Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Two Voices” in “The Poet’s Mind” by Gregory Tate: Poem demonstrates “double consciousness,” which means multiple personality

Professor Tate says that Tennyson’s “view of the embodied mind in his early writing, epitomized in ‘The Two Voices’, is of a fragmented and fluctuating compound of mental states whose operations often defy conscious control; a view that was also partly formed through personal experience…

"‘The Two Voices’ comprises a dialogue between a depressed speaker and an insidious inner voice that urges suicide” (1, p. 45).

The poem refers to states of consciousness that differ in what they remember, so that the relation of the poem to the psychological concept of “double consciousness…is evident in the emphasis that both place on the separation of the two states of consciousness through the fragmentation of memory” (1, p. 48).

Double Consciousness

Tate credits the concept of double consciousness to the work of 19th century doctor Henry Holland, who defined it as a condition in which “the mind passes by alternation from one state to another, each having the perception of external impressions and appropriate trains of thought, but not linked together by…mutual memory” (1, p. 48).

Here is another history of “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).

“The Two Voices” (3).

1. Gregory Tate. The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.

2. Dickson D. Bruce Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG03/souls/brucepg.html

3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. “The Two Voices.” http://www.philaletheians.co.uk/study-notes/constitution-of-man/the-two-voices-of-lord-tennyson.pdf

New York Times article about “The Amy Adams Method” of playing Gillian Flynn protagonist in TV mini-series raises question of multiple personality in actors

In my post earlier today, prompted by an article in The New York Times—

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/arts/television/amy-adams-hollywood-sharp-objects.html—I focused on the multiple personality of protagonists in Gillian Flynn’s novels. But the New York Times article is primarily about an actress, Amy Adams, and acting.

The article mentions that the actress had “an attendant ‘negative self-dialogue’ that never quite went away. ‘I have this internal voice that is just not a cheerleader for myself’ she said.” (She may be describing the voice of, and dialogue with, a critical alternate personality.)

“Ms. Flynn said that…Ms. Adams ‘completely immersed herself physically, bodily, mentally into Camille’ [Flynn’s protagonist in “Sharp Objects”]. [The director added:] ‘I noticed her voice dropped a few notes and her way of walking changed…’ ”

[The article goes on to explain:] “To create a believable performance, many actors jettison their own personality, hoping their character will seize the resulting void like a territorial spirit. During the making of ‘Lincoln,’ Daniel Day-Lewis was so thoroughly consumed by his presidential portrayal that Sally Field, who played Mary Todd Lincoln in the film, later claimed she’s ‘never met him.’

“Some have noted that most method actors…take pride in burying themselves in work…‘Oh, my gosh, the demons they must take on!’ Ms. Flynn said.” (Her mocking metaphor of demon possession is an old theory to explain multiple personality.)

The above, commonly made remarks about actors and acting, make actors seem like a group that might have a high percentage with multiple personality, like fiction writers. So I have often been tempted to write about actors, but compared to writers, actors have very little written either by or about them.

Gillian Flynn’s first novel “Sharp Objects” is HBO mini-series: Both “Sharp Objects” and “Gone Girl” have protagonists with multiple personality

Actress Amy Adams will play Camille in the HBO mini-series based on Gillian Flynn’s first novel, “Sharp Objects”: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/arts/television/amy-adams-hollywood-sharp-objects.html

October 29, 2016

Gillian Flynn retrospective: In “Gone Girl” and “Sharp Objects” (Flynn’s first novel) the protagonist has gratuitous or unacknowledged multiple personality.

As you will see in the following two past posts, Gone Girl has “gratuitous multiple personality,” which means that a character has multiple personality, but it is not recognized as such by any character or narrator, and it plays no intentional part in the plot or character development. Sharp Objects has “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which means that the character’s multiple personality is integral to character development, but no character or narrator recognizes that this character has multiple personality, per se.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: The Author Doesn’t Know That Her Character Has Multiple Personality

Amy discovers that her husband, Nick, is unfaithful. To take revenge, she leaves home—thus the title, Gone Girl—and stages her disappearance to look like he has killed her and disposed of the body.

