Joanne Greenberg (“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”) post 4: typical multiple personality with good memory, not psychotic, childhood trauma, writes novels.

Excellent Memory

Aside from her multiple personality memory gaps (her regular personality’s amnesia for the periods of time that an alternate personality was in control), Deborah (protagonist of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) had an excellent memory.

She had to have had a good memory to remember the details of her inner world and its secret language. Also, as she mentions on page 254, she had memorized Shakespeare’s Hamlet from beginning to end.

I have previously described this paradox of the memory of people with multiple personality—memory gaps in a person who otherwise has an excellent memory—in regard to the absent-mindedness of Mark Twain.

Not Psychotic

Psychiatrists define psychosis as impaired reality-testing; that is, a person’s inability to test the validity of their own thinking by comparing it with objective reality. If you hear a voice, but you know other people don’t hear it, and that it is a product of your own mind, then you have intact reality-testing and you are not psychotic.

Deborah’s regular personality was in touch with reality.

Childhood Trauma

Multiple personality originates as a way to cope with childhood trauma. The reason that some children cope in this way is that having imaginary companions is a normal tendency in the psychology of childhood. Deborah’s alternate personalities originated to help her cope with the trauma of surgery at age five.

Novelist

Joanne Greenberg, once she was not mentally ill—her multiple personality was no longer causing distress and dysfunction—lived happily ever after, leading a full life, writing novels.