Twain, who complained that nobody believed him when he told the truth. His brief essay, “Borges and I,” rather than being read as a straightforward admission of multiple personality, has been misinterpreted as humor or philosophy.

But here is where Borges, in his real life, was coming from: “The boy was a worry to his parents…He was an extremely anxious child…He used to have bad dreams about peeling off his face and finding someone else’s beneath it, or of taking off a mask only to discover that he was wearing another. Similar anxieties invaded his waking life, too: He was frightened of mirrors…at times he imagined he could see someone else's face staring back at him…” (1, p. 38).

If you search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog, you will find posts about the clinically well-known fact that people with multiple personality sometimes see their alternate personalities when they look in a mirror.

Borges and I (translated from the Spanish) by Jorge Luis Borges

It’s to that other one, to Borges, that things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause, one could say mechanically, to gaze at a vestibule’s arch and its inner door; of Borges I receive news in the mail and I see his name in a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of [Robert Louis] Stevenson; the other shares these preferences, but in a vain kind of way that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live so that Borges may write his literature, and this literature justifies me. It poses no great difficulty for me to admit that he has put together some decent passages, yet these passages cannot save me, perhaps because whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition. In any case, I am destined to lose all that I am, definitively, and only fleeting moments of myself will be able to live on in the other. Little by little, I continue ceding to him everything, even though I am aware of his perverse tendency to falsify and magnify.

Spinoza understood that all things strive to persevere being; the stone wishes to be eternally a stone and the tiger a tiger. I will endure in Borges, not in myself (if it is that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in those of many others, or in the well-worn strum of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him by moving on from the mythologies of the slums to games with time and infinity, but those games are now Borges’ and I will have to conceive of other things. Thus my life is a running away and I lose everything and everything is turned over to oblivion, or to the other.

I do not know which of the two is writing this piece.

1. Edwin Williamson. Borges: A Life. New York, Viking, 2004.

Madame Bovary: A dissociative identity interpretation of Flaubert’s phrases “without conscious awareness” and “like someone waking from a dream”

Since Gustave Flaubert is famous for trying to get le mot juste (the right word), perhaps I may be excused for noticing not only the presence of a particular phrase in Madame Bovary, but its recurrence:

“…and it was without conscious awareness that she made her way toward the church, inclined to any devotion, so long as her soul might be absorbed in it and all of life disappear into it…and [after having tried to ask the priest a question] she looked like someone waking from a dream” (1, pp. 96-99).

“Indeed, [momentarily reviving on her death bed, in reaction to the priest] she looked all around her, slowly, like someone waking from a dream; then, in a distinct voice, she asked for her mirror…” (1, p. 289).

What is meant by “without conscious awareness”? Obviously, she is not asleep or in a coma. She was, clearly, conscious. So the phrase evidently means that her behavior was not under the control of her regular personality, but was being controlled by an alternate personality of which her regular personality was only dimly aware. Then, when her regular personality came back into control, it was, for her regular personality, like waking from a dream.

The deathbed scenario (of the second quote) makes me think of the kind of myth or fairytale in which someone is trapped in the body of a beast, but then magically reverts to their true, human identity. Be that as it may, Emma seems once again to be switching from one personality to another, with the two personalities differing from each other in voice and appearance.

The idea “inclined to any devotion, so long as her soul might be absorbed in it and all of life disappear into it” might mean that she was prone to switching into alternate personalities; that is, she had dissociative identity (multiple personality).

1. Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York, Viking, 2010.

Identity: “How Changeable is Gender” and “Your Brain, Your Disease, Your Self” in New York Times ignore Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

People with multiple personality often have both male and female personalities. Do some transgender people have multiple personality? Do other transgender people not have multiple personality? Dr. Richard A. Friedman and the authors of the studies he cites have not considered these questions. Since I am no expert on gender identity, I won’t offer an opinion, except to say that multiple personality is relevant to any discussion of personal identity.

I don’t see any direct connection between multiple personality and neurodegenerative diseases. But if you want to discuss what makes family members think that the person’s personality or personal identity has changed, then you might take a lesson from multiple personality, in which alternate personalities do differ in moral values and not just memories, and the moral differences may be more important. In literature, this is dramatized as Mr. Hyde or the evil twin.

Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, who had self-hypnotic hallucinations, nervous attacks, and epilepsy, became characters when he wrote

Self-hypnotic Hallucinations

“They began to wonder about him [Flaubert]. The child seemed to drift away into a world of his own. Was it a form of epilepsy? Le petit mal? The ‘little sickness’, characterised by brief absences? Or was he, as some have suggested, practising a form of spontaneous self-hypnosis? Perhaps both conditions were present simultaneously. Whatever the psychiatric explanation, Flaubert treasured his self-induced hallucinations. He describes such experiences very clearly in Memoires d’un fou, written in 1838 on the eve of his seventeenth birthday. Walking alone, thinking of a girl, the hero drifts away: ‘The regular movement lulled me to sleep so to speak, I thought I could hear Maria walking by my side…I knew very well that it was a hallucination which I was producing for myself, but I could not help smiling over it and I felt happy’ “ (1, pp. 25-26).

