Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” (post 3, Chapter XIII, “Enter the Hero”): The mystery man on Ivan’s balcony is “The Master,” a nameless writer.

The Master is another patient in the psychiatric hospital, and he tells Ivan the tragic story of his failure to get his novel about Pontius Pilate published—perhaps the same story that Woland, The Devil, had told in Chapter II (titled “Pontius Pilate”).

Ivan does not comment on the coincidence between Woland’s and The Master’s narratives [correction: he does note the coincidence]; which would not be so coincidental if Woland and The Master were two personalities of the same person’s mind.

Were Woland and The Master two of Bulgakov’s narrative personalities?

Nameless

This is the [eighth] time that namelessness has come up in this blog. The other six were Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus pretends to be nameless to fool the Cyclops; the post about Edgar Allan Poe’s multiple personality; Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, in which the title character’s real name turns out to be Susan; Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Bad Girl, in which the title character’s real name is not revealed until nearly the end of the novel; the fairy tale, Rumpelstiltskin; and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca; [and Mark Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger].

Nameless personalities are very common in multiple personality. The personalities who have names—because they come out often and are socially active—are usually the tip of the iceberg.

And indeed, The Master describes himself as not being socially active: “I don’t make friends easily as a rule…it’s a strain for me to be with people…”

Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” (post 2, chapters VI-XI): Unintentionally, many characters are portrayed as being alternate personalities of each other.

In Chapter VI, Ivan, the poet, is psychiatrically hospitalized, and is misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia.

In Chapter XI, as mentioned in the previous post, Ivan, still in the hospital, is portrayed as actually having multiple personality.

In Chapter VII, Styopa Likhodeyev, director of the Variety Theater in Moscow, is besieged by Mr. Woland (consultant on black magic; usually interpreted as being The Devil; and his several strange associates), who wants to present his show at Styopa’s theater.

Of note here, Styopa has three signs of multiple personality: 1. memory gaps, 2. seeing other characters when he looks in the mirror, and 3. he is referred to in the plural, as “them” and “they” (pp. 68-69). (Search “memory gaps” and “mirrors” to read prior posts on these symptoms of multiple personality.)

Then, in Chapter VIII, “At precisely the time when Styopa lost consciousness in Yalta…Ivan…regained it” in the Moscow hospital (where he had been misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia in Chapter VI). It does not seem intentional that Styopa and Ivan would be alternate personalities, since it does not make sense in terms of the plot, but why does one of them lose consciousness at the same instant that the other one regains consciousness if they are not alternate personalities?

Returning to Chapter XI (broached in the previous post), in which one of Ivan’s four alternate personalties was represented by “a bass voice” that he heard, the whole sentence is: “ ‘Like a fool!’ a bass voice pronounced distinctly, a voice which did not come from either one of the Ivans and was amazingly reminiscent of the consultant’s bass” (p. 97). I now know that “consultant” refers to that other major character, Woland (see above). It is as if Woland were one of Ivan’s alternate personalities, an implication that does not seem intentional, as far as I can see, so far.

Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita. Translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor. Annotations and Afterword by Ellendea Proffer. New York, Vintage International / Random House, 1996.

Real-life incident shows “magical realism” is not an experimental, literary technique, but the way the minds of some people work, prompted by traumatic experiences.

Psychiatric News, the newspaper of the American Psychiatric Association, published an article recently, which begins as follows:

“A young woman who lived alone in a third floor apartment stepped out of her shower one morning and confronted a stranger with a knife. He tied her hands and began to loot the apartment. She believed he would rape and then kill her.

“While he ransacked another room, she managed to open a window and jump. As she fell, she saw a pink parachute snap open above her, and beneath its large, life-saving canopy, she felt herself float slowly to the ground. There was, of course, no parachute, and her descent lasted only seconds. Although shrubbery broke her fall, she fractured her wrist and pelvis. Passersby called an ambulance, and the police arrested the invader, still in her apartment.

