New York Times Book Review of Rachel Cusk’s “Transit” says narrator/protagonist has identity issues, as does Cusk in “The Anorexic Statement.”

Today’s rave, front-cover, New York Times book review by Monica Ali acknowledges that Transit is neither plot nor character driven, and that the narrator/protagonist is “an absence”: 

“Transit is a novel that all but dispenses with plot…What, then, is to be done?…Cusk’s answer is…a shadowy narrator, Faye —named only once…

“…she is…in many ways, an absence…There is…no whole and centered inner self to which we are introduced…Where other novelists have looked ‘deep within,’ Cusk seeks to rise above the ‘I’…

“To render a protagonist with the traditional brush strokes of personality, habits, motivations, desires and so on, may in the future and in comparison come to seem like a child’s finger painting” (1).

After reading the above review, I looked online and found Cusk’s essay, “The Anorexic Statement,” which also raises identity issues.

The Anorexic Statement

“…Is it disgusting to be a woman? Menstruation, lactation, childbirth, the sexualisation of the female body…In becoming female she must cease to be universal, and relinquish the masculine in herself that permitted her as a child to find the idea of these things disgusting indeed…

“…the observer — the male…

“A personal admission: not long ago, in a period of great turmoil, I lost a considerable amount of weight…I was unaware, inexplicably, that it had happened. That my clothes no longer fitted passed me by: I noticed it only because other people told me so. They appeared shocked…At first, I was startled in return…

“As a teenager [she is now a 45-year-old mother of two] I had been tormented by hunger and by an attendant self-disgust…I had a monster inside me…I learned to manage the monster, more or less. Like the first Mrs Rochester it had a locked room of its own, from which it sometimes succeeded in breaking free to rend into shreds my fantasies of femininity…I was accustomed to fantasy and to the safety — albeit uncomfortable — it supplied, and the notion of an integrated self was the most uncomfortable fantasy of all…while wanting more than anything to be feminine, I had only and ever found my own femininity disgusting…” (2).

To form my own opinion, I will read more Cusk in future weeks.

1. Monica Ali. Review of Transit by Rachel Cusk. New York Times Book Review. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/books/review/rachel-cusk-transit.html?_r=0

2. Rachel Cusk. “The Anorexic Statement.” NewStatesman, 31 October 2012. http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/2012/10/anorexic-statement

Maureen Dowd, calling Donald Trump a “7-year-old wild child,” joins fellow New York Times columnist, David Brooks, in seeing Trump as childlike, not childish.

In my previous post, I quoted David Brooks as saying that the reason President Trump accepts “alternative facts” is that he is sometimes like a “5-year-old.”

It is significant that both Dowd and Brooks specify the age, because there is an important distinction between childish and childlike, and when you specify a particular age—“7-year-old” or “5-year-old”—the implication is childlike, not just childish.

Childish: a person who is acting like an immature adult.

Childlike: an adult who sometimes behaves at a child’s level of cognitive and social development; for example, like an adult in a fantasy story who has switched personalities with a child; or like a real-life adult with multiple personality who has switched to a child-aged alternate personality.

Dowd and Brooks would probably disavow my interpretation and insist they only meant that Trump sometimes acts immaturely. But their specifying the age—seven or five—supports my interpretation.

Search “childlike” to see a few previous posts.

Maureen Dowd. “Wild Child Takes Charge.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/opinion/sunday/wild-child-takes-charge.html?ref=opinion

David Brooks, on PBS Newshour, explains Donald Trump’s “Alternative Facts”: Trump is either Orwellian or has a five-year-old alternate personality.

“There are two theories of he tells things that are false all the time. Is it because he’s sort of a Orwellian figure, an authoritarian figure who is twisting words in an Orwellian manner, ‘1984,’ to exercise power and control people’s minds, or is he a 5-year-old who has an ego that needs to be fed, and the universe has to warp around his ego needs…I vote on the 5-year-old kid.”

“Alternative facts” (1) are used by liars, pathological liars, confidence men, spies, in psychosis, by the misinformed, in multiple personality, and by novelists.

As I said in a recent post: Another name for multiple personality would be multiple reality, because each personality has its own view of reality (consistent with its own memories and sense of its own age, gender, abilities, preferences, etc.).

