James Tiptree, Jr., pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon: Conventional reasons are doubtful when a pseudonym is still used after real name becomes known

“Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915–1987) was an American science fiction author better known as James Tiptree Jr., a pen name she used from 1967 to her death…it was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman. From 1974 to 1977 she also used the pen name Raccoona Sheldon. Tiptree was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012…

“In 1942 she joined the United States Army Air Force and worked in the…photo-intelligence group. She later was promoted to major, a high rank for women at the time…In 1952 she and her husband were invited to join the CIA, which she accepted. However, she resigned her position in 1955 and returned to college…She studied for her Bachelor of Arts degree at American University (1957–59), going on to achieve a doctorate at George Washington University in Experimental Psychology in 1967…

“As for her personal life, Sheldon had a complex sexual orientation, and she described her sexuality in different terms over many years…

“Unsure what to do with her new degrees and her new/old careers, Sheldon began to write science fiction. She adopted the pseudonym of James Tiptree Jr. in 1967. The name ‘Tiptree' came from a branded jar of marmalade, and the "Jr." was her husband's idea. In an interview, she said: ‘A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I've had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.’ Other pen names that she used included ‘Alice Hastings Bradley,’ ‘Major Alice Davey,’ ‘Alli B. Sheldon,’ ‘Dr. Alice B. Sheldon,’ ‘Raccoona Sheldon’ and 'Alli.’

“The pseudonym was successfully maintained until the late 1970s, partly because, although ‘Tiptree’ was widely known to be a pseudonym, it was generally understood that its use was intended to protect the professional reputation of an intelligence community official…Robert Silverberg wrote ‘It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing’” (1).

Half way through her twenty-year writing career, her true identity of Alice B. Sheldon was discovered, but she continued to publish under her James Tiptree, Jr., pseudonym. Why? Was it only because the Tiptree brand was successful?

I am a quarter through her biography, from which I quote:

“…Alli had many sides or selves…Many artists feel they have another persona who does their work for them, a secret self very much unlike the ‘me’ of their daily interactions” (2, p. 5).

“Years later…she was thinking in a journal about a male side of herself she called Alex…Alex, Tiptree’s forerunner” (2, p. 85-86).

1. Wikipedia. “James Tiptree Jr.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr.

2. Julie Phillips. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2006.

“Gothic Tales” by Arthur Conan Doyle (post 4): Oxford University Press’s Introduction calls Doyle “a divided figure” with “double consciousness”

“Arthur Conan Doyle is the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced” and he “was a major figure in the great period of the history of the Gothic tale.

“Dismissed for much of the twentieth century as a cheap brand of populist melodrama, over recent decades the Gothic has become understood as a major cultural mode for the articulation of uncertainty and anxiety. With its characteristic tensions between past and present, rational scientific naturalism and the irrational and supernatural, centre and periphery, the country and the city, the Gothic drew together many of Doyle’s concerns. It provided him with a vehicle to express his divided national identity and double consciousness…

“One of the most fascinating things about Doyle is that he was such a conflicted, or even, divided, figure. He was by training a doctor, completely aware of the significance of scientific naturalism and, in the figure of Sherlock Holmes, the creator of the foremost literary rationalist…And yet he was also increasingly drawn to spiritualism, for which he became a high-profile advocate…

“One of his very earliest stories, ‘The Winning Shot’ (1883), is set in Toynby Hall, on the very edge of ‘the great wilderness of Dartmoor…To this far-flung spot…comes the Swedish occultist and necromancer Dr Octavius Gaster…

“In a manner characteristic of much classic nineteenth-century Gothic, from Frankenstein to ‘William Wilson’ to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to The Picture of  Dorian Gray, ‘The Winning Shot’ is a tale of the divided self. [At a shooting match,] Gaster recites a spell…which enables him to split his rival Charley Pillar in two, causing Charley to shoot his own double, and thus to kill himself” (1).

Oxford University Press may or may not know that “double consciousness” means multiple personality (see previous post), but they certainly do know that Arthur Conan Doyle was a “divided” figure.

1. Darryl Jones (Editor). “Introduction,” in Gothic Tales by Arthur Conan Doyle. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016.

“The Parasite” by Arthur Conan Doyle (post 3): Paradoxical man like Doyle says he has “double consciousness,” which meant multiple personality

As noted in my last post, Arthur Conan Doyle was paradoxical. He had two, contradictory sides. He was trained as a physician and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but he was also inclined to experience and believe in psychic phenomena.

In this short story or novelette, the protagonist is a professor of physiology, who describes himself as a scientist and a skeptic. “And yet I may claim to be a curious example of the effect of education upon temperament, for by nature I am, unless I deceive myself, a highly psychic man. I was a nervous, sensitive boy, a dreamer, a somnambulist, full of impressions and intuitions…” (1).

The title, “The Parasite” (1894), refers to how a hypnotist intrudes on and manipulates the protagonist’s mind. But the key to interpreting this story is the protagonist’s statement that “A peculiar double consciousness possessed me” (1).

What did the term “double consciousness” mean in Arthur Conan Doyle’s time (1859-1930)?

Double Consciousness

“…the term 'double consciousness' was applied to cases of split personality; by the late nineteenth century, it had come into quite general use not only in professional publications but also in discussions of psychological research published for general audiences as well…

“In 1817, in a New York professional journal called the Medical Repository, an account headed ‘A Double Consciousness, or a Duality of Person in the same Individual’ made use of the term in a way that remained fairly constant for psychology through the nineteenth century. The account was of a young woman—later identified as Mary Reynolds—who at about age nineteen fell into a deep sleep from which she awoke with no memory of who she was and with a wholly different personality. A few months later, after again falling into a deep sleep, she awoke as her old self. At the time of the 1817 account, she had periodically alternated selves for a period of about four years. As it turned out, this was to continue for about fifteen or sixteen years in total, until in her mid-thirties she permanently entered the second state. Her two lives were entirely separate; while in one, she had no knowledge or memory of the other. Such utter distinctiveness of the two selves was what made the editors of the Medical Repository refer to hers as a case of ‘double consciousness.’

“As a result of the Mary Reynolds case, the term ‘double consciousness’ entered into fairly extensive use. For example, Francis Wayland's influential mid-nineteenth-century textbook Elements of Intellectual Philosophy treated the concept of double consciousness as part of a general discussion of consciousness as such and recounted the Mary Reynolds case along with a few others by way of illustration. An 1860 article in Harper's also focused on the Reynolds case and on double consciousness as a medical and philosophical issue. As a medical term, then, it was hardly confined to the use of medical professionals.

“During the time Du Bois was formulating his ideas of African American distinctiveness, there had been renewed interest in double consciousness as a medical and theoretical issue. Most important for Du Bois was the role of his Harvard mentor William James. James stimulated this interest, not only in his Principles—in describing what he called ‘alternating selves’ or ‘primary and secondary consciousness,’ he drew on a body of contemporary French work which had been widely publicized in the United States as well—but also as a result of his own experience about 1890 with a notable American case of double consciousness, that of Ansel Bourne. James's work with Bourne (whose discoverer, Richard Hodgson, did use ‘double consciousness’ to label the case), as well as the American publication of the French studies on which James drew, occurred at the same time Du Bois's relationship with James was at its closest. Whether James and Du Bois talked about it at the time is impossible to say, but based on Du Bois's use of ‘double consciousness’ in his Atlantic essay he certainly seems to have known the term's psychological background, because he used it in ways quite consistent with that background” (2).

1. Arthur Conan Doyle. “The Parasite” (1894). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/355/355-h/355-h.htm

2. Dickson D. Bruce Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug03/souls/brucepg.html

“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (post 5): As in “Anna Karenina,” suicide risk in multiple personality is dramatized, but the diagnosis is unacknowledged.

This 563-page novel is divided into sections (long chapters), the next to last of which is titled “The Killer” (1, pp. 447-513). It ends when The Killer, an alternate personality of Andreas Wolf, causes him to commit suicide by throwing himself over a cliff—which is comparable to when an alternate personality of Anna Karenina causes her to commit suicide by throwing herself under a train (search “Anna Karenina” in this blog).

Andreas “began to suspect there was something inside him, some other self that had always been in him, that wasn’t in other people…This thing, which he came to think of as the Killer, was…detectable [by Andreas, the host personality] only by inference" (1, p. 459). He inferred its presence, because he had thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that seemed to come from inside him, but which he did not experience as being his own. He called this other self “Killer,” because Andreas had, in fact, killed a man years ago (an event described in great detail, and in all its ramifications, earlier in the novel).

Was this “other self” an alternate personality? If it were, Andreas might have memory gaps for periods of time that Killer was fully in control. And in fact, regarding the murder, Andreas does have to wonder what it must have been like “to crush a man’s skull with a shovel [which he knows about, because, after the murder, he saw the condition of the body]…He couldn’t recall it” (1, p. 461).