“When seen eight months later, with her physical injuries healed, she related these events with an ironic smile in a calm, straightforward manner. She had the satisfaction of having testified at the man’s trial and seeing him sentenced to prison, and had then resumed her life without further difficulties…”

If the sentence above, that I have put in bold, had appeared in a novel, you might think, oh, this author is using the literary technique known as “magical realism.” But this real-life incident shows that this is just the way some people think, prompted by traumatic experiences. When novelists write “magical realism,” they are often using subjective experiences that they have had in the past, when coping with things that frightened them.

The psychiatrist who wrote the above article interpreted it as an example of how people may use self-hypnosis and dissociation to cope with mortal threats. He doesn’t say whether he, himself, had interviewed the young woman, or had been told about the case by a colleague. Either way, there is no indication that the woman had been asked pertinent questions. (Search “mental status” in this blog for a discussion of interview issues.)

Why had she “related these events with an ironic smile” rather than with emotion more appropriate to the recollection of a life-threatening experience? Perhaps the one relating these events was a personality who had not felt threatened.

http://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2016.4b13

Multiperspectivity, Multiple Narrators, Multiple Points of View, Multiple Voices, Rounded Characters: Persons without multiple personality could not do it.

Since you could not intentionally create your own personality—including its perspective and point of view—it is a good thing that your brain knew how to do that, and did so.

In childhood, you can see the brain practicing its ability to create personalities in the normal phenomenon of imaginary companions.

In most people, one personality is enough, so as the person grows up, additional personalities are no longer generated, and the ability to do so is lost.

However, if there is childhood trauma, the ability to generate extra personalities may be maintained for the rest of the person’s life, a condition known as multiple personality.

In a small minority of cases, the multiple personality causes distress and dysfunction, and is a treatable mental illness. In a majority of cases, it does not cause distress or dysfunction, and may even be an asset; for example, in writing novels.

Multiple personality enables novelists to have multiperspectivity, multiple narrators, multiple points of view, multiple voices, and rounded characters.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”: Does Chapter XI, “Ivan is Split in Two,” indicate multiple personality is key to understanding classic novel?

This post is prompted by “Moscow’s Magic Realism” by Boris Fishman in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review. His essay is from the foreword to a new edition of the novel. He loves the book, and the appearance of his essay and the new edition remind me that the novel is a classic.

The chapters have titles, and I have peeked at chapter XI. The title says that Ivan, a poet, is split into two personalities, but the text indicates four: old Ivan, new Ivan, a bass voice (“which did not come from either of the Ivans”), and “a mysterious figure” on the balcony.

I may not get to it for a few weeks, but how can I not read a classic novel in which the novelist portrays a writer as having multiple personality?

Richard Russo’s “Everybody’s Fool” (postscript on creative process): The text speaks of having an alternate personality who “would know what came next”

One line quoted from the novel in yesterday’s post deserves further comment:

“It was Dougie [the main character’s alternate personality] who would know what came next.”

That line doesn't make sense to me in terms of the story itself, since Dougie is not able to see the future. You could interpret that line as meaning only that Dougie is more decisive than the regular personality, which he is, but the phrase “what came next” strikes me as having to do with the story-writing process, which involves what comes next.

In literary lore, writers are said to have a muse, a guide in the writing process. Several writers discussed in this blog have spoken of having an alternate personality who serves as their muse—Sue Grafton and Stephen King come to mind—and that is my interpretation of the line quoted above.

Richard Russo is saying that he, too, has an alternate personality who serves as his muse and helps him with what comes next.

Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo features Multiple Personality in both his memoir “Elsewhere” (2012) and his novel “Everybody’s Fool” (2016).

The memoir is discussed in my two recent posts (search “Russo”).

The present post is about the explicit, extensive, multiple personality of Douglas Raymer, the main character of the novel.

“…the sky was cleaved by yet another shaft of lightening, and he felt a searing heat in his right palm…

“He couldn’t tell how long he’d been howling, but when it was over, he felt a profound change to his being, his psyche…like something essential had been hewn in two. He’d entered the cemetery as Douglas Raymer…Now he felt a second presence…

“Strange that he should feel so familiar with the second presence even before being introduced, as if he’d known this ‘other’ all his life. Call him…what? Dougie, Raymer decided, because the presence he felt seemed younger, like a kid brother. A mean one. The thing about this Dougie? He absolutely did not give a shit…Dougie’s inclination, long held in check, was to kick ass and take names. Get the fucking job done. It was Dougie who would know what came next” (1, pp. 245-246).