Thus, an alternate personality has an alternate reality with its alternative facts. 

Multiple personality is not a psychosis, because there are always personalities (e.g., the regular, host personality) who are in touch with objective reality. However, when you are not talking with the host personality, but don’t know it, you might jump to the conclusion that the person is out of touch with reality, when, taken as a whole, they are not.

Most people with multiple personality are basically truthful. However, some do get a reputation for lying. Search “liar” for some past posts.

Are alternative facts ever a good thing? They are very good for writing novels.

1. Wikipedia. “Alternative facts.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

“Harvey” by Mary Chase: The Pulitzer Prize winning play about 47-year-old man with six-foot-tall rabbit—and the rabbit’s family—as imaginary companions.

Past posts—search “The Story of Ruth,” “Visual Hallucinations,” and “animal alters”—reminded me of the Pulitzer Prize winning play “Harvey” by Mary Chase, which is about a 47-year-old man, Elwood P. Dowd, who has a rational, talking, six-foot-tall rabbit as an imaginary companion. I must have once seen the movie, and I just read the play.

For an introduction to the play and its author, click these two links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(play)

http://irishamerica.com/2016/10/mary-chase-the-woman-behind-harvey/

The line in the play that most caught my attention comes at the end, when Elwood says, “Doctor, for years I’ve known what my family thinks of Harvey. But I’ve often wondered what Harvey’s family thinks of me” (1, p. 71).

The line is a non sequitur. I don’t recall anything in the play that had suggested Harvey had a family. And there is no apparent reason for that fact to be suddenly revealed, in passing, without explanation, at the play’s end.

Since I interpret Harvey as representing an alternate personality, the reference to Harvey’s “family” suggests the presence of multiple personalities.

1. Mary Chase. Harvey: A Comedy in Three Acts [1944]. Snowball Publishing.

Writers’ belief that their characters, narrators, and muses have minds of their own is based on regular personality’s amnesia for the others’ thinking process.

There are two essential criteria for multiple personality: 1. more than one psychological entity with a sense of its own personhood, and 2. amnesia of at least one personality for one other (many personalities may be partially co-conscious with each other).

However, the second criterion is really entailed in the first criterion, because amnesia is what gives one personality a sense of its own personhood. The main basis for two personalities to believe that they are separate persons is that they don’t have the same memories.

Why do writers’ regular personalities believe that their characters, narrators, and muses have minds of their own? Their belief is based on their characters,’ narrators,’ and muses’ having opinions and information that are based on thoughts for which the regular personality has amnesia. The regular personality does not remember the narrator’s or muse’s thought process in thinking up the story, or the thinking by which a character formed its opinions.

As to dramatic, overt examples of one of a writer’s personalities having amnesia for another, I could cite instances of writers’ having fugues. (Search “fugue.”) Also, I have quoted some writers as saying that when they read their past works, they may not remember having written them.

But do writers have “real” multiple personality if they are not overtly flipping from one personality to another? Overt, easily recognizable switching is a feature of 1. multiple personality that is being presented, post-diagnosis, as a public demonstration, or 2. a case that is out of control.

Most of the time, in real multiple personality, alternate personalities remain inside (sometimes heard as voices), or come out incognito. And in writers, alternate personalities are more or less under contract to limit their overt appearances to the writing study.

Genius, Multiple Personality, and Visual Hallucinations in “The Black Monk” by Anton Chekhov: a short story about pseudopsychosis in the creative process.

The protagonist, Andrei Vassilyich Kovrin, who is a rising star at the university—“I teach psychology, but I’m generally concerned with philosophy”—is the one who hallucinates the black monk and aspires to be a genius. But it is Yegor Semyonych Pesotsky (now an old man, who had raised the orphaned Kovrin as a child) who is the one that is actually famous (for his gardens) and considered a genius (in horticulture). So Chekhov’s portrayal of the old man will be considered first.

“Yegor Semyonych…It was now as if two persons were sitting in him: one was the real Yegor Semyonych…and the other not the real one…The unreal Semyonych sighed and, after a pause went on…But here the real Yegor Semyonych would recollect himself, make a terrible face, clutch his head, and shout…” (1, p. 241).

