Multiple Identity Theory is easy to prove true or false: Ask people simple screening questions for multiple personality, and interview your own voices.

Multiple Identity Theory—the idea that ninety percent of novelists, and thirty percent of the general public, have a normal version of multiple personality (normal in that it does not cause distress or dysfunction, and may even be an asset)—is easy to prove true or false.

Screening Questions

Casually, routinely, ask people—acquaintances, friends, students, whomever—if they ever have memory gaps or if things ever happen that nobody else could have done, but they don’t remember doing it.

If you ask such screening questions of people in the general public, most will promptly answer “No,” and that is that. Occasionally you will get a false positive answer from someone who is trying to be helpful, but when you ask them what they mean, it will be clear that they are only talking about normal forgetting.

But if you ask these screening questions neutrally—that is, without any implication that the person will get extra credit for answering yes, and without any insinuation that they would have to be crazy or impaired to acknowledge it—sooner or later you will get a true positive answer. When you ask what they mean, it will be clear that it is not just normal forgetting and that they don’t have any medical condition to otherwise explain it.

Search “memory gaps” and “mental status” for past posts on the implications.

Interview Your Voices

If you are a novelist, you may know that you have had memory gaps or that occasionally things happen that nobody else could have done, but you don’t remember doing it. But since you hear voices—of characters, narrators, muses, etc.—I propose that you interview them.

If you have listened to, or conversed with, your voices only in the context of writing, you may assume that they are nothing more than a feature of your creative process. But have you ever asked them if that is all they are and all they know?

Eugene O’Neill: From “Days Without End” to “Long Day’s Journey,” his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature as playwright of Multiple Personality.

This retrospective of five posts on the multiple personality of Eugene O’Neill is prompted by a book review in the New York Times which completely misses this issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/books/review-by-women-possessed-a-remix-of-a-flawed-eugene-oneill.html

Table of Contents

1. Eugene O’Neill won Nobel Prize in Literature as Playwright of Multiple Personality

2. Conversations With Eugene O’Neill: His Best Friends are Puzzled

3. Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End: Its Gratuitous Multiple Personality Suggests the Author’s Personal Experience

4. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night: His Mother’s Multiple Personality

5. Eugene O’Neill used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature to praise August Strindberg [search Strindberg posts to understand the significance]

July 6, 2014

Eugene O’Neill won Nobel Prize in Literature as Playwright of Multiple Personality

He won the Nobel Prize in 1936, having written his two plays that were most overtly about multiple personality, The Great God Brown, in 1926, and Days Without End in 1933.

The Great God Brown was a commercial success, but Days Without End was a flop. And O’Neill had such a deep emotional investment in Days Without End, and felt so bad after its poor reception, that he did not put another play on the stage for more than a decade.

Days Without End is one of O’Neill’s two most autobiographical plays. Other than his hurt feelings after it flopped, my reason for saying this is outrageously superficial. Out of his more than fifty plays, the only two that have the word “days” or “day’s” in the title are Days Without End and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the latter generally considered his most autobiographical play. The titles are almost the same, except that one was written in the prime of life, for immediate publication, while the other was written toward the end of life and published posthumously.

Obviously, the two plays are not autobiographical in the same sense. Long Day’s Journey is factually autobiographical. And if Days Without End is autobiographical, it is so psychologically.

The title of the multiple personality play, Days Without End, suggests timelessness, since multiple personality, especially in regard to its child-aged alternate personalities, has a timeless quality. As discussed previously in regard to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, child-aged alters never grow up. They are frozen in time. They experience life as days without end.

July 7, 2014

Conversations With Eugene O’Neill: His Best Friends are Puzzled

“Interviewing Eugene O’Neill is like extracting testimony from a reluctant witness” (p. xi).

“Even his interviews thus confirm the repeated marks of dual personality observed in O’Neill in other contexts by his later critics and biographers, those irreconcilable character conflicts expressed in such key works as The Great God Brown (a play he consistently tells interviewers is a personal favorite)…” (p. xiv).

O’Neill says, “People do recognize…that every one wears a mask—I don’t mean only one, but thousands of them…I don’t think The Great God Brown had a long run merely because it was a novelty” (p. 112).

George Jean Nathan says, “The way to lose O’Neill’s friendship is to ask him for oral expressions of opinion on anything (if he feels like expressing an opinion, he will write a letter, and a satisfactorily long one)…” (p. 124).

[Is he afraid of what one of the people behind one of the masks might say?]

“My plays are about life as I’ve known it,” says O’Neill (p. 160).

Because his plays include “murder, disease, suicide, insanity, and incest…O’Neill…has gained the reputation of being privately a rather morose fellow. His best friends are not so sure he is. They are not sure he isn’t, however. Nor are they sure that the truth lies somewhere in between. He merely puzzles them.” A friend who has known him for twenty-five years says, “His face is a mask. I don’t know what goes on behind it, and I don’t think anyone else does.” Another friend says, “We’ll be talking, and he’ll go into one of those long, staring silences of his” (p. 224).

Mark W. Estrin (Ed.). Conversations with Eugene O’Neill. University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

July 15, 2014

Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End: Its Gratuitous Multiple Personality Suggests the Author’s Personal Experience

Days Without End (1934) begins in John Loving’s private office, where he is writing a novel. John, and his alternate personality, Loving, are played by two different actors. The actor playing Loving wears a mask, which looks like John, but has a scornful, mocking expression.

John and Loving—who see and hear each other—discuss the plot of the novel, until Bill Eliot, John Loving’s business partner, enters the office. Eliot, and all the rest of the characters in the play, do not see or hear Loving (only John and the audience do).

The protagonist’s dramatized, split personality continues throughout the play until the last page, at which point John accepts God, his alternate personality dies, and John becomes John Loving.

The play has been reviewed three ways. The first approach is to mostly ignore the split personality, and to focus instead on the other issues which occupy the characters: marital infidelity, belief in God, and love. The second approach is to denounce the split personality as a stupid gimmick. The third approach is to recognize the split personality as “a hallmark” of O’Neill’s plays, and as part of “the tradition of the split character in modern American and British drama” (2).