So it is astoundingly inconsistent when Amy tells the reader that she is planning to kill herself, and will do so in a way that her body will never be found. Why would she kill herself after successfully taking revenge? And if she is going to kill herself anyway, why not ensure Nick’s conviction for murder by providing her dead body to the police?

If you haven’t read Gone Girl, you might wonder how a story with such amateurish inconsistencies could get published. But if you recall my post on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, you can guess the answer. The novel is otherwise so well written that the reader ignores or makes excuses for the inconsistencies.

Now, when I say that the author doesn’t know that Amy has multiple personality, I must qualify that statement by saying that the author has partial insight, and sometimes seems to be intentionally providing clues to Amy’s multiple personality. For example, Nick recalls that Amy had once taken singing lessons from a Paula, and knew a Jessie from a fashion-design course. “But then I’d ask about Jessie or Paula a month later, and Amy would look at me like I was making up words” (1, p. 46). This implies that Amy’s regular personality had amnesia for what her singing and fashion-design personalities had been doing.

Amy says, “The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities…I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they’re too lazy or stupid to pull off a switch” (1, p. 222).

And Nick is not totally oblivious to Amy’s deep changeability. He says, “She’s like this endless archeological dig: You think you’ve reached the final layer, and then you bring down your pick one more time, and you break through to a whole new mine shaft beneath. With a maze of tunnels and bottomless pits” (1, pp.253-254).

At one point, Amy distinguishes between two personalities, herself and another “I,” who has come into play since she faked her death. She says, speaking about a man named Jeff: “I wonder if ‘I’ might like sleeping with him” (1, p. 282). “I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit piscine economy, but ‘I’ am fairly interested. How many women can say they were part of a fish-smuggling ring? ’I’ am game. I have become game again since I died…‘I’ can do pretty much anything. A ghost has that freedom” (1, p. 286). Note: She has become game again, meaning that this other “I” personality, who is game for things that her regular self isn’t, had been present in the past, before she staged her death.

Why, then, do I say that Gillian Flynn has only partial insight to Amy’s multiple personality? After all, she has Amy explicitly say (see above), “I change personalities.” But she then says—like Philip Roth in his Paris Review interview (see past post)—“I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it.”

Well, it may be fair to say that “most people” do this (have multiple personality) if by “people” you are referring to novelists only. As I have previously said, I would guess that 90% of novelists have multiple personality (a normal version of it). But most of the general public don’t (only 30% has the normal version, and 1.5% the mental disorder).

In the last third of the novel, Gillian Flynn does not make a point of Amy’s multiple personality. (Except that Amy abruptly changes her mind and doesn’t kill herself, since, evidently, only one of her personalities was suicidal.) This suggests that the author’s earlier clues and references to multiple personality were just her conception of normal psychology, based on knowing herself, another great novelist. [At the time this post was written, the blog was called, "Great Novelists have Multiple Personality.]

1. Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl. New York, Crown Publishers, 2012.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects: As in Gone Girl and Dark Places, the protagonist has multiple personality, but in this novel it is the title issue

The plot of Sharp Objects is about solving several murders—which turn out to have been committed by the protagonist’s mother and half sister—all of which serves to dramatize the protagonist’s traumatic childhood.

The novel’s main issue is indicated by the title, Sharp Objects, which refers, not to the murders, but to the knives and razor blades used by the protagonist, Camille, to cut and scar her skin since childhood. (As readers of this blog know, multiple personality begins in a traumatic childhood).

Camille has a history of being psychiatrically hospitalized for self-cutting. She has a beautiful face, but scars from self-cutting cover her body from the neck down. She is no longer cutting, but her urge to cut continues throughout the novel.

