“The Unconscious”: First, Freud did not discover it (it was already well known); Second, it’s a misnomer, since it refers to conscious, alternate personalities.

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind

“The term ‘unconscious’ was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Influences on thinking that originate from outside of an individual's consciousness were reflected in the ancient ideas of divine inspiration, and the predominant role of the gods in affecting motives and actions. Unconscious aspects of mentality were referred to between 2500 and 600 BC in the Hindu texts known as the Vedas. Paracelsus is credited as the first to make mention of an unconscious aspect of cognition in 1567. William Shakespeare explored the role of the unconscious in many of his plays, without naming it as such. In addition, Western philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche used the word unconscious. In 1880, Edmond Colsenet supports at the Sorbonne, a philosophy thesis on the unconscious. Elie Rabier and Alfred Fouillee perform syntheses of the unconscious ‘at a time when Freud was not interested in the concept.’ In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, William James, in his monumental treatise on psychology (The Principles of Psychology), examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and ‘subconscious.' Historian of psychology Mark Altschule observes that, 'It is difficult—or perhaps impossible—to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.' ”

The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberger (Basic Books, 1970)

“During the entire nineteenth century, hypnosis remained the basic approach to the unconscious mind. However…it was supplemented by [the study of]…mediums…automatic writing…multiple personality…Chevreul’s pendulum…[etc.]” Freud came later.

“The Unconscious”: Misconception and Misnomer

The idea of “the unconscious” assumes, incorrectly, that a person may have only one consciousness. Posthypnotic amnesia demonstrates two states of consciousness: 1. what the person knows and remembers when in hypnosis, and 2. what the person knows and remembers when not in hypnosis. What the person knows and remembers only in hypnosis is “unconscious” only from the point of view of the person when not in hypnosis. Hypnosis that involves posthypnotic amnesia might be viewed as artificially-induced multiple personality.

In multiple personality, per se, what an alternate personality knows and thinks may be “unconscious” from the point of view of the host personality, but it is quite conscious to the alternate personality (who is conscious simultaneously with, but outside the awareness of, the host personality).

Of course, there are certain types of truly unconscious processes. For example, there are physiological processes of which a person is not conscious. Also, there are some cognitive functions, such as recognizing faces, of which a person is conscious of the result, but not of how it was done (assuming there is no face-recognizing personality, per se).

Most things that a writer’s host or editorial personalities attribute to their “unconscious” are things that one or another of their alternate personalities consciously thought up. Give credit where credit is due.

Unacknowledged Multiple Personality: Writers, e.g. Henry James and Margaret Atwood, say writers have multiple personality, but don’t call it that.

As discussed and quoted in past posts, Margaret Atwood, in her nonfiction book on writing, says that all fiction writers have two selves, one who does the regular living and another who does the writing. Henry James had depicted that very same kind of duality in his short story, “The Private Life,” in which one of the character’s personalities is out socializing, while another of that character’s personalities is back in his room doing the writing. So the multiple personality of fiction writers would appear to be common knowledge among fiction writers.

It would also appear to be common knowledge among biographers. As I mentioned in my first post (on Charles Dickens), one biographer of the novelist and literary critic, Mary McCarthy, after reporting that McCarthy had had multiple personality since childhood, commented that this should not be considered a disparagement of McCarthy, because, after all, a “Jekyll-Hyde” scenario is not uncommon among writers.

But note: Neither Atwood nor James nor the biographer—though clearly talking about multiple personality—ever calls it “multiple personality.” Multiple personality is discussed and portrayed, but never explicitly named and acknowledged.

You might think that they were just being discreet. However, if that were the case, then they might have said that writers seem to have multiple personality, but that they hesitate to put it in those terms, because they don’t mean to call them sick and they are not psychiatrists. But they didn't give that explanation.

So my hypothesis is that, in their minds, they don’t quite make the connection. They don’t quite connect what they are saying about writers to multiple personality, per se, because they don’t have the concept that multiple personality has a normal version, and that the normal version of multiple personality is common among fiction writers.

Unintentional Multiple Personality: Novels have had characters who are writers with multiple personality, but has this ever been done intentionally?

