“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.