To repeat, this old man is the only character who has actually achieved genius status, and there is never any question of his sanity. Chekhov had no reason to include the above about the old man’s “two persons” except to establish the link between multiple personality and genius, free and clear of any question of madness.

As to the monk that Kovrin hallucinates and converses with, it is repeatedly emphasized that Kovrin recognizes him as unreal. Indeed, the monk himself says so: “I exist in your imagination” (1, p. 237). Since by definition a hallucination is perceived as real, not imaginary, this is a pseudohallucination (the same as when a novelist converses with his characters). And as the monk tells Kovrin, “how do you know that people of genius, whom the whole world believes, did not also see phantoms?” (1, p. 238).

Search “visual hallucinations” for past posts about their relationship to multiple personality.

Readers should not be misled by the fact that Kovrin, himself, accepts the idea that he is mad and needs treatment. He regrets the treatment, which he feels has made him a “mediocrity…How lucky Buddha and Mohammed and Shakespeare were that their kind relations did not treat them for ecstasy and inspiration!” (1, p. 246).

1. Anton Chekhov. Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Modern Library, 2000.

“Summertime” by J. M. Coetzee (post 6): Concludes fictionalized memoir with the two basic multiple personality themes of dissociation and secretiveness.

“You must have noted how rarely he discussed the sources of his own creativity. In part that came out of the native secretiveness I mentioned. But in part it also suggests a reluctance to probe the sources of his inspiration, as if being too self-aware might cripple him” (1, p. 445).

The two basic themes of multiple personality are dissociation (which limits self-awareness) and secretiveness (so others don’t learn your secrets and tell you).

Multiple personality is a dissociative condition (the clinical version is a “dissociative disorder”). Dissociation (split personality, dividedness, doubling, double or multiple consciousness) is a way of segregating traumatic memories and multiplying ways of coping.

The most basic way of coping with trauma is to segregate traumatic memories and the feelings about them; that is, for the regular self to keep secrets from itself, because too much self-awareness would be crippling.

In order to keep secrets from yourself, you must keep these secrets from other people, because if they found out about them, they might tell you. So people with multiple personality tend to be secretive.

Note on Terms: Multiple personality entails dissociation (splitting off) into alternate consciousnesses (the alternate personalities), not “repression” into “the unconscious” (the latter terms are obsolete). Things are “unconscious” only from the point of view of the host personality. They are always perfectly conscious to one or another of the alternate personalities (characters, narrators, voices, daemon, or muse, literarily speaking).

1. J. M. Coetzee. Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood [1997], Youth [2002], Summertime [2009]. New York, Penguin Books, 2011.

New York Times: “For Trump On Twitter, Two Voices, Unalike. America inaugurated two very different presidents…One…humble…The second” not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/us/politics/one-president-with-two-very-different-twitter-voices.html?_r=0

Today’s New York Times Book Review has Graphic version of Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”: Novel raises multiple personality issues.

Search “Ackroyd” to see my past posts.

Visual Hallucinations in Multiple Personality: The Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Charles Dickens hallucinates a small boy, J. M. Barrie’s co-writer McConnachie

Recent posts on “The Story of Ruth” were about a real-life, case history of a woman with the nonpsychotic, visual hallucinations sometimes seen in multiple personality.

Previous examples of this have been Hamlet’s hallucination of The Ghost, Dickens’s hallucination of the small boy, and J. M. Barrie’s hallucination of McConnachie, his imaginary companion and co-writer.

To find these past posts, search “small boy” and “Barrie retrospective”

“Youth” by J. M. Coetzee (post 5): Working as a computer programmer, not sure who he is, what he believes, or how old he feels, from moment to moment.

At the end of Youth—age 19 to 24, Part 2 of this memoir trilogy by the future Nobel novelist—things do not seem promising: “At eighteen he might have been a poet. Now he is not a poet, not a writer, not an artist. He is a computer programmer, a twenty-four-year-old computer programmer in a world in which there are no thirty-year-old computer programmers” (1, p. 283).