Days Without End is “patently autobiographical”; it describes O’Neill’s “own spiritual-intellectual peregrinations”; and John Loving “is a persona for the playwright” (3). But if the play is patently autobiographical, why don’t any of the reviewers infer that O’Neill had multiple personality?

The main thing that strikes me about this play is that the multiple personality of the protagonist is totally unnecessary, unless that was the main issue that O’Neill wanted to dramatize. If it wasn’t, then it is one more example of what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality,” which is multiple personality that is included in works of fiction for no other reason than that it was part of the author’s personal experience.

One last comment. O’Neill ends the play by killing off the alternate personality, as though alters were demons and the way to deal with them is exorcism. Alters are not demons. They are part of the person’s total personality. Cooperation or integration may work. But alters that you think you have exorcised are just lying low.

1. Eugene O’Neill. Complete Plays 1932-1943. The Library of America, 1988.

2. Albert Wertheim. “Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End and the Tradition of the Split Character in Modern American and British Drama,” in Frederick Wilkins (Ed.), The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, Vol. VI, No. 3, Winter, 1982.

3. John Henry Raleigh. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, p. 6.

July 18, 2014

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night: His Mother’s Multiple Personality

The main characters, based on the author and his family, are the mother, 54, a morphine addict; the father, 65, an alcoholic, and former matinee idol; the older son, 33, an alcoholic; and the younger son, 23, an alcoholic who aspires to be a writer. The mother has been previously hospitalized for strange behavior attributed to her drug addiction. The play describes a day in which she relapses.

Father and sons (and apparently the doctors) have presumed that the mother’s strange behavior is drug-induced, since the behavior is said to have started 23 years ago when she was given morphine for obstetric pain, and because it is thought to happen only when she abuses morphine.

Had she had such behavior even before taking morphine? Since childhood? Does the drug only make the strange behavior more conspicuous by tranquilizing her host personality and making it easer for her other personalities to come out? These questions, of course, were never asked.

Her behavior is often referred to as “strange.” This may be meant as a euphemism for crazy, but the fact is, that although her behavior is strange, it is not irrational. Each thing she says—however odd, out-of-character, anachronistic, inappropriate, and self-contradictory—is, in and of itself, rational.

Her switches from one personality to another are described, for example, in Act Three:

“There is at times an uncanny gay, free youthfulness in her manner, as if in spirit she were released to become again, simply and without self-consciousness, the naive, happy, chattering schoolgirl of her convent days.”

[This child-aged alternate personality is oriented to a time in the past, and is not “out” or involved in such current events as the filling of a prescription for morphine, which another personality and her maid had done that day.]

Maid—The way the man in the drugstore acted when I took in the prescription for you [the mother was waiting outside in the car]. The impidence of him!

Mother—(with stubborn blankness) What are you talking about? What drugstore? What prescription?

[The child-age personality has amnesia for the period of time that the prescription was filled. As the conversation proceeds, the mother switches back and forth between child-aged and present-oriented personalities, which is confusing to the maid, who suspects the mother has taken some of the medicine, and that it’s making her “act funny.”]

Mother—(dreamily) It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you were happy is real. (She pauses—then as if her words had been an evocation which called back happiness she changes in her whole manner and facial expression. She looks younger. There is a quality of an innocent convent girl about her, and she smiles shyly.)

[Later in the conversation, when the mother says she’s not hungry…]

Maid—You ought to eat something, Ma’am. It’s a queer medicine if if takes away your appetite.

Mother—…What medicine? I don’t know what you mean. [She has switched back to the child-aged alter, who is not aware of taking drugs. Then…]

“She suddenly loses all the girlish quality and is an aging, cynically sad, embittered woman.”

Mother—(bitterly) You’re a sentimental fool…[Another personality is now speaking to the girlish personality, who had been telling how she fell in love with her future husband, a successful actor.] What is so wonderful about that first meeting between a silly romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol? You were much happier before you knew he existed, in the Convent when you used to pray to the Blessed Virgin…You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words!

[Is this personality a nun, or the personality now grown up from childhood who had wanted to become a nun? In any case, this personality condemns both the personality who fell in love with the matinee idol and the other personality who is now a “dope fiend.” She hears the men returning to the house (probably from drinking), and says,]

Mother—Why are they coming back? They don’t want to. And I’d much rather be alone. (Suddenly her whole manner changes. She becomes pathetically relieved and eager.) Oh, I’m so glad they’ve come! I’ve been so horribly lonely!

Clearly, what is “strange” and confusing about the mother’s behavior is the way she keeps switching from one personality to another. And it is highly likely that this has been going on—but less conspicuously—since childhood, when she had one personality who wanted to be a nun, one who wanted to be a concert pianist, one who fell in love with a matinee idol, etc.

In any case, neither morphine nor any other drug causes (or cures) multiple personality. However, almost any drug or substance can affect one alternate personality (alter) more than another, and by doing so, affect the balance of power among alters, so that alters who would ordinarily remain behind the scenes, come out on the stage and thrust themselves into the action, which can be strange and confusing.

Eugene O’Neill. Complete Plays 1932-1943. The Library of America, 1988.

August 18, 2014

Eugene O’Neill used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature to praise August Strindberg

“It is difficult to put into anything like adequate words the profound gratitude I feel for the greatest honor that my work could ever hope to attain, the award of the Nobel Prize…

“…the greatest happiness this occasion affords…is the opportunity it gives me to acknowledge…the debt my work owes to that greatest genius of all modern dramatists…August Strindberg…

“It was reading his plays…that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theatre myself…

“Of course, it will be no news to you in Sweden that my work owes much to the influence of Strindberg. That influence runs clearly through more than a few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see…

“…I am…proud of my debt to Strindberg…For me, he remains…the Master, still to this day more modern than any of us, still our leader. And it is my pride to imagine that perhaps his spirit, musing over this year’s Nobel award for literature, may smile with a little satisfaction, and find the follower not too unworthy of his Master.”

