“The Enigma of Arrival” (Part 2) by V. S. Naipaul (post 3): Multiple personality’s dissociative amnesia, dissociative identity, and dissociative trance.

Dissociation

The mental mechanism of multiple personality is dissociation, which may be evident in dissociative amnesia (memory gaps), dissociative identity (another term for having multiple personalities), and dissociative trance.

Dissociative Amnesia

At age eighteen, the nameless first-person narrator, coming from his homeland of Trinidad, stopped in New York (on his way to England, where he had a scholarship to Oxford University). When his plane landed in New York, he had to take a taxi to the hotel:

“The driver cheated me…he stripped me of the few remaining dollars I had on me…I felt this humiliation so keenly that memory blurred it soon; and then eradicated it for many years…the humiliation connected with…the driver’s theft, my inability to tip the Negro [at the hotel]…they were edited out of my memory for twenty years. They were certainly edited out of the diary which I wrote…that evening in the hotel” (1, p. 112).

This is not ordinary forgetting. He did not remember it that night. He did not remember it for twenty years. But the memory was there all along, in a part of his mind that was dissociated from his regular consciousness.

Did he “repress” the memory into his “unconscious”? Or did he dissociate it into the memory bank of an alternate personality? If he had alternate personalities, as he implied he did in his Nobel Prize speech (see prior post), that would indicate he dissociated the memory into an alternate personality.

[Search "psychoanalysis" for past posts on when it, and its concepts like repression and the unconscious, became obsolete; also the essay on the possibility that Freud, himself, had multiple personality.]

Dissociative Identity

“I witnessed this change in my personality; but, not even aware of it as a theme, wrote nothing of it in my diary. So that between the man writing the diary and the traveler there was already a gap, already a gap between the man and the writer. Man and writer were the same person. But that is a writer’s greatest discovery. It took time—and how much writing!—to arrive at that synthesis…But the nature of the experiences of the day encouraged a separation of the two elements in my personality” (1, p. 110).

“…I could feel the two sides of myself separating one from the other, the man from the writer” (1, p. 120).

“…my disturbance, my vulnerability, the separation of my two selves” (1, p. 124).

“The separation of man from writer which had begun on the long airplane flight form Trinidad to New York became complete…And then, but very slowly, man and writer came together again” (1, p. 147).

However, in Naipaul’s Nobel prize speech (see previous post), he concludes that, for him, man and writer remain distinct. Moreover, it is very unlikely that his split personality began at age eighteen or that he had only two personalities. Multiple personality usually begins before the personality has matured and stabilized; that is, usually before age fourteen. And there are hardly ever only two personalities.

Had he, like most people with multiple personality, had a traumatic childhood? Referring to his childhood, he says: “…the terror I had felt in these places for various reasons at different times…the fear of extinction which I had developed as a child…” (1, p. 152).

Dissociative Trance

As discussed in past posts, novelists usually enter an altered state of consciousness, either routinely, when they sit down to write, or at least for some phases of their creative process. Doris Lessing called it a “creative trance.” Naipaul is no different.

“I had developed (or discovered) this ability to concentrate…suddenly to withdraw, to shed even acute anxiety…to push the world to one side and enter my writing as I might enter a walled garden…” Especially the first draft is a “delicate, suggestible state…When a book is in that state, things around me could get written into it…and, once written into a book, hard to take out” (1, p. 169).

Trances increase suggestibility and facilitate switches to, and communication among, alternate personalities. Because of this, some therapists frequently use hypnosis in the treatment of multiple personality. I hardly ever have, because people with multiple personality are already, in effect, hypnotizing themselves; like novelists entering an altered state of consciousness and getting in touch with their characters.

Exploding Head

Nameless Narrator says he has had recurrent dreams in which there would be “an explosion in my head” (1, p. 100), dreams of “the exploding head, the certainty of death” (1, p. 103). In a person with multiple personality, I would wonder if this were caused by battling, angry personalities. And by asking to speak with any personalities who were involved in, or knew about, the exploding head in the dreams, I could probably find out.

Changes in Handwriting

Nameless gets a letter from Angela (1, pp. 174-179, the closing pages of Part 2 of the novel), a woman he had known many years ago in London. He reports that Angela’s handwriting changes markedly in several parts of the letter. He interprets these changes as reflecting her changes in mood and subject matter.

But since the alternate personalities of some people with multiple personality have different handwritings, I have to wonder why a letter with changes in handwriting was included in this narrative. Had Naipaul ever had changes in his own handwriting? Or is it just that you need not be a novelist to have multiple personality?

1. V. S. Naipaul. The Enigma of Arrival [1987]. New York, Vintage Books, 1988.