Why would the alternate personality, Killer, now want to kill Andreas, the host personality? Since Killer’s motivations for killing Andreas are not discussed, I don’t know. But why would any alternate personality want to kill the host personality? Wouldn’t that be suicide for the alternate personality, too?

Violent alternate personalities often originate as protector personalities, but over the years, may get tired of protecting the host personality, whom they come to see as a weakling. In addition, since multiple personality originates in childhood, in the childlike, magical thinking of some alternate personalities, killing may be seen as a method to get another personality out of the way, not as something permanent: “In the shadowy world of the Killer, nobody was ever dead” (1, p. 460).

But even if some alternate personalities did see death as permanent, they might feel they could survive the death of the host personality, because alternate personalities often see themselves as separate people — which is why they may reject the diagnosis of multiple personality, since it implies they are just parts or “modules” (Franzen’s term, see previous post) of one person.

When a person who had previously accepted the diagnosis of multiple personality later recants, it may be an alternate personality doing the recanting, because they had never accepted the diagnosis in the first place, since it violated their subjective sense of separate, autonomous personhood.

As Purity and Anna Karenina dramatize, suicide is a risk in clinical, multiple personality disorder (as opposed to multiple personality trait, my term for the normal version).

Purity is one more example of a novel with unacknowledged multiple personality (not gratuitous multiple personality, because in Purity it is integral to plot and personality development). However, with his talk in interviews of having his own “twelve personality modules” (see prior post), Franzen appears to have given the issue considerable thought.

1. Jonathan Franzen. Purity. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.

Jonathan Franzen (post 4): In video, says he has “twelve different personality modules,” including both sexes, and talks to some of them every day

In this interview on his novel, Purity, he does not relate the above description of multiple personality to multiple personality. He thinks it is ordinary psychology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGOEVdpbQrQ

This contrasts with the earlier interview cited in my first Franzen post, in which he said that everyone has "multiple personalities" to one extent or another.

I am not quite finished reading Purity, but so far, it does not use the terms "multiple personality" or "split personality," even in a whole section of the novel devoted to the description of a character with multiple personality.

“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (post 3): More clues to Andreas Wolf’s multiple personality, and his basing personhood on secrecy and memory

In my previous post, I noted early clues to the character Andreas Wolf’s multiple personality: his dissociative fugue and reading Iris Murdoch. Additional clues—change in voice, having a different part, switching to being a different person—include the following:

“ ‘Sit down,’ he said in a much different voice” (1, p. 258).

“I have to live with what I did [murder], but part of me doesn’t regret it” (1, p. 273).

“It happened again. Again, for a second, for less than a second, before he could turn his face away, she saw a wholly different person…” (1, p. 286).

Personhood

What is the difference between just having different roles and moods (as most everyone does) versus having different personalities (as in multiple personality)? Andreas Wolf explains the difference in his theory of personhood and identity:

“How do you know that you’re a person [or a personality], distinct from other people [or other personalities]? By keeping certain things to yourself…Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside” (1, p. 275).

The reason that persons with multiple personality have memory gaps is that one personality is not aware of another personality. For example, a person has a dissociative fugue when one personality has amnesia for the period of time that another personality was in control and went from one place to another. In contrast, when a person only goes from one role or mood to another, there is no memory gap, because all the roles and moods belong to the one and only personality.

So when Andreas Wolf gives his theory of identity in terms of secrecy and memory, he is explaining a key aspect of multiple personality. And when an author has a character present such a theory of identity in the context of that character’s behavioral clues to multiple personality, it strengthens the possibility that the author was writing about multiple personality intentionally (and not just inadvertently, as many authors seem to do, in what I call “gratuitous multiple personality”).

1. Jonathan Franzen. Purity. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.

Pablo Picasso: Do his split-face portraits depict multiple personality?

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/411164640953738034/

“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (post 2): Purity Tyler is not sure of her real name, while Andreas Wolf has dissociative fugue and reads Iris Murdoch

At the beginning of this 563-page novel, the title character, Purity “Pip” Tyler, a young, in-debt and struggling college graduate in California, suspects her mother and she have falsified identities, and does not know who her father was. She is planning to join Andreas Wolf’s WikiLeaks-like group in South America in the hope that they can discover who her father was.