[Search “Strindberg” for posts that explain the significance of O’Neill’s Nobel Prize speech.]

“The Host” (post 4) by Stephenie Meyer (post 5): In this science fiction version of spirit possession and exorcism, aliens go native and love conquers all. 

The story of this novel—that the protagonist’s alternate personality is an alien being from outer space, who at the end of the novel gets surgically removed, so that the host personality can have her body all to herself—is nothing but a science fiction version of spirit possession and exorcism, which is an obsolete, misunderstanding of a psychological condition, multiple personality.

Nevertheless, there are two reasons to read this novel. First, it is a heartwarming romance in which love conquers all. Second, its depiction of the interaction between the two personalities—their rivalry, communication, and eventual cooperation—is true to life. For some reason, the author knows something about this.

What is not true to life is the idea that you can, or would even want to, eliminate the alternate personality. Since all of a person’s personalities originate from within that person, they are all parts of that person’s total personality. The only longterm solutions to distress or dysfunction are cooperation among the personalities or their merger into one.

Some multiples (people with multiple personality) want merger: all their personalities combined into one multifaceted personality. E Pluribus Unum (from many, one). And if all personalities agree, this is possible.

But some multiples would consider merger murder. And others would consider merger stupid, since multiple personality is key to their life as a novelist. In any case, there is no medicine or therapy than can eliminate personalities or impose merger. Personalities can appear to be eliminated or merged, but they are just lying low.

Multiple Personality, Spirit Possession, Hearing Voices: Psychological and Religious Interpretations of an Ancient, Worldwide, Multicultural Phenomenon.

Spirit Possession

“Spirit possession is a term for the belief that animas, demons, extraterrestrials, gods, or spirits can take control of a human body. The concept of spirit possession exists in many religions, including Christianity, Buddhism, Haitian Vodou, Wicca, Hinduism, Islam and Southeast Asian and African traditions. In a 1969 study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, spirit possession beliefs were found to exist in 74% of a sample of 488 societies in all parts of the world. Depending on the cultural context in which it is found, possession may be considered voluntary or involuntary and may be considered to have beneficial or detrimental effects to host.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_possession

Multiple Personality
“Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession…In many possession-form cases of dissociative identity disorder [multiple personality]…manifestations of alternate identities are highly overt. Most individuals with non-possession-form dissociative identity disorder do not overtly display their discontinuity of identity for long periods of time; only a small minority present to clinical attention with observable alteration of identities. When alternate personality states are not directly observed, the disorder can be identified by two clusters of symptoms: 1) sudden alterations or discontinuities in sense of self and sense of agency, and 2) recurrent dissociative amnesias [memory gaps]…Such individuals may also report perceptions of voices (e.g., a child’s voice; crying; the voice of a spiritual being). In some cases, voices are experienced as multiple, perplexing, independent thought streams over which the individual experiences no control” (pp. 292-293 in DSM-5, the latest edition of the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association).

“The Host” (post 3) by Stephenie Meyer (post 4): Belief in Spirit Possession as a possible reason for not seeing Two Personalities as Multiple Personality.

I am half way through this 600-page novel. The protagonist still has her two personalities, Wanda and Melanie. Other characters have come to recognize that she has these two personalities. Yet nobody has called it “multiple personality” or even commented in passing that it is like multiple personality. Why?

My guess is that the author’s religious background inclines her to interpret alternate personalities as spirit possession. After all, what are muses and characters that talk to you in your head but advisory and storytelling spirits? And what is the process of writing at its most intense but a creative form of spirit possession?

Multiple personality is a psychological interpretation of what, through most of history, has been thought of as spirit (good) or demon (bad) possession.

Here is a case from the sixteenth century:
http://www.astraeasweb.net/plural/jeanne_fery.pdf 

“The Host” (post 2) by Stephenie Meyer (post 3): Story starts with descriptions suggesting knowledge of, or experience with, multiple personality.

“Then Kevin started to complain that he was blacking out for periods of time. They…noted marked differences in his behavior and personality. When we questioned him about this, he claimed to have no memory of certain statements and actions. We…eventually discovered that the host was periodically taking control of Kevin’s body [away from the control of the alternate personality]” (1, p. 26).

“ ‘Did they find Sharon?’ A chill of horror raised goose bumps on my arms. The question was not mine. The question wasn’t mine, but it flowed naturally through my lips as if it were. The [person I was talking to] did not notice anything amiss” (1, p. 29).

The first quote describes the two cardinal features of multiple personality: personality changes and memory gaps.

The second quote describes an alternate personality’s effect on behavior, in this case speech, from behind the scenes. This illustrates that personalities, even when they are not “out,” may be conscious, monitoring the situation, and able to pull strings.

1. Stephenie Meyer. The Host. New York, Little Brown, 2008.

“The Host” by Stephenie Meyer: Host Personality, Melanie, and Alternate Personality, Wanderer, are in conflict in this Multiple Personality story.

“The two main characters,” says Stephenie Meyer, “who are, you know, sharing a body have things I want to be and things I wish I weren’t…You have Melanie, who’s really, really strong physically — and I wish I could be like her because she can do anything. Nothing stops her. She’s really, really strong emotionally, so she can handle anything. But she also can be really mean. Whereas Wanderer, the other personality, is totally compassionate, absolutely cannot hurt another person, and is just as kind as I would wish to be. But she’s weak, too…And so they both have things that I want and things that I wish I didn’t have” (1, pp. 179-180).

Judging by the biography, neither Stephenie Meyer nor her novel ever mentions multiple personality. Wanderer is supposed to be an alien soul who has come to Earth to take possession of Melanie’s body. There is no acknowledgement that two-personalities-in-one-body is multiple personality.

