José Saramago (post 4): Protagonist’s voices not understood by Dialogical Self, Subpersonalities, Hearing Voices Movement, or Postmodernism.

In the last post, the protagonist of José Saramago’s The Double was engaged in a dialogue with a voice in his head. The voice was nameless, and was, therefore, named for its unique characteristic, its common sense. I interpreted this conversational inner voice to be the protagonist’s Common Sense alternate personality; that is, within the psychiatric conceptual framework of multiple personality (aka dissociative identity).

I have read a little further, and the protagonist has now had a dialogue with another, different voice in his head (1, pp. 85, 104-105). This confirms that I had not misinterpreted a literary personification of common sense; but rather, that the protagonist has multiple, distinct, alternate personalities. Moreover, since the title of the novel does not refer to these other personalities, the author seems to have considered having such alternate personalities as being, in his experience, ordinary psychology.

Other possible conceptual frameworks for interpreting the protagonist’s nonpsychotic conversations with voices in his head are Dialogical Self Theory (2), Subpersonalities (3), Hearing Voices Movement (4), and Postmodern Literature (5).

The advantage of these other frameworks is their recognition that hearing voices is surprisingly common in a substantial minority of normal people. But any bona fide, psychological process would have the possibility of breaking down or becoming excessive, leading to its corresponding mental disorder; for example, normal anxiety has its corresponding anxiety disorders. Hearing voices as viewed in these other perspectives does not qualify as a bona fide, normal, psychological process, because it does not have its corresponding mental disorder.

The advantage of the psychiatric framework of multiple personality for interpreting the protagonist’s conversations with voices is that it brings to bear a body of knowledge for understanding the protagonist, the narrator, the novel, and the author. The disadvantage of the psychiatric framework is that psychiatry, per se, is interested in psychopathology, and does not address the corresponding normal version of multiple personality.

This blog is about the normal version of multiple personality.

1. José Saramago. The Double [2002]. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. Orlando, Harcourt, 2004.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogical_self

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpersonality

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature