“Saving Agnes” by Rachel Cusk (post 4): Gratuitous multiple personality—identity changes, secret selves, pseudonyms, voices, self-persecution—in first novel.

Rachel Cusk’s award-winning first novel, Saving Agnes, has symptoms of multiple personality in its first half, but none in its second half. Why?

After finding a similar thing in the work of a number of novelists, I previously coined the term “gratuitous multiple personality” (search “gratuitous”).

Think about why an author would have gratuitous symptoms of multiple personality in a novel, as you read the following:

“Agnes Day was her real name” but “As a child Agnes had been imaginative—a word often used to explain the character of a compulsive liar—and had enjoyed frequent changes of identity…

“ ‘Bathsheba, could you please pass the salt?’ her father would politely inquire…(1, p. 13).

“As Agnes approached puberty her identity crisis…grew…she chose her own middle name, Grace…Grace was an honored guest in their house…Only her brother…Tom missed Agnes and had little time for her double…(1, pp. 14-15).

“…she sometimes wondered why the proliferation of selves she would have liked to be and lives she would have liked to live remained locked inside her, prisoners of utmost secrecy…” (1, p. 16).

“As a child she had often been mistaken for a boy…” (1, p. 19).

“Agnes had lived most of her life in constant fear and loathing of her own sex. The convent school where she had grown up had been red in tooth and claw with female cruelty” (1, p. 54)…Agnes’s wistful longings for sisterly love had been if anything intensified by her years in the convent…Agnes’s imaginary sister [Grace], who looked something like Doris Day…just smiled and sang as she lay beside Agnes in the dark…” (1, p. 61).

“She examined her fellow passengers…Women in saris…West Indian women…Could they not get together and solve each other’s problems? Agnes seemed to hear, as if from around her, dissenting voices…Condescending! they cried. Racist!…It was so hard sometimes, having to think for oneself…She got off the bus and walked” (1, p. 66).

“Agnes…recalled [that at the age of thirteen] things had…ceased to be real for her…She had, at the moment in question, been neither happy nor particularly unhappy…In any case, what she did remember was that…she had suddenly felt her mind disengage and float away…It was most unexpected…something irrevocable had taken place…‘I don’t feel as if I’m here,’ she had said to Christine Poole [her school friend]; and she remembered very clearly what had happened next. First of all, she realised her voice sounded distant, as if she were listening instead of speaking. Secondly, Christine had looked at her as if she were mad. These two events now seemed to have characterised much of her later life” (1, pp. 88-89).

(Self-) Persecutor Personality

Agnes’s supposed friends, including Christine Poole, subsequently betray Agnes by reading passages from Agnes’s personal diary to school officials. Moreover, “Her friends’ terror campaign was a Mafia-style affair…when, for example, precious objects would disappear from other girls’ rooms, to be discovered hoarded beneath Agnes’s bed…[and when Agnes’s] expensive winter coat, while hanging in her wardrobe, had come to grief…involving…time-consuming application of sharp scissors to heavy cloth” (1, pp. 94-95). 

        Note: In the context of what had been described about Agnes, psychologically, earlier in the novel, this stealing, hoarding, and cutting at school could conceivably have been the work of a self-persecutory, alternate personality, with Agnes having a memory gap (amnesia) for having done it herself. (Search “memory gap” and “persecutor personality,” a common kind of alternate personality.)

        As if purposely designed to support this multiple personality interpretation, what follows on pages 101-102 is that Agnes and her two roommates go for a walk in the park, and Agnes, strangely, gets separated from them. The narrator gives this multiple personality explanation: “[Agnes] had heard them calling for her, [but] had had a strange sense then of being someone else: a lone jogger…who had heard two friends calling to a girl lost in the woods. She had pitied that poor girl and wondered if she would read about it the papers tomorrow” (1, p. 102).

Gratuitous Multiple Personality

There are no more symptoms of multiple personality in the whole second half of the novel. Evidently, the symptoms of multiple personality in the first half of the novel had not been integral to either character development or the plot. The multiple personality had been gratuitous. Why was it in the novel? Because, as seen in the previous three posts, it reflected the author’s own normal psychology.

