Jean-Paul Sartre (post 3): Since Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky were existentialists, too, is Existentialism rooted in multiple personality?

It is possible that Sartre’s major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), was inspired, at least in part, by the kind of existential crisis experienced by the protagonist of his novel, Nausea (1938). So the nature of that crisis is relevant.

In previous posts, I pointed out that the protagonist’s symptoms of personality changes (“sudden transformations”) and travel with amnesia (dissociative fugue) support a diagnosis of multiple personality (aka dissociative identity).

So it may be no accident that Kierkegaard is considered to be a founding philosopher of Existentialism, and Dostoevsky (The Double, etc.) is considered to be one of the first existentialist novelists. (Search Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard in this blog for posts related to their multiple personality.)

One past post quotes Kierkegaard as follows:

“…in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them…My wish, my prayer, is that if it occur to anyone to cite a particular saying from the books, he do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonym…

“Each time I wish to say something, there is another who says it at the very same moment. It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me…” (1, pp. 135-151).

1. Josiah Thompson. Kierkegaard. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.