Metaphor vs. Multiple Personality: Normal person has a “part” of her with its own opinion. Disturbed person “suddenly” becomes “completely different”

Both the normal survivor and the abnormal perpetrator of a life-threatening assault (1) may have had multiple personality: the survivor may have had multiple personality trait, while the perpetrator may have had multiple personality disorder.

The survivor says that a “part” of her had thought her life was over. And when people refer to “parts” of themselves with their own points of view, they may be referring to alternate personalities.

The perpetrator seemed to “suddenly” become “a completely different person,” which may describe a switch to an alternate personality.

“Part of me had already thought my life was over,” Ms. Birli, 27, said on Tuesday, a week after her waking nightmare…

…In a moment of quiet, “when he was not beating or threatening me,” she looked around, noticed the orchids and without thinking, commented on them. “I just threw it out there, that his orchids were so beautiful.”

She added that she had orchids as well, and knew how much care went into keeping the delicate blooms alive and thriving.

“Suddenly, he started talking about how he cared for them, using water from his aquarium,” she said. “Suddenly, he was a completely different person.”

It is possible that I am over-interpreting. I can’t be certain in this particular instance. But some common metaphors may be a veiled, unknowing reference to multiple personality.

1. Melissa Eddy. “She Thought He Would Kill Her. Then She Complimented His Orchids.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/world/europe/austria-cyclist-abducted.html

Writer’s Voice: a study of the voices heard by many fiction writers

I previously mentioned this study when Dr. Fernyhough’s book, The Voices Within, came out in 2016 (see my post below), but I just came across their website and podcast, which are interesting:

1. https://writersinnervoices.com/about/ 

2. Podcast. https://hearingthevoice.org/2019/01/15/new-podcast-writers-inner-voices-literary-voices-and-the-edinburgh-international-book-festival/ 

3. Introduction to Writer’s Inner Voices https://writersinnervoices.com/

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_International_Book_Festival

October 21, 2016

Not Clinical: “What’s Up With Those Voices in Your Head?” by Casey Schwartz in New York Times reviews Charles Fernyhough’s “The Voices Within”

The conventional view is that hearing voices is a symptom of psychoses like schizophrenia. However, as Dr. Fernyhough says, “the idea of hearing voices as…the archetypal symptom of schizophrenia seems problematic. Around three-quarters of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia” hear voices, “but so do a similar proportion of individuals with dissociative identity disorder [multiple personality]” (1, p. 122).

Dr. Fernyhough is a professor of psychology (2), but he is not a clinical psychologist. As he, himself, acknowledges, he has no experience working with patients (1, p. 125), either those with schizophrenic voices or those with multiple personality voices. So he doesn’t know that the voices described by writers (Dr. Fernyhough is also a novelist) are like the voices heard in multiple personality.

1. Charles Fernyhough. The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. New York, Basic Books, 2016.

2. Casey Schwartz. “What’s Up With Those Voices in Your Head?” The New York Times, October 20, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/books/review/voices-within-charles-fernyhough.html

Groups with High Concentration of Multiple Personality

Fiction writers may not be the only group with a high concentration of people who have multiple personality trait.

Do you know any other groups?

“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” by Michael Chabon (post 5): Novel Ends with Three Major Characters Interpreted as Protagonist’s Alternate Personalities

“…I know that Arthur lies behind the kindly, absent distance I maintain from other people, that behind each sudden, shocking breach of it lies Cleveland; I have from them my vocabulary, my dress, my love of idle talk…[and] as I have found that I may fall quite completely in love with a man—kiss, weep, give gifts—I have also discovered the trace a woman leaves, that Phlox left, and it is better than a man’s” (1, p. 295).

1. Michael Chabon. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. New York, Harper Perennial, 1988/2005.

“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” by Michael Chabon (post 4): Protagonist has a memory gap, but it causes no problem and seems unrelated to anything

On pages 214-239 (1), the protagonist finally has sex with his male lover, his girlfriend finds out about it, the protagonist says he loves both of them, and the three of them have at least a temporary falling out.

Coincidentally, on page 212, just before all that, is the novel’s first mention of the protagonist’s having a memory gap: “I swallowed half a beer without noticing. Cleveland [a male friend, but not his lover] and I were both dazed, though his daze was a kind of nervous reverie, whereas mine was more akin to a torpor. When I finally remarked the pale bread flavor of the beer in my mouth, I looked around the bar and did not remember having come in” (1).

Nothing further is made of his memory gap for having come in to the bar. He has never had a memory gap previously in this novel, drinking or not drinking. The men are in a “daze,” which is not a typical word for intoxication. The memory gap is treated as a trivial detail, mentioned in passing. Why, then, is this cardinal symptom of multiple personality included?

I have only what the first-person narrator says, and since he does not connect it to anything specific, neither can I. All I can say is that something involving alternate personalities is evidently going on.