1. Rachel Cusk. Saving Agnes. New York, Picador USA, 1993/2000.

“Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation” by Rachel Cusk (post 3): She again cites her multiple personality as though it had just popped up from nowhere.

“I remember, when my own children were born, when I first held them and fed them and talked to them, feeling a great awareness of this new, foreign aspect of myself that was in me and yet did not seem to be of me. It was as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to speak Russian: what I could do — this women’s work — had so much form of its own, yet I didn’t know where my knowledge of it had come from. In some ways I wanted to claim the knowledge as mine, as innate, but to do that seemed to involve a strange kind of dishonesty, a pretending…I felt inhabited by a second self, a twin whose jest it was — in the way of twins — to appear to be me while doing things that were alien to my own character…

“And so I did two things: I reverted to my old male-inflected identity; and I conscripted my husband into care of the children. He was to take the part of that twin, femininity…My notion was that we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female…He gave up his law job, and I gave up the exclusivity of my primitive maternal right over the children” (1, pp. 18-19).

Comment

Cusk’s regular self — or, at least, her writer personality — is male or masculine. Recall Cusk post 1, in which I quoted her referring to basic female experiences as alien and disgusting: “…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…”

Now she says that her alien, female personality seemed to know about maternal things, “yet I didn’t know where my knowledge of it had come from.” Evidently, her female personality had been present and gathering such information all along, probably since childhood, but her male personality had not been aware of it.

Multiple personality starts in childhood, but the regular personality is usually not aware of it until and unless there is a life change or crisis that brings the alternate personality to the regular personality’s attention. After the crisis, the alternate personality may go back to its life behind-the-scenes, and the regular personality may assume that the alternate personality was just a temporary disturbance.

My first Cusk post had been prompted by reading a review of her recent novel, in which issues of identity and narrative structure had been prominent. Unlike the reviewer, who may have thought that such issues are present in novels because writers seek to be experimental, I suspected it reflected the author’s own psychology (which in no way detracts from the quality of the novel). Search “experimental” for past posts in regard to other writers.

1. Rachel Cusk. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012/2013.

“A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” by Rachel Cusk (post 2): She thinks that becoming a mother has given her a temporary case of multiple personality.

“I am surprised to discover how easily I have split in two. I worry; I console. Like a divided stream, the person and the mother pay each other no heed, although moments earlier they were indistinguishable: they tumble forwards, each with its separate life, driven by the same source but seeking no longer to correspond” (1, p. 56).

“…my desire to shed my motherly persona, a persona I cannot seem to support without injury to what I have come to know as my self. I remember reading a magazine article about people whose brains housed two or more alternative personalities; how these personalities just arrived one day, with their own thoughts and memories and impulses, and took up tenancy in a person’s mind. Long arguments could occur between host and tenant; parties could be held if there enough people in there. This is, I suppose, what is more commonly known as madness. Am I, then, going mad? If so it is a madness that has its genesis in pregnancy; it is the whole reproductive act, not just its postscript in breastfeeding, that has shaken my sanity” (1, p. 106).

1. Rachel Cusk. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. New York, Picador, 2001/2003.

Donald Trump’s Use of Epithets (Alternate Names): Why would Trump use epithets as his favorite tactic to undermine, confuse, and disable opponents?

During the presidential primaries and general election, Trump was famous for attaching epithets to his opponents: “Low energy-,” “Lying-,” etc.

He would not have thought that epithets would be a successful tactic against others if he had not felt that epithets would have been a successful tactic against himself. So the question is: Why would Trump, himself, feel vulnerable to epithets?

I will answer this question in terms of my speculation in past posts that Trump might have a normal version of multiple personality (like the many successful writers I discuss in this blog).

Question: Why would people with multiple personality be particularly vulnerable to epithets?

Answer: You can cause people with multiple personality to switch to one of their alternate personalities by addressing them with an alternate name.

For example: If Adam has an alternate personality named Bob, and you address Adam as Bob, Adam will switch to Bob. If Adam has an alternate personality known as The Writer, and you address Adam as The Writer, Adam may switch to The Writer personality. If you don’t know the names of Adam’s alternate personalities, and you address Adam as Low Energy or Liar, you may cause a switch to whatever alternate personalities see themselves as having low energy or having been called a liar.

In short, calling people with multiple personality by alternate names, even if you don’t know the specific names of their alternate personalities, can prompt switches among personalities, which can undermine the person’s ability to function.

If you were to try this tactic on Trump, what epithet would you use? Kellyanne Conway, before she became a Trump advisor, referred to Trump’s comments as “unpresidential”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRlJ3UoDuzs

However, calling him “Unpresidential Trump” would be disrespectful, so I can’t recommend it.

“The Girl Before” by J. P. Delaney: Raises question of how you can tell whether lying to reader is cheap trick or a manifestation of multiple personality.

One Folgate Street is the address of a unique house, built by a world-famous architect and his technology-wizard partner. From the beginning of the novel and for hundreds of pages, everyone agrees that this house has cutting-edge technology and is built like a fortress. Yet it turns out that the man who murdered Emma had been able to breach the house’s security like a cheap toy.

If the impregnability of the house were the only lie in the novel, it might be shrugged off as a cheap trick. But one of the main characters, Emma (the first-person narrator of alternate chapters) is explicitly portrayed as a pathological liar. For example, she lies to the police about having been raped. And then, after the police catch her in the lie, she lies to them again, which, as the police detective comments, is very unusual.

Indeed, Emma has been lying since childhood. As she says at one point, “I hear my mother’s voice, that thing she always said when I was caught lying as a child. Liars shouldn’t be criers” (1, p. 219).

And Emma repeatedly hears voices. Another example: “And what if he’s really angry? a voice inside my head whispers” (1, p. 177).

Search “liar,” “lying,” and “voices” for past posts on lying and voices in multiple personality.

And three characters—the architect’s deceased wife, Emma, and Jane (the other first-person narrator)—are described as look-alikes.

Search “double” and “theme of the double,” literary metaphors for multiple personality.

And the novel is published under a pseudonym, which is another gratuitous lie, since various reviews and interviews reveal the author’s real name, and when you google the pseudonym, you get the author’s real name and picture.

Search “pseudonym” for past posts on pseudonyms and multiple personality.

And, finally, the back cover features blurbs by writers Lee Child and Lisa Gardner. Search their names in this blog for past posts.

1. J. P. Delaney. The Girl Before. New York, Ballantine Books, 2017.

Thomas L. Friedman in “Meet the 5 Trump Administrations” is fourth New York Times columnist to inadvertently suggest that Trump has multiple personality.

In previous posts, I noted that three New York Times columnists (David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins) have inadvertently suggested that President Trump has multiple personality. Today they are joined by Thomas L. Friedman, whose column begins:

“It should be clear by now that there are five different Trump administrations swirling before our eyes — Trump Entertainment, Trump Cleanup, Trump Crazy, Trump G.O.P. and the Essential Trump — and no one can predict which will define this presidency, let alone make a success of it” (1).

The column goes on to describe how Trump himself, together with various of his representatives, act out his five personalities.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/opinion/meet-the-5-trump-administrations.html?_r=0

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell (post 6): Only multiple personality could account for the switches, memory gaps, and contradictory beliefs about war.

It is a running joke in this novel that the nation’s enemy and ally frequently switch places; that the people immediately change which nation they hate; and that the people immediately forget that they have made that switch. This could only happen if each person had two personalities who differed in their view of who was the enemy.

The attitude toward war also illustrates that multiple personality is present, perhaps even more present, in the most powerful members of the Party:

“The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members…is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously…(1, p. 128).

“Splitting of the intelligence” (see above) is a euphemism for split personality (an informal term for multiple personality).

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell (post 5): Society’s posttraumatic multiple personality after trauma of nuclear war, not just totalitarian mind control.

Most interpretations of Nineteen Eighty-Four jump to the conclusion that it is basically an extrapolation from Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. However, the novel itself is about the double-thinking multiple personality developed by society after the trauma of nuclear war. (Real multiple personality is a posttraumatic condition.)

Toward the end of the novel, O’Brien pauses in his torture of Winston to say, “And now let us get back to the question of ‘how’ and ‘why.’ You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power…

“You are ruling over us for our own good,” [Winston] said feebly…

“That was stupid, Winston, stupid!…Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake…The object of power is power…It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual…if he can escape his identity…” (1, pp. 174-175).