Years before, in East Germany, as the Berlin Wall was about to come down, Andreas Wolf has killed the abusive stepfather of a teenage girl to whom he is attracted. On the night he commits the murder, he has a brief dissociative fugue: “He found himself on the front porch again without knowing how he’d got there” (1, p. 136). Search “dissociative fugue” in this blog for past posts on this symptom of multiple personality.

“His life seemed to him a long war between two sides of him, the sick side that he had from his mother, the scrupled side that he had from a nongenetic father. But he feared that at base he was all Katya [his mother]” (1, p. 164).

On an occasion that his mother visits him, she sees a book on his shelf by the novelist Iris Murdoch, an author that she likes, too (1, p. 154). Coincidentally, that is an author whose multiple personality is discussed in this blog (search “Iris Murdoch”).

1. Jonathan Franzen. Purity. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.

Arthur Conan Doyle: Creator of Sherlock Holmes and believer in fairies, spirit-possession, and ghosts. How is it possible for one man to be both?

And why is it that Dr. Watson, who vouches for the truth of Sherlock Holmes stories, never actually meets Professor Moriarty?

If you can answer these questions, please submit your comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Moriarty

“Only Angels Forget” by Rosamund Clay, pseudonym of Ann Oakley (post 2): Character has amnesia, memory gap, a symptom of multiple personality

Sociologist Ann Rosamund Oakley has published other fiction, both before and after this novel, under her own name (1), so why did she publish this novel under a pseudonym? Was she embarrassed by it? Not at all. She lists this novel, among other fiction she is proud to have published, on her website (2).

As I have previously discussed, the use of pseudonyms may be a clue to multiple personality, since a pseudonym may be the name of an alternate personality (search “pseudonyms” in this blog).

Only Angels Forget

The word “forget” in the title refers to an episode in which one of the main characters is raped, but has amnesia, a memory gap, for it. She has bruises and a vague idea that she must have been assaulted, but she is not sure what happened until she finds that she is pregnant.

Most people who are raped have trouble forgetting it, not remembering it. Only a person with multiple personality, a cardinal symptom of which is memory gaps, is likely to have a memory gap for being raped (assuming the person did not have a head injury and was not drugged). Search “memory gaps” in this blog for previous discussions.

There was no necessity, in regard to either plot or character development, for this character to have had a memory gap for being raped. The reason for her memory gap is never even discussed (except when the rapist later tells his victim that "only angels forget. Good women are hard to find. Be thankful") (3, p. 187). Evidently, the author, for personal reasons, considered memory gaps to be within the realm of ordinary psychology.

The inclusion of this symptom of multiple personality was gratuitous (search “gratuitous multiple personality”) since the novel never intentionally made multiple personality an issue.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Oakley

2. http://www.annoakley.co.uk/

3. Rosamund Clay. Only Angels Forget. London, Virago, 1990.

Amy Tan (post 6): Puzzling symptoms attributed to Lyme disease included some that gave her “the eerie feeling I had developed multiple personalities”

Along with her many other puzzling symptoms eventually attributed to Lyme disease, “there were the bizarre acts I committed of which I have no memory. I purportedly threw laundry around our loft in New York, draping clothes over chairs, sofas, and tables in odd configurations, so that when I saw my rearranged rooms the next morning I thought a deranged interior decorator had broken in. The notion of ghosts also came to mind…And one night, while in a hotel in Pasadena, I reportedly called a friend at midnight and left a message in a woeful little-girl’s breathy voice, asking whether my friend had seen Lou [her husband] and my dog Bubba. The next day, after I refused to believe I had called her at such an ungodly hour, she played back the message for me. Listening to my recorded voice, I had the eerie feeling I had developed multiple personalities” (1, p. 382).

Googling Lyme disease and multiple personality, I found someone else who wondered if their Lyme disease had caused their multiple personality (2).

However, while I would not be surprised to find that Lyme disease had caused dissociative symptoms such as depersonalization, I would doubt it had caused something as psychologically complex as multiple personality. But if a person already had multiple personality, which is usually hidden, any crisis in a person’s life, including an illness such as Lyme disease, could temporarily undermine the typical secrecy and reticence of alternate personalities. And if you didn’t know that the person already had multiple personality, you might jump to the conclusion that whatever was causing the crisis had caused their preexisting multiple personality.

Amy Tan’s newly noticed symptoms of multiple personality included a little-girl alternate personality, whom Amy Tan did not remember, but whose telephone call had been recorded (see above). What she disregards is that she had always had a little-girl personality as a co-writer or ghostwriter when she wrote her stories:

“When I write my stories, I do not use childhood memories. I use a child’s memory. Through that child’s mind, I am too inexperienced to have assumptions. So the world is still full of magic. Anything can happen. All possibilities. I have dreams. I have fantasies. At will, I can enter that world again” (1, p. 112).