Nervous Attacks and Epilepsy

Occasionally, throughout much of his life, Flaubert had involuntary episodes of altered states of consciousness. Sometimes these involved weird subjective experiences that may or may not have been epileptic. Sometimes witnesses reported convulsions. Some say he died from an epileptic seizure.

So he may have had some episodes that were psychogenic—nonspecific “nervous attacks,” or even “hysterical epilepsy,” the latter often seen in persons with dissociative disorders like multiple personality—and other episodes that were epileptic.

Switching Personalities

While working on Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote the following letter at two in the morning after twelve hours of writing:

“I’ve reached the Big Fuck, I’m right in the middle of it. We are in a sweat and our heart is nearly in our mouth. This has been one one of the rare days in my life which I have spent in a state of complete Enchantment, from beginning to end. Just now, around six o’clock, at the moment when I wrote the phrase ‘nervous attack’, I was so carried away, I was making such a racket, and feeling so intensely what my little woman was feeling that I began to fear I was about to have one myself…It is a delectable thing, writing, not having to be yourself…Today…as a man and as a woman, as lover and mistress both, I have been out riding in a forest on an autumn afternoon…” (1, p. 215).

The biographer comments: “The fact that Flaubert so nearly lost his head whilst writing this scene adds a certain weight to his famously evasive remark, ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ Emma’s imminent nervous attack disappears from the published text of the novel, but in the draft version we find: ‘It was not the walk or the weight of her coat that made her pant, but a strange anxiety, an anguish of her whole being, as if she were about to have a nervous attack’ " (1, 215-216).

1. Geoffrey Wall. Flaubert: A Life. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

John Cheever’s Journal: Biographers say that he used multiple names, and referred to himself in the third person, in his journal. Multiple personality?

“…the journal was both a laboratory for fiction and a means of exorcising demons and fine-tuning the work-in-progress known as John Cheever” (1, p. 113).

“In his journal, Cheever often referred to himself in the third person, using alter egos such as ‘Coverly,’ ‘Bierstubbe,’ or ‘Estabrook’ “ (1, p. 220).

“He had a roster of fictional names and personalities that he wove around his family and friends and used in his journals, and more than half a dozen names for himself, or the characters that had originally been based on himself: Toby, Tom, Streeter, Bierstubbe, or Mr. Bierstubbe, to mention just a few” (2, p. 41).

1. Blake Bailey. Cheever: A Life. New York, Vintage Books, 2009.

2. Susan Cheever. Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984.

John Keats on The Poetical Character of The Chameleon Poet who does not have one self or identity, but continually switches from one to another

Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends, by John Keats

76. — To Richard Woodhouse.[Hampstead, October 27, 1818.]

My dear Woodhouse — Your letter gave me great satisfaction, more on account of its friendliness than any relish of that matter in it which is accounted so acceptable to the “genus irritabile.” The best answer I can give you is in a clerklike manner to make some observations on two principal points which seem to point like indices into the midst of the whole pro and con about genius, and views, and achievements, and ambition, et cætera. — 1st. As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort, of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical Sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone,) it is not itself — it has no self — It is everything and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated — It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity — he is continually in for and filling some other body. The Sun — the Moon — the Sea, and men and women, who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity — he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures. — If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops?83 It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical Nature — how can it, when I have no Nature? When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a very little time annihilated — not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of Children. I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no dependence is to be placed on what I said that day.

In the 2d place, I will speak of my views, and of the life I purpose to myself. I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared, that may be the work of maturer years — in the interval I will assay to reach to as high a summit in poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer. The faint conceptions I have of poems to come bring the blood frequently into my forehead — All I hope is, that I may not lose all interest in human affairs — that the solitary Indifference I feel for applause, even from the finest spirits, will not blunt any acuteness of vision I may have. I do not think it will. I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night’s labours should be burnt every Morning, and no eye ever shine upon them. But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some Character in whose soul I now live.

I am sure however that this next sentence is from myself — I feel your anxiety, good opinion, and friendship, in the highest degree, and am

Yours most sincerely

John Keats.

Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: Multiple Identity (Multiple Personality) Literary Theory via Feminist Literary Criticism

Gilbert & Gubar’s index does not include multiple personality, per se, but it does include Doubles, Duplicity, Fragmentation of personality, Mirrors, and pseudonyms, all of which have prominent roles in this blog. As they say in Part I. Toward a Feminist Poetics:

“We shall see, then, that the mad double is as crucial to the aggressively sane novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot as she is in the more obviously rebellious stories told by Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Both gothic and anti-gothic writers represent themselves as split like Emily Dickinson between the elected nun and damned witch, or like Mary Shelley between the noble, censorious scientist and his enraged, childish monster. In fact, so important is this female schizophrenia [multiple personality] of authorship that, as we hope to show, it links these nineteenth-century writers with such twentieth-century descendants as Virginia Woolf (who projects both ladylike Mrs. Dalloway and crazed Septimus Warren Smith), Doris Lessing (who divides herself between sane Martha Hesse and mad Lynda Coldridge), and Sylvia Plath (who sees herself as both a plaster saint and a dangerous ‘old yellow’ monster)” (1, p. 78).

At one point, Gilbert & Gubar touch on the fact that they are not talking about something unique to women, but which is common psychology among novelists and poets of both genders:

“As Joyce Carol Oates has observed, critics often ‘fail to see how the creative artist shares to varying degrees the personalities of all his characters, even those whom he appears to detest—perhaps, at times, it is these characters he is really closest to’…writers (as Oates implies) do use masks and disguises in most of their work…what Keats called ‘the poetical Character’ in some sense has ‘no self’ because it is so many selves” (1, pp. 68-69).

But they pursue their feminist thesis.

Nevertheless, I recommend their excellent book, especially if you read it in awareness of this blog’s thesis.

1. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Second Edition. New Haven, Yale Nota Bene Yale University Press, 1979/1984/2000.

Fiction Writing: In today’s New York Times Sunday Review, Ben Dolnick says it is like doing a puzzle that someone else has already created. Who?

“Toward the end of a puzzle, there’s a moment when you shift from being the puzzlemaker’s adversary to being her admirer, even her accomplice. The human intelligence on the other side of the page begins to come clear…

“In fiction writing you are of course both the maker and the solver, but the sense of discovery — the feeling that whole sublayers of structure and theme have been created by a stranger with your pleasure in mind — is no less acute.”

Others have spoken of the Muse, Voice, Alter Ego, or Shadow. Mark Twain might have called it Mysterious Stranger (the title of his last novel). I call it Alternate Personality.

John Cheever’s Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award winner): Coverly Wapshot may have multiple personality and so may Moses Wapshot’s wife

In this autobiographical, episodic novel about the Wapshot family—especially brothers Moses and Coverly and their parents—the two episodes of interest to this blog are when Moses marries Melissa and when Coverly discovers that he is bisexual.

Moses and Melissa are very much in love, and very eager to make love, which they frequently do, in spite of Melissa’a rich guardian. And they are soon married. But then, suddenly, Melissa changes drastically, from a beautiful, ardent lover to a chaste spinster who speaks in a “voice that he didn’t recognize at all” (1, p. 307) and who dresses like Cinderella.

However, after the guardian’s mansion is destroyed by fire, Melissa reverts to being Moses’s beautiful, loving wife. And although these sudden switches in personality are not acknowledged in the novel to be multiple personality, that is what it looks like.

Coverly is also recently married, and while his wife is away, his gay male boss makes sexual advances. Coverly is sexually aroused, but he doesn’t act on it, because “the lash of his conscience crashed down with such force that his scrotum seemed injured” (1, p. 290). And “Then the lash crashed down once more, [but] this time at the hands of a lovely woman who scorned him bitterly…and whose eyes told him that he was now shut away forever from a delight in girls” (1, p. 290).

Assuming drugs or brain disease don’t account for it, only a person with multiple personality has such vivid and personified subjective experiences, which is why multiple personality used to be thought of as spirit or demon possession.

1. John Cheever. The Wapshot Chronicle [1957]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2003.

John Cheever said his favorite book was Madame Bovary, and that his aunt didn’t hold his National Book Award novel against him, since he had a split personality

MADAME BOVARY

Interviewer: Do you have a very favorite book?

Cheever: Yes definitely. Madame Bovary. I’ve probably read it twenty-five times, many of those in French.

Interviewer: Why is it such a great novel?

Cheever: Because the writing is absolutely precise and simply perfect. This book was a considerable turning point in fiction, an innovation. Of course, all great novels are innovations but Madame Bovary was, for one thing, the first account we have of controlled schizophrenia…(1, p. 25).

THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE (National Book Award winner)

Interviewer: One almost has a feeling of eavesdropping on your family in that book.

Cheever: The Chronicle was not published (and this was a consideration) until after my mother’s death. An aunt (who does not appear in the book) said, “I would never speak to him again if I didn’t know him to be a split personality” (1, p. 99).