“Can I tell you something? Raymer [regular self] asked.

 Anything [said Dougie].

I’m so tired of being everybody’s fool.

He expected to be laughed at, but he wasn’t. I’m here to help” (1, p. 257).

And so Raymer and Dougie continue their dialogue for the whole second half of the novel. Dougie is aware of everything Raymer thinks, but Raymer is not aware of Dougie except when he allows Raymer to be. They work as partners, and Raymer is much more successful with Dougie’s help.

Although Dougie stays mostly behind the scenes, advising Raymer as a rational voice in his head, he sometimes takes over briefly, leaving Raymer with brief memory gaps.

On the last page of the novel, when Raymer might be on the verge of living happily ever after, Dougie is still there, advising Raymer to “Play your cards right for once” (1, p. 477).

Although Raymer rationalizes his split personality as being a new thing, caused by his being struck by lightening—although it is not clear in the text that he was struck—there are suggestions that his condition was not new. For example, at the beginning of the novel, there is an incident when “He couldn’t remember pulling the trigger but must’ve” (1, p. 16), an episode in which he behaved rather aggressively, like it might have been Dougie who pulled the trigger, and that that was why he had a memory gap for doing it. And then there is Raymer’s feeling when he first officially meets Dougie, hundreds of pages later, and felt “so familiar with the second presence even before being introduced” (see above).

Incidentally, Raymer is probably not the only character in this novel with multiple personality. Other characters hear rational voices in their head. For example, the character, Alice, not only has imaginary conversations, but also has amnesia—“I keep trying to remember who you [Raymer] are” (1, p. 11), a cardinal symptom of multiple personality (since one personality may have memory gaps for what another personality knows).

But the main thing to keep in mind when you read this author’s novel is this author’s memoir, which tells us that, to Richard Russo, multiple personality is not just a gimmick or joke.

Another interesting thing is the reviews of this novel, a number of which I’ve read. Most of them don’t even mention Raymer’s multiple personality, even though he is the main character, and his multiple personality is explicit and prominent throughout the whole second half of the novel. And the one review I saw that did mention it, did so dismissively, as though it were a minor thing in the text, when, in fact, it is clearly major. The blind spot that most reviewers have for multiple personality is truly amazing.

To be fair, part of the blame is the author’s. I saw one interview about this novel that Russo had on public television. The interviewer never mentioned the main character’s multiple personality, but neither did Russo.

1. Richard Russo. Everybody’s Fool. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Third Anniversary of “Novelists have Normal Version of Multiple Personality”: Seven reasons this literary-psychiatric blog is not, yet is, popular.

1. Title: a third of people think “Who cares?”; a third think “Everyone already knows that”; a third think “Multiple personality is a plot gimmick and doesn’t really exist” (It does exist, more commonly than you think).

2. M.D.: This guy must be a psychiatrist (true) and he is going to give a psychoanalytic view. (On the contrary, I reject the Freudian view.) In any case, this psychiatrist is neither a novelist nor a professor, so he is not one of us. (True. I think outside the box, because I am from outside the box.)

3. Smartphone visitors: They don’t have a search dialog box and a larger screen, which are needed to fully enjoy this blog.

4. Referrals: The main way for a blog to get more visitors is to get referrals from famous people or popular blogs, which may never happen here.

5. Content: To appreciate the posts in this blog, you need some knowledge of both literature and multiple personality, and very few people have that combination. Fortunately, you can learn everything you need to know from the blog itself, if you read it from its beginning, or search names and subjects found in its indexes. Unfortunately, relatively few people are willing to do that.

6. On the positive side, this blog continues to have visitors from many countries, including Brazil, China, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Pakistan, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, UK, USA, Vietnam.