And when Winston objects that there are certain objective realities that the Party cannot control, O’Brien explains that “Reality is inside the skull…We make the laws of nature…Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them…Have you forgotten doublethink?” (1, pp. 176-177).

Thus, Big Brother and the Party are not eating power food while they feed totalitarian poison to everyone else. Leaders of the Party like O’Brien are eating their own cooking: They, too, lose their individual identities and engage in doublethink (double consciousness, multiple personality).

(Search previous post on Orwell’s “doublethink.” And past posts on “double consciousness,” “double,” and “theme of the double.”)

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

“Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?” by psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman in New York Times is accompanied by graphic suggesting multiple personality.

As noted in previous posts, three columnists of The New York Times (David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins) have inadvertently suggested that President Trump has multiple personality. Now, a call by psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman for mental health professionals to educate the public, but avoid making long-distance diagnoses, is accompanied by a graphic which inadvertently suggests that Trump has multiple personality (1).

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/opinion/is-it-time-to-call-trump-mentally-ill.html

Re President Trump’s News Conference Today, His Easily-Checked Lie About Electoral College Win: Does multiple personality or cynicism explain it?

Here is what happened at President Trump’s news conference of February 16, 2017, as reported by Politifact, a fact-checking website:

“Trump opened his remarks talking about his accomplishments, starting with the election itself.

‘We got 306 because people came out and voted like they've never seen before so that's the way it goes,’ Trump said. ‘I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.’

“This is incorrect. Trump received a smaller share of the Electoral College votes (56.88 percent)  than former presidents George H. W. Bush (79.18 percent), Bill Clinton (68.77 percent in 1992, and 70.45 percent in 1996) and Barack Obama (67.84 percent in 2008 and 61.71 percent in 2012).

“So that’s five elections since Reagan and in which the winner got a larger percentage of the Electoral College votes than Trump.

“Overall, Trump ranks in the bottom third in terms of the size of his Electoral College win. We rated his repeated claim that he won in a ‘massive landslide’ False” (1).

Three Speculations

Since Trump is not psychotic (and at least one personality knows the facts), was the lie told by an alternate, emotional-reality personality, who honestly believed what he said?

Or is Trump just so cynical that he believes most ordinary people see fact-checking as an elitist conspiracy?

Or did a cynical personality let an emotional-reality personality have its say?

1. Politifact. Fact-checking Donald Trump's Feb. 16 press conference. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/feb/16/fact-checking-donald-trumps-press-conference/

Allen Frances in NY Times on Trump: “grandiosity, self-absorption, lack of empathy, ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity, and pursuit of dictatorial powers…

…but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder” (1).

How does Dr. Frances know that President Trump does not suffer from the distress required to diagnose mental disorder? Has he interviewed Trump? And is the Trump administration going so well that Dr. Frances can be sure Trump has no impairment? In any case, a debate over whether Trump is “mentally ill” is a game of semantics.

Instead, consider these more interesting questions: What can account for Trump’s puzzling inconsistencies? Why is Trump so unpredictable?

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/an-eminent-psychiatrist-demurs-on-trumps-mental-state.html

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Chapter Three) by George Orwell (post 4): Novelists and others with multiple personality have special kinds of dreams.

One of Winston Smith’s dreams is described as being of the following type:

“It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.”

Orwell’s narrator, apparently reflecting Orwell’s own dream experiences, speaks of the above kind of dream as though it were ordinary. But most people don’t dream that way.

What follows are parts of two past posts about novelists, people with multiple personality, and their special kinds of dreams.

November 15, 2013

George du Maurier’s “Dreaming True”

…George du Maurier—author of Peter Ibbetson and Trilby, two best sellers, the latter with the famous character, Svengali; grandfather of novelist, Daphne du Maurier—“used to feel within himself two persons, the one serious, energetic, full of honest ambition and good purpose; the other a wastrel, reckless and careless, easily driven to the Devil.”