QUESTIONS

Did Cheever mean “schizophrenia” in its correct usage as the name of a psychosis? Or did he mean a split personality (multiple personality), which is not a psychosis, and something completely different?

Was Cheever’s aunt serious? Did he have multiple personality, and was this common knowledge in the family?

1. Scott Donaldson (Editor). Conversations with John Cheever. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” makes sense only if she has multiple personality.

As I noted in yesterday’s post, the text of this play gives no prior examples of the kindness of strangers. Indeed, Blanche had been kicked out of the town where she had been working as a teacher, for her having had sex with a student, to which people had not taken kindly.

Her regular “host” personality (lady-like and mildly flirtatious) simply does not account for her history of being sexually promiscuous and predatory, which implies the existence of a promiscuous and predatory alternate personality. And, very likely, Blanche (host personality) had amnesia, memory gaps, for the periods of time that the alter had been out and in control.

This means that, over the years, Blanche had repeatedly found herself in places and situations that the alter had gotten her into—for example, in a hotel bed with a stranger—but that Blanche couldn’t explain. If the man had gotten what he wanted and now saw that she was upset and confused (he might guess that she had had sex with him because she was intoxicated or in an alcoholic blackout), then either he or hotel staff might have acted kindly toward her, helping her get her things together, into a taxi, and safely on her way home, which, to the host personality, would have been the kindness of strangers.

Multiple personality starts in childhood. Its two cardinal symptoms are alternate personalities and memory gaps. Since Blanche (host personality) has had episodes of finding herself with strangers literally for decades, she has, indeed, “always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: Blanche DuBois, her ex-husband, and Stanley Kowalski reflect the author’s multiple personality

In the last scene, when Blanche is being taken away to a mental hospital—to cover up the fact that her brother-in-law, Stanley, had raped her while her sister was in the hospital to give birth, and that her sister, Stella, had taken her husband’s side in the cover-up—and the nurse asks the doctor if they should put Blanche in a straitjacket, the doctor says that it won’t be necessary, because he correctly senses that Blanche will respond appropriately to simple kindness. Blanche, in turn, sensing the doctor’s kindness, says, in the play’s most famous line: “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

But, the fact is, nothing we have learned about Blanche’s history supports the idea that she has ever depended on the kindness of strangers. So the significance of that famous line is that it reflects Blanche’s intact interpersonal skills, which, in turn, suggests that her psychological problems, however severe, are probably not psychotic.

So, then, what is Blanche’s psychological problem? She certainly has a much more serious problem than just a histrionic personality. We learn that she had been driven out of the town where she had been working as a school teacher for having had sexual contact with a seventeen-year-old student; not to mention her notorious sexual promiscuity. And all that is in gross contradiction to her usual attitude of good manners and propriety. This degree of self-contradiction is suggestive of multiple personality.

The play’s purported explanation for Blanche’s psychological problems is that she was once married to a man who turned out to be gay, and that her insensitive response to finding him out prompted him to literally blow his brains out. But multiple personality starts in childhood, not in marriage, and we are told very little about Blanche’s childhood.

However, Tennessee Williams’s own childhood is better known, and his multiple personality is reflected in the play. Three of his personalities appear to be the basis for Blanche DuBois, Blanche’s ex-husband, and Stanley Kowalski.

In his autobiography, the author says that prior to his severe illness at age eight (diagnosed as diphtheria), “I had been a little boy with a robust, aggressive, almost bullying nature,” which sounds like Stanley Kowalski.

As a result of the year-long illness and his mother’s overly solicitous attention, he added “sissy” personalities (1, pp. 11-12), which involved both a gay male personality and a female personality. He says, “I don’t think I had effeminate mannerisms but somewhere deep in my nerves was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden” (1, p. 17). In the play (scene six), when Blanche recalls her tragically deceased gay husband, she recalls that “he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking” (2, p. 114).

According to Williams, both his sister and mother were psychotic, and his experience with them inevitably adds some psychotic coloring to Blanche. But the character and the play mostly reflect his own multiple personality.

1. Tennessee Williams. Memoirs. Garden City NY, Doubleday, 1975.

2. Tennessee Williams. A Streetcar Named Desire [1947]. New York, New Directions, 2004.

Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs and biographies: Childhood onset of alternate personalities and memory gaps, symptoms of multiple personality

Childhood

“My first eight years of childhood in Mississippi were the most joyously innocent of my life…That world…ended…for me, by an illness diagnosed…as diphtheria with complications. It lasted a year, was nearly fatal, and changed my nature as drastically as it did my physical health. Prior to it, I had been a little boy with a robust, aggressive, almost bullying nature. During the illness, I learned to play, alone, games of my own invention…

“During this period of illness and solitary games, my mother’s overly solicitous attention planted in me the makings of a sissy…I was becoming a decided hybrid…” (1, pp. 11-12).

