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