A few brief quotes from a textbook on multiple personality will help you to understand what I will then quote from the novel.

Self-Cutting in Multiple Personality

“Self-mutilation—typically cutting with glass or razor blades, or burning with cigarettes or matches—occurs in at least a third of MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients. The percentage of self-mutilators is probably much higher, because this behavior is often not reported to therapists and is rarely spontaneously discovered except by physical examination” (1, p. 64).

“The sites of self-mutilation in MPD are often hidden from casual examination and commonly include upper arms (hidden by long sleeves), back, inner thighs, breasts, and buttocks. Self-mutilation frequently takes the form of delicate self-cutting with razor blades or fragments of glass” (1, p. 89).

“…persecutor personalities are found in the majority of MPD patients. The persecutor personalities usually direct their acts of hostility toward the host [regular] personality…Suicide is an ever-present issue with multiples. The internal persecutors may be threatening to commit suicide themselves, threatening to kill the host (internal homicide), or urging or commanding the host to kill himself or herself…Self-mutilation by persecutors to punish the host or other alters is common” (1, pp. 205-206).

In this blog, suicide in multiple personality was seen in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Internal homicide was my interpretation of Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen.” Self-cutting has not been discussed in the blog previously.

Camille’s Skin Speaks

Camille has carved specific words into her skin. The words are not experienced by her as being her own thoughts. They just seem to come to her or appear on her skin or are “screamed” at her, and she feels the urge to take sharp objects and cut these words into her skin.

The fact that these are specific words, not just feelings, suggests that they are communications from some sort of thinker. The compulsion to carve them into her skin might indicate that the thinker wants his or her thoughts to be taken seriously and remembered.

Actually, there seems to be more than one thinker behind these words, since the “words” are sometimes described as “squabbling at each other”:

“I am a cutter…My skin, you see, screams. It’s covered with words—cook, cupcake, kitty, curls—as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh…my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked…The problem started long before that…The last word I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body…Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in. I stayed at the hospital twelve weeks. It’s a special place for people who cut, almost all of them women, most under twenty-five. I went when I was thirty” (2, pp. 60-63).

Camille is not psychotic. But how can a person who is not psychotic have the subjective experiences and overt behavior described above? The likely explanation is that she gets these messages from, and is pushed to self-cut by, one or more alternate personalities.

However, if she were a real person coming to me for psychiatric evaluation, I would not make the diagnosis of multiple personality unless and until I actually met and interviewed one or more alternate personalities (without using any drugs or hypnosis).

For example, I might look at the words carved into her skin, choose one, and, since Camille says that she didn’t think up that word, I would ask, “Who said [specific word]?” If she had multiple personality, then in reaction to my question I would see a change in demeanor, the alternate personality involved with that specific word would identify herself, and the alter would be able to provide verifiable information previously unknown to my patient.

Does Gillian Flynn understand Camille?

She would if she had mechanically constructed the character, but most novelists don’t get their characters that way. I would guess that she had read of, or knew, someone who was a cutter; that the idea incubated in her mind; and that one day the character came alive for her. So I think it unlikely that Flynn has any deep psychological understanding of the character.

What about my theory that novelists have a normal version of multiple personality and that they use it to write their novels? Well, I do believe that, but that doesn’t mean most novelists know they have multiple personality or that I know what part it played in the writing of any particular novel.

As I have said in previous posts, apart from my analyses of Gone Girl and Dark Places, the only things I know about Gillian Flynn are that her favorite mystery novelist is Agatha Christie (see my posts on Christie), and that, as a child, one of Flynn’s favorite movies was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which the main character has multiple personality.