7. There have been more than six hundred posts. I don’t know why “Ernest Hemingway’s Twenty Nicknames” has had the most visits. Second most visited is Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen.” Other popular posts have included the first one, “Dickens, Multiple Personality, and Writers”; Henry James’s “The Ambassadors”; Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl”; Debbie Nathan’s “Sybil Exposed”; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Dialogue with the Mirror”; and “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams.

Richard Russo’s memoir “Elsewhere” (postscript): He may not have conceptualized the self-dividedness of mother and grandmother as multiple personality.

In yesterday’s post, the quotes from his memoir may have made it seem like he conceptualized, what both his mother and grandmother had, in terms of multiple personality. But the rest of the memoir suggests that he did not think of it that way.

He may have been impressed by the psychological fact that people could be self-divided, and he might incorporate that knowledge in his novels, but he might do so without thinking of it in terms of multiple personality, per se.

And his having knowledge of multiple personality only by observation of others, and not from his own personal experience, would be a cautionary lesson for Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the thesis of this blog: When unintentional multiple personality is found in a novel, it would not necessarily reflect the author’s own psychology. It could reflect the psychology of people the author has known.

However, that would be a problem for my theory, since part of the theory is that the writer uses his own multiple personality in his creative writing process; for example, characters, to the extent that they come alive for the writer and have minds of their own, are equivalent to alternate personalities.

So I wonder if Russo is as different from his mother and grandmother in this regard as he thinks. Perhaps he, too, has multiple personality, but in his case, it is the normal version.

“Elsewhere,” memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo: Mother dialogues with herself and grandmother has child-aged alternate personality.

“I gave myself a good talking-to.”

“ ‘I can’t take it anymore!’ she’d scream…Sometimes these episodes had specific triggers—a raise or bonus at work that she expected but that didn’t come through…But more often what she couldn’t take anymore was vague…Wild eyed, she’d often fix her gaze on me and ask unanswerable questions: ‘Don’t I deserve a life?…

“By the time I was in high school, though, this much had become clear: in fact, nothing was going to happen…Because the result was the same every time she had one of these meltdowns. The morning after…‘Ah, Ricko-Mio,’ she sighed, using her pet name for me. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.’ She’d give my hand a reassuring pat. ‘Last night, after you went to bed, I gave myself a good talking-to.’

“That phrase always gave me the willies…I’d never given myself a good talking-to. For that to happen there would have to be two of me, and I was always one…There was simply no other me to assume the talked-to position…Somehow, my mother was able to do that. More bizarrely still, it worked. It just didn’t last” (1, pp. 44-46).

“I hurt me.”

“One of my most vivid early memories of my grandmother had to do with her ongoing battles with milk. She preferred milk in bottles, but when home delivery ceased she had no choice but to switch to supermarket cartons, which she invariably tried to squeeze open at the wrong side, then attacked with a dull paring knife. Like my mother, once embarked upon a particular course of action, however misguided, she was incapable of reversing it, and the consequences could be explosive, even bloody…When I asked what happened, she’d show me her punctured thumb or wrist and say, in the voice of a little girl, ‘I hurt me’…

“…my grandmother’s syntax, as well as the little-girl cadence she used only when she’d injured herself, creeped me out. She never said I hurt myself but rather I hurt me, as if me and I were different people entirely, and the one holding the paring knife had stabbed an innocent bystander…I’d also linked my otherwise sane grandmother’s short-lived but recurring bouts of madness to whatever it was that possessed my mother from time to time. I’d be much older before I began to see the good talkings-to my mother was always giving herself as somehow related to my grandmother’s ‘I hurt me’—both implying a divided or fractured self…” (1, pp. 146-147).

1. Richard Russo. Elsewhere, a memoir. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

“All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr (post 2): Character hears voice of alternate personality inside her, as do many people with multiple personality.

The characters in this novel go through a lot, but they do not change. Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who becomes blind as a child in the 1930s due to cataracts, by 2014 still has the same intellectual interests and has never had cataract surgery. Werner, the other main character, shows himself in the end to be the type of person the reader knew he was all along. Likewise, the ultimate fate of the diamond, hidden throughout most of this story (from the Nazis during WWII), is not revealed. So this novel is neither character-driven nor plot-driven—it is a situation-drama.

