“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.