BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Visual Hallucinations in Multiple Personality: Anton Chekhov short story on Genius, Clinical Case, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Biography of Charles Dickens 

January 24, 2017
Genius, Multiple Personality, and Visual Hallucinations in “The Black Monk” by Anton Chekhov: a short story about pseudopsychosis in the creative process.

The protagonist, Andrei Vassilyich Kovrin, who is a rising star at the university—“I teach psychology, but I’m generally concerned with philosophy”—is the one who hallucinates the black monk and aspires to be a genius. But it is Yegor Semyonych Pesotsky (now an old man, who had raised the orphaned Kovrin as a child) who is the one that is actually famous (for his gardens) and considered a genius (in horticulture). So Chekhov’s portrayal of the old man will be considered first.

“Yegor Semyonych…It was now as if two persons were sitting in him: one was the real Yegor Semyonych…and the other not the real one…The unreal Semyonych sighed and, after a pause went on…But here the real Yegor Semyonych would recollect himself, make a terrible face, clutch his head, and shout…” (1, p. 241).

To repeat, this old man is the only character who has actually achieved genius status, and there is never any question of his sanity. Chekhov had no reason to include the above about the old man’s “two persons” except to establish the link between multiple personality and genius, free and clear of any question of madness.

As to the monk that Kovrin hallucinates and converses with, it is repeatedly emphasized that Kovrin recognizes him as unreal. Indeed, the monk himself says so: “I exist in your imagination” (1, p. 237). Since by definition a hallucination is perceived as real, not imaginary, this is a pseudohallucination (the same as when a novelist converses with his characters). And as the monk tells Kovrin, “how do you know that people of genius, whom the whole world believes, did not also see phantoms?” (1, p. 238).

Readers should not be misled by the fact that Kovrin, himself, accepts the idea that he is mad and needs treatment. He regrets the treatment, which he feels has made him a “mediocrity…How lucky Buddha and Mohammed and Shakespeare were that their kind relations did not treat them for ecstasy and inspiration!” (1, p. 246).

1. Anton Chekhov. Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Modern Library, 2000.

January 16, 2017
“The Story of Ruth” by Morton Schatzman, M.D.: Case history of woman referred to psychiatrist, because she had disturbing visual hallucinations of her father.

“Ruth” (a pseudonym) is a twenty-five-year-old married mother who is referred to a psychiatrist by her physician, because she has frightening visual hallucinations of her father, who, she has always remembered, had sexually assaulted her when she was ten.

As Dr. Schatzman, the psychiatrist, says in his introduction, “This is a true story. Some of the incidents are extraordinary, but they actually happened. Whenever I was with Ruth, I carried a pen and paper or an audiotape machine to record what occurred. All the conversations that appear here are reported verbatim or nearly so.”

He calls her life-like visual hallucinations “apparitions,” and it turns out that Ruth has had the ability to make apparitions of people she knows “all my life” (1, p. 99). She can voluntarily see life-like apparitions of her friend Becky, and of Dr. Schatzman, too.

Ruth notices that “I sometimes forget my experiences of an apparition unless I make a particular effort to remember it.” And “they’ve got personalities,” Ruth commented. “I can’t make them do what they don’t want to do, or keep them from doing what they want to do. They’re like real people” (1, p. 122).

Ruth finds that she can see her father’s face when she looks in the mirror (1, p. 137). (Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog to see past posts on persons with multiple personality, who may see alternate personalities when they look in the mirror.) And Ruth is soon observed to switch from her own personality to that of her father. Indeed, the “father” personality carries on conversations with the psychiatrist (1, pp. 138-141). Moreover, Ruth has amnesia [for those conversations]: “I can’t remember anything after I started to feel his feelings” (1, p. 158).

Thus, Ruth has the two cardinal symptoms of multiple personality: 1. switching to an alternate personality, and 2. memory gaps (amnesia).

[She later tells Dr. Schatzman that she aspires to be a writer. What a coincidence!]

1. Morton Schatzman, M.D. The Story of Ruth. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980.

August 1, 2014
Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 3, Sc 4): The Ghost—Rational, Person-Like, Seen/Heard only by Hamlet—His Alternate Personality

My last post argued that Shakespeare’s gratuitous, unnecessary use of a ghost at the beginning of the play was in itself suggestive of the author’s multiple personality. My argument is bolstered in Act 3, Scene 4, when it is revealed—to anyone who knows about multiple personality—that the Ghost is not really a ghost, but is one of Hamlet’s alternate personalities.

The scene is a meeting between Prince Hamlet and his mother, Queen Gertrude. When the Ghost enters, Hamlet sees and hears it, but his mother does not. She takes his hallucination as clear evidence that he is psychotic. But her diagnosis is incorrect, since she doesn’t understand the difference between hallucinations in psychosis and hallucinations in multiple personality.

“The hallucinatory voices of MPD [multiple personality disorder] often carry on lengthy discussions that seem coherent and logical to the patient. This ‘secondary process’ [rational] quality can help to distinguish them from the more ‘primary process’ [irrational] voices reported by schizophrenic patients…MPD patients may also [visually] hallucinate their alter personalities as separate people existing outside of their bodies” (1, p. 62).

Let me give a real-life example of that kind of hallucination from one of the great novelists who had multiple personality, Charles Dickens, previously quoted in this blog. As recorded in Forster’s biography, Dickens tells about a vision he had when he was once on the road to Canterbury, was nearing the house called Gadshill-place, and he thought he saw, standing by the road, a strange young boy:

“Holloa!” said I [Dickens], to the very queer small boy, “where do you live?”
“At Chatham,” says he.
“What do you do there?” says I.
“I go to school,” says he.
    I took him up [into his carriage] in a moment, and we went on [Dickens recalls]. Presently, the very queer small boy says, “This is Gads-hill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran away.”
“You know something about Falstaff, eh?” said I.
“All about him,” said the very queer small boy. “I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!”
“You admire that house?” said I.
“Bless you, sir,” said the very queer small boy, “when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now I am nine, I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it. Though that’s impossible!” said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his might.
    I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy [Dickens recalls]; for that house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true (2, pp. 4-5).

Thus, Dickens, in real life, conversed with a “ghost,” which was actually a child-aged alternate personality.

And so it is that people who are not psychotic, but do have multiple personality, may very well have the kind of experience with “ghosts” that Hamlet does.

1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
2. John Forster. The Life of Charles Dickens. Vol. I. London, Chapman and Hall, 1874.

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