Most of the multiple personality of characters in novels—switches in personality, memory gaps, hearing voices of alternate personalities, etc.—is unintentional and gratuitous, as indicated by three things:

1. It is not a consistent feature of character development.

2. It is not integral to the plot.

3. No narrator or character explicitly acknowledges its presence.

An example of this is the novelist with multiple personality in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, which I discussed in a past post.

When multiple personality in a novel is unintentional and gratuitous, its only reason for its being in the novel is that the author had thought of it as ordinary psychology. And only a person who has multiple personality, but does not think of it in those terms, would consider its signs and symptoms as ordinary psychology. Thus, gratuitous multiple personality in a novel is evidence of the author’s multiple personality.

If a character’s multiple personality appears unintentional, since no narrator or character recognizes it as such, but it is integral to the plot, then I call it unacknowledged multiple personality. So there are two types of unintentional multiple personality, gratuitous and unacknowledged, both of which are circumstantial evidence of the author’s multiple personality.

All the above is to introduce the following question: Do you know of any novel with a character who is a writer with multiple personality in which the multiple personality is clearly intentional (explicitly acknowledged by a narrator or character, and integral to character development and plot)? I don’t.

If you do know of any such novel, or have any thoughts about unintentional multiple personality, please submit your comment.

Literary-Psychological blog’s 900 posts on over 100 Writers are Proof that Most Novelists and Many Others have a Normal Version of Multiple Personality.

“Normal Version” means that they have signs and symptoms of multiple personality (usually camouflaged), but function and feel well.

“Multiple Personality” means having multiple, potentially interviewable (without hypnosis or drugs) identities (alternate personalities), each with its own subjective feeling of personhood, its own memory bank, and often its own name, or own version of the person’s name, although some are nameless.

In contrast, people without multiple personality have multiple roles in life, but only one identity (sense of personhood), one memory bank, and are almost never nameless.

“Proof” consists mainly of evidence from the lives and works of over 100 writers in 900 posts. It is explained by these facts and this theory:

1. that many normal children have a natural talent for multiple personality, as indicated by imaginary companions and alternate identities (e.g., when young children insist they are superheroes or princesses),

2. that some of these children have traumatic experiences, and cope with it by developing lifelong multiple personality (mostly the normal version), and

3. that out of this pool of people in the general public who have a normal version of multiple personality come novelists, playwrights, and poets, since multiple personality is an asset integral to their creative process.

“Beside Oneself”: An expression used since 1400s, it is an inadvertent reference to multiple personality, for how else could people be beside themselves?

There is an intuitive recognition of multiple personality in the language of everyday life.

When people are “in their right mind” (which implies they have other, wrong minds), they have “got it together” (which implies that it is possible to have it separately or dissociated).

When people are upset, not in their right mind, and don’t have it together, they may feel beside themselves (1, 2, 3).

People appear beside themselves, and overtly manifest their multiple personality, only when something has upset them. This is a recognition of the connection between trauma and multiple personality.

1. http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/beside+oneself

2. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/01/origin-beside/

3. http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2015/03/beside-onerself.html

“Stop Reading My Fiction as the Story of My Life” by Jami Attenberg in New York Times Book Review: She avoids the real issue of how novels are written.

If there is anything more annoying than a reader who asks if a novel is autobiographical, it is a writer who pretends to misunderstand the question.

Readers are not really asking if the author had been fat like a character. They are asking how novels are written.

Here is what Attenberg says about her creative process:

“…I write fiction because it is a beautiful place to hide…It is a fictional universe. And how do you even explain the creative process…I have the possibility with fiction to make a character feel more real than with nonfiction…Fiction is a magic trick of sorts…at best it doesn’t just conjure up an imaginary world; it makes the real one disappear, it makes the author disappear…” (1).

Although some of the above is meant to describe the reader’s experience, all of it is probably Attenberg’s experience as the writer: She does not understand her creative process, but her fictional universe is a beautiful place to hide, where her regular self disappears, and her characters feel more real than real.

That is what readers are asking about, but they find it annoying that Attenberg and other authors do not elaborate.

1. Jami Attenberg. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/books/review/stop-reading-my-fiction-as-the-story-of-my-life.html

American Psychiatric Revolution of 1980: USA embraces Bipolar Disorder (British) and Multiple Personality (French) as it abandons Psychoanalysis.

