“Regeneration Trilogy” by Pat Barker (post 6): Dr. Rivers says his having alternate personalities is normal, even preferable, since they are aware of each other.

Dr. Rivers (psychiatrist, neurologist, sociocultural anthropologist)

“Perhaps it was his own experience of duality that formed the link, for certainly in the years before the war [WWI] he had experienced a splitting of personality as profound as any suffered by Siegfried [Sassoon, the warrior/anti-war poet]. It had been not merely a matter of living two different lives, divided between the dons of Cambridge and the missionaries and headhunters of Melanesia, but of being a different person in the two places. It was his Melanesian self he preferred, but his attempts to integrate that self into his way of life in England had produced nothing but frustration and misery. Perhaps, contrary to what was usually supposed, duality was the stable state; the attempt at integration, dangerous. Certainly Siegfried had found it so” (1, p. 392)… “Siegfried had always coped with the war by being two people: the anti-war poet and pacifist; the bloodthirsty, efficient company commander. The dissociation couldn’t be called pathological, since experience gained in one state was available to the other” (1, p. 390).

Dr. Rivers uses the words “duality” and “splitting of personality” advisedly, because he experiences two senses of self and ways of thinking that go beyond the differences that people ordinarily experience in different moods and circumstances. What he experiences are two different senses of personhood.

His having more than one sense of personhood fulfills Criterion A for the diagnosis of multiple personality. Criterion B is memory gaps; that is, when one personality has amnesia for the period of time that another personality was in control. Dr. Rivers, in denying Criterion B for himself and Sassoon—“since experience gained in one state was available to the other”—disavows multiple personality, strictly speaking.

However, in multiple personality, there are usually some alternate personalities who are co-conscious and share knowledge. But earlier in the novel, Dr. Rivers did acknowledge that he had amnesia for some kind of traumatic event at age five, and that since then his ability to visualize all past experiences has been grossly impaired. Thus, he may fulfill Criterion B  (memory gaps) for multiple personality; and also Criterion C (distress and/or dysfunction), in regard to the dysfunction of visualization. In short, there is circumstantial evidence that he may have other alternate personalities who are not co-conscious and do not share what they know and remember. Nevertheless, he is highly functional and not in significant distress from these things, so I would say that his multiple personality is a normal version.

Further Comment

The three main characters—Dr. Rivers, Siegfried Sassoon, and Billy Prior—all appear to have multiple personality, differing only in severity. In terms of the distinction I make in this blog, Billy Prior has clinical multiple personality (Criterion A, Criterion B, and Criterion C, distress and dysfunction). Dr. Rivers has a normal version of multiple personality (Criterion A, probably Criterion B, but not Criterion C). Sassoon is intermediate.

I still have more than a third of the trilogy to read, but what I have read so far raises these questions: Why would a novelist have three main characters with different degrees of multiple personality? Moreover, the spokesman for the three, Dr. Rivers, says, “Perhaps, contrary to what was usually supposed, duality was the stable state”; that is, his normal version of multiple personality is the best way for a person to be. Why would a novelist be of a mind to write a masterpiece which takes that position? (Because most novelists, themselves, have a normal version of multiple personality?)

The idea of duality—multiple personality with only two personalities—is a literary oversimplification. Although duality may seem to be the case at the beginning of the diagnostic process, almost every person with multiple personality turns out to have more than two personalities.

1. Pat Barker. The Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration [1991], The Eye in the Door [1993], The Ghost Road [1995]. London, Viking/Penguin, 1996.