However, on the bright side, he has identity issues suggestive of multiple personality, which may explain why he is not sure who he is, what he believes, or how old he feels, from moment to moment:

“…who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can he know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure?…he does not believe himself. He does not know what he believes” (1, p. 150-151).

“In his heart he does not feel himself to be more than eight years old, ten at the most” (1, p. 170), which suggests the presence of one or more child-aged personalities (a common type of alternate personality).

1. J. M. Coetzee. Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood [1997], Youth [2002], Summertime [2009]. New York, Penguin Books, 2011.

“Trump, Sworn In, Issues A Call: ‘This American Carnage Stops,’ ” says New York Times front page headline: But why does Trump think there is carnage?

The front page of today’s New York Times is topped by a banner headline about yesterday’s presidential inauguration: “Trump, Sworn In, Issues A Call: ‘This American Carnage Stops.’ ” And since the USA is not a scene of carnage, the implication is that President Trump is either a demagogue or out of touch with reality. But there is a third possibility.

Readers of this blog know I have speculated about the possibility that Trump has multiple personality (ever since I read that he used to call people on the telephone using different names for himself). So my explanation for his talk about carnage relates to multiple personality.

Another name for multiple personality would be multiple reality, because each personality has its own view of reality. For example, a child-aged alternate personality—let’s say age seven; forever frozen at age seven—may view reality as always being like it actually was for that person back in the year when he was seven. 

If at age seven, the person had experienced or witnessed carnage of some sort, then that personality, forever living in the reality of that year, may continue to view the world in terms of carnage.

Meanwhile, the person’s other personalities have other views of reality. Those personalities who see themselves as being the person’s actual adult age and who are living in the present year, when there is no carnage, will view reality like everyone else. In short, having multiple personalities entails having multiple realities.

When a person writes, he may have input from all of his personalities.

You can see why multiple personality would be advantageous to novelists, who need alternate realities to write bestsellers and win Nobel prizes.

“Youth” by J. M. Coetzee (post 4): Memoir’s narrator says protagonist thinks “To know one’s own mind too well spells the death of the creative spark.”

This is the full quotation:

“Usually he does not know his own mind, does not care to know his own mind. To know one’s own mind too well spells, in his view, the death of the creative spark” (1, p. 232).

Before reading the above (I’m still reading Youth), I had come to a similar conclusion about writers' beliefs on creativity in a recent post:

A number of writers have acknowledged that they have more than one self, at least two—a regular self and a writing self. Some writers have said that you cannot interview the one who actually wrote their books. Many writers claim that they have co-writers or ghost writers of one sort or another: muses, voices, daemons, shadows, the unconscious, narrators, and their characters, themselves.

But these same novelists object if I call the above a normal version of multiple personality, because that makes their creative process sound too rational, too explainable. And if there is one thing about their creative process that they are sure of, it is the mystery at its heart.

Could I be right? Or is Coetzee saying something that writers believe only in their youth?

1. J. M. Coetzee. Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood [1997], Youth [2002], Summertime [2009]. New York, Penguin Books, 2011.

Is “The Forgotten Man” just a political slogan used for many years by both parties, or is it one of Donald J. Trump’s alternate personalities (post 17)?

President Trump has used the phrase “the forgotten man” in his campaign speeches and again, today, in his inaugural. It is usually discussed as an old political slogan (1).

But considering the fact that Trump has put his own name on every building and place that he can—becoming president, he has put his name on the whole country—perhaps he, in his mind, is the forgotten man.

How could this be? He knows that he is well known. But perhaps he has an alternate personality who says to Trump, “You’re famous, but that’s you, not me.” Donald replies, “You’re Trump, too.” But the alternate personality, who has his own identity, does not see himself as Trump, and cannot be convinced.

Well, couldn’t Trump publicize the name of his alternate personality, the way that writers publish books under the name of their alternate personality’s pseudonym? Apparently, this alternate personality does not have a name. Some alternate personalities don’t.

1. Wikipedia. “Forgotten man.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_man

Multiple Senses of Identity in “Boyhood” by J. M. Coetzee (post 3): Alternate personalities related to language, anger, invincibility, and avoidance.