Of course, it is rare for someone with multiple personality to have only two personalities. So it was probably another alternate personality who was the “deranged interior decorator” (see above). And the child personality who made the telephone call was probably not the same one whose perspective Amy Tan often switched to when writing her stories.

1. Amy Tan. The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life. New York, Penguin Books, 2003.

2. “Can an organic illness cause DID” [dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder]. https://www.psychforums.com/dissociative-identity/topic61567.html

Gratuitous Multiple Personality in “The Magician” by W. Somerset Maugham (post 2): The magician’s magic works by empowering an alternate personality

Margaret is deeply in love with her fiancé, and they plan to marry in two weeks. The magician casts a spell on Margaret that makes her marry him instead.

But how did the magician’s spell work? Did it modify Margaret’s one and only personality, or did it cause a switch from her regular personality to an alternate personality?

Margaret confirms the latter when she says to her fiancé: “There seem to be two persons in me, and my real self, the old one that you knew and loved, is growing weaker day by day” (1, p. 137).

That is, Margaret’s regular personality still loves her fiancé, but her alternate personality loves the magician. The magician’s magic worked by empowering Margaret’s alternate personality.

Since the plot of this novel does not need Margaret to have multiple personality, and no narrator or character refers to it in those terms, this is another example of unwarranted “gratuitous multiple personality” (search it in this blog for examples in other novels). Gratuitous multiple personality in a novel probably reflects the author’s own psychology.

“Look, the sun is rising”

This novel is criticized as being derivative; for example, of George du Maurier’s Trilby, only with du Maurier’s Svengali replaced by Maugham’s magician.

But the line quoted above, which comes at the end of this novel, after the villain has been vanquished, reminds me of the title of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a later novel. Is Hemingway derivative?

Since Hemingway cites Ecclesiastes as including a phrase close to his title, it is assumed that the Bible was his inspiration. But the Bible’s “The sun rises” is soon followed by “there is nothing new under the sun.” Is that what Hemingway meant by his title? If he meant something more hopeful, he may have been paraphrasing The Magician.

But be that as it may, the reason for this post is to point out yet one more example of a surprisingly common literary phenomenon: gratuitous multiple personality.

1. W. Somerset Maugham. The Magician [1908]. New York, Penguin Books, 2007.

Novelist Jonathan Franzen, expressing his understanding of himself, said he has multiple personalities, which are unresolvable, and that is why he is a writer

“I think everyone to some degree has multiple personalities," he says. "We have these different modules running in our heads. I can feel myself thinking like my father; I can sound to myself like my mom … and I write because I’m unresolved. Numerous strains in my personality are not resolvable” (1).

Most people will not agree that they have multiple personalities, and they are correct. Most people have only multiple moods and multiple roles in their everyday lives.

The difference is that personalities are autonomous, have a sense of their own distinct personhood, and have their own memory banks, while moods and roles do not.

1. Interview 2010. http://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/the-master-s-craft-1.956125

“Near to the Wild Heart” by Clarice Lispector: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” said author, quoting Flaubert, when asked about similarity to her protagonist

Background

“Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories…She has been the subject of numerous books, and references to her and her work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films…

“Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector’s first novel…published around her twenty-third birthday in December 1943. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers on the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize…

“Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states…” —Wikipedia

“Splitting”

I first heard of Clarice Lispector in a recent review of another of her novels in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/books/review-chandelier-clarice-lispector.html. The review says that the strangeness of Lispector’s novels is due to splitting: “…the strangeness comes from a splitting — of women experiencing themselves as subject and object. This fracturing is everywhere in Lispector…”

I wondered what kind of splitting would be found in Lispector’s autobiographical first novel.

Near to the Wild Heart

Although much of this novel is unintelligible, it was award-winning, and the author went on to a brilliant literary career. And so, since the unintelligibility was not due to illiteracy or psychosis, what was it due to?

The usual answer is experimental literary technique. Search “experimental” in this blog for past posts on what I see as a fallacious idea. In short, much of what has been interpreted as experimental literary technique has been a manifestation of the author’s multiple personality (the trait, not the disorder).

Added April 15: My best guess as to the cause of the unintelligibility is that multiple personalities are trying to speak at the same time, and editorial personalities are declining to intervene.

