Siri Hustvedt (post 3) on how she became her father, like writers become their characters, and people with multiple personality become alternate personalities.

“During the last week I spent with my father before he died…On one of those last nights, I crawled into the narrow, too short bed I had slept in as a child and pulled the covers over me. As I lay there, thinking of my father, I felt the oxygen line in my nostrils and its discomfort, the heaviness of my lame leg, from which a tumor had been removed years before, the pressure in my tightened lungs, and a sudden panicked helplessness that I could not move from the bed on my own but would have to call for help. For however long it lasted, only minutes, I was my father. The sensation was both overwhelming and awful. I felt the proximity of death, its inexorable pull, and I had to struggle to leap back into my own body, to find myself again” (1, pp. 124-125).

Was that a one-time identification with her father, or did she have an on-going identification, an alternate personality, who was patterned after her father? And had she switched to that alternate personality for a few minutes? She notes that her father had once told her of his having had “a trembling fit” (1, p. 126). Was the shaking woman really a shaking man, an alternate personality patterned after her father, inside her? Or was it the shaking of an alternate personality derived from the febrile convulsions she had had as a child? (1, p. 153).

The point here is that Hustvedt becomes other people, psychologically speaking. She becomes her characters when she writes a novel. She became her father as described above.

And who have subjectively realistic experiences of becoming other people? People with multiple personality do, when they switch to their alternate personalities.

1. Siri Hustvedt. The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. New York, Frances Coady/Henry Holt, 2009.