Multilingual people think, feel, and act somewhat differently when speaking each of their languages, but most do not feel like another person, which is how the protagonist feels:

“When he speaks Afrikaans all the complications of life seem suddenly to fall away. Afrikaans is like a ghostly envelope that accompanies him everywhere, that he is free to slip into, becoming at once another person, simpler, gayer, lighter in his tread” (1, p. 106).

Similarly, it is not uncommon for people to act immature under certain threatening circumstances, but in most people the “inner child” is not as concretely experienced as this, which looks like the description of a very young, angry, child-aged alternate personality:

“…shouting and storming and crying…the baby behavior that he knows is still inside him, coiled like a spring…the ugly, black, crying babyish core of him…” (1, pp. 94-95).

In other threatening situations, the protagonist was sometimes aware of “something deeper inside him, something quite jaunty, that said, ‘Never mind, nothing can touch you, this is just another adventure’ " (1, p. 95).

The latter appears to be the voice of a somewhat older, more verbal, alternate personality.

Yet another alternate personality inside him may sometimes intervene when he does not want to hear or see something: “…he can feel a hand go up inside his own head to block his ears, block his sight” (1, p. 136).

Of these four alternate personalities, only the Afrikaans one typically comes “out” and temporarily controls behavior. The other three generally stay inside—where most alternate personalities are, most of the time—but may affect the host personality through feelings, voices, or changes in perception.

Of course, if you have neither witnessed nor experienced alternate personalities, and if you have not read all my posts on over a hundred other writers, you may think I am mistakenly reifying Coetzee’s metaphors.

1. J. M. Coetzee. Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood [1997], Youth [2002], Summertime [2009]. New York, Penguin Books, 2011.

Namelessness in “Boyhood” by J. M. Coetzee (post 2): The memoir’s only comment bearing on why the narrator makes the protagonist nameless.

I find that the memoir itself gives a reason for the protagonist's namelessness:

“He seethes with rage all the time. That man, he calls his father when he speaks to his mother, too full of anger to give him a name: why do we have to have anything to do with that man? Why don’t you let that man go to prison?” (1, p. 132).

Thus, according to the only comment in the text about why anyone would refer to another person by pronoun and not by name, the narrator of this memoir may be doing this to express anger at the protagonist.

And while a person could be angry at himself, I think that it would not occur to a person to express that anger by making himself nameless. It is a way to express anger at someone else.

So the narrator is relating to the protagonist as though the latter were someone else at whom he is angry. And the only sense in which that could be true would be if the narrator and protagonist were alternate personalities and saw themselves as different people.

(Search "nameless" and "namelessness" for past posts regarding other writers.)

1. J. M. Coetzee. Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood [1997], Youth [2002], Summertime [2009]. New York, Penguin Books, 2011.

Memoir by Nobel novelist J. M. Coetzee: Multiple Personality meaning of its Third-Person narration explained in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” by Dickens.

Why is the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s memoir (1) “he” rather than “I”? Why would someone refer to himself in the third person?

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens planned to reveal the murderer’s multiple personality by having him refer to himself in the third person. Dickens assumed that the meaning of third-person self-reference—multiple personality—would be obvious to the average reader.

However, in reviews of Coetzee’s fictionalized memoir, I have not seen anyone raise the issue of multiple personality (usually using euphemisms) until the third part of this trilogy, Summertime, even though the third-person narration starts at the very beginning of the first part, Boyhood.

Having just started Boyhood, I will reserve further comment until I have read more.

1. J. M. Coetzee. Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood [1997], Youth [2002], Summertime [2009]. New York, Penguin Books, 2011.

“The Story of Ruth” by Morton Schatzman, M.D. (post 2): Ruth is talented, not crazy, and the psychiatrist is surprised to hear what she wants to be.

As I noted in the previous post, Ruth’s multiple personality was evident, but Dr. Schatzman had made no mention of it, which is not surprising, since he wrote his book prior to the publication of DSM-III (1980), the first edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual to clearly describe the diagnostic criteria. And it was still a decade before the first modern textbook on multiple personality (Putnam, 1989).

When Dr. Schatzman finally does raise the issue of multiple personality, he does so as an aside (1, p. 168), and quickly drops it, since he is not sure of Ruth’s diagnosis, and feels that psychiatry must “await further understanding of…cases of multiple personality” (1, p. 171).