1. Chas Newkey-Burden. Stephenie Meyer: Queen of Twilight. The Biography. London, John Blake, 2010.

“Stephenie Meyer: Queen of Twilight”: Characters speak to author as autonomous voices in her head, like voices of alternate personalities in multiple personality.

“Just as Edward would later speak to Bella in her head…so did he and Bella speak to the author. ‘All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head,’ she wrote on her website. ‘They simply wouldn’t shut up. I’d stay up as late as I could stand trying to get all the stuff in my mind typed out…only to have another conversation start up in my head…’ ” (1, p. 62).

1. Chas Newkey-Burden. Stephenie Meyer: Queen of Twilight. The Biography. London, John Blake, 2010.

Nobel Prize in Literature: Thirty-Five Winners and Contenders discussed in “Novelists use Normal Version of Multiple Personality,” literary psychology website.

Search names to read posts (some writers have one post, others have many).

Winners

1923 W. B. Yeats

1929 Thomas Mann

1934 Luigi Pirandello

1936 Eugene O’Neill

1949 William Faulkner

1954 Ernest Hemingway

1964 Jean-Paul Sartre

1976 Saul Bellow

1980 Czeslaw Milosz

1982 Gabriel García Márquez

1983 William Golding

1993 Toni Morrison

2005 Harold Pinter

2006 Orhan Pamuk

2007 Doris Lessing

2010 Mario Vargas Llosa

2014 Patrick Modiano

2016 Bob Dylan

Contenders

Jorge Luis Borges

Joseph Conrad

Elena Ferrante

Robert Frost

Graham Greene

Henry James

Franz Kafka

Haruki Murakami

Vladimir Nabokov

Joyce Carol Oates

Marcel Proust

Philip Roth

Salman Rushdie

August Strindberg

Leo Tolstoy

Mark Twain

Edith Wharton

“Lost Daughter” (post 2) by Elena Ferrante (post 10): Amnesia for stealing doll, moving doll, getting lost, indicates multiple personality since childhood.

The little girl, Elena, was frantic about her missing doll. Her whole family was frantic. They could not “stand hearing the child scream anymore.”

Leda (47, divorced, protagonist and first-person narrator) says, “I was confused, placed a hand on my chest to calm my racing heart. I had taken the doll, she was in my bag…I discovered that I couldn’t recall the exact moment of an action that I now considered almost comic, comic because it was senseless” (1, p. 44). She tries to rationalize the theft, but the fact is it was “senseless.” And she was surprised to find the doll in her bag, because she could not actually recall having taken it and put it there. Moreover, whatever had made her take the doll now prevented her from simply returning it.

Later, in the privacy of her own apartment, Leda says, “I placed the doll on my knees as if for company…I kissed her face, her mouth, I hugged her as I had seen Elena do…I slept on the sofa…I looked for the doll but didn’t see her…I looked around, hunted under the sofa, afraid that someone had come in and taken her. I found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table, in the shadows. I must have brought her there…” but she does not actually recall having put the doll there (1, pp. 62-63).

Indeed, Leda has been having memory gaps since childhood. She says, “I had experience with getting lost. My mother said that as a child all I did was get lost. In an instant I would vanish…I didn’t remember anything about my vanishing…” (1, p. 40). She doesn’t say that it was a long time ago and so “I don’t remember” anything about it now, but that “I didn’t remember” anything about her vanishing even at that time.

Comments

A standard question that is used to screen people for multiple personality is: Do things ever happen that nobody else could have done, but you don’t remember doing it?

Leda, if truthful, would have answered, “Yes, since childhood,” and then reported what I have quoted above.

Actions that the person must have done, but cannot recall (when the memory gap cannot be better explained by ordinary forgetting or a medical condition) were probably done by an alternate personality. Search “memory gaps” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

Of course, clinically, I would not make a formal diagnosis of multiple personality based only on the probability that an unremembered action had been done by an alternate personality. The formal diagnosis of multiple personality is not based on an interpretation of what is probable. It is based on actually meeting one or more of the person’s alternate personalities.

The usual way to meet an alternate personality is to discuss with the person their unremembered action—such as stealing or moving the doll, or vanishing in childhood—discussing it at length. Since the regular personality does not relate to this subject matter, but the alternate personality involved in that matter does relate to it, the regular personality will eventually tune out, and the alternate personality will come out.

You will see a change in demeanor. The alternate personality can explain more about what happened, often including details that can be corroborated. And they will give you their own age, gender, and name (though they are often reluctant to divulge their name until they know you better and are sure they can trust you).

If you then turn the conversation away from the subject matter of interest to that personality, or just mention the person’s regular name, there will be a switch back to the regular personality, who will have amnesia (a memory gap) for your conversation with the alternate personality.

In conclusion, since Leda does not understand the significance of her memory gaps, the novel ends as it begins: She is a mystery to herself.

1. Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa editions, 2006/2008.

“The Lost Daughter” (post 1) by Elena Ferrante (post 9): In chapter one, protagonist cannot understand herself (main theme?) and is named Leda.

“I had been driving for less than an hour when I began to feel ill,” begins the one-and-a-half-page first chapter of this 140-page novel. In the first paragraph, she feels weak and disoriented (thinking she was at the beach in childhood, frightened by her mother’s warning to heed the red flag that warned of a rough sea and the danger of drowning). In the second paragraph, she wakes up in a hospital and is told she had been in a one-car accident. In the third and last paragraph of chapter one, she concludes with what could be the novel’s main theme, that there are things about herself she cannot understand:

“I said it was drowsiness that had sent me off the road. But I knew very well that drowsiness wasn’t to blame. At the origin was a gesture of mine that made no sense, and which, precisely because it was senseless, I immediately decided not to speak of to anyone. The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand” (1).

1. Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa editions, 2006/2008.