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

2. Gillian Flynn. Sharp Objects. New York, Broadway Paperbacks, 2006.

“Self-Blurbing” by Author’s Pseudonym: Publisher and friends probably think it a joke, but alternate personalities may sincerely appreciate each other

Self-Blurbing

To the Editor:

Michael Ondaatje’s wonderful story (By the Book, June 17) about the “self-blurb” the crime novelist Donald Westlake gave his own book, written under his Richard Stark pseudonym, “I wish I had written this book,” is not unique. In 1955, Evan Hunter published “Murder in the Navy” under his Richard Marsten pseudonym with this self-blurb: “‘Superb Suspense!’ says Evan Hunter, author of ‘The Blackboard Jungle’”…

Richard Dannay

New York

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/books/review/letters-to-the-editor.html

Plato, Euripides, New Testament: In ancient world, not only Homer’s Odyssey had multiple personality or its literary metaphor, the theme of the double

In December 2017, I discussed multiple personality in Homer’s Odyssey, but in 2014 and 2015, I cited it in Plato, Euripides, and The New Testament.

June 28, 2014

Plato and Euripides say Helen of Troy had Multiple Personality

If multiple personality is a real, observable, psychological phenomenon—and not just a modern fad—it should be reflected in the history of literature, even in antiquity. And since multiple personality is often represented in literature by the theme of the double, it would be interesting to know how far back that theme goes.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey say that Helen really went to Troy. But there was another version of that story in Ancient Greece, one in which it was Helen’s double, and not Helen herself, who went to Troy.

Plato, in both his Phaedrus and Republic, cites Stesichorus’s Palinode, which is a recantation of Homer’s story that Helen went to Troy. According the Stesichorus version, which is dramatized in Euripides’ play, Helen, it was not Helen, herself, who went to Troy, but only her eidolon (ghost, shadow, image, phantom), which impersonated her.

“In 412/411 B.C.E. [Euripides] produced Helen, a play in which he takes up the theme of the eidolon, to dramatize two confrontations—the one in the mind of Menelaus between the true Helen and her fickle double, and the other between Helen herself and the image of her for which the Greeks and Trojans fought at Troy…Euripides’ Helen is the only surviving treatment of the phantom-Helen theme from antiquity…splitting Helen into her self and her image…Across the Greek world the disjunction between essence and phenomena was the chief topic of conversation among the philosophers and mathematicians, and one of the principal themes of Athenian tragedy. What plot more topical in late fifth-century Athens than the story of a woman divided into her real and her imaginary selves?” (1, pp. 8-9).

Of course, Plato and Euripides did not use the term “multiple personality,” but the theme of the double is close enough.

1. Austin, Norman. Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994.

February 11, 2015

Theme of the Double (Multiple Personality) in The New Testament: Jesus’s Exorcism of Two Demoniacs in The Gospel According to Matthew

Dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) is defined as a “disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession” (1, p. 292).

The most famous case of possession in The New Testament is that of the Gerasene demoniac, described in Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20, and Luke 8:26-39.

In Mark: “Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’”

In Luke: “Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him.”

However, in Matthew, when Jesus came, “two demoniacs met him” (2).

Thus, Mark and Luke represent multiple personality as one person who has more than one identity. But Matthew, in describing the same event, uses the literary device known as the theme of the double, in which two identities of one person are incarnated as separate people, as in Dostoevsky’s The Double.

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

2. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (Editors). The Oxford Annotated Bible: Revised Standard Version Containing the Old and New Testaments. New York, Oxford University Press, 1962.

“The Illusion of Independent Agency” (Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own) by Marjorie Taylor, et al.

Abstract

“The illusion of independent agency occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, and/or actions. Children often report this sort of independence in their descriptions of imaginary companions…Fifty fiction writers were interviewed…Ninety-two percent…reported at least some experience of the illusion of independent agency…As a group, the writers scored higher than population norms in…dissociation…” (1).

Note: Multiple personality, a.k.a. dissociative identity, a dissociative neurosis, uses the psychological defense mechanism of dissociation.

