“Splitting the Difference” by Wendy Doniger: Hindu and Greek myths teem with doubled and split characters, literary metaphors for multiple personality

In Splitting the Difference, Wendy Doniger, Professor of the History of Religions, has a few pages on multiple personality, but it is a brief, minor detour. Her thesis is gender:

“Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are given doubles, who double themselves, who are seduced by gods doubling as mortals, whose bodies are split or divided…Myth, Doniger argues, responds to the complexities of the human condition by multiplying or splitting its characters into unequal parts, and these sloughed and cloven selves animate mythology’s prodigious plots of sexuality and mortality. Doniger’s comparisons show that ultimately differences in gender are more significant than differences in culture; Greek and Indian stories of doubled women resemble each other more than they do tales of doubled men in the same culture. In casting Hindu and Greek mythologies as shadows of each other, Doniger shows that culture is sometimes but the shadow of gender.” —from back cover of Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (The University of Chicago Press, 1999)

This book does raise issues of gender in the mythology of Ancient India and Greece, but it also shows the pervasiveness of literary metaphors for multiple personality.