As noted in the previous post, the novel originated in the author’s feeling or image of a boy who was trapped, but who coped with this childhood trauma through his interest in radio. This is the exact situation of Werner.

Multiple personality is one way to psychologically cope with childhood trauma, and in novelists, there are two basic ways for it to be manifest in their novels. First, a character may have overt switches between personalities, either explicitly like Dostoevsky’s The Double or implicitly (and probably unintentionally) like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Second, a character may never overtly switch from one personality to another, but may hear voices of alternate personalities inside them. All the Light We Cannot See is of the latter kind.

For example, Marie-Laure converses with the voice of her absent (imprisoned or deceased) father (1, p. 376):

Don’t risk it, says the voice of her father. Don’t risk the noise.

Just one, Papa. I will save the other. The German is gone…

Why hasn’t the trip wire sprung?

Because he cut the wire. Or I slept through the bell…

Why would he leave when what he seeks is here?

Who knows what he seeks?

You know what he seeks [the diamond]…

Note that this dialogue, which continues for three times the above length, is not written like a girl who is simply imagining what her father might say. It is written like a dialogue with an alternate personality inside her—in real life multiple personality, alternate personalities are often active behind the scenes and heard as voices—which had been created in the image of her father to help her cope with the trauma of his absence.

The other main character, Werner, is also portrayed as having the tendency to create alternate personalities inside him—“doppelgängers” of people he knows:

“Werner thinks of her, whether he wishes to or not. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made of mist…She takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger…” (1, p. 423).

Since the author had not intended to raise the issue of multiple personality, why are these characters written as having subjective experiences that only people with multiple personality would have? Apparently, the author thinks of these kinds of experiences as ordinary psychology, which anybody might have. And why would he think that way unless such experiences were personally familiar to him?

1. Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See. New York, Scribner, 2014.

“All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr, who says he wanted to write “a book that reminds us of the magic of radio…especially over a child’s mind”

The title of this Pulitzer Prize novel refers to radio waves.

If you go to the author’s website, the page about this book, and you play the video, in which Doerr discusses how he came to write it, you find that the book originated from the idea of “a boy trapped somewhere” (unrelated to World War II) and “the magic of radio…especially over a child’s mind.”

Who cares about the psychological origin of this book? Judging from his video, the author cares, and wants you to care, too.

http://www.anthonydoerr.com/press/441/

Donald Trump does not have narcissistic personality disorder—he has real accomplishments—and it would not explain his alleged alter egos with pseudonyms.

Since Trump’s alleged use of pseudonyms has brought him to the attention of this blog (see prior posts), I might as well point out that one common psychological opinion, narcissistic personality disorder, is incorrect.

The psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-5, clearly states:

“Many highly successful individuals display personality traits that might be considered narcissistic. Only when these traits…cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress do they constitute narcissistic personality disorder” (DSM-5, p. 672). Persons with this disorder have “inflated judgments of their own accomplishments” and are “preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success” (DSM-5, p. 670).

The fact is, Donald Trump is a billionaire who has almost clinched the Republican nomination for president of the United States of America. He does not have “inflated judgements” of accomplishment or “fantasies” of success. And he is neither dysfunctional nor in distress. So I think that anyone who says Trump is a “textbook case” of narcissistic personality disorder has not read the textbook.

Moreover, if it were true that he had alter egos with their own names who were not just fantasy but actually made telephone calls or were responsible for other behavior, it would not necessarily mean he was mentally ill—he probably isn’t—but it would certainly point in a different direction, as previously mentioned.

Washington Post updates story on Donald Trump’s alleged use of pseudonyms (by alternate personalities?) to speak about himself in third person.

Let me emphasize that The Washington Post story does not speak in terms of alternate personalities, and does not raise the issue of multiple personality. The article does not make any psychological interpretation of why Trump, or anyone, would talk about himself as though he were someone else.