You can see from this episode why memory gaps are rarely complained about or spontaneously mentioned by persons who are being evaluated by a psychiatrist or other interviewer. Most memory gaps seem to the person to have occurred for no particular reason, cause no particular problem, and are forgotten about, unless you specifically inquire about them.

1. Michael Chabon. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. New York, Harper Perennial, 1988/2005.

“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” by Michael Chabon (post 3): Is Parallel Bisexuality (vs. Serial Bisexuality) indicative of multiple personality?

Halfway through the novel, the main issue has been the protagonist’s puzzlement and conflict regarding his sexual orientation. He had long wondered if he were homosexual, since he has long felt attracted to men as well as women. Now, during the summer following his four years of college in Pittsburgh, he is in a loving sexual relationship with a woman, but is also in love with a man.

What strikes me is that these two relationships are happening at the same time, and that these are both loving relationships. It would be just as remarkable if he were in two loving heterosexual relationships at the same time. These are love relationships, not just sexual encounters.

So I’m entertaining the hypothesis that parallel bisexuality—love relationships with both men and women at the same time—may be indicative of multiple personality, because alternate personalities can do contradictory things.

It would help to confirm this hypothesis if the heterosexual protagonist had memory gaps for the gay protagonist. No such memory gaps have been mentioned. But many things in this novel have not been mentioned; for example, all the people he must know in Pittsburgh from the last four years.

“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” by Michael Chabon (post 2): Author’s essay on writing this novel speaks of “writing self,” bisexuality, and help from “muse”

“Writing Self”

When he was soon to start an MFA program where students were expected to write novels, Chabon wondered, “Had the time come to leave my current writing self behind?” His phrase would seem to indicate that he distinguished between his writing self and his regular self, and that he felt he could change from one writing self to another.

By “writing self,” could Chabon merely have meant writing style? He did think about emulating the styles of various famous writers. But why, then, didn’t he speak of leaving his current writing style behind?

Especially in a person who is careful about his choice of words, I would interpret “self” as implying a personality state, so that having and changing selves would be equivalent to having, and changing among, alternate personalities.

Why, then, didn’t he speak of his current writing personality? Either he didn’t realize the connection between self and personality (as in multiple personality) or he knowingly used “self” as a euphemism.

Bisexuality?

Chabon, who has been married since 1993 with four children, says that back at the time in his life on which this novel is based: “I slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him.”

I don’t know that Chabon has ever used the word “bisexual.” But he has said that people are difficult to categorize.

In posts last month, prompted by works of two other novelists, I discussed a possible connection between some instances of bisexuality and multiple personality, since many multiples have both male and female alternate personalities.

“Muse”

Referring to the time he started to work on this novel, Chabon jokingly speaks of getting “help” from a “ghost” or “muse.” Psychological truth is often spoken as if in jest. Spirits that “help” fiction writers, and are called “ghosts” or “muses,” are, in psychological terms, alternate personalities.

1. Michael Chabon. Author’s essay (2005) on writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988). New York, Harper Perennial, 1988/2005.

240 Fiction Writers:  Award-winning, bestselling, and/or literary, from antiquity to contemporary, and various cultures

No matter how brilliant and intelligent you are, you may need to read posts on dozens or even hundreds of writers before you conclude that I know what I’m talking about, and that it’s worth knowing. Fortunately, many of the writers and posts are enjoyable.

Earlier posts, from the past six years—whether about great writers and their works or about multiple personality—are among the most enjoyable.

Michael Chabon: Unintentional writer; likes liars with dual reality; childhood trauma; male friendship; encyclopedic memory; spontaneous characters

“I’m not at all an intentional writer. I don’t plan. I don’t think about how my writing will strike the reader…So it wasn’t until Ayelet [his wife] read the manuscript that I realized it was funny” (1, p. 6).

“I’m interested in liars. I always have been…I’ve always been interested in people who say they’re one thing and turn out to be another thing. I don’t know why—it’s just a motif that interests me, and then they are fun to write. It’s very entertaining to write a character who you get to actually give two biographies to, or two realities, or more…” (1, pp. 13-14).

“His mother, Sharon, now a lawyer, and father, Robert, a doctor, lawyer, and director of a medical center, divorced when he was eleven, a traumatic event he has described as ‘the worst thing that ever happened to me’ ” (1, pp. 16-17).

“I seem to choose to tell stories—and it feels like the stories choose me—about men and their relationships and friendships” (1, p. 18).

“Encyclopedism is definitely a part of my family. First and foremost, there’s my father, who knows everything…and at times in his life has deliberately set out to master various branches of knowledge…That was extremely valuable to me, too. I read the encyclopedia when I was a kid for fun. And I read the dictionary for fun. I discovered that I had fortunately inherited from my father his memory for things like that…I just can’t help it, in a sense” (1, p. 19).