The third edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-III, was published in 1980. Whereas previous editions had used psychoanalytic terms (e.g., “neurosis”) and assumed the validity psychoanalytic concepts (e.g., “repression” and “the unconscious”), the 1980 edition prided itself on its scientific objectivity. Psychoanalytic terms were no longer used; psychoanalytic theory was no longer assumed; and all diagnoses now had diagnostic criteria (a list of specific signs and symptoms).

Prior to DSM-III in 1980 (and the 1970s leading up to it), USA psychiatry had had an overly broad concept of schizophrenia. Some patients who actually had bipolar disorder (aka manic-depression) or multiple personality had been misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia.

Two events, the introduction of lithium in 1970 (to treat bipolar disorder) and a study that compared British and USA psychiatric diagnosis, convinced USA psychiatrists that they had been misdiagnosing some patients as having schizophrenia, who actually had bipolar disorder.

Another medical awakening in the 1970s was the prevalence of child abuse. Until 1970, psychiatric textbooks had stated that, literally, only one child in a million was the victim of child abuse. But now it was found to be much more common than that.

USA doctors had had blind spots for bipolar disorder and childhood trauma.

Also in the 1970s, some psychiatrists, who may have wondered what else psychiatry had missed, began to recognize cases of multiple personality and its connection to childhood trauma. I was not one of those psychiatrists. My focus in the 1970s was on bipolar disorder. I did not realize that any of my patients had multiple personality until 1986.

The reason I give credit to French psychiatry for multiple personality is that the origin of its basic concept, dissociation, is most associated with French psychiatrists like Pierre Janet (1859-1947). Unfortunately, for most of the 20th century, Janet’s concept of dissociation was eclipsed by Freud’s concept of repression. Since Freud’s concept could not explain the occurrence of even one case of multiple personality, so long as Freud was popular, the diagnosis of multiple personality would likely be missed.

However, DSM-III (1980)—and subsequent editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s official diagnostic manual (the latest edition is DSM-5, published in 2013)—do have a chapter devoted to dissociative disorders, including multiple personality (aka dissociative identity disorder), but do not have a chapter for “repression disorders,” because Janet was right and Freud was wrong.

Donald Trump helps disprove myth that multiple personality is popular, culture-specific, diagnostic fad, mostly limited to United States of America.

There is a myth that multiple personality is a popular, culture-specific, diagnostic fad, mostly limited to the USA. Although the presence of multiple personality in other parts of the world has been addressed (1), the myth persists that multiple personality is popular in the USA.

If that were true, then multiple personality would be a common speculation about Donald Trump, but it is not.

In spite of the fact that Donald Trump has a history of using pseudonyms, speaking of himself in the third person, puzzling inconsistencies, marked changes in demeanor, lying, and frequently changing his hair color—which, taken together, do not prove, but certainly raise the possibility that he has multiple personality—very few people in the USA have seriously considered that diagnosis.

What is the status of multiple personality in the USA among psychiatrists and psychologists? Since 1980, it has been a full-fledged psychiatric diagnosis among the Dissociative Disorders in the official diagnostic manual (2). (It was a diagnosis prior to then, but listed as a subtype of hysterical neurosis. In 1980, “hysterical neurosis” and all other Freudian terms and theory were eliminated from the diagnostic manual.)

However, even though multiple personality is in the official diagnostic manual, if you look at psychiatry and psychology textbooks and training programs in the USA, most do not teach how to diagnose multiple personality (search “mental status exam” and “diagnostic criteria” in this blog).

In short, multiple personality, though accepted scientifically and found worldwide, is not popular with, or understood by, the public, most psychiatrists, and most psychologists, in the USA or anywhere else.

1. George F. Rhoades, Jr., PhD and Vedat Sar, MD. Trauma and Dissociation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Not Just a North American Phenomenon. New York, The Haworth Press, 2005.

2. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

Re “Trump’s Method, Our Madness” by Joel Whitebook in New York Times: Perhaps “dissociated statements and actions” indicate a dissociative disorder.

