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.