Article’s Introduction

“…When we surveyed accounts of the writing process, we were struck by the numbers of authors who described having personal relationships with their characters and imagined conversations with them. For example…Alice Walker reported having lived for a year with her characters Celie and Shug while writing the novel The Color Purple. Walker writes, ‘We would sit…and talk. They were very obliging, engaging, and jolly…Things that made me sad, often made them laugh. Oh, we got through that; don’t pull such a long face, they’d say.’

“In these accounts, writers describe their characters as autonomous beings who exist and act outside of their authors’ control and have minds of their own. They arrive fully formed…and are resistant to change. For example, when J. K. Rowling, the author of the…Harry Potter books…was asked…why she made her main character a boy, she answered that she had tried to make him a girl…But…'He was very real to me as a boy…I never write and say, ‘OK, now I need this sort of character.’ My characters come to me in this sort of mysterious process that no one really understands, they just pop up’…

“Some writers report that their novel seems to be dictated to them, or that the characters are the ones who are working out the plot. This sort of description is quite common and can be found in interviews and writings of authors as varied as Henry James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, Kurt Vonnegut, Sue Grafton, and Quentin Tarantino…” (1).

My Comment

The principal author of this study, Marjorie Taylor, a developmental psychologist, is an expert on imaginary companions in children. And I seem to remember reading somewhere that it was a question from the audience of one her lectures on imaginary companions that prompted her to do this study. The question may have asked whether imaginary companions and/or a writer’s characters were anything like alternate personalities in multiple personality.

In her study of fifty fiction writers, the measure of dissociation that she used was Bernstein and Putnam’s Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), whose Putnam is Frank W. Putnam, M.D., author of Diagnosis & Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (New York, The Guilford Press, 1989), the textbook I have frequently cited in this blog. But Taylor’s article makes no mention of multiple personality.

In her book on imaginary companions in children, she says that they differ from the alternate personalities of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality) in that they don’t take over, and there are no memory gaps. But, she would acknowledge, in getting a history of imaginary companions, you sometimes have to rely on parents, because later, some children don’t remember them. And when she says they don’t take over, she is forgetting her own description of children’s “impersonation of an imaginary character.” Moreover, as Prof. Taylor notes, “In some cases, an alter personality can be traced back to the imaginary companion of a child” (2, p. 82).

So while it is true that the imaginary companions of most children do not mean that they have clinical multiple personality, she misses the possibility that multiple personality may have a nonclinical, normal version: multiple personality trait, as opposed to multiple personality disorder. And I think that is what she found in 92% of fifty fiction writers.

1. Marjorie Taylor, Sara D. Hodges, Adèle Kohányi. “The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?” Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol. 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003.

2. Marjorie Taylor. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Best study ever done by psychologists on the psychology of creative writing is ignored by all 31 psychologists in book, “The Psychology of Creative Writing”

Please use either of the following links to see the original article discussing that best study, "The Illusion of Independent Agency" (meaning characters seem to have minds of their own):

http://imaginarycompanions.uoregon.edu/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf

http://socialcognitionlab.uoregon.edu/files/2013/03/Taylor-Hodges-Kohanyi_2003-2b6wdel.pdf

September 30, 2015

“The Illusion of Independent Agency” by Taylor, Hodges, Kohanyi: The best article ever published by psychologists on the psychology of creative writing

I first cited the article in my post of August 18, 2013:

The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do adult fiction writers experience their

characters as having minds of their own?

Marjorie Taylor, Sara D. Hodges, Adele Kohanyi [see below]

Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003

Yes, ninety-two percent of the fifty fiction writers did experience that. They interacted with, and heard the voices of, their characters. They provided dramatic examples of characters who not only composed their own life histories, but also attempted to take control of the plot away from the writer. Some of the characters were even experienced by the writers as “leaving the pages of the writers’ stories to inhabit the writers’ everyday worlds (e.g., wandering around the house).”

