“The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves” by Siri Hustvedt (post 2): She has “sense that two Siris were present,” but no evaluation for multiple personality.

Two and half years after her father’s death, speaking at a memorial for him, she “launched into my first sentence, and began to shudder violently from the neck down. My arms flapped. My knees knocked. I shook as if I were having a seizure. Weirdly, my voice wasn’t affected. It didn’t change at all…When the speech ended, the shaking stopped” (1, p. 3).

“Once before, during the summer of 1982…In an art gallery in Paris, I suddenly felt my left arm jerk upward and slam me backward into the wall. The whole event lasted no more than a few seconds. Not long after that…came the violent migraine that lasted for almost a year…I have suffered from migraines since childhood” (1, pp. 4-5).

“The shaking woman felt like me and not like me at the same time. From the chin up, I was my familiar self. From the neck down, I was a shuddering stranger…I decided to go in search of the shaking woman” (1, p. 7).

“I have a vague sense that there are hidden recesses of my personality that I am reluctant to penetrate. Maybe that’s the part of me that shook” (1, p. 19).

“Did I…have a kind of double consciousness—a shuddering person and a cool one?” (1, p. 27).

Recurrent attacks of shaking when giving talks were minimized by taking propranolol (Inderal), “but I felt the quiver internally…It was like shaking without shaking” and she had “a grim sense that two Siris were present, not one” (1, p. 40).

“The strangeness of a duality in myself remains, a powerful sense of an ‘I’ and an uncontrollable other. The shaking woman is certainly not anyone with a name. She is a speechless alien who appears only during my speeches…I have come to think of the shaking woman as an untamed other self, a Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll, a kind of double” (1, p. 47).

“Is each of us a singular being or a plural one?” (1, p. 69).

“When I am writing well…the sentences come as if I hadn’t willed them, as if they were manufactured by another being…the sense that I have been taken over happens several times during the course of a book…I don’t write; I am written…What is at work in automatic writing?” (1, p. 72).

“When I write fiction, I see my characters moving around, speaking, and acting…I am usually one of those characters, not I as I but I as someone else, an other self, male or female, projected into the mental world I inhabit as I write” (1, p. 112).

“When I shook, it didn’t feel like me. That was the problem” (1, p. 193). The problem has never been explained or solved, but is under control, and she is at peace with it.

Hustvedt has studied this problem for years. She has been evaluated by various medical, neurological, and psychiatric specialists. And her book has about as many notes and scholarly references as pages.

But only two of her many references are books about multiple personality, and neither of these books has “diagnosis” in its title. Indeed, they are not the kind of books someone would read to find out if she had multiple personality, a condition whose physical symptoms may include pseudoseizures and severe headaches (2). 

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

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.