President Trump’s alleged multiple realities are again reported by New York Times, which fails to note that alternate personalities may have alternate realities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/us/politics/trump-access-hollywood-tape.html.

I previously addressed this issue in a post of January 21, 2017. [Search "Trump" for Trump posts.]

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 12): Sam’s and Frodo’s views of Sméagol-Gollum approach, but do not reach, multiple personality.

In the last post, I erred in saying that the narrator, per se, misunderstood the multiple personality meaning of the debate between Sméagol and Gollum, because that misunderstanding was attributed to a specific character, Sam.

In the next chapter, Sam’s view approaches multiple personality: “Sam, remembering the overheard debate, found it hard to believe that the long submerged Sméagol had come out on top: that voice at any rate had not had the last word in the debate. Sam’s guess was that the Sméagol and Gollum halves (or what in his own mind he called Slinker and Stinker) had made a truce and a temporary alliance: neither wanted the Enemy to get the ring; both wished to keep Frodo from capture, and under their eye, as long as possible” (1, p. 638). And since Sam may have previously made the “Slinker and Stinker” distinction, I can only accuse the narrator of carelessness and inconsistency in expressing Sam’s point of view.

Frodo still does not distinguish between Sméagol and Gollum as Sam has, but Frodo has newly noticed that Gollum, who had typically referred to himself as “we,” now sometimes refers to himself as “I”: “For one thing, he noted that Gollum used I, and that seemed usually to be a sign, on its rare appearances, that some remnants of old truth and sincerity were for the moment on top” (1, p. 643). However, Frodo does not yet connect the “I” to the Sméagol personality as opposed to the “we” of the Gollum personality.

Comment

Since Sam does not explain what he means by saying there is a Sméagol half and a Gollum half, it cannot be assumed that he recognizes it as multiple personality, per se. Sam’s theory of the case must be assumed to be magical, not psychological, until proven otherwise.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings [1954-55]. 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Margaret Atwood on the novelist’s writing process: “you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The premise is that the writer knows herself, knows her art, but the truth is that my fiction writing process is not always entirely conscious. I do not always know the why. The great joy in writing fiction comes during the magical moments of being transported, of being blissfully lost in one’s imaginative space. And those moments are difficult to distill into intellectually coherent explanations. And so I have had to invent answers to the sorts of questions writers are often asked, about my process, my choices, my characters. In inventing those answers, sometimes I believe myself, and sometimes I don’t.” —Eudora Welty Lecture, November 8, 2017, minutes 18-20: https://www.c-span.org/video/?437019-2/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-delivers-eudora-welty-lecture

Margaret Atwood
“…the mere act of writing splits the self in two…What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’?…By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward…and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes over and uses it to commit the actual writing…All writers are double…you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read…” —Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York, Anchor/Random House, 2002.

Knowledge is key to reading comprehension, says Daniel T. Willingham in today’s New York Times: What knowledge do you need to understand novelists?

For reading comprehension, knowledge is more important than reading skills. It is an obvious idea, once you think of it, but you might not think of it. Here is Willingham’s argument: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/how-to-get-your-mind-to-read.html?_r=0.

My argument is that one thing you need to know about, to understand novels, is multiple personality, which you can learn here as you read posts on over 150 novelists.

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 11): Narrator fails to recognize multiple personality, even when the alternate personalities debate.

For most of the time that the magic ring had been out of the picture, the Sméagol personality had probably stayed inside, did not come out, and did not pay much attention to what was going on in the outside world, leaving that to the Gollum personality to manage. But now that the presence of the ring (in Frodo’s possession) has brought the Sméagol personality out, he is quite engaged. In multiple personality, alternate personalities come out when what they are interested in is at issue.

Indeed, regarding the issue of the ring, Sméagol and Gollum disagree. Sméagol wants to keep his promise to follow Frodo as his master (since Frodo has the magic ring), but Gollum wants them to take the ring away from Frodo, making them “Lord Sméagol” and “Gollum the Great” (1, p, 633).

The narrator, who does not know multiple personality when he sees it, introduces the debate between the Sméagol personality and the Gollum personality (1, pp. 632-633) as a debate between a person and a thought: “Sméagol was holding a debate with some other thought that used the same voice but made it squeak and hiss. A pale light and a green light alternated in his eyes as he spoke” (1, p. 632).

The narrator describes an autonomous thought process, with different enunciation, and with eyes that emanate a green light—not to mention its own, separate, sense of self—which is a dramatized alternate personality, not just “some other thought.”

When you are ambivalent and have an ordinary “debate with yourself,” you have a subjective sense of taking both sides, which is not the case in the debate between Sméagol and Gollum, who have separate senses of self and are alternate personalities.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings [1954-55]. 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 10): Sméagol-Gollum may have gratuitous multiple personality, serving no purpose and unintentional.