…George du Maurier had a psychological technique that he called "dreaming true." "‘Dreaming true’ was [George du Maurier’s] little secret. My grandpapa George developed the ability to ‘visit’ the past by dreaming true,” wrote Daphne. “He would lie back and in his mind’s eye become the child he once was, and he wrote about this ‘psychic’ ability too, in Peter Ibbetson.” Perhaps Daphne, herself, had been using a similar technique, when she wrote the opening line of her novel, Rebecca, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

“Dreaming true” is not the same as “lucid dreaming.” The latter refers to dreaming in which the dreamer knows he is dreaming and can direct the action of the dream. In contrast, George du Maurier describes dreaming true as being like reality, and not like dreams, in that you can’t fly or jump off cliffs, etc. In Peter Ibbetson, he describes it as a way to visit his true, actual past. Ibbetson could “turn myself into my old self, and thus be touched and caressed by those I had so loved.” Dreaming true sounds like a version of self-hypnotic age-regression. I think it's possible that hypnotic age regression involves switching to a child-age alter.

December 12, 2014

Dreams in Multiple Personality 

Some novelists have spoken of dreams as being part of their creative process. Some of these experiences may be actual dreams (verifiable by EEG). But when we hear a story about a creative insight or inspiration in a dream, we often can’t be sure whether it was a dream or a dreamlike experience. Some people have very vivid, dreamlike experiences.

Whether dream or dreamlike, it may be a message from an alternate personality (alter) to the host personality (host), as seen in the following:

Dream as Clue to Multiple Personality

A person who was not yet in therapy, but who knew that she “lost time” (had memory gaps, amnesia) and heard voices (which later proved to be the voices of her alternate personalities, aka alters), had the following dream:

“I was sitting in a photo booth trying to get it to take a picture of me, but all the pictures that came out showed other people—or at least faint outlines of other people. In the mirror, where you see what will come out, the face kept changing, like ghosts” (1, p. 72).

Dream as Message from Alter to Host

In multiple personality, the host personality usually doesn’t know about the multiple personality. The dream quoted above could have been a message from an alternate personality to the host personality, if an alter had wanted to begin to inform the host about the multiple personality.

As an alter of another person said, “I show her [the host personality] images a lot, even while she’s awake, of memories and things I feel and want to do. But she sees them best if I show them to her while she’s dreaming” (1, p. 77).

Mistaking Real Life for a Dream

A woman with no cats had recurring “nightmares” involving cats. When she awoke from one of these “dreams,” she was surprised to find “the velour jogging suit in which she slept covered with cat hair” (1, p. 72). The real life activity of one her alters had previously been mistaken for a dream.

1. Deirdre Barrett. “Dreams in Multiple Personality Disorder,” pages 68-81 in Trauma and Dreams, edited by Deirdre Barrett. Harvard University Press, 1996.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell (post 3): In Chapter One, Winston Smith’s alternate personality writes “Down With Big Brother” in his diary.

Winston Smith, the protagonist, begins a diary, about which, two things—the origin of what he writes and his handwriting—are specified: 

1. “The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.” 2. “His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops” (1, p. 7).

The origin of the content of Winston Smith’s diary recalls what George Orwell had written in his essay “Why I Write” (see previous post), which I again quote: “…for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise…the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind…This habit continued till I was about twenty-five…Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside…”

In the novel, why is Winston Smith’s style of handwriting specified? Because seven pages later, his handwriting changes: “His eyes refocused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals— DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” (1, p. 14).

Thus, in both Orwell’s nonfiction essay and his novel, writing is described as not being under the control of the person’s regular personality; rather, it is “against my will, under a kind of compulsion” and “by automatic action.”

Indeed, the novel takes this two steps further. Winston Smith has amnesia, a memory gap, for having written “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.” And he writes it in a different handwriting.

These things—automatic (nonvolitional, involuntary, dissociated) writing, amnesia, and a change in handwriting style—are evidence of the presence of an alternate personality.

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

“Why I Write” by George Orwell (post 2): He is “driven on” and must "efface one's own personality” due to alternate personalities he “can neither resist nor understand”

He converses with, or gets out of the way of (“efface one’s own personality”), alternate personalities (“imaginary persons,” “demon”) who take over and which he “can neither resist nor understand”:

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer…

“I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons…

“…for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise…the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind…This habit continued till I was about twenty-five…Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside…

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand…And…one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality…”

Pseudonym

Why did Eric Arthur Blair continue to use a pseudonym (George Orwell) after everyone knew who he was?

