DSM-5: Order of Diagnostic Criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personality) prevents most clinicians from making this diagnosis.

Every condition in the psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM-5) has “diagnostic criteria,” which is a list of symptoms that define it.

In DSM-5, the two main diagnostic criteria for multiple personality are listed in the following order:

Criterion A is about having more than one personality.

Criterion B is about having memory gaps.

The above order suggests, incorrectly, that:

First, you will see that a person has more than personality.

Second, you will discover that one personality has a memory gap for the period of time that another personality was in control.

But in the typical case, a clinician discovers memory gaps first.

The diagnosis of multiple personality is typically made by screening all patients for memory gaps: Have you ever had memory gaps? Do you ever lose time?

If the person has had memory gaps (not due to another medical condition), the presence of alternate personalities will be discovered in the course of accounting for the memory gaps.

Proposed order of the diagnostic criteria:

Criterion A should be about having memory gaps.

Criterion B should be about having more than one personality.

For previous, related posts, search “diagnostic criteria” and “mental status.”

Donald Trump (post 12) seems unable to “pivot”: If he has multiple personality, he might be less flexible than a person with one multifaceted personality.

If a person with multiple personality were like a group of people, he might find it easy to “pivot”—change tactics in a political campaign—by just switching to one of his other personalities.

But a person with multiple personality is not like a group of ten people. He is like one person divided into ten parts, with each part specialized to come out and deal with a particular type of situation. And if one of those parts is specialized in personal confrontations, then that is the part who will take charge in debates.

“Tender is the Night” (post 2) by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 3): Dick Diver’s multiple personality memory gaps and Nicole Diver’s “different simple people”

In the second half of the novel, Dick, a psychiatrist—married to Nicole (a former mental patient, who probably has multiple personality, but is now usually stable)—becomes an alcoholic. He even has, it would, at first, appear, alcohol blackouts:

“He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved” (1, p. 177).

“Dick finished his bottle and then danced with the English girl again, conquering his unwilling body with bold revolutions and stern determined marches down the floor. The most remarkable thing suddenly happened. He was dancing with the girl, the music stopped—and she had disappeared” (1, p. 265).

Two peculiarities of these episodes are 1. how brief a time the amnesia covers (ten minutes and the length of a dance), and 2. in the first episode, there are auditory hallucinations (voices). If the amnesia were the result of alcohol toxicity from a high blood-alcohol level, why would it have been so brief? But the more interesting question is why Dick heard voices. Voices may be heard in severe alcohol withdrawal, but they are not usually heard during intoxication. And this is not the only time that Dick has heard voices. It is an “old” experience:

“But the old interior laughter had begun inside him…the laughter inside him became so loud that it seemed as if [the person he was speaking to] must hear it…” (1, p. 368).

As I said, people don’t usually hear voices when they are drunk. And the voices Dick hears are personalized, like they are voices of people or personalities: “voices that did not know how much he was loved.” Moreover, his hearing these voices is apparently an old, recurring experience: “the old interior laughter.”

Although alcohol intoxication does not typically feature auditory hallucinations, multiple personality does: the voices of alternate personalities speaking from behind the scenes. Therefore, Dick has probably had multiple personality memory gaps, not alcohol blackouts.

(Search “memory gaps” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.)

Other passages suggestive of his having multiple personality include:

“Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him…” (1, p. 122).

“His love for Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken universe of the war’s ending—in such contacts the personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the personality itself—there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people…” (1, p. 287).

The latter passage might be a description of how a novelist takes in the personalities of people he knows, which may start out as being like the real-life person, but will get creatively processed to become characters, what I have called “character alternate personalities (CAPs).”

Nicole’s multiplicity

Similarly, Nicole says, “When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban” (1, p. 191).

“…a split personality—Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing could be explained” (1, p. 227).

“ ‘Think how you love me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight’ ” (1, p. 238).

“You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”

“Oh no,” [Nicole] assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really—I’m just a—I’m just a whole lot of different simple people” (1, p. 343).

“Multiple personality” was renamed “dissociative identity” in the psychiatric diagnostic manual (the DSM) to emphasize that although the person may appear multiplied, they are really subdivided: into different, relatively simple, people-like parts.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night [1934]. New Delhi, Rupa, 2013.

“Tender is the Night” (post 1) by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 2): Nicole is called “twin six” and victim of father-daughter incest, raising possibility of multiple personality.

In the first half of the novel, there is a love triangle among three young Americans in Europe: Dick (Dr. Richard Diver, a handsome psychiatrist), Nicole (Dick’s beautiful heiress wife), and Rosemary (a beautiful Hollywood starlet).