I have just finished the chapter “Taming of Sméagol,” and he is clearly portrayed as having multiple personality by his continually making plural self-reference as Gollum, singular self-reference as Sméagol, and the fact that other characters notice a distinct change in his behavior when he goes from one personality to the other.

And since Gollum often talks about Sméagol by name—e.g., “Don’t ask Sméagol. Poor, poor Sméagol, he went away long ago. They took his Precious [the magic ring], and he’s lost now” (1, p. 616)—but Sméagol has not commented on Gollum by name, it is not clear that the Sméagol personality is even aware of the Gollum personality, which would add support to a multiple personality diagnosis.

And so far, there has been no purpose served by the split personality, such as a good vs. evil morality tale. Both of these personalities are good at times, but Sméagol had strangled a friend to death, and Gollum tries to strangle Sam. So a single personality with ambivalence and mixed motivations would have served just as well.

Most significant is the fact that a character in a novel has rather obvious multiple personality, but multiple personality, per se, is not explicitly raised as an issue by any narrator or character: which may mean that the author did not intend to portray multiple personality, but inadvertently did so as a reflection of his own psychology.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings [1954-55]. 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 9): Is Gandalf yet another character with unacknowledged multiple personality, or is he only joking?

Gandalf, the old wizard, who had been their leader, but thought to have died, suddenly returns and surprises his comrades, including Aragorn:

     “At last Aragorn stirred. ‘Gandalf!’ he said. ‘Beyond all hope you return to us in our need!…

     ‘Gandalf,’ the old man repeated, as if recalling from old memory a long disused word. ‘Yes, that was the name. I was Gandalf…Yes, you may still call me Gandalf…

     ‘But you are all in white!’

     ‘Yes, I am white now,’ said Gandalf. ‘Indeed I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman as he should have been…

     ‘Was it you, Gandalf, or Saruman that we saw last night?’

     ‘You certainly did not see me,’ answered Gandalf, ‘therefore I must guess that you saw Saruman. Evidently we look so much alike…’ ” (1, pp. 495-498).

1. J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings [1954-55]. 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

A Myth about Multiple Personality: The person may have only two personalities, and if they are aware of each other, then it is not real multiple personality.

Some psychiatrists and others have the misconception that if a person has been found to have two personalities, and they are aware of each other, then it is not real multiple personality.

Indeed, one UK psychiatric textbook calls this the “double phenomenon,” which, it says, is much more common than multiple personality.

However, it is not unusual, at first, to think that a person with multiple personality has only two personalities.

But when you know the person better, and eventually meet all of their personalities, you will find that they have various degrees of mutual awareness, ranging from those who are aware of all the others to those who are aware of only themselves (1, pp. 114-115).

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

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 8): Is Frodo a hobbit besieged by magical forces or a person with conflict among his alternate personalities?

“He seemed to be in a world of mist in which there were only shadows: the Ring was upon him…And suddenly he felt the Eye. There was an eye in the Dark Tower that did not sleep…He heard himself crying out: Never, never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell. Then as a flash from some other point of power there came to his mind another thought: Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the Ring! Two powers strove in him…Suddenly he was aware of himself again, Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger” (1, pp. 400-401).

The above must be read in the context of an earlier passage, previously quoted:

“Frodo himself, after the first shock [from the departure of Bilbo]…did not worry much about the future. But half unknown to himself [what he knew was compartmentalized in different personalities?] the regret that he had not gone with Bilbo was steadily growing. He found himself wandering at times [was this that common symptom of multiple personality, the dissociative fugue?] especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams. He began to say to himself: ‘Perhaps I shall cross the River myself one day.’ To which the other half of his mind always replied: ‘Not yet’ ” (1. p. 43).

The intended meaning is that Frodo is a hobbit besieged by magical forces. But the story would seem to have been written by a person who’d had storytelling, and conflicted, alternate personalities.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings [1954-55]. 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., in fifteen-year study of members of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, found mood disorders, but missed multiple personality.

Dr. Andreasen is an eminent American psychiatrist who studied psychiatric correlates of creativity in members of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fifteen years (http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/03/science/science-watch-creativity-and-mental-illness.html). She found that mood disorders (bipolar and depression) were common.

I cannot fault her for having missed the more significant psychiatric correlate of creativity in writers—multiple personality—because I myself had never made that diagnosis until the end of 1986. But I don’t think she has ever corrected her mistake.

Although I have posts on Philip Roth, who had been on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a better-known writer, I will repeat my posts on Frank Conroy, who was director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for eighteen years:

October 24, 2016

Is it an open secret at Iowa Writers’ Workshop and other graduate-level creative writing programs that novelists have normal version of multiple personality?

Four of the many illustrious writers associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop have been cited here in past posts: T. C. Boyle (alumnus and faculty), Frank Conroy (1987-2005 director and faculty), Philip Roth (faculty), and Kurt Vonnegut (faculty).

My guess is that multiple personality is, indeed, an open secret at writing programs: everyone, vaguely, knows about it, but they don’t speak about it, except, occasionally, in euphemism or jest.