“Sometimes, when psychoanalysts begin treatment with a new patient, they quickly find themselves feeling that they can’t make sense of what is going on. The patient’s statements and behavior simply don’t add up, and the flurry of dissociated statements and actions can quickly begin to produce something like a disorienting fog” (1).

“During initial interviews of patients who later proved to have MPD [multiple personality disorder], I have noticed a recurring pattern: I find it difficult to obtain a coherent history…much of the information is inconsistent or even contradictory…” (2, p. 72).

When someone has “dissociated statements and actions,” evaluate for dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality), found in the diagnostic manual in the chapter on Dissociative Disorders (3).

1. Joel Whitebook PhD. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/opinion/trumps-method-our-madness.html

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

3. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

“A Separate Peace” by John Knowles (post 2): Only one character in the novel is nameless (no last name), and namelessness indicates multiple personality.

Multiple personality—in this novel and its author—is indicated by two indisputable facts: Gene sees Phineas in the mirror (see post 1) and Phineas has no last name.

Phineas is the only character in the novel who has no last name, and namelessness marks him as an alternate personality. Search “nameless” and “namelessness” in this blog to read the many past posts on this frequently recurring subject.

Many other things in this novel are consistent with a multiple personality interpretation, but all the other things are disputable.

For example, there is the title, “A Separate Peace.” If “peace” were read as “piece,” then the title would suggest that Phineas is a separate piece (an alternate personality) of Gene, and all the characters are separate pieces of the author.

“A Separate Peace” by John Knowles (post 1): What does it mean when Gene sees Phineas in mirror: romantic friendship, literary doubling, or multiple personality?

In 1942, Gene (first-person narrator) and Phineas (Finny) are 16-year-old roommates at an American boys’ boarding school. At age 18, they will face the draft into WWII. The plot revolves around the nature of their relationship, which may be one or more of the following:

1. romantic friendship (either nonsexual or implicitly homosexual)

2. literary doubling (Finny represents a latent side of Gene’s personality)

3. multiple personality (Finny represents Gene’s alternate personality)

Gene and Phineas are of the same height and general appearance. Their clothes fit each other. Gene is a top student. Finny is a star athlete. Finny’s voice is “hypnotic” (1, pp. 14, 25, 54). Why is the word “hypnotic” used repeatedly? It implies that what is going on involves altered states of consciousness (perhaps the altered consciousness of alternate personalities).

Gene sees Phineas in the Mirror

After Phineas is hospitalized for a broken leg, Gene has this experience:

“I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every thought, to forget where I was, even who I was…I decided to put on his clothes. We wore the same size, and although he always criticized mine he used to wear them frequently, quickly forgetting what belonged to him and what to me…

“But when I looked in the mirror…I was Phineas, Phineas to the life. I even had his humorous expression on my face, his sharp, optimistic awareness…The sense of transformation stayed with me throughout the evening, and even when I undressed and went to bed…it was only on waking up that this illusion was gone, and I was confronted with myself…(1, p. 62).

Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog for previous discussions, and other literary examples, of this known phenomenon of multiple personality: seeing alternate personalities in the mirror.

1. John Knowles. A Separate Peace [1959]. New York, Scribner, 2003.

“Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?”: The New York Times Book Review asks an inappropriate question.

What are the differences between the ways that, and the purposes for which, fiction and nonfiction are written? If you knew the answer to that question, then you would not ask “Which dystopian novel got it right?”

Orwell and Huxley were not trying to predict the future and get it right. If they had wanted to do that, they would have written essays, not novels.

1. “Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?” The New York Times Book Review. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/books/review/which-dystopian-novel-got-it-right-orwells-1984-or-huxleys-brave-new-world.html?_r=0

Shirley Jackson (post 8) on Writing: Notes she writes to herself while awake, and other notes she writes to herself while she is supposedly asleep.

Notes Written Awake

“When I start writing a book, I go around making notes, and I mean that I literally go around making them; I keep pads of paper and pencils all over the house…I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, ‘Shirley, don’t forget—no murder before chapter five’…or ‘Shirley, have old man fall downstairs.’ When I am ready to write the book, I go and collect all my little scraps of paper and try to figure out what I was thinking when I wrote them” (1, p. 392).

