“Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse (post 4): Mirrors in Magic Palace like mirrors in textbook on multiple personality; Hesse on psychiatry and Art of Life.

In the Magic Palace, Harry first sees himself in a mirror as being two personalities, the man, Harry, and the steppenwolf.

“I fixed my eyes on the little mirror, where the man Harry and the wolf were going through their convulsions” (1, p. 317).

Then Harry sees himself in another mirror as being many people, ranging from childhood to old age. (This is like alternate personalities in multiple personality, which come in different ages, beginning in childhood, when multiple personality starts.)

“I faced the gigantic mirror on the wall. There I saw myself…But I had scarcely had time to recognize myself before…A second, a third, a tenth, a twentieth figure sprang from it till the whole gigantic mirror was full of nothing but Harrys…Some of the multitudinous Harrys were as old as I, some older, some very old. Others were young. There were youths, boys, schoolboys, scamps, children. Fifty-year-olds [Harry’s age] and twenty-year-olds…” (1, pp. 319-320).

“[Multiple Personality] patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror…They may describe themselves sequentially change into several different people while looking into a mirror (2, p. 62).

Psychiatry

Hesse’s character relates the multiplicity of selves to psychiatry, but gets multiple personality confused with schizophrenia, or as he calls it, “schizomania”: “The separation of the unity of the personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science has invented the name schizomania for it. Science…is wrong insofar as it holds that one only and binding and lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves…In consequence of this error many persons pass for normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who are geniuses…(1, pp. 342-343).

Hesse’s term “schizomania” reflects a confusion between multiple personality and schizophrenia. Having many selves is not seen in schizophrenia. It is the defining symptom of multiple personality.

Art of Life

One room in the Magic Palace is for reorganizing a person’s multiple selves. And as Harry is told: “This is the art of life. You may yourself as an artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy (1, p. 345).

Correcting “schizomania” to “multiple personality,” Hesse’s character is saying that multiple personality is the basis of all art and fantasy. I would not say “all,” but otherwise I agree.

1. Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf [1927]. Translation from the German by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz (1963). New York, Picador Modern Classics/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.

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