Another way of putting this is to say they both know it and don’t know it.

Take, for example, Conroy’s “Me and Conroy” (see post earlier today). It was apparently written by an alternate personality. Does this mean Conroy knew he had multiple personality? Not necessarily. Conroy may have felt that the essay was written by a writing self (a euphemism), while the latter apparently thought of himself as another person, not as Conroy’s alternate personality. Was the whole thing a joke? No, it was published in a collection of nonfiction essays, and was seen by his friend, Tom Grimes, as consistent with what he knew about Conroy (see past post).

“Me and Conroy”: Frank Conroy either pretends he has multiple personality (why would he?) or publishes essay by alternate personality.

In a previous post, Tom Grimes, a friend and student of Conroy at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in describing Conroy as having several personalities, mentioned the following essay, “Me and Conroy,” which, since it is very brief, is quoted in its entirety:

“He needs me more than I need him, but you’d never know it from the way he treats me. Contempt is perhaps too strong a word. It’s something icier, more distant, more perfectly disinterested. He uses me as if I could easily be replaced, which is certainly not true. Not easily, anyway. Who else would put up with him the way I have? (For instance, this is the fourth version of this manuscript, and it’s only a tiny bit better than the first. A lot of time for a very small gain, in other words, and no complaints will be heard.) Who else would ask nothing of him—I mean nothing, not once, ever—simply for the experience of his company? What makes it worse is I think he knows all this and finds it banal. Yes! He does! I felt it just now as my hand wrote the word.

       Should I mention the matter of the cigarettes? I think I should. After smoking a pack a day for forty years, I stopped five months ago. Quitting was difficult, to say the least, but the support of my family and friends helped. I’m on the verge of a big change here, which is to say seeing myself as a nonsmoker, accepting myself as a nonsmoker. Everybody respects this except him. My abstinence irritates him for some reason, and when I try to write he tempts me with images of the red and gold Dunhill package, which he knows I used to smoke on special occasions. ‘Is this not a special occasion?’ he seems to be saying, ‘with the clipboard across your knees and your pen in your hand? Is this not as special as it’s ever going to get?’ Arrogant bastard.

       You see, there’s nothing fancy about it. The situation resembles the story line of a thousand execrable country-western songs more than it does any delicate Borgesian aperçu. I’ve laid my life on the line, and if that isn’t love I don’t know what love is. For my entire adult life he has simply popped up whenever it pleased him, used me, put me through a million changes and split without warning, leaving me exhausted and enervated. He takes me, and my love, totally for granted, and if I had any brains I’d tell him to fuck off. But of course it’s far too late for that. He is my fate, for better or worse.

       I just wish he’d talk to me directly sometimes. You know, stop whatever he’s doing and look me in the eye and tell me something that would help me get rid of this idea of myself as some feckless brokenhearted jukebox cowboy crying in my beer. I mean, would the sky fall? Would the stars freeze in their courses? God damn it, he owes me. Don’t you think?” (1).

1. Frank Conroy. “Me and Conroy” (1995), pp. 121-122, in Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.

October 16, 2016

Frank Conroy: Tom Grimes, writer and friend of Director, Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1987-2005), says “Frank inhabited several personalities”

“Several incarnations of Frank existed. The pool playing, hard-drinking, cigarette smoking was quintessential Frank. Jazz musician Frank protected and supported this Frank, as well as the literary Frank, for many years. Literary Frank was solitary. Teaching Frank focused solely on the text. He was devoted to teaching, and if, at times, he came across as heartless in class, that was a function of him wanting everyone in the class to learn something from the story being discussed. But his impersonal exterior dissolved if he worked closely with someone -- at least, it did in my case. With Jayne Anne Phillips, too, who was Frank’s first truly serious, and incredibly diligent, student. Whenever I spoke to Frank one on one about my novel, he was talking to me, not to the words on the page. So, Frank inhabited several personalities, although most were known, even to him, as Frank Conroy. He wrote a brief essay about this, called ‘Me and Conroy,’ which begins, ‘He needs me more than I need him, but you’d never know it from the way he treats me. Contempt is perhaps too strong a word. It’s something icier, more distant, more perfectly disinterested. He uses me as if I could easily be replaced, which is certainly not true. Who else would put up with him the way I have?’ Ultimately, you have the Frank who is a conflation of his public and private personae. Elsewhere in the essay he writes, ‘For my entire adult life he has simply popped up whenever it pleased him, used me, put me through a million changes and split without warning, leaving me exhausted and enervated. He takes me, and my love, totally for granted, and if I had any brains I’d tell him to fuck off. But of course it’s far too late for that. He is my fate, for better or worse’ ” (1).

1. JC Hallman. “An Interview with Tom Grimes” (2010). http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_08_016444.php

September 19, 2016

“Stop-Time” by Frank Conroy: How has the Iowa Writers’ Workshop interpreted the memory gaps in Conroy’s memoir?

