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.