Are there any other indications of multiple personality in this novel?

As seen in quotations from the novel (below), the protagonist experiences a separate awareness of another being inside her; she hears voices inside her, probably of alternate personalities; she says she feels split in two; what is probably an alternate identity slaps her face; she sees what is probably an alternate personality in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog); she says she is divided into complete little lives; and she has an anonymous lover who never actually existed (probably an alternate personality) (and search “nameless” in this blog).

“I am suffering, a separate awareness told her. And suddenly this other being loomed big and took the place of the one who was suffering” (1, p. 44).

“Joana didn’t pay her too much attention until she heard her voice…she’s just repeated one of the voices she’s heard so often when she was single…From that day on, Joana felt voices. She understood them or didn’t understand them” (1, p. 66).

“One day she split in two…She gathered up all of her pieces…her inner ones…she found herself different to herself…she really had split into two, each part facing the other, watching her, wishing for things that the other could no longer give. In truth, she had always been two…It was just that until then the two of them had worked together and couldn’t be told apart. Now the one that knew she was worked on her own…” (1, pp. 68-69).

“At times, when through a special mechanism, the same way one slides into sleep, she closed the doors of conscience and allowed herself to speak, she was surprised…by her own hands slapping her own face. At times she heard strange, crazy words coming from her own mouth” (1, p. 73).

“She looked for herself a lot in the mirror…without the strength to sustain her gaze against that woman’s…” (1, pp. 88-89).

“I’ll never have guidelines then, she thought some months after marrying. I slide from one truth to the next, always forgetting the first, always dissatisfied. Her life was made up of complete little lives, of whole closed circles, which isolated themselves from one another…Why so independent, why don’t they merge into just one block…Fact was they were too whole…Nothing therefore binds me” (1, pp. 91-92).

“…the woman with the voice” (1, p. 132).

“I will be closer to Him and to the woman with the voice” (1, p. 148).

“…her [anonymous] lover, the unhappy man had never existed” (1, p. 182).

1. Clarice Lispector. Near to the Wild Heart [1943]. Translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin. Edited and with an Introduction by Benjamin Moser. London, Penguin Books, 2012.

Afterword of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” calls novel featuring multiple personality an updated version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

A new essay in today’s New York Times on Jay Gatsby (1) does not mention his probable multiple personality (search “F. Scott Fitzgerald” to see my past posts), but it does provide an excuse for me to add something I failed to note previously: a connection between The Great Gatsby and another novel I discussed, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.

In Palahniuk’s Afterword to Fight Club, he says: “Really, what I was writing was just The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was ‘apostolic’ fiction—where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero” (2, pp. 215-216). Obviously, the Palahniuk personality who is writing the Afterword is not consciously comparing the two novels in regard to multiple personality, but don’t be misled by that, because the personality writing the Afterword does not even mention that his own novel features multiple personality, as I noted in the following past post:

June 25, 2017

“Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk: Protagonist has “split personality,” but author’s Afterword about writing novel does not mention multiple personality.

There are two major issues in this novel: the protagonist’s multiple personality and the fight clubs.

The author’s Afterword does discuss the fight clubs. But Palahniuk says, “The whole idea of a fight club wasn’t important. It was arbitrary…The fighting wasn’t the important part of the story” (2, p. 213). Which would leave multiple personality as the basic reason that this novel was written.

The novel itself is explicit about the protagonist, who ultimately says: “I’m not Tyler Durden. He’s the other side of my split personality. I say, has anybody here seen the movie Sybil?” (2, p. 196). Why, then, is the issue of multiple personality not even mentioned in an author’s Afterword about why and how the novel was written? It is a remarkable omission…

Interpretation

One of Palahniuk’s personalities that was not in charge of writing the Afterword, but who did know that his novel was about multiple personality, may have realized that Tyler Durden and Jay Gatsby had the same psychological condition, and wanted to get that in.

1. Jesmyn Ward. “Jay Gatsby.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/books/review/jesmyn-ward-great-gatsby.html

2. Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club [1996]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2005.

“Where the Past Begins (A Writer’s Memoir)” by Amy Tan (post 5): “My hands are not the ones tapping the keyboard, although I still believe they are”

In this memoir, every so often, Amy Tan interrupts the story of her life for what she calls “interludes,” such as an excerpt from her journal or a brief essay. One of the latter is titled “I Am The Author of This Novel.”

