“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.