I am mentioning this story here, because the relationship between pseudonyms and multiple personality has been a recurring issue in regard to novelists, but probably applies to other people as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-alter-ego-barron/2016/05/12/02ac99ec-16fe-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html 

“Cambridge” by Susanna Kaysen (post 2), author of “Girl, Interrupted”: Altered identity, memory, consciousness raise possibility of multiple personality.

In the previous post, I discussed “Girl, Interrupted,” because it had been written by a novelist, had been widely read and made into a movie, and I wanted to see what issues related to multiple personality might have been missed by psychiatrists, reviewers, and readers.

In “Girl, Interrupted,” Kaysen was in her late teens. In “Cambridge,” she is younger, between seven and eleven.

Although Kaysen's perspective is not psychiatric, and she does not provide enough diagnostically relevant information, she does describe sorts of things seen in people who are eventually discovered to have multiple personality.

In the first two quotes below, she describes a multiple or divided sense of self: two “creatures” and two “parts.” In the third quote, she reports strange episodes of altered consciousness. Coincidentally, she describes these episodes as coming in “waves,” like the title of the multiple personality novel by Virginia Woolf, previously discussed.

“I became two creatures”

“One night I felt an amazing thing. I became two creatures, one that was my physical self, sliding into and under the lake of sleep, and another that was also me, but a me without the bother of a body…They were opposites, they had to move in equal measure from each other, so the further I sank into sleep, the further the other me could go up into the air. What was best about it was the feeling of being peeled apart…I called it soul traveling…It was some sort of flying” (1, pp. 16-17).

Two “parts”

When she finally got her mother to give up teaching her to play the piano, “part of me would curl up into a furious, rejected, desperate ball that wanted only to please her and was tight with regret and worry, while another part puffed itself into an equally furious, gleeful, flailing, shapeless enormousness, amazed at its ability to inflict the pain I saw in her face” (1, p. 63).

Having different “parts” is a common euphemism for different personalities.

“Parts…disappearing”

In a good many people with multiple personality, the host personality (the regular personality) comes for treatment, because she feels depressed and depleted. The host personality has that empty feeling, because she is not the whole person: she lacks the feelings and memories that are in the other personalities. The following quote may describe episodes is which alternate personalities have become more alienated from the regular personality:

“Parts of me seemed to be disappearing. I didn’t understand what was happening. Something was happening—something was eating up my insides or chewing up my past. It was hard to know what it was. It was even hard to know what it felt like. That was part of what was terrible about it. Was I asleep? Was I dead? Was I sick? I seemed to be asleep, mainly. But it wasn’t the sort of lively, hating sleep I’d had in second and third grade, when I’d slept because I felt school was a waste of my time. That had been intentional; this was out of my control. It came in waves, a death-wave of not feeling, not-seeing, not-caring. Then I’d come back to life…” (1, pp. 153-154).

In conclusion, I would state this principle: When sane people have a tendency toward weird subjective experiences involving their sense of identity, their memory, and their state of consciousness, the basis of these experiences may be multiple personality. I can’t completely prove this principle by “Girl, Interrupted” and “Cambridge”—they don’t provide enough information—but they do provide enough to discuss these issues.

1. Susanna Kaysen. Cambridge. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

Unacknowledged multiple personality in “The Bad Girl” by Mario Vargas Llosa (post 2): Title character’s true problem never recognized by anyone in novel.

In my previous post, having misread a biography, I said that “Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, is said to write novels based on the premise that people have multiple personality.” However, now that I have read one of these novels, “The Bad Girl,” I find it questionable that the author recognizes his characters have multiple personality, per se.

I jumped to conclusions when the biographer said, “The Bad Girl states that by living life as she has chosen (a bizarre series of events with multiple personalities), she experiences it more ‘intensely’ ” (1, p. 106). The fact is, no narrator or character in the novel ever says that she has multiple personality. Even when she is psychiatrically hospitalized for a month of evaluation and treatment, including hypnosis, the doctors focus on her recent trauma, ignore her history of alternating identities, and don’t realize that she has multiple personality.