Why do these notes address “Shirley”? They could not be mistaken for anyone else’s notes. They were obviously written by the only novelist of the house; written by Shirley for herself. Yet the notes are written as if someone else were addressing Shirley to help her write her book. 

Moreover, Shirley does not say she has to remember what she was thinking when she wrote these notes; rather, she has to “try to figure out what I was thinking when I wrote them,” as if they were originally someone else’s (an alternate personality’s) ideas.

Notes Written Supposedly Asleep

People with MPD (multiple personality disorder) “frequently have the experience of waking up in the morning and finding evidence that they were busy during the night, although they do not remember anything. They may find drawings, notes, poems, relocated furniture, discarded clothing, or other evidence that they have been up and busy. If this is a common life experience for a patient, there is an excellent chance that he or she has MPD” (2, p. 81).

Sleepwalking or somnambulism that has nothing to do with multiple personality is usually relatively simple behavior. Although there can be more complex behavior, such as driving a car or engaging in sex, the behavior is relatively habitual and automatic; whereas, in multiple personality, that which alternate personalities do while the person (host personality) assumes that she or he has been asleep are things for which a person would probably have had to have been awake.

One Example

“I was talking casually one evening recently to the husband of a friend of mine, and he mentioned his service in the Marines. I said, ‘Oh, yes, your rifle number was 804041,’ and then we kind of stared at each other dumbfounded, since one does not usually just happen to know the rifle numbers of the husbands of friends. We finally remembered that some months before, during a similar conversation after another bridge game, he had mentioned his Marine service, and remarked that one thing he would never forget was his rifle number, 804041…

“I was having a good deal of trouble at the time, working over a new novel that somehow refused to go together right…One night I gave up; I shoved the typewriter away and…went to bed, somehow forgetting to set the alarm clock.

“When I came rushing downstairs the next morning, half an hour late…I did not go at once into the study…it was not until much later in the morning that I went near my desk, but when I did, I got one of the really big shocks of my life. A sheet of paper had been taken…and put directly into the center of the desk, right where it would be most visible. On this sheet of paper was written, in large figures, and in my own writing with my own pencil, 804041.

“Now, I have walked in my sleep frequently, particularly when I am under pressure with a book, and have done odd things in my sleep, but I have rarely taken to writing notes to myself, and particularly not in code…Clearly, I was remembering this number as a clue to something else…”

Then Shirley remembered that the former Marine had told her about a woman member of an anti-Fascist organization who had been taught to “withdraw her mind from her body” so that she would not break under torture.

“When I remembered all of this and went back to my book again, I found that the trained ability to separate mind from body, a deliberate detachment, was the essential characteristic I had been looking for for my heroine, and was what I had been trying to tell myself by [the number]…(1, pp. 378-380).

Another Example

“Two weeks ago, I had written part of the beginning of the book and was having a great deal of trouble making it go together and could not find a suitable name for my secondary female character. One evening…finally I decided to give up…and I stomped furiously up to bed.

“The next morning, when I went to my desk, I found a sheet of typing paper…set right in the middle. On the paper was written, ‘oh no oh no Shirley not dead Theodora Theodora.’ It was written in my own handwriting, but as though it had been written in the dark.

“I have always walked in my sleep, but I don’t think I have ever been so frightened. I began to think that maybe I had better get to work writing this book awake, because otherwise I was going to find myself writing it in my sleep…Since then, the book has been going along nicely, thank you, and my female character is named Theodora and is turning out quite well.

“Now, incidentally, you can see why a writer might be reluctant to explain where ideas for books come from” (1, pp. 392-393).

1. Shirley Jackson. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. Edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Dewitt. Foreword by Ruth Franklin. New York, Random House, 2015.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“The Bird’s Nest” by Shirley Jackson (post 7): The War Among Personalities, The Pitiful Doctor, and The Number of Alternate Personalities. 

Personality War

This novel is very good at illustrating the rivalry, conflict, and war among alternate personalities in multiple personality disorder (as opposed to normal multiple personality, in which the personalities are reasonably cooperative).

Indeed, the author may have come to think of the novel’s plot as a mystery story—Which of the four personalities would win?—making the ending a surprise twist (in which a previously unknown, fifth personality, takes over).