Indeed, his failure to diagnose multiple personality in this case is one reason I recommend the book. It eliminates the possibility that the doctor’s interest in multiple personality influenced the patient. Not only is Dr. Schatzman neither experienced with, nor particularly interested in, multiple personality, he never even raises the issue with his patient.

Nevertheless, much of what Dr. Schatzman does in his therapy and study of Ruth’s “apparitions” is the same as he might have done if he had known he was treating multiple personality. You can read how he helps Ruth turn her symptoms, and fears of being crazy, into a talent she is proud of, and self-understanding.

“Where do we go from here?” [Ruth asks Dr. Schatzman]…

“I’m going to write up what’s happened so far. After you and my colleagues have read it and responded to it, we’ll see.”

“It would make good material for a biography of me. I’d like to try writing one. I’ve wanted to be a writer for a long time” [Ruth says] (1, p. 284).

What a coincidence.

1. Morton Schatzman, M.D. The Story of Ruth. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980.

“The Story of Ruth” by Morton Schatzman, M.D.: Case history of woman referred to psychiatrist, because she had disturbing visual hallucinations of her father.

“Ruth” (a pseudonym) is a twenty-five-year-old married mother who is referred to a psychiatrist by her physician, because she has frightening visual hallucinations of her father, who, she has always remembered, had sexually assaulted her when she was ten.

As Dr. Schatzman, the psychiatrist, says in his introduction, “This is a true story. Some of the incidents are extraordinary, but they actually happened. Whenever I was with Ruth, I carried a pen and paper or an audiotape machine to record what occurred. All the conversations that appear here are reported verbatim or nearly so.”

He calls her life-like visual hallucinations “apparitions,” and it turns out that Ruth has had the ability to make apparitions of people she knows “all my life” (1, p. 99). She can voluntarily see life-like apparitions of her friend Becky, and of Dr. Schatzman, too.

Ruth notices that “I sometimes forget my experiences of an apparition unless I make a particular effort to remember it.” And “they’ve got personalities,” Ruth commented. “I can’t make them do what they don’t want to do, or keep them from doing what they want to do. They’re like real people” (1, p. 122).

Ruth finds that she can see her father’s face when she looks in the mirror (1, p. 137). (Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog to see past posts on persons with multiple personality, who may see alternate personalities when they look in the mirror.) And Ruth is soon observed to switch from her own personality to that of her father. Indeed, the “father” personality carries on conversations with the psychiatrist (1, pp. 138-141). Moreover, Ruth has amnesia: “I can’t remember anything after I started to feel his feelings” (1, p. 158).

Thus, Ruth has the two cardinal symptoms of multiple personality: 1. switching to an alternate personality, and 2. memory gaps (amnesia).

However, at the mid-point of this book (as far as I’ve read), Dr. Schatzman, an American psychiatrist living in London, has not mentioned multiple personality. In fact, he has seemed more interested in whether or not these “apparitions” (his choice of terms) are “real” spirits. So far, he has not found any evidence that they are.

1. Morton Schatzman, M.D. The Story of Ruth. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980.

Novelists reject the theory that their creative process involves a normal version of multiple personality, because the theory misses the mystery of art.

A number of writers have acknowledged that they have more than one self, at least two—a regular self and a writing self. Some writers have said that you cannot interview the one who actually wrote their books. Many writers claim that they have co-writers or ghost writers of one sort or another: muses, voices, daemons, shadows, the unconscious, narrators, and their characters, themselves.

But these same novelists object if I call the above a normal version of multiple personality, because that makes their creative process sound too rational, too explainable. And if there is one thing about their creative process that they are sure of, it is the mystery at its heart.

American Psychological Association was founded by Morton Prince and others in opposition to parapsychology and in support of multiple personality.