Since Conroy had been the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for eighteen years (1987—2005), I wonder how the Workshop interprets the memoir’s two memory gaps, cited in my previous posts. I can think of four possibilities; namely, that the Workshop

1. ignores the memory gaps, or

2. considers them a metaphor, not to be taken literally, or

3. considers them literally true, but nothing special, or

4. recognizes them as a cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

September 19, 2016

“Stop-Time” by Frank Conroy: Amnesia—a multiple personality memory gap—for the building he lived in until he was eight years old.

This memoir is the story of a chaotic, puzzling childhood, which, Conroy says, is “a past I didn’t understand, a past I feared” (1, p. 278).

The key to this psychological mystery is his history of memory gaps, one instance of which I quoted in my previous post, from the beginning of the memoir. Another example is found toward the end of the memoir:

“…I would find myself staring up at that particular building. Because I’d been told, I knew I’d lived there for many years as a child. Passing it my mind became still. All the noises of the world stopped abruptly, like a movie running on without a sound track. I had lived in the building until I was eight years old and yet I lacked memories of it. No image of the apartment, no image of having lived there, no image of myself. It was spooky” (1, p. 212).

This is not ordinary forgetting. It is impossible for Conroy to have had no memories at all of where he lived until he was eight years old. The memories must have been somewhere. If they were not held by his regular personality, then they must have been held by one or more alternate personalities.

If I had interviewed him, I could have brought out and spoken with these alternate personalities. And what they told me could have been corroborated by family, friends, neighbors, and an inspection of the inside of the building itself.

1. Frank Conroy. Stop-Time [A Memoir, 1967]. New York, Penguin Books, 1977.

September 17, 2016

“Stop-Time” by Frank Conroy: a childhood memory ends just when the traumatic part begins, which is typical of a multiple personality memory gap.

Ordinary memory tends to remember the most emotionally arousing parts of past events: what was surprising, frightening, etc.

The opposite is typical of memory in multiple personality. If something is starting to happen that is frightening—e.g., signs that a beating or molestation is about to occur—they will automatically switch to the alternate personality who had originated to deal with, and contain the memory of, that kind of experience, leaving the regular personality with a memory gap for the period of time that the alternate personality substituted. And that is what Frank Conroy appears to be describing in this childhood memory:

“The arrival home of my father late one night. I ran down the hall, opened the door, and looked up at him. My last memory is that something was wrong…I’ve been told that on that night he got rough and chased me all over the apartment. When my mother came home I was hiding under the bed, but my memory ceases at the opening of the door. The image is vivid and detailed to the point of remembering the weave of his suit—gray-blue herringbone—and the smell of his breath. Bourbon, but after that, nothing” (1, p. 22).

1. Frank Conroy. Stop-Time [A Memoir, 1967]. New York, Penguin Books, 1977.

Comment

Fiction writers have a higher than average incidence of both mood disorders (bipolar and depression) and multiple personality, because both conditions are more common in people who have had traumatic childhoods.

Dr. Andreasen thought that the mood disorders were somehow key to the writers’ creativity, because she didn’t know that the writers had multiple personality. 

She didn’t know that the writers had multiple personality, because she relied on the standard psychiatric mental status examination, which does not ask about memory gaps, the footprints of times that alternate personalities were in control.

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 7): Frodo has strange experience of his friend Strider’s switch to an alternate personality.

Previously, in Tolkien post 6, I noted the curious fact that there is one character who has ten different names in this novel. It is not the character who is usually thought to have multiple personality, Gollum, who has only two names. It is the character first introduced to the reader as Strider. And I wondered if there would be anything more than multiple names to suggest that Strider had multiple personality.

In the following passage, note especially the “strange voice” of “Strider, and yet not Strider” who was “no longer there”:

“ ‘Fear not!’ said a strange voice behind him. Frodo turned and saw Strider, and yet not Strider; for the weatherworn Ranger was no longer there. In the stern sat Aragorn son of Arathorn, proud and erect, guiding the boat with skillful strokes…‘Fear not!’ he said. ‘Long have I desired to look upon the likenesses Isildur and Anárion, my sires of old. Under their shadow Elessar, the Elfstone son of Arathorn of the House of Valandil Isildur’s son, heir of Elendil, has naught to dread!’ Then the light of his eyes faded [as he switches back to his regular personality], and he spoke to himself: ‘Would that Gandalf were here!…whither now shall I go?’ ” (1, p. 393).

This is not simply a description of a man experiencing a moment of pride in his heritage. If it were, that is how Frodo would have experienced his friend’s behavior. But Frodo hears his friend’s voice as so different from what it usually sounds like that it sounds like the voice of a stranger. And although this stranger looked like his friend Strider, it was, somehow, not Strider.

Frodo is having the uncanny experience of hearing and seeing a friend who, temporarily, does not sound and seem like the friend he knows, because his friend has switched to an alternate personality.