“…it was in my sixteenth year that my deep nervous problems approached what might well have been a crisis…My adolescent problems took their most violent form in a shyness of pathological degree…for the next four or five years, I would blush whenever a pair of human eyes, male or female (but mostly female since my life was spent mostly among members of that gender) would meet mine…

“I don’t think I had effeminate mannerisms but somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden…Well, the school maiden imprisoned in my hidden self, I mean selves, did not need a frown to make her tremble, she needed only a glance” (1, pp. 16-17).

Switches Personalities like Charles Dickens

“According to [Gore] Vidal, who on occasion wrote in the same room as Williams, the playwright entered entirely into his imaginary world while working;  he was ‘so absorbed that, as he was typing, he was acting out what his characters were doing’ “ (2, p. 35).

Comment: Maybe he was just “acting out” what his characters were doing. But this sounds like how Charles Dickens’s daughter described her father at work. And Dickens was probably not just “acting out” his characters, but was probably switching personalities, from his regular personality to each character’s personality and back again. Search “Dickens” in this blog for my essay on Dickens, which discusses that whole scenario.

“Absentmindedness” (Memory Gaps)

“For those who were forever picking up after him, or, like his [college] roommates, organizing around him, his absentmindedness was hardly endearing. In fact, it could be damned exasperating. Tom’s [his real name] skipping classes or missing exams wasn’t so much deliberate as that he simply forgot them. If this neglect had been willful laziness, it would never have been tolerated. But he had an air of sheer helplessness, even desperation at times, that made all but the hardened want to help him. He was a dependent, and while he hated it, he also relied upon it—which is to say, discovering its power, he was not above using it. And in this, he would never change” (3, p. 110).

Comment: Search “absent-mindedness,” “memory gap(s),” and “paradoxical memory” in this blog, for relevant previous posts, to understand the significance of this.

Persecutor Alternate Personality (Since Childhood)

“…in his journal…he addressed the ‘enemy inside myself’—an essential division in his personality that would plague him and manifest itself in patterns of contradictory behavior throughout the years to come. It would divide him not only against himself but often against those closest to him, leading him to characterize himself as ‘half-mad’…

Journal Entry: “A little crazy blue devil has been with me all day. I wish I could shake him off and walk alone and free in the sunlight once more. There is one part of me that could always be very happy and brave and even good if the other part was not so damned ‘pixilated.’ ”

“…Not until he was thirty-two did he finally confide in a friend the torment of the blue devils and the fact that he had first become conscious of the specter when he was ten years old” (3, pp. 174-175).

Note: Search past post on "persecutor personalities" to understand what these are and the common part they play in multiple personality.

1. Tennessee Williams. Memoirs. Garden City NY, Doubleday, 1975.

2. John Lahr. Tennessee Williams. New York, W. W. Norton, 2014.

3. Lyle Leverich. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York, Crown, 1995.

Sue Woolfe, novelist and teacher of creative writing, asks “What are we doing in our minds, those of us who spend years sitting in rooms making up stories?”

Here are some of her questions and answers:

“Sometimes I feel guided, though I don’t know by what…” (1, p. 3).

“…I had long been aware that while I write fiction, I seem to be using my brain in a very different way from when I’m not—and differently from when I read. For example, I seem to ‘watch’ an imaginary scene in my mind’s eye as I write about it…” (1, p, 16).

“…a well-received story…logically develops and explores a moral principle…Most readers and critics would assume the moral principle was the starting point, indeed the aim, of the whole endeavor. However…these thematic principles are often not intended but discovered by writers during or even just on finishing the creation, not before the creation. But how could that be?” (1, p. 17).

How does an author create “complex fictional works of unpremeditated coherence?” (1, p. 26).

“…students often speak with excitement and awe about the power and autonomy of characters they’d previously considered playthings…

“…characters in their settings become insistent—insistent because the characters begin to enter unbidden into my conscious thoughts even when I’m not working. I ‘see’ characters over time far more clearly than I had previously, and far more clearly than if I had daydreamed them” (1, pp. 28-29).

“After all, what is consciousness? I assume that we all have an interior commentary that chatters on and on, like a voice-over narration in a film” (1, p. 40).

[I don’t have a commentator, but Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow did. He was quoted in my post of November 15, 2014 as saying: “I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me.”]

“As a child I’d lived much of the time in my imagination, so I’d always thought of it as my confidante” (1, p. 49).

“Plato thought that a poet is able to create only what the muse dictates…” (1, p. 49).