“In the case of Mysteries, it is, as he says, the kind of expected semi-confessional first novel, a narrator close in many ways to myself” (1, p. 20).

“Some characters come together, from their aches and sources of those aches down to their smallest particulars of speech and dress, very quickly and effortlessly. And once I have a good sense of them, I can sort of sit back and let them do what they do” (1, p. 46).

I plan to buy his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which he started as a college student, then worked on in an MFA writing program: It was submitted for publication by the professor and became a bestseller. Chabon won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000).

1. Brannon Costello (Editor). Conversations with Michael Chabon. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2015.

“The Virgin Suicides” by Jeffrey Eugenides (post 2): Who is narrator? Why is he nameless? Why does namelessness suggest multiple personality?

Five teenage sisters commit suicide. Neither the sisters nor any other character is rounded or deeply understood. The narrator’s nostalgic conclusion is as follows:

“So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over backyard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists’ offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations…The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness…It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us…” (1, pp. 241-243).

Why is the speaker, the protagonist, the narrator, the only character who is nameless?

Nameless Narrator

The reader’s initial impression is that the narration is a first-person plural “Greek chorus,” a metaphor used by some reviewers, prompted by the author’s name. The narrator speaks of “we” and “us,” referring to a group of teenage boys who are neighbors and schoolmates of the five sisters.

But later in the novel, the nameless narrator, routinely and repeatedly, refers to each of the other boys in the group individually, by name, making it clear that the narrator is not a group. He is an individual, the group’s spokesman. Why, then, is he alone nameless? What makes him different?

My theory is that the narrator is the author’s literary “voice” alternate personality, discussed in the previous post. Namelessness is a common attribute of alternate personalities.

Search “nameless” for past posts on other writers.

1. Jeffrey Eugenides. The Virgin Suicides [1993]. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2018.

“The Virgin Suicides” by Jeffrey Eugenides: In video, author describes genesis of first novel as “dictated” by “literary voice.” What is literary voice?

Jeffrey Eugenides begins his brief video on writing his first novel, The Virgin Suicides, by talking about the “literary voice” that came to him. He describes it as a “mystical” experience that “dictates the novel” (1).

What is a literary voice? It is not a psychotic hallucination, since authors know, objectively, that it comes from their own mind. Yet it is not experienced as simply their own thought, their own ideas, or as a product of their own imagination. It seems to involve an independent intelligence that somehow, more or less, points in the right direction, or, as Eugenides says, dictates the novel.

If the literary voice were merely the author’s or narrator’s style, then it would have been called “literary style.” But it’s not called that, and to define it that way is to avoid and ignore the fiction writer’s subjective experience.

The extent to which the writer’s literary voice is an auditory experience, per se, will vary from writer to writer. Some writers say that they hear voices in their head. Others would not say that they hear them, because it comes from inside, not outside. But the defining attribute is that it does not feel like something they, themselves, have or would have, thought or imagined.

Since Eugenides recalls that a baby sitter had once mentioned to him that she and her sisters had contemplated suicide, why does he invoke the idea of a literary voice? Why doesn’t he simply say that the novel is his own elaboration of that idea?

Because that’s not how he experienced it. I would speculate that one of his alternate personalities did, out of his regular personality’s awareness, work on that idea, and was the voice for this novel that eventually came to him.

1. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/04/13/jeffrey-eugenides-on-the-virgin-suicides/

“The Perfect Child” by Lucinda Berry: Janie, six-year-old psychopath, may have multiple personality, even if the author hadn’t intended it

Janie is an abused and abandoned six-year-old girl. The police discover that her mother had been murdered. Her father is unknown. She is adopted by a doctor, Christopher, and a nurse, Hannah, who had been unable to have a child of their own.

It gradually becomes apparent, and is eventually learned, that Janie is a psychopath, who had killed her mother by slitting her throat; who kills her cat and likes to hurt people, because she enjoys seeing them in pain; and kills Hannah’s sister by pushing her down a flight of stairs.

The author, Dr. Lucinda Berry, is “a trauma psychologist and leading researcher in childhood trauma. She uses her clinical experience to create disturbing psychological thrillers, blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction. She enjoys taking her readers on a journey through the dark recesses of the human psyche” (1).

In an author interview from before she wrote this novel, Dr. Berry says that each of her novels is based on a different psychological condition. For example, one of her earlier novels had been about a child with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality), whose symptoms included memory gaps (2).

Thus, Dr. Berry intended The Perfect Child to be about a child whose psychological problem is psychopathy, not multiple personality. But it is possible that Janie has a psychopathic alternate personality.

Janie does not have memory gaps, as far as is known, but nobody ever asks her if she does. Indeed, the novel has very little about what Janie is thinking. Point of view switches from Hannah to Christopher to a social worker. No chapter is written from Janie’s point of view.