Toward the end of the first half of the novel, it is revealed that Nicole is a former mental patient who had been hospitalized and treated by one of Dick’s colleagues, and that she still gets mentally ill at times. Here is what is known about her mental illness so far:

Nicole says, “One doctor in Chicago said I was bluffing, but what he really meant was that I was a twin six and he had never seen one before. But I was very busy being mad then, so I didn’t care what he said, when I am very busy being mad I don’t usually care what they say, not if I were a million girls” (1, p. 144).

Nicole says, “I think one thing today and another tomorrow. That is really all that’s the matter with me, except a crazy defiance and a lack of proportion” (1, p. 146).

Her father says, “…she got crazier and crazier…Almost always about men going to attack her, men she knew or men on the street—anybody” (1, p. 150).

At the Swiss psychiatric hospital her diagnosis is “Schizophrénie…Divided Personality” (1, p. 151).

Nicole’s father confesses to the psychiatrists that after Nicole’s mother died, he committed incest with Nicole (1, p. 152).

Comment

I don’t know what “twin six” means in this context. (If you know, please submit a comment.) Had the doctor in Chicago witnessed multiple personality—six to twelve personalities (“twin six”)—but had never seen a case before and thought she was faking?

The formal psychiatric diagnosis—equating schizophrenia with divided personality—suggests that the Swiss psychiatrists (this novel was written in the 1930s) did not make any distinction between schizophrenia, a psychosis, and multiple personality, a dissociative disorder. This reflects the historical fact that Eugen Bleuler, the Swiss psychiatrist who coined the term “schizophrenia” (to replace “dementia praecox”), had spoken of a heterogeneous “group of schizophrenias,” within which he included cases that would today be diagnosed as multiple personality.

Since there is no history of mental illness in Nicole’s family, the Swiss psychiatrists attribute her mental illness to the father-daughter incest, which today’s psychiatrists associate more with multiple personality than with schizophrenia.

Another diagnostic indication is the very fact of Dick’s romantic attraction to Nicole. Persons with multiple personality tend to be much more socially engaging than persons with schizophrenia.

Indeed, training in the treatment of multiple personality includes the cautioning of therapists against two types of countertransference or acting out: 1. attempts to reparent child-aged alternate personalities, and 2. sexual involvement with sexualized alternate personalities, commonly found in cases with a history of incest. Therapists are told not to be surprised if a woman who had developed multiple personality to cope with incest now has alternate personalities who seek acting-out authority figures for sex and revenge.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night [1934]. New Delhi, Rupa, 2013.

“Hillary Clinton’s ‘Angry’ Face” by Lisa Feldman Barrett in New York Times (Sept. 23/25?, 2016) is based on questionable study of gender prejudice.

In her Sunday Review “Gray Matter” essay, Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett says that “…people perceive emotion differently in men’s and women’s faces. It’s something for Americans to consider as they watch the first debate between Mrs. Clinton and Donald J. Trump on Monday” (1).

The problem, says Professor Barrett, is that people think men deal rationally with situations, but women get emotional. In the journal article on which her essay is based, she notes that one reason given for this prejudice is the morphology of feminine faces:

“People of all ages who have facial qualities that resemble an infant (e.g., round face, smaller chin, larger eyes) are subject to what has been called the baby-face overgeneralization effect whereby they are judged to be psychologically similar to babies. Feminine faces are morphologically similar to baby faces, leading to the possibility that inferences about female emotionality, just like other aspects of the female sex role stereotype, result from this perceptual overgeneralization” (2).

So professor Barrett did a study “…using androgynous faces, created on a computer by melding male and female features. We then produced “male” and “female” versions of each face by adding gender-typical hair. Our test subjects, who were unaware of this ruse, were again more likely to attribute an internal, emotional cause to the poses in the faces with female hair, and more likely to attribute a situational cause to the poses in the faces with male hair” (1).

But if you look at the pictures of the “androgynous faces” used in the study (2), the female, shoulder-length, “gender-typical hair” hides the the sides of the neck, giving a supposedly gender-neutral picture the appearance of having a neck that is half as thick as the androgynous picture with the relatively short male hair. And since babies have thinner necks than adults, the study did not show that the prejudice of women’s emotionality is independent of “the baby-face overgeneralization effect.”

Indeed, long hair, per se, may make a person look more emotional than a person with short hair, even if both persons are the same sex. And Professor Barrett doesn’t even mention lipstick, etc., which is designed to suggest youth and emotional arousal.

