Literature professor says “Harvey,” based on Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, is a great holiday movie, but she fails to recognize multiple personality.

Jennifer Finney Boylan in New York Times on “Harvey" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/opinion/christmas-holidays-movies.html?_r=0

Search “Mary Chase” for my brief past post on this play.

Search “McConnachie” for posts related to J. M. Barrie’s real-life version of Harvey (in the sense of having a co-conscious, companionable, alternate personality), except that McConnachie is not an animal. For another literary example of an animal alternate personality, search “Kafka.”

People with multiple personality sometimes see and interact with their alternate personalities—like children do with their imaginary companions and fiction writers sometimes do with their characters—either when they look in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors”) or as a free-standing visual hallucination (not psychotic, because they know very well that it is not objectively true and that other people cannot see it).

I think that professors of literature should know about these things, so that they know what they are reading.

They can still enjoy “Harvey,” just as people can still enjoy Peter Pan even if they know about J. M. Barrie’s “McConnachie.”

Indeed, knowing that “Harvey” is a case of multiple personality, and that multiple personality is not a psychosis, might even reinforce their enjoyment of “Harvey.”

And as I emphasize in this blog, if a person’s multiple personality does not cause significant distress or dysfunction, it is not a mental illness, and may even be an asset.