Anthony Doerr (post 3), Time Travel, and using a Time Machine in the treatment of multiple personality to help child-aged personalities grow up.

Anthony Doerr has just reviewed a book on the history of time travel, because it has been one of his lifelong interests (1).

Why would a novelist be interested in time and time travel?

Time in Multiple Personality

Novelists, I argue in this blog, are likely to have a normal version of multiple personality. And time is a key issue of multiple personality in two ways: First, people with multiple personality often think of their memory gaps as “losing time.” Second, the most common type of alternate personality is the child-aged alternate personality, who never grows up, and is frozen in time (often the time of a childhood trauma).

The alternate personalities of an adult with multiple personality see themselves as being of various ages: child-age personalities, teenage personalities, young-adult personalities, actual-age personalities, older personalities. Some personalities may see themselves as living in past centuries, the future, or spiritual realms. The child-aged personalities often see themselves as living in the year when the person had been that age: If the person is 30 in 2016, a ten-year-old personality may think it is 1996.

Time Machine

In the treatment of multiple personality, “Age progression techniques are useful in the ‘growing up’ of infant and child alter personalities…Via…suggestion, the infant or child alter can be helped to grow older…Various metaphors or images can be used to help the alter progress in time. Kluft describes using ‘time machine’ fantasies in the age progression of alter personalities. Other metaphors or images, such as riding along a river through time, flipping calendar pages, or speeding days and nights, are equally useful…” (2, p. 233).

Of course, novelists, having a normal version of multiple personality, don’t need treatment. But they may enjoy writing novels that take them back and forth through time.

1. Anthony Doerr. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/books/review/james-gleick-time-travel.html?_r=0

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