Two Questions

The two questions I have about this character are, first, whether there will be any more evidence of multiple personality, and, second, whether this character’s multiple personality is integral to the plot, and is in the novel intentionally.

The latter distinction is important, because when multiple personality has been put in a novel intentionally, then it may be regarded as a gimmick. But if it does not appear intentional—if it is what I have termed “gratuitous multiple personality”—then it may be in the novel only because it reflects the author’s own psychology.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings [1954-55]. 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Multiple Personality ignored regarding worldwide belief in ghosts, and when Harvard psychologists reference Harvard’s greatest psychologist, William James.

Belief in ghosts is common around the world: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/why-do-people-believe-in-ghosts/379072/.

In other words, it is relatively common for people to sense the presence of a personified being other than their own regular self. But the obvious connection between ghosts and multiple personality is usually ignored.

Why connect ghosts—or any other type of sensed, personified presence—with multiple personality? Because whenever you have an unexplained psychological phenomenon, it is reasonable to ask if there is a known psychological condition that has that type of experience. And the known psychological condition in which people sense the presence of other personified beings is multiple personality.

The failure to think of multiple personality when it is obviously relevant reminds me of the way a Harvard psychology textbook failed to mention multiple personality when referencing the most revered psychologist in the history of Harvard, William James, as discussed the following past post:

June 10, 2015

Harvard’s Psychology textbook reveres William James, but hides and omits James’s validation of dissociative fugue and multiple personality

The recent Harvard psychology textbook cites William James (1842-1910) on twenty-six different pages, spread throughout the text, beginning on page one. He is evidently the Harvard psychologist of whom Harvard is most proud. “His landmark book—The Principles of Psychology—is still widely read and remains one of the most influential books ever written on the subject” (1, p. 2).

However, there are two pages in the recent Harvard textbook on which James is not mentioned: page 572, devoted to dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality) and page 573, devoted to dissociative amnesia and dissociative fugue. This is strange, since two whole pages of James’s The Principles of Psychology are devoted to James’s study and treatment of Ansel Bourne (2, p. 391-392).

“Ansel Bourne was a famous 19th-century psychology case due to his experience of a probable dissociative fugue. The case, among the first ever documented, remains of interest as an example of multiple personality and amnesia. Among the doctors who treated Bourne was William James…” —Wikipedia

Indeed, James devotes twenty-seven pages of his “landmark book” to cases which involve alterations of the self, including fifteen pages on “alternating personality” (2, pp. 378-393).

William James concludes that “The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting” (2, p. 401).

1. Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert, Daniel M. Wegner. Psychology, Second Edition. New York, Worth Publishers, 2011.

2. William James. The Principles of Psychology, Volume One [1890]. New York, Dover Publications, 1950.

Blog Visits, Multiple Personality, and the United Kingdom: Land of Magic (J. M. Barrie, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling) and Ghosts (Shakespeare’s Hamlet)

During the four and a half years that I have been writing this blog, there has been a rough correlation between the nationality of the writers I discuss and the nations from which the blog is visited. For example, since my recent posts on a writer from Portugal, there have been more visits from Portugal.

The UK is the one exception. When I have discussed UK writers, there has rarely been any increase in visits from the UK. In fact, there have been very few visits from the UK at any time. And considering the large number of UK writers I have discussed, the lack of UK visitors has been striking.

Is there a boycott by the UK? Since the first writer I discussed was Charles Dickens, do they hold it against me? While there could be a little of that, my main hypothesis is that the United Kingdom does not believe in alternate personalities: they believe in magic and ghosts.

I don’t know the latest views of British psychology and psychiatry. I recall seeing something in recent years about British research with brain imaging that tended to confirm the validity of multiple personality. But I have the impression that the British Journal of Psychiatry has consistently promoted derision.

This is not to say that multiple personality is popular in the United States, where I would describe the attitude as mixed. Most of the modern psychiatric literature on multiple personality comes from the USA, but Mark Twain scholars in the United States are no more interested in this blog than are Dickens scholars in England.

Yet I think that the UK may go beyond skepticism, and has a more than average belief in magic, ghosts, and spirits.

Nobel Prize in Literature: Twenty-Five Winners Discussed in Literary Psychology Blog on Writers With Signs of Normal Version of Multiple Personality.

To see the posts on these writers, search their names in this blog.

1907—Rudyard Kipling, United Kingdom

1923—William Butler Yeats, United Kingdom

1929—Thomas Mann, Germany

1934—Luigi Pirandello, Italy

1936—Eugene O’Neill, United States

1948—T. S. Eliot, United Kingdom

1949—William Faulkner, United States

1954—Ernest Hemingway, United States

1964—Jean-Paul Sartre, France

1973—Patrick White, Australia

1976—Saul Bellow, United States

1980—Czeslaw Milosz, Poland

1982—Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia

1983—William Golding, United Kingdom

1993—Toni Morrison, United States

1998—José Saramago, Portugal

2001—V. S. Naipaul, United Kingdom

2003—J. M. Coetzee, South Africa

2005—Harold Pinter, United Kingdom

2006—Orhan Pamuk, Turkey

2007—Doris Lessing, United Kingdom

2010—Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru

2014—Patrick Modiano, France

2016—Bob Dylan, United States

2017—Kasuo Ishiguro, United Kingdom (born Japan)

Blog software records most visits in past month from: India, United States, Pakistan, Russia, Germany, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, China, Portugal.