Pitiful Doctor

Some readers find the doctor arrogant and paternalistic. I took pity on him, since treating those four personalities was like trying to conduct group therapy when members of the group don’t agree on the nature of reality (multiple personality may be thought of as multiple reality).

Number of Personalities

And since this was probably the doctor’s only case of multiple personality, he made a number of serious mistakes, one of which was to assume that Elizabeth had only four or five personalities.

He evidently didn’t know, for example, that the real-life woman known as “Eve” in “The Three Faces of Eve” (1) was eventually found, by the doctor who cured her, to have had about twenty-two personalities. And if Shirley Jackson’s doctor had read Mark 5:1-20 in the New Testament, he would have known that the man with multiple personality treated by Jesus was called “Legion” because he contained multitudes.

1. Wikipedia. “Chris Costner Sizemore.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Costner_Sizemore

“The Bird’s Nest” by Shirley Jackson (post 6): Humorous novel of young woman with four alternate personalities concludes when fifth personality takes over.

Elizabeth, a young woman with headaches and memory gaps (common symptoms of multiple personality), is diagnosed with multiple personality after the doctor and patient’s aunt meet Elizabeth’s four distinct personalities: Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy, and Bess.

The story is a fairly realistic case history, with the point of view switching among Elizabeth’s four personalities, her Aunt Morgan, and the doctor, all of whom are often in seriously humorous distress.

The novel ends with the apparent disappearance of all four of Elizabeth’s named personalities, but with the appearance of a fifth personality, who is nameless:

“She was awakened from her enchantment at a quarter to four on an afternoon in July…Her first clear thought was that she was all alone; it had been preceded by a rebellious, not-clear feeling that she had succeeded in remembering absolutely all her mind would hold; the second thought…she phrased almost aloud: I haven’t any name, she told herself, here I am, all alone and without any name” (1, pp. 360-361).

Her aunt’s impression was that her niece was now a “Goddamn unfeeling heartless icicle…she is…as a vessel emptied…Much of what was emotion has been lost; the facts are there, the memory clear, but the feeling for these things is suspended” (1, p. 373).

On the last page of the novel, the doctor says to Aunt Morgan, “This child is without a name. Did you know?” So they call her “Victoria Morgan,” who says she is happy and knows who she is (1, p. 380).

The novel thus ends with the protagonist no longer in crisis or causing a disturbance. But her multiple personality has not been cured.

If her multiple personality had been cured (by the integration of all her personalities into one multifaceted personality), then she would have retained her name, Elizabeth, and would have had all the emotions of all four personalities. But she does not. So where are these emotions now? Still in the other four personalities, who are lying low, behind the scenes.

As soon as this newly discovered personality said she remembered what the other four personalities had known, but was nameless (search “nameless” in this blog), it was clear that she was another alternate personality, but of a kind referred to in the textbook as a “memory trace personality,” which “can provide historical information on past events and the activities of other personalities” but “tends to be passive” (2, p. 110).

In short, a young woman with covert, camouflaged, multiple personality since childhood (multiple personality starts in childhood) has a time of crisis as a young adult, during which some of her alternate personalities become overt and readily diagnosable. The crisis passes, and most of her alternate personalities revert to their usual life behind the scenes.

1. Shirley Jackson. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. Edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman. Short Stories, The Bird’s Nest [1954], Life Among the Savages, Raising Demons. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1966.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” by Jonathan Lethem: mentions “cryptomnesia,” which is a manifestation of mythopoetic, alternate personalities.

Lethem begins his essay by noting that Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) has the same basic plot as a story by Heinz von Lichberg (1916). “Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia” (1).

“Cryptomnesia” is a term coined by Théodore Flournoy, who explained it as a manifestation of multiple personality (2, 3).

In multiple personality, a person can both know and not know something, can both remember and not remember it, because one personality may know and remember what another personality does not.

And it is not just that alternate personalities may know and remember things that the host personality does not. Alternate personalities may use these things for mythopoeic or mythopoetic purposes; that is, to make up elaborate stories.