The name of this first-person narrator and protagonist is “Leda,” which may allude to the woman in Greek mythology who was raped by Zeus disguised as a swan. One of Leda’s daughters was Helen of Troy, discussed in the following past post:

June 28, 2014

Plato and Euripides say Helen of Troy had Multiple Personality

If multiple personality is a real, observable, psychological phenomenon—and not just a modern fad—it should be reflected in the history of literature, even in antiquity. And since multiple personality is often represented in literature by the theme of the double, it would be interesting to know how far back that theme goes.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey say that Helen really went to Troy. But there was another version of that story in Ancient Greece, one in which it was Helen’s double, and not Helen herself, who went to Troy.

Plato, in both his Phaedrus and Republic, cites Stesichorus’s Palinode, which is a recantation of Homer’s story that Helen went to Troy. According the Stesichorus version, which is dramatized in Euripides’ play, Helen, it was not Helen, herself, who went to Troy, but only her eidolon (ghost, shadow, image, phantom), which impersonated her.

“In 412/411 B.C.E. [Euripides] produced Helen, a play in which he takes up the theme of the eidolon, to dramatize two confrontations—the one in the mind of Menelaus between the true Helen and her fickle double, and the other between Helen herself and the image of her for which the Greeks and Trojans fought at Troy…Euripides’ Helen is the only surviving treatment of the phantom-Helen theme from antiquity…splitting Helen into her self and her image…Across the Greek world the disjunction between essence and phenomena was the chief topic of conversation among the philosophers and mathematicians, and one of the principal themes of Athenian tragedy. What plot more topical in late fifth-century Athens than the story of a woman divided into her real and her imaginary selves?” (1, pp. 8-9).

Of course, Plato and Euripides did not use the term “multiple personality,” but the theme of the double is close enough.

1. Austin, Norman. Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994.

“Bob Dylan Says He’ll Skip Nobel Ceremony (He’s Busy)”: Post 3 on multiple personality-like inconsistency of Nobel Prize in Literature winner.

“Yesterday evening the Swedish Academy received a personal letter from Bob Dylan, in which he explained that due to pre-existing commitments, he is unable to travel to Stockholm in December and therefore will not attend the Nobel Prize Ceremony…”

However, “his official website lists no tour dates after Nov. 23” (1).

First, Dylan made himself unavailable when the Swedish Academy tried to notify him of the award. Second, he announced his pleasure at winning the award and his wish to attend the ceremony if at all possible. Third, he is unavailable to attend the ceremony for no believable reason.

Bob Dylan demonstrates the puzzling inconsistency and the subjective variability in his sense of personal identity that are seen multiple personality.

As previously quoted, Dylan has said: “I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time” (2).

Bob Dylan may or may not think of this as multiple personality. I could not be absolutely sure that it is multiple personality without my (or someone else’s) having spoken to, or otherwise confirmed the presence of, one or more alternate personalities. But certainly Mr. Dylan has done and said enough to raise the possibility of his having multiple personality, putting him in the company of other winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature discussed in past posts.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/books/bob-dylan-nobel-ceremony.html?_r=0

2. Jonathan Cott (Editor). Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. New York, Wenner Books, 2006.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Gillian Flynn, Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates: All have protagonists with gratuitous, unacknowledged, multiple personality.

Sartre’s Nausea, Flynn’s Gone Girl, Greene’s The Third Man, Oates’ You Must Remember This: All have protagonists who have signs and symptoms of multiple personality at the beginning these novels, but which is forgotten about by the end of the novel, because, evidently, the inclusion of these signs and symptoms had been inadvertent, unintentional, and not recognized by the author (or editors and reviewers) as being what they were.

I have previously highlighted this issue—gratuitous, unacknowledged, multiple personality—in regard to Flynn, Greene, and Oates. But since Sartre won a Nobel Prize in Literature, Nausea was his first novel, and one of which he was proud, here is a repeat of my post on it, highlighting this issue:

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Nobel Prize novelist Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea:  The novel’s opening—saying the protagonist's “sudden transformations” must be explained—is totally forgotten

“Sudden Transformations”

The novel begins with the protagonist’s worry about his “sudden transformations.” For example, due to some kind of change that suddenly came over him, he left France and went to Indo-China, and then, after six years, he suddenly reverted to his regular self and returned to France.

He is trying to understand what is wrong with him, and is worried that he will have another “sudden transformation”:

“I have to admit that I am subject to these sudden transformations…That is what has given my life this halting, incoherent aspect. When I left France, for example, there were a lot of people who said I had gone off on a sudden impulse…

“And then, all of a sudden, I awoke from a sleep which had lasted six years…I couldn’t understand why I was in Indo-China. What was I doing there?…[And so he returned to France]…

“If I am not mistaken, and if all the signs which are piling up are indications of a fresh upheaval in my life, well then, I am frightened…I’m afraid of what is going to be born and take hold of me and carry me off—I wonder where? Shall I have to go away again…Shall I awake in a few months, a few years, exhausted, disappointed…I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late” (1, pp. 14-15).

Author Forgets Sudden Transformations

Amazingly, the rest of the novel makes no mention of sudden transformations. Instead, the protagonist’s problem becomes “nausea,” which eventually leads to his epiphany about existence (1, p. 182), “absurdity” (1, p. 185), and “contingency” (1, p. 188), and his discovery that he might prevent Nausea by becoming a novelist (1, pp. 245-246).

Multiple Personality

The protagonist is described at the beginning of the novel as having the two cardinal symptoms of multiple personality: personality switches and amnesia. And he did not have just the one six-year fugue. He says that he is prone to these sudden transformations, which are what has given his life its “halting, incoherent aspect.”

Author, Editor, Scholars, Reviewers

What can account for a novel that states the protagonist’s main problem at the beginning, then just forgets that problem, and talks about something else? Well, the author may have had multiple personality. But there is no good excuse for the editor, scholars, and reviewers.

1. Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea [1938]. London, Penguin Books, 2000.

Comment

Sartre, Flynn, Greene, and Oates are a very diverse group. And they are far from the only writers cited in this blog as having gratuitous multiple personality in their work. This is not an idiosyncrasy of a particular writer, but reflects something endemic to the psychology of fiction writers: a normal version of multiple personality.