Aside from country, I do not know who visits or why (except that I recently discussed a Nobel Prize novelist from Portugal).

I would like to know if you have found any facts or ideas, from recent or old posts, useful or questionable; if you have discussed them with colleagues, students, and friends; and if you or they have any questions or comments, which I would do my best to answer.

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 6): When a character has ten different names, both character and author may have multiple personality.

Only a fifth of the way through this thousand-page epic, I notice that one of the characters already has three or four different names. And I see in Wikipedia that he will eventually have about ten different names: Strider, Aragorn, Dúnadan, Ranger of the North, Longshanks, Wingfoot, Elessar Telcontar, Envinyatar, Estel, and Thorongil (1).

It is easy to shrug off this multiple naming as amusing and explainable, since it relates to the ways that different language communities have named him under various circumstances; to different stages of his life (childhood vs. adulthood); and to whether or not his secret heritage has been revealed.

Nevertheless, in real life or fiction, it is unusual for one person to have ten different names, except in multiple personality, in which ten or more personalities are common. I don’t know if there will be anything else to suggest that this character has it.

So far, all I know is that the author was comfortable with giving a character multiple identifications, suggesting that the author’s personal experience had led him to consider it ordinary psychology.

1. Wikipedia. “Aragorn.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aragorn

Mystery for Psychology and Literary Criticism: Fiction writers—even professors of literature or creative writing—rarely write books that explain their work.

It is a tacit assumption of most literary theories, literary critics, and psychologists that most novelists, playwrights, and poets understand their creative process and the things they write.

And maybe they do understand it. But what is the evidence? Are there books, written by authors, themselves, that prove it?

If you know of any such books, please cite them, and submit your comment.

Geniuses rarely write about genius, because many recall everything in their creative process and see no mystery, while others have amnesia for part of it.

Novelists are a good example of the latter. Search “genius” and “creative process” in this blog for interesting discussions.

J. R. R. Tolkien (post 5) on Writing: “I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, not of ‘inventing’…I had very little conscious, intellectual, intention”

Writers have often said such things about their writing process, but literary criticism mostly remains at the stage that I was before starting this blog: it thinks writers are joking. For if literary criticism thought that writers were not joking, it would be looking for a theory that explains what writers say. That is, if writers’ regular selves are not conscious of inventing it, who or what within the writers is conscious of inventing it?

In letters, J. R. R. Tolkien said the following:

1951

    “You asked for a brief sketch of my stuff that is connected with my imaginary world…

     I do not remember a time when I was not building it. Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write. But I have never stopped…

     But an equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all heroic legend…

     [Stories] arose in my mind as ‘given’ things…always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’ ” (1, pp. 143-145).

18 April 1955

     “The Lord of the Rings [published 1954-55] as a story was finished so long ago now that I can take a largely impersonal view of it, and find ‘interpretations’ quite amusing; even those that I might make myself, which are mostly post scriptum: I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual, intention in mind at any point.*

*Take the Ents, for instance. I did not consciously invent them at all. The chapter called ‘Treebeard’, from Treebeard’s first remark on p. 66, was written off more or less as it stands, with an effect on my self (except for labour pains) almost like reading some one else’s work. And I like Ents now because they do not seem to have anything to do with me…I was not inventing but reporting (imperfectly) and had at times to wait till ‘what really happened’ came through…” (1, pp. 211-212).

1. Humphrey Carpenter (Editor), Christopher Tolkien (Assistant). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

“Fellowship of the Ring” (Shadow of the Past) by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 4): Ring’s Powers Explained by Hypnosis; Characters May Have Multiple Personality.

The second chapter of The Lord of the Rings introduces three powers of the Ring and four main characters (Frodo Baggins; Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord; Gandalf, wizard; and Sméagol nicknamed Gollum).

The Ring, Personified

The gold “Ring” (always capitalized like a name) is worn on a person’s finger and looks like an inanimate object, but Gandalf explains that it has a will of its own, like a person: “A Ring of Power looks after itself, Frodo. It may slip off treacherously, but its keeper never abandons it…It was not Gollum, Frodo, but the Ring itself that decided things. The Ring left him…The Ring was trying to get back to its master” (the Dark Lord) (1, p. 55).

The Ring has three powers: it prevents the person who wears it from aging; it keeps them from wanting to part with it; and can make them invisible. The mechanism of these powers is not explained (it is magical), but since the Ring is personified, it is legitimate to consider whether it exerts its powers by a method that a person might use, hypnosis.