“The American Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1884 in Boston, Massachusetts. Among other founding members were the psychologists G. Stanley Hall, James Mark Baldwin, Joseph Jastrow, and Christine Ladd-Franklin. Among the first vice Presidents were Hall, William James and the philosopher Josiah Royce. The mathematician Simon Newcomb was the first President. The early members of the society were skeptical of paranormal phenomena. Hall and Jastrow took a psychological approach to psychical phenomena. By 1890 they had resigned from the society. Hall and Jastrow became outspoken critics of parapsychology. Other early members from the society including Morton Prince and James Jackson Putnam left the ASPR in 1892 to form the American Psychological Association” (1).

Morton Prince (2) was known for his study of multiple personality. He is mostly remembered today for The Dissociation of a Personality, his book about Christine Beauchamp (3), a woman with multiple personality.

1. Wikipedia. American Society for Psychical Research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_for_Psychical_Research

2. Wikipedia. Morton Prince. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Prince

3. Wikipedia. Christine Beauchamp (pseudonym). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Beauchamp_(pseudonym)

Alternate Personality: Alters always have sense of self and agency; are usually inside, conscious, monitoring, pulling strings; occasionally “out” and in control.

A person with multiple personality has a host personality (“host”) and alternate personalities (“alters”). The host is the regular personality, who is “out” (overt) and in control of behavior most of the time. The alters have some characteristics always, some usually, and some occasionally.

Alters Always

1. have sense of self: “I am,” “I think,” “I feel,” “I remember,” “I can,” “I want,” self-image

2. have sense of independent agency (a mind of their own)

     An alter always has a sense of its own selfhood or personhood, a sense of “I” or “I am.” It can think. It has a self-image (age, gender, appearance). It has memories and a past. It has characteristic feelings, abilities, and preferences. It has a will and can do things, either in the person’s inside, subjective world (where it is most of the time) or outside in the real, objective world.

Alters Usually

1. inside

2. conscious, monitor

3. pull strings

     

Alters are usually inside the person’s mind. They are usually not “out” and in control of routine behavior, which is the job of the host personality. Alters come out and take overt control of behavior only when the situation calls for it.

For example, an alter who specializes in playing the piano will tend to come out only when there is a piano. An alter who fights will come out only if the host is threatened. In short, alters are usually conscious, and they often monitor what is going on with the host out in the real world, so that they know when to come “out.”

However, even when inside, an alter may be able to pull strings by speaking to the host (who hears a voice) or giving the host ideas or feelings (which the host may ascribe to inspiration, the unconscious, etc.).

Occasionally Alters are

1. “out” and in control

2. usually incognito

3. even simultaneously

Alters may or may not have their own name. If they do, and you know their name, you can usually bring them out if you address them by name.

In most people with multiple personality, when alters do come out, they do so incognito. That is, even if they have their own name, they usually pass for the regular, host personality by responding to the person’s regular name. They have found life is simpler that way.

You know that an alter had been “out” if the person (really, the host personality) has a memory gap (for the time and behavior when the alter was “out”). By inquiring about the lost time and forgotten behavior, you may be able to bring the involved alter out to discuss what happened and why. Of course, as soon as the person switches back to the host, the host will have a memory gap for your conversation with the alter (unless work has been done to increase co-consciousness and communication).

Occasionally, more than one personality is “out” at the same time. For example, the host may have a visual hallucination of an alter either in the mirror or as an apparition. Or a group of personalities may hallucinate each other and hold a meeting. Or writers may converse with their characters. As long as the person can distinguish between what is subjective and what is objective, and it causes no distress or dysfunction, these things are normal.

“Memoirs of Many in One” by Patrick White (post 2): The Nobel Prize winner’s last novel is about his multiple personality, just as its title suggests.

However, White never uses the term “multiple personality.” The closest he comes to explicit acknowledgement is his reference to Alex, the protagonist, as being schizophrenic: “schizophrenics and fellow mystics” (1, p. 95). White may have made the common linguistic mistake of using the term “schizophrenia” to mean split personality (multiple personality). (Schizophrenia, a psychosis, and multiple personality, a nonpsychotic dissociative disorder, are different conditions, but the psychiatrist who coined the term “schizophrenia” did not know that.)

“The conceit [of the novel] was that he, Patrick White, had been asked to edit the memoirs of the late Alex…Gray…who, [White] admitted…‘is myself in my various roles and sexes. It gives me great scope.’ Alex Gray’s forebears and offspring are also fragments of White, and these familiar figures of his imagination are gathered together in the pages of Memoirs as friends…holding one last party before the ship sails” (2, p. 622). (This was the last novel published in White’s lifetime.)