“Much of the work of fiction writing depends on first finding and then learning to maintain a voice. For readers…It is the personality they sense inside the writing…Writers—all those I have spoken to, at least—consider it essential to ‘find’ a voice…; in fact, the voice is considered so privotal that commonly if a group of writers at a bar are recounting their problems, and one of them says that he or she cannot fine the voice for the current work, everyone murmurs in sympathy…

“…there is , for me at least, an almost visceral sensation that the voice will lead me through the story, that the voice already knows the story though I don’t…

As a novelist friend said, “There was an element of magic about writing the book. There were times when I felt in direct relation to that voice, that the book was—as they say—‘writing itself’ through me…[The character’s] voice felt very natural to me, although it’s not a voice I ever use in my own life. In taking on that persona—that voice, actually—I discovered an astonishing freedom. Perhaps that’s the compulsion of writing: the freedom to be, not somebody else, but another of your selves” (1, pp. 60-61).

“A character seems for a very long time into fictional work to be not a character but a boon companion to the author, a fellow muser, a consciousness about any number of subjects. Even if the character’s outlook is counter to the writer’s usual views, even if he or she is morally repugnant, there is a conviction of a shared understanding of the world—the character seems like a person the writer could possibly have become” (1, pp. 69-70).

“…the state of trance I induce when I write, a trance so profound that I lose track of my physical whereabouts, my sense of time, my sense of myself and even my own name, so that I am, for instance, barely able to remember what a telephone is, let alone coherently answer an interrupting phone call. In my experience, very little material written in the trance state, or written while emerging from it, is discarded—even though in the early stages of the writing process, when I go into the trance, I have no idea the subject matter or concerns of the eventual novel” (1, p. 93).

“This is a very personal search. It does not pretend to be anything other than the investigation of a novelist baffled by her own creative processes and seeking to understand them, the better to have faith in their worth and to articulate them to others” (1, Preface).

1. Sue Woolfe. The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A writer looks at creativity and neuroscience. Crawley, University of Western Australia Press, 2007.

Carol Tavris mixes recovered-memory therapy with multiple personality disorder: a fallacious, guilt-by-association argument in today’s Wall Street Journal

In the course of reviewing the book I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Carol Tavris says:

“Here are the psychiatrists…who prospered by promoting recovered-memory therapy and multiple personality disorder.”

“…But feminists contributed to the panic as well: For them, the day-care trials validated everything they feared about the mistreatment of children. This concern caused many to uncritically support the multiple-personality and recovered-memory epidemics…”

Whenever you read an article that conflates “recovered-memory” (also known as “repressed-memory”) with multiple personality, you know that you can’t trust the article. Neither I nor any psychiatrist I know who is interested in multiple personality has ever practiced “recovered-memory therapy.”

Now, multiple personality disorder is a condition of secrecy, and much may be unknown to the regular, host personality. So it is possible for traumatic experiences to be known to alternate personalities and not to the host. But such memories are not accessed by pressuring the host personality. You have to speak with the alternate personalities, themselves. Moreover, I, and most, psychiatrists have always known that you can’t accept improbable “memories” as historical facts without corroboration.

Writers like Tavris don’t put these issues in the historical context that I provided in yesterdays’s post: Before these “epidemics,” child abuse was thought to happen to only one child in a million. And after these “epidemics,” multiple personality is still much more common than she thinks. But how would she know that? She has never screened people for multiple personality or made the diagnosis.

Misleading: Mark Oppenheimer’s review of Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s in The New York Times Book Review

[Here is some context that Mr. Oppenheimer fails to provide:]

In the USA, prior to the 1970s, it was thought that child abuse was extremely rare, and that it happened to only one child out of a million. Literally, only 1 out of 1,000,000.

So when society found out that it was actually much more common than that, some people went to extremes, especially those looking for “repressed memories” and who believed in “satanic ritual abuse,” which were misguided fads.

Nevertheless, now, after the dust has settled, it remains a fact that child abuse is not one in a million. How common is it?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the leading national public health institute of the United States. It is a federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services.

According to the CDC:

—There were 678,932 victims of child abuse and neglect reported to Child Protective Services (CPS) in 2013.

—The youngest children are the most vulnerable with about 27% of reported victims being under the age of three.

—CPS reports may underestimate the true occurrence of abuse and neglect. A non-CPS study estimated that 1 in 4 children experience some form of child maltreatment in their lifetimes.

—About 1,520 children died from abuse and neglect in 2013.

The recent history of multiple personality disorder is similar to that of child abuse, which makes sense, since most adults with this diagnosis have a history of childhood trauma. Prior to the 1970s, multiple personality was thought to be extremely rare. But it was diagnosed more frequently in the 1970’s, and was overdiagnosed by some people in the 1980s and 1990s.