If anyone wants to delve deeper into the physiognomy of sexual stereotyping, I suggest they include my article on the subject (3). [added 6:26 am]

In any case, I don’t see how the prejudice of female emotionality is relevant to this particular presidential contest. Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it is Trump who appears more emotional.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opinion/sunday/hillary-clintons-angry-face.html?ref=opinion

2. http://www.affective-science.org/pubs/2009/shes-emotional-2009.pdf

3. Nakdimen KA. The physiognomic basis of sexual stereotyping. Am J Psychiatry. 1984 Apr;141(4):499-503. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6703126

Note: The New York Times article appears online on September 23, 2016, and in the online version of the September 25th, Sunday Review, but, for some unknown reason, the article does not appear in the print version of the Sunday Review.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Blake Bailey, who is working on a biography of Philip Roth, reviews the new biography of Shirley Jackson by Ruth Franklin.

I haven’t read Shirley Jackson yet, but I have her novel, The Bird’s Nest, because the plot is explicitly about a person with multiple personality, and it was published in 1954, three years before “The Three Faces of Eve,” a 1957 nonfiction book and movie, made the subject popular.

Blake Bailey does not wonder why Shirley Jackson would come up with a multiple personality novel at a time when multiple personality was not a popular subject and no recent cases had been reported, or why she would have been motivated to study the subject by reading Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality, a nonfiction book about a case of multiple personality that had been published back in 1906.

Perhaps Mr. Bailey will think about multiple personality for his biography of Philip Roth (search Philip Roth in this blog).

Hillary Rodham Clinton, unlike Trump, often has a bare neck, an appearance of vulnerability, which can be powerful, but only with gentlemen.

In my last post, I commented on Trump’s neckties, and how they secure his collar to protect his neck. In contrast, Hillary, like many women, often goes around with her neck exposed, a blatant appearance of vulnerability. 

Women expose their necks because it works for them, at least with gentlemen, here defined as men who do not attack the weak and vulnerable. But is Trump a gentleman or a predator? Predators have contempt for the weak and vulnerable.

However, since Trump may have more than one personality, he may be both a gentleman and a predator, and I can’t say which style would work best with him, a bare or a covered neck. So I guess the best way for Hillary to dress when debating Trump would be whatever way gives her the most confidence.

Donald Trump’s Long Neckties are not Symbols of Impotence. Long Neckties are not Phallic Symbols. They tie the collar around the neck.

The two most noticeable features of Trump’s appearance are his changing, colorful hair and his often excessively long neckties. I don’t know why he wears such long neckties. Perhaps he thinks they are phallic symbols.

The idea that a long necktie is a phallic symbol is one of the silliest Freudian interpretations, for if the long necktie, which hangs limply, were a phallic symbol, it would symbolize impotence.

The key to understanding the necktie is its name, “necktie”: Its purpose is to tie something around the neck (a collar).

Why would anyone want to secure a collar around the neck? Because the neck, both in fact and symbolically, represents vulnerability, as in the expression “sticking your neck out.” It you want to kill someone, the neck is a prime target. And so anything that covers the neck will help protect the person and decrease the appearance of vulnerability.

My argument is supported, not disproved, by the slave collar, for a collar that someone else has imposed on you shows that they have taken control of you at your most vulnerable point, your neck.

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (post 3): Rather than “a put-up job,” such as mocking friend’s indecisiveness, Frost got poem from his voices.

Scholars familiar with Lawrance Thompson’s biography of Frost may cite the following as the origin and meaning of “The Road Not Taken”:

“Frost was familiar with all the unavoidable excruciations through which [his friend Edward Thomas] went each time he was required to make a choice…Teasing gently, [Frost] accused Thomas of being such a romantic that he enjoyed crying over what might have been. After one of their best flower-gathering walks, he had said to Thomas, ‘No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.’ ” After completing the poem, Frost mailed a copy to Thomas, but Thomas didn’t get the joke (1, pp. 87-89).

However neat the above scenario, it is at odds with what the same biography quotes Frost as saying about his creative process:

“A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness…” Only later does a poem find its thought or meaning. “Let’s say again: A poem particularly must not begin thought first…” (1, p. 65).

So Frost would not have written “The Road Not Taken” based on an idea, any idea, including the idea of mocking his friend’s indecisiveness. That would have been “a put-up job so to speak.” However, once the poem had been written, Frost realized that it embodied the indecisiveness of his friend, at least for Frost, personally. His friend’s indecisiveness had not been the basis of the poem, but was now Frost’s personal interpretation.

It must not be forgotten, as I noted in my previous post, that Frost heard voices all his life. And as Frost says, “I hear everything I write. All poetry is to me first a matter of sound. I hear my things spoken” (1, p. 68).

1. Lawrance Thompson. Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph 1915-1938. New York, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970.

“Stop-Time” by Frank Conroy (post 4): How has the Iowa Writers’ Workshop interpreted the memory gaps in Conroy’s memoir?