Do you dispute that a major character in each of these novels has clear signs and symptoms of multiple personality? Do you have a better explanation for why they do? Please submit your comment.

“The Varieties of Anger” by Lisa Feldman Barrett in NY Times fails to distinguish eyebrows down, object-altering anger from eyebrows up, self-altering outrage.

Dr. Barrett says, “The varieties of anger are endless…Anger is a large, diverse population of experiences and behaviors, as psychologists like myself who study emotion repeatedly discover…No single state of the face, body or brain defines anger…Perhaps you want to lash out…Other varieties of anger involve frustration and helplessness…” (1).

However, there is a way to divide anger into two basic kinds, which are tied to two basic facial expressions: 1. eyebrows down, object-altering anger, and 2. eyebrows up, self-altering outrage (2).

1. Lisa Feldman Barrett. “The Varieties of Anger.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-varieties-of-anger.html
2. Kenneth A. Nakdimen. “The Two Faces of Attention.” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 42(2), 1978, 97-118.

Literary Fiction promotes Empathic Attunement: Emotional Empathy (I’m happy or sad if you are) and Cognitive, Hypnotic Empathy (It’s true if you say so).

Studies say that reading literary fiction promotes empathy.

Empathy is usually subdivided into two kinds, emotional and cognitive. An empathic person is able to get in tune with another person’s emotions or thoughts.

My idea of prototypical emotional attunement is a mother’s love of her child: I’m happy (or sad) if you are. My idea of prototypical cognitive attunement is the attitude of a hypnotic subject toward the hypnotist: It’s true if you say so.

The distinction between emotion and cognition is not always clear. Freud is said to have abandoned the use of hypnosis when a patient he had hypnotized suddenly threw her arms around his neck, leading him to conclude that there was no essential difference between love and hypnosis.

If literary fiction promotes empathy, and empathy is related to hypnosis, what is the connection between literary fiction and hypnosis?

Authors of literary fiction are often in a trance when they write it. And readers of literary fiction are often in a trance when they read it.

All of which is normal, necessary, and enjoyable.

“Throwing Anna Under the Train” by Todd Gitlin in New York Times: In Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (post 9), Anna’s suicide was due to her multiple personality.

Todd Gitlin’s essay seems to be a parody of feminist analysis, prompted by what, I don’t know: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/books/review/throwing-anna-under-the-train.html

In any case, it prompts me to provide my eight posts from earlier this year on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, explaining Anna’s suicide as a complication of her multiple personality:

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Leo Tolstoy, writing Anna Karenina, experienced his characters as autonomous, alternate personalities, who were not under his control.

In what “has often been cited by scholars as Tolstoy’s aesthetic credo…He gave an example: the scene of Vronsky’s suicide…When Tolstoy was revising this chapter, Vronsky, ‘completely unexpectedly’ for him, the author, ‘but quite decidedly, proceeded to shoot himself ’…Tolstoy then leveled his anger at literary critics: ‘And if critics now already understand what I want to say…then I congratulate them and can confidently assure them that they know more than I do.’

“Twentieth-century literary critics tend to read this much-quoted formula as a claim of art’s superiority over other forms of expression, affirming art’s ability—and Tolstoy’s—to produce inexhaustible meaning, perhaps to express the inexpressible. But at precisely the time Tolstoy coined this formula, he was considering retreating from literature and abandoning Anna Karenina. In this context, we may read Tolstoy’s words somewhat differently: as an admission of art’s inherent inability to deliver a clear message and a complaint about the author’s lack of control over his text” (1, pp. 44-45).

1. Irina Paperno. “Who, What Am I?”: Tolstoy’s Struggles to Narrate the Self. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2014.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Anna’s “Doubling” in Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (post 2): Is it “moral quandary,” the literary “double,” evil “spirit” possession, or multiple personality?

“The reality of the doubling is first suggested by Vronsky’s sense that as soon as Anna begins to speak about her unresolved situation with Karenin, it as if ‘she, the real Anna, withdrew somewhere into herself and another woman stepped forward, strange and alien to him, whom he did not love but feared, and who rebuffed him’…

“…the reality of Anna’s doubling—in the sense that it defines her in her world—is confirmed by how it progresses in her mind. She goes from the repeated feeling of psychological doubling during moments of heightened stress to the sense during her illness that she has actually split in two; she tells Karenin, ‘I’m the same…But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her…The one who is not me…’ Because this reads as an aggravation of the condition that beset Anna before her illness, it would be implausible to discount it as merely febrile raving”…

“If this is a psychological state…it appears to be a reification of her moral quandary…The context makes it clear that she is tormented by the competing demands of passion and morality, and the image of doubling in her soul implies the irreconcilability of these demands”…

“…a repeated motif in Anna Karenina about an evil ‘spirit’ that seems to take possession of Anna lends itself to a ‘Gothic’ interpretation that is in keeping with, if not identical to, aspects of the long and influential tradition of doubles in literature” (1, pp. 198-199).

Has anyone interpreted Anna’s doubling as multiple personality?

1. Vladimir E. Alexandrov. Limits to Interpretation: The Meanings of Anna Karenina. Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

“Voices” in Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (post 3): Anna’s “inner voice” comes out and speaks of love; a “voice” takes one side of her husband’s inner debate.

In post 2, I quoted a literary scholar, making the conventional interpretation of Anna’s “doubling,” that it is a metaphor for her moral and emotional conflicts. But that interpretation does not explain how “her inner voice” can participate in a conversation with Count Vronsky, saying the word “Love” (as quoted below). Only an “inner voice” that is an alternate personality can take part in a conversation with someone else.

“Anna Arkadyevna [Karenina]…listened with delight to what Vronsky was saying…

“…he said, ‘but you know it’s not friendship I need, for me there is only one possible happiness in life, this word you dislike so…yes, love…..