Of course, the article itself is much richer than the above blurb. And so here are two links to the complete, original article:

http://imaginarycompanions.uoregon.edu/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf

http://socialcognitionlab.uoregon.edu/files/2013/03/Taylor-Hodges-Kohanyi_2003-2b6wdel.pdf

This classic article, like this blog, is not just for psychologists, but for anyone interested in how fiction is actually written.

Scott Barry Kaufman, James C. Kaufman (Eds.) The Psychology of Creative Writing: None of 31 contributors cites “The Illusion of Independent Agency” [including co-author of latter]

John Baer               Jane Piirto

Michael V. Barrios      Jonathan A. Plucker

Genevieve E. Chandler   Samaneh Pourjalali

James C. Kaufman        Steven R. Pritzker

Scott Barry Kaufman     Mark A. Runco

Adele Kohanyi           Sandra W. Russ

Aaron Kozbelt           R. Keith Sawyer

E. Thomas Lawson        Pat Schneider

Martin S. Lindauer      Janel D. Sexton

Todd Lubart             Dean Keith Simonton

David Jung McGarva      Jerome L. Singer

Sharon S. McKool        E. M. Skrzynecky

Daniel Nettle           Robert J. Sternberg

James W. Pennebaker     Ai-Girl Tan

Susan K. Perry          Grace R. Waitman

                        Thomas B. Ward

It is not just that none of these eminent scholars cited that specific article—“The Illusion of Independent Agency” (2) (and see earlier post today)—but that none of them discussed the kinds of things reported in that article; i.e., the kinds of things that fiction writers commonly say about how their mind works in their creative writing process.

Why do these 31 brilliant scholars have this blindspot? Probably because they have no theory or framework—like Multiple Identity Literary Theory (the theory of this blog)—within which “the illusion of independent agency” makes sense.

Indeed, the authors of the article I’m praising evidently did not fully appreciate that what they call “the illusion of independent agency” is the essence of multiple personality, and that what they found in 92% of fifty fiction writers is a normal version of that.

1. Scott Barry Kaufman, James C. Kaufman (Editors). The Psychology of Creative Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

2. Marjorie Taylor, Sara D. Hodges, Adele Kohanyi. “The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?” Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol. 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003.

“Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 4): Some people have transsexualism, others have multiple personality, but some may have both

Three Possibilities

People seeking sex reassignment surgery are screened for multiple personality, because there have been cases in which multiple personality was the actual problem.

It is generally thought that a person has either one condition or the other. And I have no reason to doubt that some people have transsexualism with no multiple personality, and that other people have multiple personality with no transsexualism.

But if you are born with transsexualism, and have it during childhood, the social difficulties could be traumatic, and since some children cope with trauma by developing multiple personality, there would probably be some fraction of the transsexual population who have developed multiple personality, secondarily.

I’m Looking Through You

The memoir’s full title is I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted. Perhaps the title alludes to the Lennon/McCartney lyric, which begins:

I'm looking through you, where did you go?

I thought I knew you, what did I know?

You don't look different, but you have changed

I'm looking through you, you're not the same

But since Boylan does look different, I don’t see how that song would apply. Except that the woman Boylan sees in the mirror is translucent, and the title could be the host personality’s view through the translucent alternate personality.

Another possibility is that “I’m looking through you” is the perspective of an alternate personality, who is inside, looking out through the eyes of the host personality.

“Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 3): Had the alternate personality in the mirror gotten the body remade in her own image?

I see two defendable interpretations, a skeptical one and multiple personality.

Skeptical

Since standard medical practice would include an evaluation for multiple personality before going ahead with sex reassignment surgery, the author has already been evaluated for multiple personality and found not to have it. (Of course, the validity of that finding would depend on what questions they asked her and how truthfully she answered them.)

Multiple Personality

The following passage, from near the end of the memoir, could be interpreted to mean that the alternate personality, previously seen in the mirror, and now seen once again, had succeeded in getting the body remade in her own image:

“I looked up, and there she was, just as in days long past. Floating in the mirror was the translucent old woman in the white clothes. I hadn’t seen her reflected there for years and years, but there she was once more, looking at me with that surprised expression I remembered from my childhood. Why, Jenny Boylan. What are you doing here?

“Except that, as I stared at her, I realized that it was no ghost. After all this time, I was only looking at my own reflection.

“Against all odds, I had become solid.

“Was it possible, I thought, as I looked at the woman in the mirror, that it was some future version of myself I’d seen here when I was a child? From the very beginning, had I only been haunting myself?” (1, p. 249).

Conclusion

Although I’m inclined to interpret “ghosts” and strange reflections in the mirror as alternate personalities, I can’t make a definitive diagnosis here.

1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (A Memoir). New York, Broadway Books, 2008.

Absent-mindedness in “Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 2): Author works as bank teller and misplaces ten thousand dollars

As I continue to read this memoir, I’m on the alert for multiple personality types of memory problems: memory gaps, dissociative fugues, or striking examples of absent-mindedness.

One possible example of the latter is when the author works as a bank teller and misplaces $10,000 by the coffeemaker (1, p. 162). This is the climax of repeated incidents of carelessness in money handling, told as an amusing anecdote of absent-mindedness, possibly due to the author’s preoccupation with writing a poem between customers.

Absent-mindedness is usually nothing more than being preoccupied, but please search “absent-minded” for examples of its relation to multiple personality.

1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (A Memoir). New York, Broadway Books, 2008.

“Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan: Asks why person with gender dysphoria, a condition without visual hallucinations, would see “ghosts”

Professor Boylan (1, 2) had already published a memoir about the resolution of gender dysphoria by sex reassignment surgery, so her next memoir, I’m Looking Through You, Growing Up Haunted (3), was meant to raise a separate issue: why she had seen “ghosts” (4).

“I do not believe in ghosts, although I have seen them with my own eyes…Maybe someday researchers will tell us more about what makes people see things that are not there…In the meantime, when it comes to ghosts…we’re all pretty much on our own” (3, p. 107).

Two ghosts she had seen, while he was growing up (prior to sex reassignment surgery), were a young girl standing before him, and an older woman when he looked in the mirror.

If visual hallucinations cannot be accounted for by a neurological condition, medical condition, or psychosis, then the cause may be multiple personality, especially if the person is a novelist, playwright, or poet.

Search visual hallucinations, ghost, ghosts, mirror, and mirrors.

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

2. https://barnard.edu/profiles/jennifer-boylan

3. Jennifer Finney Boylan. I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (A Memoir). New York, Broadway Books, 2008.

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/opinion/31boylan.html

“Me and My Shadows” by Fay Weldon: Essay, anthologized the same year she was chair of judges for the Booker Prize, declares she has multiple personality

Fay Weldon CBE FRSL is an English author, essayist, feminist, playwright, and professor of creative writing, who has published over forty books through 2017. She was chair of judges for the 1983 Booker Prize. —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Weldon

Here are two interesting past posts:

March 25, 2016

Fay Weldon—like J.K. Rowling, Iris Murdoch, Charlotte Brontë—has male writer, alternate personality, says Weldon in “Me and My Shadows” (1983 essay)

As discussed in past posts, J. K. Rowling writes books under a male pseudonym (Robert Galbraith); Iris Murdoch wrote books with male, first-person narrators; and Charlotte Brontë used male pseudonyms since childhood. Of course, male writers may have opposite-sex alternate personalities, too: As Gustave Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary c'est moi.”

Before quoting from Weldon’s more explicit essay, let me cite her memoir, which covers her first thirty-two years (1931-1963), for what it indicates about her dissociative (split personality) tendencies.

Auto da Fey (Memoir)

Weldon describes her split sense of self during her first sexual intercourse: “…before I knew it spirit had split from body, I had in some way de-materialized, and was hovering in the top left-hand corner of the room looking down…” (1, p. 201).