Since Conroy had been the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for eighteen years (1987—2005), I wonder how the Workshop interprets the memoir’s two memory gaps, cited in my previous posts. I can think of four possibilities; namely, that the Workshop

1. ignores the memory gaps, or

2. considers them a metaphor, not to be taken literally, or

3. considers them literally true, but nothing special, or

4. recognizes them as a cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

Perhaps there are other interpretations or a diversity of opinion. Perhaps Conroy’s memoir is also read in other writing programs. Perhaps you are not affiliated with any writing program. In short, your interpretation of Conroy’s memory gaps is welcome.

“Stop-Time” by Frank Conroy (post 3): Amnesia—a multiple personality memory gap—for the building he lived in until he was eight years old.

This memoir is the story of a chaotic, puzzling childhood, which, Conroy says, is “a past I didn’t understand, a past I feared” (1, p. 278).

The key to this psychological mystery is his history of memory gaps, one instance of which I quoted in my previous post, from the beginning of the memoir. Another example is found toward the end of the memoir:

“…I would find myself staring up at that particular building. Because I’d been told, I knew I’d lived there for many years as a child. Passing it my mind became still. All the noises of the world stopped abruptly, like a movie running on without a sound track. I had lived in the building until I was eight years old and yet I lacked memories of it. No image of the apartment, no image of having lived there, no image of myself. It was spooky” (1, p. 212).

This is not ordinary forgetting. It is impossible for Conroy to have had no memories at all of where he lived until he was eight years old. The memories must have been somewhere. If they were not held by his regular personality, then they must have been held by one or more alternate personalities.

If I had interviewed him, I could have brought out and spoken with these alternate personalities. And what they told me could have been corroborated by family, friends, neighbors, and an inspection of the inside of the building itself.

1. Frank Conroy. Stop-Time [A Memoir, 1967]. New York, Penguin Books, 1977.

Donald Trump now says he believes President Obama was born in the USA: Has Trump changed his mind or is a different personality speaking?

Since it is a well-known fact that President Obama was born in the USA, most people have assumed that Donald Trump always knew it, but had only pretended to believe otherwise, because of racism and/or political advantage.

But that assumption entails the further assumption that Trump is an excellent actor, because he couldn’t have been a leading “birther” if other birthers had sensed he was insincere. So if Trump is not an excellent actor, then he must have sincerely believed what he had said.

My hypothesis is that Trump both believes and disbelieves that Obama was born in the USA, and that he takes one or the other position depending on which of his personalities is speaking. For I still have not heard a better explanation than multiple personality for his pseudonyms, hair color changes, unpredictability, questionable memory, and self-contradictions.

Would Donald Trump be our first multiple personality president? I don’t know, since I have not studied presidents. All I know is that multiple personality has not stopped novelists from winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“Stop-Time” by Frank Conroy (post 2): a childhood memory ends just when the traumatic part begins, which is typical of a multiple personality memory gap.

Ordinary memory tends to remember the most emotionally arousing parts of past events: what was surprising, frightening, etc.

The opposite is typical of memory in multiple personality. If something is starting to happen that is frightening—e.g., signs that a beating or molestation is about to occur—they will automatically switch to the alternate personality who had originated to deal with, and contain the memory of, that kind of experience, leaving the regular personality with a memory gap for the period of time that the alternate personality substituted. And that is what Frank Conroy appears to be describing in this childhood memory:

“The arrival home of my father late one night. I ran down the hall, opened the door, and looked up at him. My last memory is that something was wrong…I’ve been told that on that night he got rough and chased me all over the apartment. When my mother came home I was hiding under the bed, but my memory ceases at the opening of the door. The image is vivid and detailed to the point of remembering the weave of his suit—gray-blue herringbone—and the smell of his breath. Bourbon, but after that, nothing” (1, p. 22).

1. Frank Conroy. Stop-Time [A Memoir, 1967]. New York, Penguin Books, 1977.

Psychology of Literary Liars: John le Carré quoted in New York Times as saying he is a liar, but that is also true of Isabel Allende and William Faulkner.

In Walter Isaacson’s New York Times (September 13/18, 2016) book review of The Pigeon Tunnel, a new memoir by spy novelist John le Carré, the author is quoted as saying: “I’m a liar. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.”

For perspective, I reprint my past post from October 27, 2014:

Novelist Isabel Allende said in interviews that she was a liar: The Paradox of the Honest Liar, a Clue to Multiple Personality

Allende: I remember always having told stories—and making them up and inventing and exaggerating and lying all the time.

Interviewer: Lying?

