“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.