“Kim” (post 2) by Rudyard Kipling (post 5): “a demon in Kim woke up and sang with joy” as he assumed clothes, speech, and gestures of alternate personalities.

In Chapter 9, Kim meets Lurgan Sahib, who is in charge of helping spies to assume their various new identities.

Kim is compared to another boy who works for Lurgan, but who, unlike Kim, does not have what it takes to assume alternate identities:

“The [other] child played this game [of assuming alternate identities] clumsily. That little mind…could not temper itself to enter another’s soul; but a demon in Kim woke up and sang with joy as he put on the changing dresses, and changed speech and gesture therewith” (1, pp. 134-135).

Why can’t this other boy assume alternate identities. Can’t he remember what to do? Can’t he follow Lurgan’s suggestions? The chapter answers both of these questions.

The other boy is demonstrated to have an excellent memory, just as good as Kim’s. And he is demonstrated to be much more suggestible than Kim. So if an excellent memory and compliance with suggestions were keys to adopting alternate identities, the other boy would have been very good at it. But he lacked the ability “enter another’s soul” (switch identities) that Kim had.

The narrator attributes Kim’s ability to switch identities to spirit possession—“a demon in Kim”—a nonpsychological explanation for multiple personality.

Search “spirit possession” for past posts on its relation to multiple personality.

1. Rudyard Kipling. Kim [1901]. New York, W.W. Norton, 2002.