Hypnosis had been portrayed as a method for arresting the process of aging and death in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1845.

Hypnosis could prevent a person from wanting to part with the ring.

Hypnosis could make a person invisible if the person had multiple personality, in the sense that hypnosis could prompt a switch in personalities, so that the personality which had been out and in control is no longer out and visible.

Multiple Personality

Sméagol, who had been nicknamed Gollum, due to the gurgling in his throat, is not present in this chapter, and the only suggestion of his multiple personality is Gandalf’s quoting Gollum as having used “we” to refer to himself (1, p. 57) and Gandalf’s saying about Gollum that “There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own” (1, p. 55), suggesting that Gollum’s mind was divided, like a person with multiple personality.

“Frodo himself, after the first shock [from the departure of Bilbo]…did not worry much about the future. But half unknown to himself [what he knew was compartmentalized in different personalities?] the regret that he had not gone with Bilbo was steadily growing. He found himself wandering at times [was this that common symptom of multiple personality, the dissociative fugue?] especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams. He began to say to himself: ‘Perhaps I shall cross the River myself one day.’ To which the other half of his mind always replied: ‘Not yet’ ” (1. p. 43). A part of the mind that is like a voice which can be quoted may be an alternate personality. None of this is definitive for multiple personality; however, it certainly looks like foreshadowing.

“But last night I told you of Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord. The rumours that you have heard are true: he has indeed risen again and left his hold in Mirkwood and returned to his ancient fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor. That name even you hobbits have heard of, like a shadow on the borders of old stories. Always after a defeat and respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again” (1, p. 51). It is a cliché that the Devil can take many shapes, but taking different shapes is a metaphor for switching personalities, like Jekyll to Hyde.

Comment

Hypnosis and multiple personality are closely related. Self-hypnosis is one old theory for the mechanism of multiple personality. People with multiple personality are often highly hypnotizable, and hypnosis is often used in treatment (although I have rarely used it).

I have no reason to think that Tolkien intended this novel to involve hypnosis and multiple personality, but they may be involved, unacknowledged and inadvertently.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings [1954-55]. 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Imaginary Language Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and Théodore Flournoy: Imaginary language worlds may be created by mythopoetic, alternate personalities.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) said that the story of The Lord of the Rings was of secondary importance to his main interest, the creation of imaginary languages:

“The philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien created a number of constructed languages. Inventing languages (called glossopoeia by Tolkien, paralleling his idea of mythopoeia or myth-making) was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens…

“Glossopoeia was Tolkien's hobby for most of his life. At a little over 13, he helped construct a sound substitution cypher known as Nevbosh, 'new nonsense', which grew to include some elements of actual invented language. Notably, Tolkien claimed that this was not his first effort in invented languages. Shortly thereafter, he developed a true invented language called Naffarin which contained elements that would survive into his later languages, which he continued to work on until his death more than 65 years later. Language invention had always been tightly connected to the mythology that Tolkien developed, as he found that a language could not be complete without the history of the people who spoke it, just as these people could never be fully realistic if imagined only through English and as speaking English. Tolkien therefore took the stance of a translator and adaptor rather than that of the original author of his works…

“Tolkien wrote in one of his letters: "what I think is a primary ‘fact’ about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. [. . .] It is not a ‘hobby’, in the sense of something quite different from one’s work, taken up as a relief-outlet. The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse…I should have preferred to write in ‘Elvish’. But, of course, such a work as The Lord of the Rings has been edited and only as much ‘language’ has been left in as I thought would be stomached by readers.”

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_constructed_by_J._R._R._Tolkien

In 1899 (English trans. 1901) Théodore Flournoy, an eminent psychologist, published a widely read book on a case of multiple personality in which the person created imaginary languages:

From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages by Théodore Flournoy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9odore_Flournoy

I cited that book in a past post:

September 25, 2015

Mythopoetic Function of Alternate Personalities: Illustrated by Famous Medium, Helene Smith, in Théodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars

How does the mind create fiction and myth? And how can we ever find out? Fiction writing is done in private. And even fiction writers, themselves, are not entirely sure how they do it, which suggests that it takes place in “the unconscious.”

What goes on in “the unconscious”? And why study mediums to find out? Because mediums make a public spectacle of what usually takes place in private and out of awareness. Mediums turn off their regular consciousness by going into a trance, allowing their “unconscious” to come out and have its say.

“The mythopoetic function…Its great explorer was Flournoy with his research on Helen Smith and other mediums” (1, p. 318).