Search “mars” to bring up past post:

Mythopoetic Function of Alternate Personalities: Illustrated by Famous Medium, Helene Smith, in Théodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars

1. Jonathan Lethem. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine; Feb 2007, pp. 59-71. https://www.sunydutchess.edu/faculty/allen/lethem%20-%20ecstasy%20of%20influence.pdf

2. Wikipedia. “Cryptomnesia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia

3. Théodore Flournoy. From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages [1899/1901]. With a Forward by C. G. Jung and Commentary by Mireille Cifali. Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994.

“Glad Tidings About the Three Faces of Donald Trump” by New York Times columnist Gail Collins compares Trump to famous case of multiple personality.

“There are three basic variations. Reasonable Chatting Trump is pleasant but useless. Unscripted Trump is pretty close to nuts. And then there’s the Somewhat Normal Republican Trump, who we enjoy calling SNORT” (1).

Collins had previously written about the “three Donald Trumps” (2).

But, now, with “the three faces” of Trump, she is comparing Trump to the famous case of multiple personality, “The Three Faces of Eve” (3, 4, 5).

1. Gail Collins. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/opinion/glad-tidings-about-the-three-faces-of-donald-trump.html?_r=0

2. Gail Collins. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/opinion/the-three-donald-trumps-speak.html

3. Thigpen, C.H. & Cleckley, H. (1954) A case of multiple personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 135-51. Synopsis: http://www.holah.karoo.net/thigpen.htm

4. Thigpen, Corbett H. & Cleckley, Hervey M. The Three Faces of Eve. New York, McGraw Hill, 1957.

5. Wikipedia. “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957 film). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Faces_of_Eve

“Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means”: Her New York Times essay contradicted by what she previously said about her creative process.

Previous Atwood posts (search “Atwood”) include the following two comments she made in a published interview about her creative process:

“I don’t ‘get an idea’ for a novel…I usually find that I have collected a number of compelling images or that a voice starts operating, somebody starts talking, and I want to know more about him, find out about him…” (1, p. 164).

“…when I do go back and read things I’ve written a long time ago I’m often surprised…I can’t remember having written them” (1, p. 169).

One of the least credible things in the Times article is her explanation of why the protagonist is nameless:

“Why do we never learn the real name of the central character, I have often been asked. Because, I reply, so many people throughout history have had their names changed, or have simply disappeared from view. Some have deduced that Offred’s real name is June, since, of all the names whispered among the Handmaids in the gymnasium/dormitory, “June” is the only one that never appears again. That was not my original thought but it fits, so readers are welcome to it if they wish” (2).

But why would one Handmaid be nameless if other Handmaids have names?

For a general discussion of this recurring literary issue, search “nameless” and “namelessness” in this blog.

In short, I think that Atwood’s account of how she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale is mostly a plausible reconstruction, not her actual creative process.

1. Earl G. Ingersoll (Editor). Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 1990.
2. Margaret Atwood. “Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump.” New York Times, March 10, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html

“Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life” by Ruth Franklin: “Jackson, who embraced ‘that compound of creatures I call Me’…kept multiple diaries simultaneously”

“As a sickly, isolated child growing up in a strict New England family, Hawthorne is said to have developed an unusual quirk: he composed an inner dialogue, divided into two personalities, that substituted for conversation and companionship. One side served as a storyteller, the other as audience, offering questions or criticisms. As a teenager, Jackson did something similar, but on the page. She kept multiple diaries simultaneously, each with a different purpose” (1, p. 36).

“She had always been moody, as nearly all teenagers are. Now, in an extension of the persona splitting of her multiple diaries, she took the unusual step of assigning names to her moods, as if they were characters in a play. The habit continued through her college years and later manifested in her fiction—most strikingly in The Bird’s Nest, her novel of multiple-personality disorder, in which a woman’s mind fractures into four distinct characters, each with her own name and defining characteristics” (1, p. 50).

“The demon in the mind. This was Jackson’s obsession, perhaps her fundamental obsession, throughout her life” (1, p. 63).

“On her last day at the University of Rochester—June 8, 1936—Jackson wrote herself a letter, addressed to ‘Shirlee’ and signed ‘Lee’: the name of a new persona” (1, p. 68).

“Soon after she began writing The Bird’s Nest, in late 1952 or early 1953, Jackson…began to suffer from headaches that often came on very suddenly…She began to lose her memory: first just a slight absentmindedness, then forgetting entire conversations…” (1, pp. 344-346). (Search “headaches,” “absent-minded,” “absentmindedness,” and “memory gaps” in this blog.)

“Then there was the question of multiple personality: what it meant…to Jackson in particular—Jackson, who embraced ‘that compound of creatures I call Me’; who teased interviewers by playing up either her housewife persona or her witchy tendencies, but always kept the writer under wraps, hidden from view” (1, p. 351).

1. Ruth Franklin. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York, Liveright Publishing/WW Norton, 2016.

“Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic” by Darryl Hattenhauer says “Jackson’s reputation should be restored to the lofty position it occupied during her life”

“In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Shirley Jackson was ranked among America’s most highly regarded fiction writers…an article in 1955 on the strength of contemporary American fiction listed her with J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, William Styron, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty…In 1968, Macmillan’s Literary Heritage series included her with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Welty, and Ellison in its canonical anthology The American Experience: Fiction…When Joyce Carol Oates’s first novel appeared, her publisher advertised her as ‘already compared to William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Shirley Jackson’…This study argues that Jackson’s reputation should be restored to the lofty position it occupied during her life” (1, pp. 1-2).

“Jackson was…almost, at least at times, a multiple personality. As is well-known, multiple personalities often arise from sexual abuse, and it seems that Jackson might have been so victimized [by her] maternal uncle…”

“More precisely…She was a bit like the multiple personality described in a book by [Morton] Prince…that she used to develop Elizabeth, the protagonist with a multiple personality in The Bird’s Nest…

“Sometimes when Jackson awoke, she found disturbing notes that she had written to herself while sleepwalking” (1, pp. 25-26).

“As Jackson did in her letters…Betsy [one of the alternate personalities in The Bird’s Nest] refers to herself with a lowercase i ” (1, p. 134).

“In her diary as an adolescent, [Jackson] wrote of her writing as something that came not from her but from her pen or her typewriter” (1, p. 22).

“The most important nonfictional work enabling this novel [The Bird’s Nest] is the definitive work of the time on multiples, The Dissociation of a Personality by a doctor named Morton Prince. Jackson studied it assiduously before writing this novel…Prince appears to have helped Jackson understand her own life” (1, pp. 130-131).

1. Darryl Hattenhauer. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003.

“Protect Us From This Dangerous President, 2 Psychiatrists Say” in New York Times letter: But how could Trump appear crazy and get elected President?

Published opinions that contend President Trump is crazy have been astonishing. This latest opinion by these two psychiatrists calls him erratic, psychotic (“failure to distinguish between reality and fantasy”), paranoid, and irrational (1).

But is there a method to Trump’s madness? Is Trump Hamlet? What kind of madness did Hamlet have, anyway? (Search Hamlet in this blog.)

In short, what kind of pseudo-madness can be high-functioning enough to get elected President? The same kind of pseudo-madness—multiple personality—that can win a Nobel Prize in Literature.

And how dangerous are novelists, really?

1. Judith L. Herman, Robert Jay Lifton. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/opinion/protect-us-from-this-dangerous-president-2-psychiatrists-say.html

Multiple Personality in 1950s: Shirley Jackson’s novel “The Bird’s Nest” (1954) preceded Thigpen & Cleckley’s nonfiction “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957).

To put the previous post on Joyce Carol Oates’ comments about Shirley Jackson in historical context: In the 1950s, in the whole world, there was only one real-life case of multiple personality known to the general public, Thigpen & Cleckley’s The Three Faces of Eve, published in 1957.

Shirley Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest, a novel explicitly about a person with multiple personality, was published in 1954. 

1. Wikipedia. The Bird’s Nest (1954 novel by Shirley Jackson) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bird's_Nest_(novel)

2. Thigpen, C.H. & Cleckley, H. (1954) A case of multiple personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 135-51. Synopsis: http://www.holah.karoo.net/thigpen.htm

3. Thigpen, Corbett H. & Cleckley, Hervey M. The Three Faces of Eve. New York, McGraw Hill, 1957.

4. Wikipedia. "Lizzie" (1957 film). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_(1957_film)

5. Wikipedia. “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957 film). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Faces_of_Eve