White’s reference to the novel as being about “premature senility” (2, p. 622) probably reflected his own fears of growing old. Both the protagonist and the novel’s “editor” (“Patrick White”) are elderly. But the story of the protagonist’s multiple personalities—“Alex acquired names [of alternate personalities] as other women encrust themselves with jewels” (1, p. 9)—was life long.

“…I [Patrick White] knew I would never escape Alex…her life was mine historically, personally, and if I cared to admit, creatively” (1, p. 179).

“…I I [personal pronoun repeated in the text] — the great creative ego — had possessed myself of Alex Gray’s life when she was still an innocent girl and created from it the many images I needed to develop my own obsessions, both literary and real” (1, p. 192).

Mirror Mirror on the wall,

What’s my gender after all?

Alex (a woman) says, “The afternoon of Patrick’s visit the glass [mirror] shows me up…I can see the grains of powder trembling on the hairs of the moustache, feel the more-than-down on my forearms…” (1, p. 26).

“One last look at myself in the glass. I am Alex once more” (1, p. 27).

That is, first she sees a male alternate personality in the mirror (with a mustache and hairy arms), but then she sees her regular female self.

In this connection, recall from my previous post on Patrick White that he had said in his autobiography: “I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of man or woman according to actual situations or the characters I become in my writing.”

Search “mirror” and “mirrors” to see past posts on the fact that people with multiple personality sometimes see their alternate personalities when they look in the mirror. I have also previously mentioned that it is common for persons with multiple personality to have both male and female personalities.

Comment

This novel is often frustrating and confusing, because White does not explain Alex’s thoughts as coming from various alternate personalities. Without that explanation, Alex often seems delusional.

Evidently White, who had already won the Nobel Prize and was getting old when he wrote this novel, was more concerned with pleasing himself. What Alex said probably made more sense to White, because he knew where she was coming from: her many in one (many personalities in one person).

1. Patrick White. Memoirs of Many in One. New York, Viking Penguin, 1986.
2. David Marr. Patrick White: A Life. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991/1992.

Patrick White (1912-1990), Nobel Prize in Literature (1973), on his contradictory, alternating personalities, evident in his writing, but hidden from him.

“I chose fiction, or more likely it was chosen for me, as the means of introducing to a disbelieving audience the cast of contradictory characters of which I am composed” (1, p. 20).

“I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of man or woman according to actual situations or the characters I become in my writing” (1, p. 80-81).

“I never re-read my books once I have corrected the proof, but if for some specific reason I have to open one and glance at a paragraph or two, I am struck by an element which must have got into them while I was under hypnosis. On one level certainly, there is a recognisable collage of personal experience, on another, little of the self I know. This unknown is the man the interviewers, the visiting professors, the thesis writers expect to find, and because I am unable to produce him I have given up receiving them” (1, p. 182).

1. Patrick White. Flaws in the Glass: A Self-portrait. Penguin Books, 1981.

“Kim” (post 3) by Rudyard Kipling (post 6): Kipling and Kim have “divided sense of self” and “many selves,” but their multiple personality is unacknowledged. 

“The major problems and contradictions in the novel are informed and shaped by Kipling’s divided sense of self…The inner quest, the search for an identity (“Who is Kim—Kim—Kim?”), suggests the possibility of self-discovery and integration of his many selves…” (1, p. 442).

However, at the end of the novel, Kipling remains a “Two-Sided Man” (title of the Kipling poem that Kipling quotes at the beginning of Chapter 8) and Kim remains a two-sided boy: on one side, Kim is the disciple of a holy man; on his other side, he is a government spy.

If a teenager, concurrently, is both the disciple of a holy lama and a government spy, and does both, not out of coercion, but sincerely and with dedication, that behavior is so self-contradictory as to suggest multiple personality. (Search “self-contradiction” for past posts.)

1. Zohreh T. Sullivan. “What Happens at the End of Kim?” in Norton Critical Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim [1901]. New York, WW Norton, 2002.