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.