“I am the author of this novel, which is told by a first-person narrator, who is not me…

“I am not the first-person narrator. I am the author who determined the voice of the narrator, which, by extension, is the voice of the entire narrative…

“…by voice, I mean more the mind of the character and her identity, how she perceives herself in the world she inhabits…

“The main point is: her mind is not my mind, and her identity is not my identity…

“And just to be clear…the first-person fictional consciousness is not me, unless you think my doppelgänger should get credit as a separate entity. And now, in just raising the rhetorical question, she evidently thinks she should be acknowledged.

“So let me rephrase: I am the author of a novel told by a doppelgänger in possession of my thoughts, who inserts her subconscious into my subconscious…My hands are not the ones tapping the keyboard, although I still believe they are, and these words you are reading are entirely hers, which I still believe are mine” (1, pp. 223-226).

The above is a variation of the tortuous explanation that many novelists give at book signings when asked if their novel is autobiographical. Except that the novelist would probably not invoke the concept of “voice” at book signings. It is a term more commonly used in creative writing workshops (2). (Search “voice” in this blog for previous discussions.)

The creative writing term “voice” is more or less equivalent to the psychological term “alternate personality.”

1. Amy Tan. Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2017.

2. Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall. Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

“Where the Past Begins (A Writer’s Memoir) by Amy Tan (post 4): Chooses not to think of her “benevolent companion when I write” as an alternate personality.

“It makes sense I would seek companionship to help me sort through confusing ideas, thoughts, and beliefs, mine and others’. My characters are already like companions in that way, although I am always aware that they are fictional ones I created. Yet I have periodically felt I have with me a spiritual companion who drops hints and guides me toward revelations, ones I never would have stumbled upon. At times, I am alarmed to read sentences I do not recall writing, or, even more disturbing, when I read thoughts penned in my journal that I don’t remember thinking. The thoughts are not contrary to what I believe. It’s just that I don’t remember thinking about those things at that particular time or in quite that way—which often seems to be more insightful than I could ever be. This isn’t the flip side of my personality or a fragmented psyche. Whatever it is, I don’t need to analyze it any further. I simply welcome this benevolent companion when I write…” (1, pp. 164-165).

1. Amy Tan. Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2017.

“Where the Past Begins (A Writer’s Memoir)” by Amy Tan (post 3): Author’s Host Personality, Narrator Personality, and Two Child-Aged Personalities

“And then there are the experiences that were a secret to myself…One was shocking: my mother on the verge of killing me. How could I have forgotten that?…The bad stuff gave me the emotional reactions I have today—my quirks of personality, my volatility and secretiveness…

“The fictional mind can take me to what it knows…This is the fictional mind that lets go and allows free-form imagination to take over…It requires that I let go of logic, assumptions, rationale, and conscious memory. I am guided by intuitions, and as I put together the story, the origins of those intuitions return, and not just as a distant memory of what happened, but as if I am going through the moments and the heart-pounding suspense as it happens…

“My mother is holding a Chinese cleaver, the one she uses to slice raw beef. She’s coming at me and I’m backing away…“I kill you first…then me. We…go to heaven together”…She can’t take it anymore and I can’t either. I’m shouting, “Go ahead. Do it. Do it right now.”…And then I hear a disembodied voice come out of me—not my voice—and it’s wailing, “I want to live! I want to live!” And I’m so goddamned mad that this voice betrayed me…

“I recalled my feeling that the disembodied voice had a will of its own and went against mine…

“And then I considered that maybe the episode had never happened. If it had, I wouldn’t have forgotten it—not for twenty years…I eventually called my mother…She immediately confirmed [that it did happen]”…

“I know that there must be many traumatic episodes in my life that my subconscious has put away…But once the fiction-writing mind is freed, there are no censors, no prohibitions…But its most important trait is this: it seeks a story, a narrative that reveals what happened and why it happened” (pp. 110-130).

Four Personalities

1. Host Personality: In multiple personality, the regular personality is typically the least in the know and has the most amnesia.

2. Narrator Personality: The “fictional mind” can access other personalities and their stories.

3. Suicidal Child-Aged Personality: She wants to end her mother’s never-ending death threats and get it over with.

4. Another Child-Aged Personality: She wants to live, says so in her own voice, and has a will of her own.

This analysis into just four personalities is probably an oversimplification.

Amy Tan. Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2017.

Children and Adolescents: Recognizing Multiple Personality (a.k.a. Dissociative Identity) by using Dissociative Experience Checklists

Multiple personality begins in childhood, but most mental health professionals who work with children have never learned its symptoms or made the diagnosis.