Judging from what he says about why he writes, the pseudonym would seem to have been an acknowledgement that his regular personality, Eric Blair, was not the personality mainly responsible for his serious writing.

Search “pseudonyms” for past posts on other writers.

1. George Orwell. “Why I Write” (1947), pp. 243-248 in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism, second edition, edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

“Doublethink” of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell is taken from multiple personality: Alternate personalities have alternate views of reality. 

It is a basic feature of multiple personality that one personality will know something that another personality does not; that two personalities will hold contradictory opinions; and that different personalities will differ in their views of reality. With that in mind, consider these definitions of “doublethink” from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth” (1).

1. Wikipedia. “Doublethink.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink

“Enchantment” by Daphne Merkin: The author of this autobiographical novel is an exceptional writer who does NOT have multiple personality.

Not all novelists have multiple personality. Daphne Merkin’s autobiographical novel, Enchantment, is about a woman with episodes of major depression since childhood.

“I first seriously entertained the idea of suicide when I was nine or ten” (1, p. 228).

When Hannah was fifteen, she went on a school outing from New York to Washington, D.C. Since her seat on the bus was not near the popular girls, “I cried steadily for the four hours that it took to get to Washington” (1, p. 47).

The relatively few times she speaks of a voice in her head, it is not a multiple personality kind of voice, with a mind of its own. Rather, it expresses, or is a metaphor for, her depression: “The voice I carried inside me…spoke…a language of deflation” (1, p. 83).

When some people with multiple personality look in the mirror, they see an image that looks different from their objective appearance; they see one of their alternate personalities. In contrast, when Hannah looks in the mirror, she sees her objective appearance (1, p. 170). Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog for past posts on multiple personality kinds of mirror experiences in the works of other writers.

“I am twenty-six but I am really six, looking to be special” (1, p. 210). Because of her depressive need for extra emotional support, she may sometimes act childish (as opposed to having a child-aged alternate personality, which may make a person with multiple personality sometimes act childlike).

For a nonfiction, detailed description of Merkin’s decades of depression, treatment with antidepressant medication, and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy, see her magazine articles (2, 3).

Clues to the presence of multiple personality — e.g., memory gaps, hearing voices with minds of their own, seeing alternate personalities in the mirror, puzzling inconsistencies and self-contradictions, speaking of oneself in the third person, namelessness, author’s pseudonyms, lying due to the different views of different personalities, fugues — are missing from both Merkin’s novel and her life.

1. Daphne Merkin. Enchantment. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

2. Daphne Merkin. “A Journey Through Darkness.” The New York Times Magazine. May 6, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/magazine/10Depression-t.html
3. Daphne Merkin. “My Life in Therapy.” The New York Times Magazine. August 4, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/magazine/08Psychoanalysis-t.html

New York Times misses multiple personality: Television review of “Legion” fails to mention it is based on Marvel Comics superhero with dissociative identity.

A review of the television show, “Legion” (1), fails to mention it is named after, and based on, a Marvel Comics superhero who has multiple personality (2).

The name “Legion” comes from the New Testament: Jesus asked a man his name, and the man replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many” (3).

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/arts/television/review-in-legion-a-heros-journey-is-a-real-head-trip.html?_r=0

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_(Marvel_Comics)

3. New Testament. Mark 5:1-20

Gratuitous Multiple Personality (Major Concepts in Literary Criticism): Characters have symptoms of multiple personality, but the author did not intend it.

If a character in a novel has signs and symptoms of multiple personality, is labelled as having multiple personality by a narrator or character, and if multiple personality is integral to the plot, then it is an intentional literary device, and does NOT imply that the author has multiple personality.

In contrast, if a character in a novel has signs and symptoms of multiple personality, but is not labelled as having multiple personality, is not recognized by any narrator or character as having multiple personality, and if multiple personality is not integral to the plot, then the novel has what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.”

Most of the literature I have discussed in this blog has gratuitous multiple personality. Two examples are Graham Greene’s The Third Man (the novel, not the movie) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

Search “The Third Man” and “Gone Girl.”