Throughout this memoir, Weldon uses the first person, except for thirty-one pages: “It is around this juncture that the first person begins to seem inappropriate to the tale and changes into the third. An ‘I’ for Davies/Bateman is not possible to incorporate into the current Weldon at all. Franklin Birkinshaw [her birth name] can be osmosed, Fay Franklin Davies acknowledged, but [Mrs] Fay Bateman is more than the current ‘I’ can bear” (1, p. 283).

“Mrs Bateman, previously Davies, née Birkinshaw, found herself able to resume the first person again. She was Fay Bateman, not Mrs Bateman any more. She could put her adventures as a married woman behind her and pick up where she left off” (1, p. 314).

If you think that this change from first person to third person and back to first person is just a feminist statement about her marriage, and not indicative of multiple personalities, read what she says next, in her essay.

“Me and My Shadows” (1983 essay)

“…How else other than in terms of split personality am I to explain…at the end of a week in which I cannot remember having written at all, typescript is neatly stacked waiting for delivery — neatly, when I am neat in nothing else? Or that when I read for the first time what I have written it comes to me as something new?…

“[Personality] A lives a kind of parody of an NW lady writer’s life. Telephones ringing, washing machine overflowing, children coming and going, and so on. B does the writing. B is very stern, male (I think), hard working, puritanical, obsessive and unsmiling. C is depressive, and will sit for days staring into space, inactive, eating too much bread and butter, called into action only by the needs of children. A knows about C but very little about B. B knows about A and C and in fact controls them, sending them out into the world to gather information but otherwise despising them. C is ignorant of A and B — and although A and B leave her notes, advising her at least to tidy the drawers or sort the files so as not to waste too much of the lifespan, C has not the heart or spirit to act on them…the writing of fiction, for me, is the splitting of the self into myriad parts. It’s being author, characters, readers, everyone…” (2, p. 162).

In short, Fay Weldon is another successful writer with her own, normal version of multiple personality.

1. Fay Weldon. Auto da Fay. New York, Grove Press, 2002.

2. Fay Weldon. “Me and My Shadows,” pp. 160-165, in On Gender and Writing, Edited by Michelene Wandor. London, Pandora Press, 1983.

March 30, 2016

Contrasting Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Fay Weldon’s Splitting: Implicit, Literary, Multiple Personality vs. Explicit, Commercial, Multiple Personality

In past posts, I cited a number of literary scholars who associated Virginia Woolf with multiple personality. And I quoted Fay Weldon’s essay on her own multiple personality.

Earlier today, I cited literary scholars, and Woolf herself, on the multiple personality implicit in The Waves. Also, I recently read Weldon’s Splitting, a marital farce revolving around the protagonist’s explicit multiple personality.

Conventional wisdom is that multiple personality is a cheap gimmick used in commercial fiction. But I have found that multiple personality is relatively common in literary fiction. However, its presence is not acknowledged in the text, and it is usually unrecognized in reviews and criticism. In literary fiction like The Waves, whether or not you figure out that multiple personality is at issue, you come away with a feeling of psychological, philosophical, and/or spiritual depth: unacknowledged multiple personality is one thing that makes literary fiction seem literary.

Compared to Woolf’s The Waves, Weldon’s Splitting, a commercial novel, is not taken seriously. The multiple personality in Splitting is explicit and the plot is a madcap comedy. But you can understand how the author of the essay “Me and My Shadows” (see previous post), about Weldon’s own multiple personality, would write a novel like Splitting. Weldon knows what she is talking about.

I’m guessing that Woolf did not understand herself as well as Weldon understands herself. Or that Woolf had multiple personality disorder (a mental illness) and Weldon the normal version. Or that Woolf had both multiple personality and bipolar disorder; although, sometimes the former is mistakenly diagnosed as the latter.