Allende: Yes, they were not lies for me because I thought those things really happened, but my mother says I was a terrible liar. I was always punished for lying.

Interviewer: How would you describe the difference between lies and truth?

Allende: For me, I can no longer say…For example, I just went to Switzerland and I received an award. It was a bronze statue. I no longer know what size the bronze statue is. When I received it I think it was more or less like this (holds hands a foot apart), but then I started telling the story and now it is this big (arms open wide). Very soon it will be a monument. [1, pp. 115-116]

She has a good sense of humor, but don’t let that obscure her serious, lifelong concern with lying.

The obvious problem with Allende’s explanation is that she (the host personality, who is doing this interview) actually does recall the original, true size of the bronze statue. The only way her explanation could make sense would be if the exaggerations in her stories were honestly believed by a separate, story narrator, personality, and it was the latter personality whom her mother and others would accuse of lying.

“So many times I don’t remember people’s names, or the places I have been…I don’t remember the names of the men I have married. At times I even forget the names of my own children…They had always told me that I was a liar…” ( 1, p. 218).

This is seen with a person who has multiple personality, in which life experiences are divided among the separate memory banks of different personalities.

“I have a terrible memory. I’m always inventing my own life, so I find that in different interviews I tell different stories about the same subject…The truth is I’m a born liar” (1, pp. 288-289).

This reminds me of when William Faulkner (see past post) warned interviewers not to ask him personal questions, because he might give different answers when future interviewers ask him the same question.

“…I have a special voice for storytelling, a voice that, although mine, also seems to belong to someone else…” (2, p.  227). When writing, she is “transformed into a multifaceted being, reproduced to infinity, seeing my own reflection in multiple mirrors, living countless lives, speaking with many voices. The characters became so real that they invaded the house…” (2, p. 263).

“We learn early on to wear masks we change so frequently that we are no longer able to identify our own faces in the mirror” (3, p. xiv-xv). [My novel Eva Luna] “is dotted with autobiographical observations about the practice of writing” (3, p. 63). [People with multiple personality may have a problem with mirrors. Search “mirrors” in this blog.]

If you are new to this blog, you might think that all the above about lying, memory, and mirrors are just some idiosyncrasies of Isabel Allende, and have no wider significance.  But these same issues have come up with many of the other novelists discussed in this blog. For relevant prior posts in this blog, search: liar; lying; duplicity; mirror; memory.

In conclusion, whenever you have a person who has a reputation for being a liar, or even admits to having repeatedly lied, but this doesn’t make sense to you, because the person seems to be a basically honest and moral person—in short, the paradox of an honest liar—the solution to this mystery may be multiple personality, in which different personalities have different memory banks and different views of reality; which has been seen previously in this blog’s discussion of other great novelists.

1. John Rodden (ed). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

2. Isabel Allende. Eva Luna. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

3. Celia Correas Zapata. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Houston, Arte Publico Press, 2002.

“A Perfect Spy” (post 1) by John le Carré (post 2): In first hundred pages, spy tells how unhappy childhood taught him the “art” of multiple personality.

This is John le Carré’s most autobiographical novel, especially in regard to his childhood.

The following scene takes place when the spy, the protagonist, was a schoolboy, after the latest episode of his chaotic childhood, when he was taking refuge in his school’s staff lavatory:

“He took out his penknife, opened it and held its big blade uppermost before his face in the mirror…He thought of cutting his throat…He pressed his cheek against the wood panelling…The knife was still in his hand. His eyes went hot and blurred, his ears sang. The divine voice inside him told him to look, and he saw the initials “KS-B” carved very deeply into the best panel…

“All afternoon he waited, confident nothing had happened. I didn’t do it. If I went back it wouldn’t be there…

“It was not until evening line-up that the full name of the Honorable Kenneth Sefton Boyd was called out…[Boyd was] Mystified. Mystified himself, [the protagonist] watched [Boyd] go [to get corporal punishment]…

“ ‘It had a hyphen,’ Sefton Boyd told [the protagonist] the next day. ‘Whoever did it [carved ‘KS-B’] gave us a hyphen when we haven’t got one. If I ever find the sod I’ll kill him.

“ ‘So will I,’ [the protagonist] promised loyally and meant every word. Like [his father, he] was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment” (1, pp. 97-98).

Comment

The protagonist had evidently carved the initials in the wood panelling: The initials were carved, and he was right there holding the knife. But he had no memory of doing it—he had a memory gap (search “memory gaps”)—and he did not notice the carving until a voice in his head told him to look.

That is, an alternate personality had carved the letters, and his regular personality had amnesia for what the alternate personality had done. And then a third personality, the voice, told the regular personality to look and see what the alternate personality had done.