However, now that the dust has settled, multiple personality disorder is still more common than most people realize. According to DSM-5 (2013) (the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association) it occurs in about 1.5% of the people in the USA, which is about 4,500,000 people.

Of course, those are statistics for the most severe form of multiple personality, multiple personality disorder. This blog is about a milder, normal version of multiple personality, which, I estimate, occurs in 90% of novelists and 30% of the general population.

In recent posts, I discuss the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. In past posts, I discuss more than fifty other writers.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography reports memory gaps like those seen in multiple personality, at age 15 and subsequently

In the summer of 1914, when Nabokov was fifteen, a “numb fury of verse-making first came over me” (1, p. 167). It was when “my first poem began” (1, p. 168).

“…On the physical plane, my intense labors were marked by a number of dim actions or postures, such as walking, sitting, lying…Each of these broke into fragments…for instance, I might be wandering one moment in the depths of the park and the next pacing the rooms of the house. Or, to take the sitting stage, I would suddenly become aware that a plate of something I could not even remember having sampled was being removed and that my mother, her left cheek twitching as it did whenever she worried, was narrowly observing from her place at the top of the long table my moodiness and lack of appetite. I would lift my head to explain — but the table had gone, and I was sitting alone on a roadside stump, the stick of my butterfly net, in metronomic motion, drawing arc after arc on the brownish sand…

“When I was irrevocably committed to finish my poem or die, there came the most trancelike state of all. With hardly a twinge of surprise, I found myself, of all places, on a leathern couch in the cold, musty, little-used room that had been my grandfather’s study. On that couch I lay prone, in a kind of reptilian freeze, one arm dangling, so that my knuckles loosely touched the floral figures of the carpet. When next I came out of that trance, the greenish flora was still there, my arm was still dangling, but now I was prostrate on the edge of a rickety wharf, and the water lilies I touched were real…I relapsed into my private mist, and when I emerged again, the support of my extended body had become a low bench in the park…

“…when the old trance occurs nowadays, I am quite prepared to find myself, when I awaken from it, high up in a certain tree, above the dappled bench of my boyhood, my belly pressed agains a thick, comfortable branch and one arm hanging down among the leaves upon which the shadows of other leaves move” (1, pp. 172-173).

[That first poem] “was indeed a miserable concoction…In my foolish innocence, I believed that what I had written was a beautiful and wonderful thing…’How wonderful, how beautiful,’ [my mother] said, and with the tenderness in her smile still growing she passed me a hand mirror so that I might see the smear of blood on my cheekbone where at some indeterminable time I had crushed a gorged mosquito by the unconscious act of propping my cheek on my fist. But I saw more than that. Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass” (1, pp. 175-177).

People with multiple personality have memory gaps because one personality has amnesia for the periods of time that another personality was out. For further discussions of that, search memory gap(s) and dissociative fugue in this blog.

1. Vladimir Nabokov. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited [1947/1967]. Introduction by Brian Boyd. New York, Everyman’s Library, 1999.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (post 3): This novel’s blatant self-contradictions reflect multiple narrative personalities that should have been reconciled in rewrite

Now that I’ve read Lolita, I’m no longer interested in whether Clare Quilty is a “double” of Humbert Humbert (HH). No, the main feature of this novel—especially in regard to multiple personality—is self-contradiction.

At the beginning of Lolita, HH spells out his fixation on “nymphets,” who are pubescent girls aged nine to fourteen. But at the end, HH wants to live forever-after with Lolita even though she is no longer a nymphet: She is years too old, not to mention married and pregnant by someone else.

The way that Nabokov glosses over this contradiction is that he calls HH “a maniac,” which is not a valid diagnosis, and is just a poor excuse to account for anything, no matter how inconsistent. (The reason that there is such a thing as psychiatric diagnosis is that symptoms tend to be consistent.)

Either the author had more than one narrative personality, whose differences were not reconciled in rewrite, or the author failed to “prune” (as Stephen King would say) what the characters told him and failed to “control” his characters (as Toni Morrison would say) (as quoted in past posts).

It is like the person who wrote the end of this novel was not the same person who wrote the beginning, and hadn’t even read the beginning.

Subjectively Experienced Metaphors (SEMs): Rather than being analogies, some metaphors are subjective experiences; e.g., synesthesia or multiple personality

Most people think of metaphors as analogies or connections between previously unrelated things, which may be true for most metaphors. However, some metaphors may reflect actual subjective experiences.

One such type of metaphor, synesthetic metaphors, may reflect the writer’s synesthesia. For an outline of the types of synesthesia—actual subjective experiences on which certain metaphors could be based—see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia.