What follows are two checklists of symptoms, one for children and one for adolescents.

If a child or adolescent has many of these symptoms, then multiple personality should be suspected, but the formal diagnosis is not made until alternate personalities acknowledge their presence: which they usually will not do until someone recognizes the clues, realizes what is going on, and inquires specifically about this or that specific symptom.

Of course, if these psychological phenomena are not causing any significant distress or dysfunction, then they are not really “symptoms,” per se, and a “diagnosis,” per se, cannot be made. Without distress or dysfunction, there is no mental illness, and the child or adolescent has multiple personality trait (MPT), not multiple personality disorder (MPD). Most people with multiple personality have the trait, not the disorder.

Child Dissociative Checklist (CDC) by Frank W. Putnam, M.D.

1. Child does not remember or denies traumatic or painful experiences that are known to have occurred.

2. Child goes into a daze or trance-like state at times or often appears “spaced out.” Teachers may report that he or she “daydreams” frequently in school.

3. Child shows rapid changes in personality. He or she may go from being shy to being outgoing, from feminine to masculine, from timid to aggressive.

4. Child is unusually forgetful or confused about things that he or she should know; e.g. may forget the names of friends, teachers or other important people, loses possessions or gets easily lost.

5. Child has a very poor sense of time. He or she loses track of time, may think it is morning when it is actually afternoon, gets confused about what day it is, or becomes confused about when something has happened.

6. Child shows marked day-to-day or even hour-to-hour variations in his or her skills, knowledge, food preferences, athletic abilities; e.g. changes in handwriting, memory for previously learned information such as multiplication tables, spelling, use of tools or artistic ability.

7. Child shows rapid regressions in age-level behavior, e.g. a twelve-year-old starts to use baby-talk, sucks thumb, or draws like a four-year-old.

8. Child has a difficult time learning from experience; e.g. explanations, normal discipline or punishment do not change his or her behavior.

9. Child continues to lie or deny misbehavior even when the evidence is obvious.

10. Child refers to himself or herself in the third person (e.g., as she or her) when talking about self, or at times insists on being called by a different name. He or she may also claim that things that he or she did actually happened to another person.

11. Child has rapidly changing physical complaints such as headache or upset stomach. For example, he or she may complain of a headache one minute and seem to forget about it the next.

12. Child is unusually sexually precocious and may attempt age-inappropriate sexual behavior with other children or adults.

13. Child suffers from unexplained injuries or may even deliberately injure self at times.

14. Child reports hearing voices that talk to him or her. The voices may be friendly or angry and may come from “imaginary companions” or sound like the voices of parents, friends or teachers.

15. Child has a vivid imaginary companion or companions [and may not feel that they are only pretend]. Child may insist that the imaginary companion(s) is responsible for things that he or she has done.

16. Child has intense outbursts of anger, often without apparent cause and may display unusual physical strength during these episodes.

17. Child sleepwalks frequently.

18. Child has unusual nighttime experiences; e.g. may report seeing “ghosts” or that things happen at night that he or she can’t account for; e.g., broken toys, unexplained injuries.

19. Child frequently talks to him or herself, may use a different voice or argue with self at times.

20. Child has two or more distinct and separate personalities that take control over the child’s behavior.

Items from Adolescent Dissociative Experiences Scale (A-DES) by Judith Armstrong, PhD, Eve Bernstein Carlson, PhD, and Frank W. Putnam, M.D.

2. I get back tests or homework that I don’t remember doing.

3. I have strong feelings that don’t seem like they are mine.

4. I can do something really well one time and then I can’t do it at all another time.

5. People tell me I do or say things that I don’t remember doing or saying.

9. I hear voices in my head that are not mine.

11. I am so good at lying and acting that I believe it myself.

12. I catch myself “waking up” in the middle of doing something.

13. I don’t recognize myself in the mirror.

15. I find myself someplace and I don’t remember how I got there.

16. I have thoughts that don’t really seem to belong to me.

20. People tell me that I sometimes act so differently that I seem like a different person.

21. It feels like there are walls inside my mind.

22. I find writings, drawings or letters that I must have done but I can’t remember doing.

25. I find myself standing outside of my body, watching myself as if I were another person.

26. My relationships with my family and friends change suddenly and I don’t know why.

27. I feel like my past is a puzzle and some of the pieces are missing.

29. I feel like there are different people inside of me.

30. My body feels as if it doesn’t belong to me.