“Learning to live on several planes at once” means having several different personalities. As previously discussed in this blog, the “alternate” in “alternate personality” is misleading, because all the personalities are conscious simultaneously, and they alternate only in regard to which one is out in front and is most in control of overt behavior at that moment, “the face you spoke from at that moment.”

It is noteworthy that, even after the protagonist’s regular personality sees, from circumstantial evidence, that he must have been the one who carved the initials in the wood panel, he does not really believe it. Why? Because remembering is believing. And the regular personality does not remember doing it. That is why you can give a person (the regular personality) all kinds of proof, even videotapes showing, that they have multiple personality, and they may still deny it.

In conclusion, this episode in the novel is a description of multiple personality, but since the terminology is not used, the author may not understand it in those terms.

1. John le Carré. A Perfect Spy. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.

[September 16, 2016: I don't plan any more posts on this book.]

Why is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Writers aren’t people…they’re a whole lot of people…” used as epigraph for biography of spy novelist John le Carré?

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person” (1, p. 12).

The above is one way to describe multiple personality. That is, objectively, there is one person, but, psychologically, it is like there is more than one person, in some cases a whole lot of people, who usually try to present themselves as one person behind the mask of the host personality.

Another Fitzgerald quote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” —from The Crack-up [1936]

Self-contradiction is an ability for which a person with multiple personality is specially qualified, since it is relatively easy for two personalities to hold contradictory views. Indeed, one clue that a person might secretly have multiple personality would be puzzling contradictions.

John le Carré

John le Carré’s biographer never directly explains his choice of the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote as his epigraph, but he does address one of the favorite subjects of this blog, an author’s use of pseudonyms:

“ ‘People who have had very unhappy childhoods’, John le Carré once wrote, ‘are pretty good at inventing themselves.’…As a boy he learned to invent…adopting one persona to conceal another…‘I’m a liar,’ he explains…Of course, ‘John le Carré’ does not exist. The name is a mask, for somebody called David Cornwell…Over the years he has provided several explanations for it, but has subsequently admitted that none of them is true” (2, p. xiv).

I have argued that authors make bogus excuses for their use of pseudonyms, when the true explanation relates to their multiple personalities. (Search “pseudonyms” to see past posts.)

Other comments by John le Carré:

“I’ve often tried to draw this parallel between the writer and the spy” (3, p. 14). “When, as a writer, I spied on myself, I often invented characters that represented the other half of me…But the greatest magic of writing lies in the fact that one actually does not know oneself as long as things have not been put on paper. That is what renews the urge to write. It is a journey of discovery into the self” (3, pp. 113-114).

INTERVIEWER: Your characters always seem to be searching for their own identities.

Le CARRÉ: Yes, that’s true, but it’s part of the golden center that one can never touch. I’m looking for mine, they’re looking for theirs (3, p. 158).

Alternate Personalities as Spies

To understand multiple personality, it is useful to think of alternate personalities as secret agents. As discussed in past posts, alternate personalities usually stay behind the scenes, while the regular, host personality deals with the public. And when any alternate personality does come out (in a person whose multiple personality has not been diagnosed or recognized), it usually does so incognito, answering to the regular name, like a spy hiding behind an assumed identity. Alternate personalities, like spies, usually don’t acknowledge their identity unless and until their cover is blown.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Love of The Last Tycoon: A Western [1941]. Edited with Preface and Notes by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York, Scribner, 2003.

2. Adam Sisman. John le Carré: The Biography. New York, Harper, 2015.

3. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Judith S. Baughman (Editors). Conversations with John le Carré. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2004.

Laura Albert of JT LeRoy literary hoax, who had, in effect, reported alternate personality in Paris Review and court, describes self as “avatar variant”

This real-life story illustrates the relationship of pseudonyms to alternate personalities, and the tendency of people to disavow having multiple personality.

http://www.theparisreview.org/miscellaneous/5664/being-jt-leroy-nathaniel-rich

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/nyregion/21writer.html?_r=0

http://www.filmreviewdaily.com/Reviews/Author%20The%20JT%20LeRoy%20Story.html

http://themuse.jezebel.com/the-writer-once-known-as-jt-leroy-lives-to-tell-another-1786387896

Frank Conroy’s Foreword to “Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl” cites it as one of two books that he found most inspirational to him as a writer.