“ ‘Love…’ she repeated slowly with her inner voice, and suddenly…added: ‘That’s why I don’t like this word, because it means too much for me, far more than you can understand…’ ”

Soon after the above, when her husband is debating with himself what his wife is up to, his own “voice” takes one side in the debate:

“…Alexei Alexandrovich [Karenin] found nothing peculiar or improper in the fact that his wife [Anna Karenina] was sitting at a separate table with Vronsky and having an animated conversation about something; but he noticed that to the others in the drawing room it seemed something peculiar and improper, and therefore he, too, found it improper. He decided that he ought to say so to his wife…

“ ‘But, finally,’ he asked himself…, ‘what has happened? Nothing. She talked with him for a long time. What of it? A woman can talk with all sorts of men in society…but…some voice said to him that this was not so, that if others had noticed it, it meant there was something…” (1, pp. 141-143).

The author appears to think, probably on the basis of his own psychology, that voices are a routine aspect of everyone's psychology. The fact is, most people do not have voices. But people with multiple personality do sometimes hear the rational voices of their alternate personalities. And these alternate personalities sometimes do come out and participate in conversations, typically incognito.

1. Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin Books, 2000/2002.

Friday, March 4, 2016

More evidence of multiple personality in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (post 4): Anna’s experience of a “double soul” and her post-switch or hair-pulling headache.

Double Soul

Having confessed infidelity to her husband, Anna was beside herself:

“She felt that everything was beginning to go double in her soul” (p. 288).

“And again she felt things beginning to go double in her soul” (p. 290).

“Again she felt that things had begun to go double in her soul” (p. 293).

Post-Switch or Hair-pulling Headache

“ ‘Ah, what am I doing!’ she said to herself, suddenly feeling pain in both sides of her head. When she came to herself, she saw that she was clutching the hair on her temples and squeezing them with both hands” (p. 288).

“…that gesture, which was terrible for her even in remembrance, when she had clutched her hair with both hands…” (p. 302).

“When she came to herself” (switched from an alternate personality back to her regular self), she found her hands clutching her hair, which she didn’t recall doing, and which was a gesture that was uncharacteristic of her (which is why she said, “Ah, what am I doing!”).

Given the ambiguous way that Tolstoy and/or the translators worded the above, I cannot be sure whether the pain in her head was due to pulling the hair—“clutching” and “squeezing” do not necessarily mean painful pulling and pressing—or whether she had a headache so severe that she grabbed at her hair in agony.

In short, Anna had head pain for one of two reasons: First, some people with multiple personality have headaches, sometimes severe, when they switch personalities. Second, an alternate personality may have pulled, or made her pull, her hair, causing the pain. In either case, since Anna knew that pulling her hair like that was something she would never do, it had been very frightening to find herself doing it.

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin, 2000/2002.

Friday, March 4, 2016

Did Tolstoy (post 5) and Nabokov (post 9) intentionally put multiple personality in their novels, having borrowed the idea from Dostoevsky (post 7)?

In my posts on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, when I argue that Anna, judging from signs and symptoms in the text, had multiple personality, do I mean that Tolstoy intentionally created Anna with that in mind?

After all, Dostoevsky had started a tradition of multiple personality in Russian literature, beginning with The Double (1846). And this tradition continued in the 20th century with Vladimir Nabokov, whose novels Lolita and Despair were discussed in past posts.

Indeed, Nabokov is an amusing case. He derided Dostoevsky, saying he was an inferior literary talent, but said that Dostoevsky had one good idea, that of The Double. And then Nabokov went on to use that idea in Despair, and to manifest his own multiple personality with the contradictory narrative perspectives of Lolita.

But what about Tolstoy? I doubt that he intentionally constructed Anna to depict multiple personality, because most novelists do not mechanically, intentionally, “create” their major characters, according to Mark Twain and other novelists I have quoted. This is true even in the carefully planned detective and mystery genres, as seen in a number of past posts.

I have not finished Anna Karenina yet, but if it turns out that neither the narrator nor any character explicitly invokes the idea of multiple personality, per se, then my inference will probably be that Tolstoy did not have multiple personality in mind, even if Anna has symptoms.

So how could a character get multiple personality if the author did not intend it? Was Tolstoy influenced by Dostoevsky? Where did Dostoevsky get the idea? Edgar Allan Poe? But both Dostoevsky and Poe, themselves, had multiple personality.

Indeed, most novelists (and perhaps 30% of the general public) have a normal version of multiple personality, and their characters reflect it.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

“Anna Karenina” by Tolstoy (post 6) and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (post 2): Multiple Personality is revealed in a life crisis.

In post 2 on Tolstoy, I quoted a literary critic as saying that Anna’s declaration of having multiple personality—quoted below—cannot be dismissed as just the raving of a person in a fever, because she has a history of “doubling” earlier in the novel, when she had not been ill.

But that is not the only reason to take what Anna says seriously. The narrator makes it quite clear that Anna is speaking during a lucid period, when her delirium has temporarily abated:

“From the bedroom came Anna’s voice saying something. Her voice was gay, animated, with extremely distinct intonations…She seemed not only healthy and fresh but also in the best of spirits. She spoke quickly, sonorously, and with unusually regular and deep-felt intonations.

“ ‘Because Alexei — I am speaking of Alexei Alexandrovich (such a strange, terrible fate, that they’re both [both her lover and husband] Alexei, isn’t it? — Alexei wouldn’t refuse me…

“…Alexei [her husband], come here. I’m hurrying because I have no time, I haven’t long to live, I’ll be feverish soon and won’t understand anything. Now I do understand, I understand everything, I see everything…

“ ‘Yes,’ she began. ‘Yes, yes, yes. This is what I wanted to say. Don’t be surprised at me. I’m the same. But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her — she fell in love with that man [her lover], and I wanted to hate you and couldn’t forget the other one who was there before. The one who is not me. Now I’m real, I’m whole…No, you can’t forgive me! I know this can’t be forgiven! No, no, go away, you’re too good!’ With one hot hand she held his hand, and with the other she pushed him away.”