Why would a novel have gratuitous multiple personality? My theory is that the author thinks of it as ordinary psychology, because the author has multiple personality.

For some such authors, I have found biographical evidence of multiple personality. For others, biographical information is limited, and my inference that they have multiple personality is a hypothesis.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by Edward Albee (post 6): Who’s afraid that exorcism of Martha’s alternate personality is futile? Martha says, “I am.”

My interpretation of Act One was correct. As you recall, I said that it must have been one of Martha’s alternate personalities who told Honey about Martha’s alleged son. This was indicated by Martha’s simultaneous change of clothing, George’s reaction, and Martha’s history of having memory gaps.

The confirmation of my interpretation comes at the end of the play when Martha (her host personality) reports having no memory—a multiple personality memory gap—of her (alternate personality) having told Honey about Martha’s alleged son (1, p. 251). Of course, since Martha recalls often having had the urge to tell someone, and since there is no reason for Honey to lie about this, Martha accepts Honey’s testimony that she did tell her, but Martha does not actually recall doing so.

The obvious reason that Martha and George had always agreed not to tell anyone about their imaginary son is that they both knew he was imaginary, and they feared that their talking about him as being real would be considered crazy by others. Martha’s father might disown her or insist that she needed to be committed, and he might blame George for collusion with Martha’s craziness.

Was Martha psychotic? No. Although she apparently did have an alternate personality who believed in the imaginary son, her regular personality knew very well that the son was imaginary.

What would be expected to happen now that George was no longer going to humor Martha’s alternate personality who believed in the reality of their “son”? Should Martha be afraid what will happen? Or, as this question is phrased, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Martha, in her last line answers, “I am.”

Martha is right, because George can’t kill off her alternate personality. Exorcism does not work and is not therapeutic. At most, it can temporarily scare an alternate personality into staying inside, being quiet, and lying low.

1. Edward Albee. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York, New American Library, 1962/2005.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (Act One) by Edward Albee (post 5): Martha changes clothes and speaks of son; she has a history of memory gaps.

Martha and George entertain guests Nick and Honey. Martha tells Honey that she and George have a son living elsewhere, who is about to have his twenty-first birthday.

It is suggestive of multiple personality that Martha reveals the alleged existence of a son (which she would normally not reveal) simultaneously with changing her dress (which is uncalled for, and may indicate a switch in personalities, since, in multiple personality, different personalities often dress differently).

As George’s reaction indicates, neither her telling about their alleged son nor her changing her dress had been called for, and their simultaneous occurrence may be significant. Indeed, the way George says “She’s changing” may refer to Martha’s personality, not her dress.

HONEY (to GEORGE)

She’ll be right down…she’s changing.

GEORGE (Incredulous)

She’s what? She’s changing?

HONEY (To GEORGE, brightly)

I didn’t know until just a minute ago that you had a son.

GEORGE (Wheeling, as if struck from behind)

WHAT?

HONEY

Twenty one…twenty-one tomorrow…tomorrow’s his birthday.

GEORGE (Nailing it down)

She told you about him.

HONEY (A nervous giggle)

Yes.

GEORGE (Strangely)

You say she’s changing?

Later in Act One, George threatens Martha with a shot gun, which frightens everyone, until the gun proves to be fake.

HONEY (To MARTHA)

I was never so frightened in my life. Weren’t you frightened? Just for a second?

MARTHA (Smothering her rage at GEORGE)

I don’t remember.

At first, you might think that Martha says “I don’t remember” just to prove that George’s frightening joke had not upset her. But later in Act One, George reveals that Martha has a history of memory gaps: forgetting “half-filled glasses [of alcohol] everywhere in the house…in the linen closet, on the edge of the bathtub…I even found one in the freezer, once,” all of which Martha disputes (since she does not remember it).

Has Martha been hiding her drinking or having alcoholic blackouts during binges? Obviously not, since you don’t hide your drinking by leaving glasses of alcohol on the edge of the bathtub; and you drink the alcohol, you don’t waste it and leave it behind on a binge.

The point of Act One is not simply that George and Martha allegedly have a son, but that it is a secret which Martha would not reveal, except when she changes.

1. Edward Albee. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York, New American Library, 1962/2005.