Ricardo (the narrator and other main character) knows very well that the Bad Girl changes attitudes and identities, using different names and behaving in different ways, but he sees her as a calculating adventurer, who seeks out rich men, not as a person with multiple personality, per se.

Ricardo does not recognize multiple personality when he sees it. For example, he meets her when she is in her new identity of Comrade Arlette. She does not recognize him. He reminds her that the last time he knew her “your name was Lily” (2, p. 23). Then she does remember him from back then, quite clearly. “Still, a moment later…she absolutely denied knowing what I was talking about. How could I have made up a thing like that? I was thinking about somebody else. She never had been named Lily” (2, p. 24).

This novel reminds me of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (search past posts), not only in that it is about the adventures of a mistress with multiple personality who comes to a tragic end, but in the reader’s belated discovery of the title character’s real name. Roxana’s real name is Susan. The bad girl’s real name is Otilia (2, p. 234). And if Ricardo had understood that the love of his life, the bad girl, had multiple personality, he would have addressed her by that name with the expectation of either seeing a personality switch or of hearing the bad girl speak of Otilia in the third person. But he never addresses her by, or even asks her about, her real name, since this novel does not acknowledge or recognize the issue of multiple personality, per se.

Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa seems inclined to a conception of human nature that verges on multiple personality. For example, near the end of the novel, he makes a point of mentioning a ballet “where each dancer would be many, each man and woman containing countless human beings” (2, p. 261).

1. Raymond Leslie Williams. Mario Vargas Llosa: a life of writing. Austin, University of Texas Press, 2014.

2. Mario Vargas Llosa. The Bad Girl. Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2006/2007.

Unpredictable: This may be a symptom of multiple personality—different personalities differ—so saying you intend to be unpredictable may be a cover story.

One reason that multiple personality is usually undiagnosed is that people who have it come up with good cover stories.

Among the main clues to multiple personality are a puzzling inconsistency and memory gaps. What would be good cover stories?

As discussed in past posts, Mark Twain, who gave many interviews, had the humorous cover story that he was an intentional liar. William Faulkner, who avoided interviews, because he might contradict himself, had the cover story that an artist should be known only by his art.

Traditionally, people tout their consistency and don’t want to be called flip-floppers. So it may be a cover story—to cover up multiple personality—if someone says that he intends to be unpredictable.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton: Their use of pseudonyms means they might have multiple personality, which could be advantageous, but puzzling.

In yesterday’s post, I cited two news stories, which reported that Trump and Clinton had used pseudonyms. And in this blog, I have discussed examples of the use of pseudonyms as a manifestation of multiple personality. Of course, the use of pseudonyms, in and of itself, does not prove that a person has multiple personality, and it certainly does not prove that either Trump or Clinton has multiple personality.

But what if they did have multiple personality? Well, you have to distinguish, as this blog does, between normal multiple personality and multiple personality disorder (also known as dissociative identity disorder). Most people have never heard of normal multiple personality. It is not in the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-5, except by implication.

The DSM-5 criteria for diagnosing multiple personality disorder requires not only, A. more than one personality, and B. memory gaps, but also C. that “The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” The inclusion of criterion C implies that there are people who have the basic symptoms of multiple personality, but do not have significant distress or dysfunction from it, and so are not mentally ill.

This blog takes that a step further. Not only may a person have multiple personality and not be mentally ill, but, sometimes, the multiple personality may be an advantage. My prime example is novelists, who do have multiple personality, who use it in their creative process, and who do lead very successful lives (without any public recognition of their multiple personality, because, as I explain in this blog, the condition is usually camouflaged, and may not be recognized even by the persons, themselves).

In short, I don’t know if either Trump or Clinton has multiple personality. But since they are both very high-functioning people, if they did have multiple personality, they would not be mentally ill: it would be the normal version, which might give them an advantage, but also make them puzzling.

Pseudonyms: Donald Trump’s use of a pseudonym, “John Barron,” in 1980’s, was “phony-spokesman trick,” not multiple personality, reports Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/21/the-amazing-story-of-donald-trumps-old-spokesman-john-barron-who-was-actually-donald-trump-himself/

I provide the link here, because pseudonyms have been a recurrent topic in this blog, and using them as a “phony spokesman trick” in business had not been mentioned.