Another category of metaphor is personification. An example would be to attribute a human voice, with a mind of its own, to a fictional character, as when a novelist, in an interview, says, “When I heard the character’s voice, and the character came alive to me, I knew I had a novel.”

That is usually considered metaphorical, since “everyone knows” that characters don’t really exist or have voices or minds of their own that the novelist actually hears. But what if novelists say they actually do hear a voice in their head? And what if, according to novelists, the voice says things that the novelist hadn’t thought of? If novelists actually do have those subjective experiences, is what they say in interviews a metaphor?

(As readers of this blog know, I consider autonomous characters with minds of their own to be equivalent to alternate personalities in multiple personality.)

Well, in one sense it is a metaphor, but in another sense it isn’t. It is a metaphor, because characters don’t really exist. It is not a metaphor, because novelists honestly feel that they are reporting an experience.

The only name for this that I’ve thought of is: Subjectively Experienced Metaphors (SEMs). Maybe you can think of a better name. Or maybe there already is a name for this that I haven’t heard.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: Was Humbert Humbert (HH) a pedophile, a hebephile, or demon possessed; that is, a person with multiple personality?

I have just started Lolita. I am a very slow reader. And I am bogged down at the very beginning over what the protagonist is, sexually speaking.

Hebephile, Not Pedophile

Loosely speaking, HH is a pedophile, since he is sexually attracted to children. However, since his preference is for girls between 9 and 14 who show the first signs of puberty—“bud-stage breast development” and “the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair” (1, p. 20)—he is not a pedophile (who prefer prepubescent), but rather a hebephile (who prefer pubescent), strictly speaking.

But not Hebephile, either

However, HH is not attracted to most pubescent girls, no matter how pretty, but only to girls who remind him of his childhood girlfriend, so he is not really a hebephile, either.

“it was Lilith he longed for”

“But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child…Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for” (1, p. 20).

Who is Lilith?

“Lilith…is a Hebrew name for a figure in Jewish mythology…who is generally thought to be in part derived from a historically far earlier class of female demons in Mesopotamian religion…

“The Hebrew term lilith (translated as "night creatures", "night monster", "night hag", or "screech owl") first occurs in Isaiah 34:14…In Jewish magical inscriptions on bowls and amulets from the 6th century BC onwards, Lilith is identified as a female demon…

“In Jewish folklore…Lilith becomes Adam's first wife, who was created at the same time…and from the same earth as Adam. This contrasts with Eve, who was created from one of Adam's ribs…in the 13th century writings of Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob ha-Cohen, Lilith left Adam after she refused to become subservient to him and then would not return to the Garden of Eden after she coupled with the archangel Samael. The resulting Lilith legend is still commonly used as source material in modern Western culture, literature, occultism, fantasy, and horror…” — Wikipedia

“Nymphets” attract men who are already “bewitched”

HH says, “Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymph (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets’…

“Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not…Neither are good looks any criterion…”

And the man will “come under a nymphet’s spell” (1, pp. 16-17).

Demons and Spells

Demon possession is an obsolete theory for multiple personality.

Allusions to Edgar Allan Poe

HH’s childhood girlfriend, the fixation on which his attraction to nymphets is based, is named after a poem by Poe, “Annabel Lee.”

HH’s double name not only suggests literary doubles, but reminds readers of Poe’s multiple personality story, William Wilson.

So, what can I do?

Keep reading.

1. Vladimir Nabokov. The Annotated Lolita [1955]. Introduction and Notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. New York, Vintage Books, 1970/1991.

Persecutor Personalities: A common type of alternate personality seen in both multiple personality and “literary double” classics like Dostoevsky and Poe

In my last post, on Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, I explained the protagonist’s self-cutting as probably due to alternate personalities who wanted to teach the host personality a lesson. Their getting Camille to cut and scar most of her body makes them “persecutor personalities.”

Other literary examples of persecutor personalities are Dostoevsky’s The Double and Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson. In Dostoevsky, the protagonist’s “double” (alternate personality) ruins him socially and finally gets him sent away to a mental hospital. In Poe, the protagonist commits suicide when one personality tries to stab the other personality to death, which, psychologically speaking, would be termed “internal homicide.”

“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) [in the patient’s childhood]; others have evolved from original helper personalities into current persecutors” (1, p. 108).

You might wonder, since multiple personality is a psychological defense, why there would ever be any alternate personalities who identify with the abuser or who evolve into persecutors. The answer is this: An alter who mimics the abuser might have made the child behave in a way that would not provoke the actual abuser to commit actual abuse. An alter who was originally a protector personality may, over the years, have come to view the host personality as an unredeemable, contemptible weakling.

Persecutor personalities are real, and, in some cases, dangerous. I have seen and worked with them in my treatment of multiple personality patients.

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