Foreword

“When I began…to write my own memoirs, there were two books whose existence heartened me—Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs…and Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, because it proved that a writer could successfully re-create states of consciousness despite his failure to understand those states when they had originally occurred…

“Renee’s courage inspired me…My own fears of reliving what had been a chaotic, frightening and confusing childhood seemed, after her example, fears I could not allow myself…

“…the book moved me because it was so clearly a triumph…of faith in the act of writing. Beset by…the impossibility of any full and direct re-creation of abnormal states of mind…she nonetheless went on to write the book, giving us the sensations of schizophrenia more vividly…than anything I’ve read…”

Frank Conroy

“Frank Conroy (1936 – 2005)…published five books, including the highly acclaimed memoir Stop-Time. Published in 1967, this…book was nominated for the National Book Award…Conroy…was director of the influential Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa for 18 years, from 1987 until 2005…” (Wikipedia).

He was an eminent person in the American literary academy.

In my first post of this blog, on Charles Dickens, in discussing Edmund Wilson’s famous essay on Dickens’s multiple personality, “Two Scrooges,” I wondered why Wilson had appreciated Dickens’s multiple personality while others had not. Had Wilson known anyone with multiple personality? I found that he had. A biography of Wilson’s wife, the novelist and critic, Mary McCarthy, told of her multiple personality since childhood.

Thus, both books cited by the longtime director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop as most inspirational to him as a writer were by people who had multiple personality: one, with misdiagnosed mental illness, was the “schizophrenic girl”; the other, with the normal version, was a novelist.

Marguerite Sechehaye’s “Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl”: Child-aged personalities of case of multiple personality respond well to “Mama”

“[This is Renee’s intimate story as she recalled it shortly after her recovery. It begins with her first feelings of unreality when she was five years old.]”

“I remember very well the day it happened…a disturbing sense of unreality…it was during this same period that I learned my father had a mistress and that he made my mother cry. This revelation bowled me over because I had heard my mother say that if my father left her, she would kill herself” (1, pp. 21-22, the first two pages of her story).

“From the point of view of scholarship, my last year at the elementary school was good enough. I took three prizes, two of them firsts” (1, p. 28).

“Beneath the exterior of a girl, hardworking and full of responsibility (I managed a household of six persons on a pitiful budget, educated my brothers and sisters, and was an excellent student), I felt more and more bewildered. The Fear, previously episodic, now never left me. Every day I was sure to sense it, and the unreal situations increased as well” (1, p. 35).

[“Renee, who had never cared for dolls, suddenly, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, began to play with them like a little girl…”] (1, p. 39).

“For me this doll “really” existed…Just the same I did not believe that she was really alive, since I never gave her anything to eat” (1, p. 42).

“During the earliest attacks of Fear and an intense unreality, I sometimes uttered these unconscious and shocking words: ‘I should prefer to escape into madness to avoid this consuming Fear.’ Alas, I did not know what I was saying. In my ignorance I believed that madness was a state of insensibility where there was neither pain nor suffering nor joy, but particularly, no responsibility…For me, madness was definitely not a condition of illness…It was rather a country, opposed to Reality, where reigned an implacable light…leaving no place for shadow” (1, pp. 43-44).

[But madness was also weird and horrible, and against it] “I waged a battle with the help of the analyst who later became my ‘Mama.’ Only near her I felt secure, especially from the time when she began to sit next to me on the couch and put her arm around my shoulders. Oh, what joy, what relief to feel the life, the warmth, the reality!” (1, p. 46).

“I literally hated people, without knowing why. In dreams and frequently in waking fantasies I constructed an electric machine to blow up the earth and everyone in it. But what was worse, with the machine I would rob all men of their brains, thus creating robots obedient to my will alone. This was my greatest, most terrible revenge” (1, p. 47).

“One day I wrote a letter of entreaty to the unknown author of my suffering, to the Persecutor…Some time after I discovered that the Persecutor was none other than the electric machine, that is, it was the ‘System’ that was punishing me” (1, p. 48). “…the head of the System, Antipiol. He took up his position…” (1, pp. 100-101).

“…the sound of my voice and the meaning of my words seemed strange. Every now and then, an inner voice interrupted sneeringly, ‘Ah, Ah!’ and mockingly repeated what I had said. These inner voices…were affected, ridiculous” (1, p. 50).

“Then Mama’s sweet voice sounded…saying, ‘Little Renee, my little Renee needn’t be afraid when there is Mama…What did me the most amazing good was her use of the third person in speaking of herself, ‘Mama and Renee,’ not ‘I and you’…‘Renee,’ or, better still, ‘the little personage’ ” (1, pp. 52-53).

“In the midst of this horror and turbulence, I nonetheless carried on my work as a secretary. But what a hardship. Added to the torment, strident noises…But I readily distinguished them from the noises of reality. I heard them without hearing them, and recognized that they arose within me” (1, p. 59).