                                *

“The doctor and his colleagues said it was puerperal fever, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred ends in death. All day there was fever, delirium and unconsciousness. By midnight the sick woman lay without feeling and almost without pulse.

“The end was expected at any moment” (pp. 411-414).

But this is an 817 page novel, and Anna fully recovers.

“Anna Karenina” is the second work I have discussed about a woman who becomes more aware of her multiple personality after giving birth. The first was “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Search “Gilman” in this blog.

Why would multiple personality be more obvious after giving birth? No special reason. It is an example of the general principle that multiple personality becomes more obvious when a person who has multiple personality (since childhood) is undergoing a major change or crisis.

Most of the time, multiple personality is hidden and secretive. The regular self is not aware (or only vaguely aware) of the alternate personalities, and the latter go about their business incognito. That is why most people who have multiple personality are never recognized as having it.

However, during a life crisis of one sort or another, the personalities are more likely to bump into each other and be less discreet. This is when the small minority of multiples who ever do get diagnosed, usually get their diagnosis.

[Added 7:18 pm: Of course, people who have some expertise in diagnosing multiple personality can diagnose it even if there is no current crisis, by asking relevant questions, which most clinicians have never been taught. Search "mental status exam."]

But after the crisis passes, and everything reverts to its usual hiddenness and secretiveness, the episode is usually shrugged off as a temporary disturbance.

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin, 2000/2002.

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy (post 7): The narrator thinks Anna’s death is God’s vengeance for her sins, but the text describes classic multiple personality.

In a classic multiple personality scenario, Ms. A, an attractive, but reserved, young woman, is enjoying a quiet evening at home, when, suddenly, Ms. B, a sexually adventurous alternate personality, takes over, goes to the bar of a hotel, meets a man, and they go to his room.

After Ms. B is satisfied, she relinquishes control, and Ms. A finds herself in puzzling circumstances. “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” she wonders. The last thing she remembers is being at home, but now she suddenly finds herself in a strange man’s bed.

Anna Karenina’s death scene is the same as the above, except that instead of a personality B who is sexually adventurous, Anna’s personality B is vengeful and suicidal:

“And suddenly…[Anna] realized what she must do. With a quick, light step she went down the stairs…to the rails and stopped close to the passing train. She looked at the bottoms of the carriages…and tried to estimate by eye the midpoint between the front and back wheels and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.

“ ‘There!’ she said to herself…’there, right in the middle, and I’ll punish him and be rid of everybody and of myself’…

“And just at the moment when the midpoint between the two wheels came even with her, she…fell on her hands under the carriage, and with a light movement, as if preparing to get up again at once, sank to her knees. And in that same instant she was horrified at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wanted to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and implacable pushed her head and dragged over her. ‘Lord, forgive me for everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of any struggle’ ” (p. 768).

Since the novel’s epigraph is “Vengeance is mine; I will repay” (says the Lord), the narrator interprets the above, not as multiple personality, but as God’s punishment for Anna’s sins. The narrator does not realize that he has described a multiple personality scenario (especially in view of Anna’s “doubling” issues, cited in prior posts).

How can novelists write characters with multiple personality and not know it? This has happened so often in the novels discussed in this blog that I had to coin a term for it—gratuitous multiple personality—which, in a novel, is multiple personality that is unintentional, and is there only because it reflects the novelist’s own multiple personality, or at least the novelist’s sense that multiple personality is a common feature of ordinary psychology.

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin Books, 2000/2002.

March 14, 2016

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy (post 8): Anna asked “Where am I?” for the same reason she hadn't remembered doing her hair or recognized herself in the mirror.

Just before killing herself, Anna wondered, “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” (see post 7). I have been trying to imagine how generations of readers have misinterpreted what she said, and not recognized it as a complete non sequitur, indicative of a switch to another personality, who was not aware of the thoughts and actions that the text had just described.

Perhaps some readers have thought that Anna’s brain was impaired, that she had never fully recovered from the delirium of puerperal fever. But no, since then, Anna has been described as amazing Vronsky with “her knowledge, her memory” to such an extent that he “wanted corroboration,” which she then provided by showing him where she had gotten her facts in the many books she had read (p. 643).

More likely, I think, readers have attributed Anna’s confusion to some sort of madness; what, in past posts, I have called “literary madness,” which usually confuses multiple personality with schizophrenia. Two distinctions are that multiple personality has peculiar problems with memory and mirrors; whereas, schizophrenia does not.

“ ‘…did I do my hair or not?’ [Anna] asked herself. And she could not remember. She felt her head with her hand. ‘Yes, my hair’s been done, but I certainly don’t remember when.’ She did not even believe her hand and went to the pier-glass to see whether her hair had indeed been done or not. It had been, but she could not remember when she had done it. ‘Who is that?’ she thought, looking in the mirror at the inflamed face with strangely shining eyes fearfully looking at her. ‘Ah, it’s me,’ she realized…” (p. 755).

As discussed in past posts (e.g., search Mark Twain), people with multiple personality may have both amazingly good memory (like Anna, see above) and peculiar lapses of memory, the latter due to one personality’s having amnesia for what another personality thinks and does. Also, people with multiple personality sometimes have peculiar problems with recognizing themselves in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog).

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin Books, 2000/2002.

Comment

How do most readers and literary critics interpret the passages from the novel that I have quoted in the above posts? If you do not realize that those passages are descriptions of symptoms of multiple personality, they will be ignored, glossed over as idiosyncrasies, or thought of as “madness,” a psychiatrically meaningless, nonspecific, literary euphemism.

Are suicide attempts common in multiple personality? Unfortunately, yes. Sometimes it is done by a depressed alternate personality, other times by a persecutor alternate personality, who, because personalities think they are each people in their own right, thinks it can get rid of a weak, regular personality without itself dying.

Of course, suicide attempts and actual suicide are much more of a risk for people with the clinical version, the mental illness, multiple personality disorder, than it is in the normal, high-functioning version, present in many novelists and others.