P.S. (about 8 pm): In Hillary Clinton’s emails with an old Chicago friend, she would sometimes use the nickname “Gert” or "Gertie.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-clintons-emails-reveal-about-family-pseudonyms/

Eugene O’Neill: Playwright’s works feature multiple personality, such as the mother in Tony Award nominated revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”

I see that a revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has just been nominated for seven Tony awards, so let me draw your attention to my four posts on O’Neill, including one on that play.

Search “Eugene O’Neill” to read the four posts.

Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, is said to write novels based on the premise that people have multiple personality. 

“El sueño del celta opens with an epigraph citing a text by the turn-of-the-century Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, Motivos de Proteo:

‘Each one of us is, successively, not one but many. And these successive personalities that emerge one from the other tend to present the strangest, most astonishing contrasts among themselves.’

“This quote from Rodó is a kind of theory of human personality that appears in several of Vargas Llosa’s novels, but underlies in a consistent and significant way La casa verde, El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, and El sueño del celta” (1, pp. 110-111).

1. Raymond Leslie Williams. Mario Vargas Llosa: a life of writing. Austin, University of Texas Press, 2014.

“A Streetcar Named Desire”: Ben Brantley’s review in New York Times does not reveal relationship between Tennessee Williams and Blanche DuBois.

I quote Tennessee Williams about that relationship.

I also explain that, according to the text of the play, Blanche DuBois does NOT have a history of depending on the kindness of strangers in the way that most reviewers seem to think.

Please search “Tennessee Williams” to read my four posts.

“Girl, Interrupted” by Susanna Kaysen: Are a suicide attempt that is “a form of murder” and concerns about “losing time” indicative of multiple personality?

This 1993 memoir was made into a 1999 movie starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, who won an Oscar. It is about Kaysen’s 1967-9 psychiatric hospitalization on a ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital, a place, according to the cover, which was renowned for its famous patients, including Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles. Kaysen's discharge diagnosis was “Borderline Personality, Recovered.”

Although there is nothing in this book that is diagnostically definitive, two things are suggestive of multiple personality: the way Kaysen talks about her suicide attempt, and, separately, her concern about whether she might have had memory gaps. (Search “memory gaps.” It is a cardinal symptom of multiple personality and a recurrent subject in this blog.)

Suicide Attempt

In discussing her suicide attempt—an overdose with fifty aspirin—she says the following:

“Suicide is a form of murder—premeditated murder…” (p. 36).

“Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself…” (p. 37).

This is a well-known multiple personality scenario in which a “persecutor” personality (search “persecutor”) attempts to kill the regular personality, because the latter is weak and dysfunctional.

Memory Gaps: “Losing Time”

The first episode is when Kaysen worries about whether her psychiatric evaluation had lasted only twenty minutes, as she recalled, or three hours, as the doctor claimed. She gathers documentary evidence, and figures out time lines, to prove that she was right. But the issue I’m raising is not whether she was right, but why she got so worked up about the issue. Perhaps this was not the first time that she might have had a memory gap, and she worried whether it meant she was crazy.

The second episode is when she goes to a dentist and gets a tooth pulled. Afterward, she says to the nurse, Valerie:

“I want to know how much time that was [in the dentist’s office],” I said. “See, Valerie, I’ve lost some time, and I need to know how much. I need to know” (p. 109). And she was so upset, she started crying.

Here she has used the classic metaphor that people with multiple personality often use about their memory gaps: losing time.

In conclusion, although I can’t diagnose multiple personality based on sketchy information about a person I’ve never met, this memoir may describe a kind of suicide attempt that is seen in multiple personality: the internal homicide, in which one personality attempts to kill another personality.

And this memoir does raise questions about memory gaps, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality. However, Kaysen never complained about memory gaps to her doctors at McLean Hospital, and they never asked her if she had any memory gaps, which is typical of most patients with multiple personality and most psychiatrists.

Susanna Kaysen. Girl, Interrupted. New York, Vintage Books/Random House, 1993/1994.