“A ceaseless voice within me repeated over and over, ‘This is it, Renee, this what the System has done to you!…You are alone in your punishment. I am alone and afraid. Renee is afraid.’ With all my strength I tried to choke off the poor little voice, this baby’s voice speaking in the third person like a tiny child…But the little voice continued more firmly: ‘Mama, Renee is afraid; the System has punished Renee; Renee is afraid’ ” (1, p. 70).

“I kept writing simply to keep myself busy—anything rather than listen to the little voice” (1, p. 75).

“During this holiday, I noticed a complete loss of the sense of perspective. I sketched like a child. I got lost easily and I could not orient myself spatially” (1, p. 88).

“I continued to respond to voices which, though I actually did not hear them [externally], existed nonetheless for me” (1, p. 94).

“Mama [what she called Sechehaye, her therapist] brought me a gift—a little plush monkey…When he had his arms up, I was anxious lest he hurt me…When I related my fears to Mama…She took the monkey’s two arms, lowered them…and said, ‘Mama’s little monkey, Mama asks you alway to keep your arms down to comfort Renee…The little monkey agreed; I could see it in his eyes. It is hard to express how relieved I was…At any rate, from that moment, the impulse to self harm left me abruptly” (1, p. 96-97).

“At these times my ear took some part in hearing the voices…Now even though I distinguished them readily from real voices, I could say I actually heard them…” (1, p. 100).

“I seemed to grow smaller…The voices were screaming, crying out that I ought to throw myself in the river. But I resisted with all my strength as I ran to Mama…Mama tried…to calm me…’Why,’ she said, ‘don’t you want the apples I buy you? [Renee replies,] ‘Because the apples you buy are for grown-ups and I want real apples. Mama’s apples, like those,’ and I pointed to Mama’s breasts…She put the piece [of apple] in my mouth, and with my eyes closed, my head against her breast, I ate, or rather drank, my milk. A nameless felicity flowed into my heart. It was as though, suddenly, by magic, all my agony…had given place to a blissful calm…I reveled in my joy…the contentment of a tiny baby…I saw Reality, marvelous Reality, for the first time…During [the] second day, I realized that the voices had disappeared…For the first time I was in touch with reality” (1, pp. 104-107).

“Months passed; then one day my nurse failed to appear as usual…It was early in the nurses absence when I first began to notice the fact that Mama has patients and that she had a husband whom I called the ‘Great Personage.’…I could not bear the thought that she was giving a large part of her time to strangers, leaving me alone with the System and the newly returned voices” (1, pp. 112-113).

But eventually, facilitated by a doll Mama gives to Renee, a few sedative injections, and more therapy from Mama, the title of the last chapter is “I Become Firmly Established in Wonderful Reality” (1, p. 130).

Comments

In her Introduction to the Autobiography, the therapist, Marguerite Sechehaye, emphasizes how ill Renee had been: that even though “Renee’s intimate introspections…seem to bear witness to an astonishing lucidity, it is not to be forgotten that”…“there were long periods of hebephrenic catatonia when her confusion made it impossible to register what went on either around or within her” (1, p. 18).

I would add that Sechehaye did not understand what was going on in Renee even when Renee was lucid. As indicated by my added boldface in the above narrative, it is quite likely that Renee had one or a few child-aged alternate personalities who were “small” “personages” and babies who related to dolls and Mama the way child-aged alternate personalities would be expected to. Sechehaye might have realized this if she had ever asked, “How old are you?” at the times and in the ways that I (or anyone familiar with multiple personality) would have. Plus there were probably other personalities, such as the “Persecutor” (search “persecutor personalities”), head of the “System.”

In short, there is nothing in the autobiography or Sechehaye’s interpretation of it to indicate what actually did happen with all these alternate personalities, beyond the fact that they settled down, went behind the scenes, and stopped causing trouble; which, if the truce lasted, was, in practical terms, a successful treatment, not of schizophrenia, but of multiple personality.

Cautionary Note

“Multiples evoke the desire and fantasy of reparenting in many therapists. The child alters [alternate personalities] especially seem to beg for good parents to hold and nurture them. Their painful history and current torment may elicit strong parental feelings…In some cases, therapists have taken multiples into their homes and tried to raise them anew…

“Instead, I believe that the reparenting process must occur from within the multiple. The adult personalities must…care for…the child alters. In my experience, this works well” (2, p. 193).

In the case of "Renée," a pseudonym for Louisa Düss, Marguerite Sechehaye and her husband actually, legally, adopted her (3).

1. Marguerite Sechehaye (Part 2, Analytic Interpretation). Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: The True Story of “Renee” (Part 1) [1951]. Translated by Grace Rubin-Rabson. Foreword by Frank Conroy [1968]. New York, Meridian/Penguin, 1994.

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

3. Wikipedia.