From India to the Planet Mars

According to historian Sonu Shamdasani, in his Introduction: “At the end of the nineteenth century, many of the leading psychologists—Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, Bleuler, James, Myers, Janet, Bergson, Stanley Hall, Schrenck-Notzing, Moll, Dessoir, Richet, and Flournoy—frequented mediums…What took place in the seances enthralled the leading minds of the time, and had a crucial bearing on many of the most significant aspects of twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and painting, not to mention psychical research…

“For [Frederic] Myers, whom Flournoy called the founder of subliminal psychology…in contradistinction to his contemporaries such as Freud and Janet, the unconscious, or as he termed it, the subliminal—the secondary personalities revealed in trance states, dreaming, crystal gazing, and automatic writing—potentially possessed a higher intelligence than one’s waking or supraliminal personality and often served to convey messages of guidance…

“Myers ended up embracing the spiritist hypothesis and attempted to unite science and religion in an overarching synthesis…Flournoy, by contrast, attempted to maintain a purely psychological viewpoint…

“For [William] James and Flournoy, the investigation of trance states was a central question if a psychology worthy of the name was to develop. Within this enterprise, the investigation of mediums held pride of place…

“The innovation of From India to the Planet Mars was that it was the first major study of what Myers called pseudo-possession, whose main goal was to disprove the supernatural origin of the phenomena and to give an account of their psychogenesis. In such a manner it established a devastating skeptical paradigm in psychical research…

“Cryptomnesia plays a crucial role in Flournoy’s analysis as the main alternative paradigm to the spiritualistic hypothesis…For Flournoy what was presented as a memory—in the case of Helene, of an anterior existence—in actuality represented a hidden and forgotten memory that had been through a process of subconscious elaboration…Spiritualists were up in arms about the book, for understandable reasons…

The “transition from spiritualism to multiple personality is very clearly developed in From India to the Planet Mars. While Flournoy rejects the extrapsychic existence of the figures in Helene’s trances, and regards them as intrapsychic, he still regards them as personalities…the psychologization of mediumship leads to a multiple personality model. From India to the Planet Mars was the first psychological study of multiple personality to become a best-seller…

“Throughout From India to the Planet Mars, Flournoy never ceases to marvel at the artistic and dramatic powers of Helene’s subconscious creative imagination. On one reading what is left of her romances when shorn of their spiritualistic garb is precisely art…"

The Introduction to From India to the Planet Mars concludes with this quotation from Ellenberger (Psychology Today, March 1973, p. 56), the historian of the unconscious quoted at the beginning of this post:

“Flournoy was a great explorer of the mythopoetic unconscious, particularly in his book From India to the Planet Mars…Today we seldom hear of the mythopoetic unconscious. What psychoanalysts call fantasies represent a minute part of mythopoetic manifestations. We have lost sight of the importance of this terrible power—a power that fathered epidemics of demonism, collective psychoses among witches, revelations of spiritualists, the so-called reincarnations of mediums, automatic writing, the mirages that lured generations of hypnotists, and the profuse literature of the subliminal imagination…unfortunately neither Freud nor Jung became aware of the mythopoetic unconscious” (2, pp. xi-li)

And note: The thing that mediumship makes public is that the mythopoetic “unconscious" is populated by, and is a function of, alternate personalities, who, even when behind-the-scenes, and out of the awareness of the regular self, are usually conscious, and often busy making things up.

1. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York, Basic Books, 1970.

2. Théodore Flournoy. From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages [1899/1901]. With a Forward by C. G. Jung and Commentary by Mireille Cifali. Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994.

The only past post I have on J. R. R. Tolkien, aside from the recent one on the diagnosis of Gollum, is the following:

April 4, 2014

J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, probably had Multiple Personality

Multiple personality’s childhood onset explains why it has a child’s way of thinking: imaginary companions and imaginary worlds (paracosm). Any adult who has created imaginary characters and worlds—especially when richly detailed, ultra-romantic, and/or fantastic—is likely to have had multiple personality.

Since these fictional characters and worlds are experienced as having minds of their own and as having actually existed, the writer, as Dickens put it, subjectively feels that he “didn’t invent it” (see June 2013 post).

And as J. R. R. Tolkien said, “They arose in my mind as ‘given’ things…always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’” (1, p. 100).

If Tolkien had multiple personality, it would not be surprising if his characters had it, too. At least one does: Smeagol-Gollum.

Now, a writer’s multiple personality may or may not extend beyond his writing and into his relations with real people. Was Tolkien’s multiple personality ever evident in real life? The following suggests that it was:

“During his undergraduate days Tolkien developed his childhood interest in painting and drawing and began to show some skill at it, chiefly in the sketching of landscapes. He also paid a great deal of attention to handwriting and calligraphy, and became accomplished in many styles of manuscript. This interest was a combination of his enthusiasm for words and his artist’s eye, but it also reflected his many-sided personality, for as someone who knew him during these years remarked (with only slight exaggeration): ‘He had a different style of handwriting for each of his friends’” (1, p. 65).

Writing in different handwritings (under circumstances in which there is no reason to suspect that a person is faking) is often indicative of multiple personality.

Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. [First published in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin, 1977.]

I hope to read The Lord of the Rings. Even though Tolkien said that its story was of secondary importance to its invented languages, many people have enjoyed the story.