Raising the possibility that Janie has multiple personality are, 1. her puzzling inconsistency in maturity and ability to form relationships, as if she switched among alternate personalities of different ages and ability to relate, and 2. Hannah’s impression that Janie is possessed by a demon or the devil.

Janie can sometimes socialize as though she were quite normal. And she relates to Christopher in such a loving, enmeshing way that it keeps him loyal to her no matter what crimes she commits. But Janie is also known to have walked around with feces in her pants for days.

As to demon possession, Hannah’s diary includes the following: “I can see the demon in her eyes when I look at her…I heard her talking to it again today. In a different language. Latin? She thinks he’s funny. She says he’s the one who told her to put her poop on the walls. When the devil takes over, there is nothing you can do.”

Christopher, after reading the above in Hannah’s diary, says: “I stopped there, stunned. Hannah wasn’t a religious person, never had been. Her parents hadn’t brought her to church, not even on the holidays” (1, p. 301).

So was Hannah’s impression that Janie was possessed a symptom of Hannah’s own mental illness? Or was Hannah distinguishing between Janie’s host personality and Janie’s psychopathic alternate personality, who made Janie do bad things?

Comment

This novel may be another example of “unacknowledged multiple personality” (search past posts). 

Copyright

The author is Lucinda Berry. But the copyright is owned by Heather Berry. Who is she? Is one name or the other an alternate personality?

1. Lucinda Berry. The Perfect Child. Seattle, Thomas & Mercer, 2019.

2. Meet The Thriller Author, Hosted by Alan Peterson https://get.thrillingreads.com/mtta-62-lucinda-berry/

Added July 21, 2019

Psychopathy

“The current conceptualizations of psychopathy have been criticized for being poorly conceptualized, highly subjective, and encompassing a wide variety of underlying disorders. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D., has written:

‘…psychopathy and its synonyms (e.g., sociopathy and antisocial personality) are lazy diagnoses. Over the years the authors’ team has seen scores of offenders who, prior to evaluation by the authors, were dismissed as psychopaths or the like. Detailed, comprehensive psychiatric, neurological, and neuropsychological evaluations have uncovered a multitude of signs, symptoms, and behaviors indicative of such disorders as bipolar mood disorder, schizophrenia spectrum disorders, complex partial seizures, dissociative identity disorder [multiple personality disorder], parasomnia, and, of course, brain damage/dysfunction’ ” (1).

1. Wikipedia. “Psychopathy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association’s manual) lists symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality) in the wrong order

DSM-5 lists alternate personalities first and memory gaps second.

As implied by my recent post on “The Psychiatric Interview and Mental Status Examination,” chapter one of the American Psychiatric Association’s textbook of psychiatry, the first step in diagnosing multiple personality is, almost always, to elicit a history of memory gaps.

Multiple personality rarely presents with obvious alternate personalities (which usually stay inside during psychiatric interviews). You screen for multiple personality by looking for its footprints: the memory gaps that the host personality has for the periods of time that an alternate personality had come out.

So if DSM-5 had wanted to be helpful in diagnosing multiple personality, it would have listed its key symptoms (the “diagnostic criteria”) in this order: 1. memory gaps, 2. alternate personalities. For it is only after discovering memory gaps that a clinician will consider the possible presence of alternate personalities.

Indeed, you often make first contact with an alternate personality when you inquire as to what went on during a memory gap: the alternate personality who was out during that time may come out and tell you.

Then why do the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for dissociative identity disorder make the mistake of listing alternate personalities first and memory gaps second? Its reasons, whatever they are, are rationalizations. Any clinician who expects to see alternate personalities first will almost always miss the diagnosis.

Female Pseudonym of President Donald Trump: Persons with multiple personality often have both male and female alternate personalities

Since the last time I checked the Wikipedia entry, “Pseudonyms of Donald Trump” (1), it has added a female pseudonym, "Carolin Gallego,” which he used in a 1992 letter to New York Magazine:

“Based on the fact that I work for Donald Trump as his secretary — and therefore know him well — I think he treats women with great respect, contrary to what Julie Baumgold implied in her article … I do not believe any man in America gets more calls from women wanting to see him, meet him, or go out with him. The most beautiful women, the most successful women — all women love Donald Trump.—Carolin Gallego, December 7, 1992” (2).

I do not have the information I would need to diagnose multiple personality, but his use of pseudonyms raises the issue.

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

2. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/10/read-letters-to-new-york-from-spike-lee-and-donald-trump.html

Added later July 17: Trump's hair is not naturally blond. Who chooses to do that? Carolin?

“The American Psychiatric Association Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry, 7th Edition [2019]”: Its mental status exam will miss multiple personality

This textbook, published by the American Psychiatric Association, has a chapter on Dissociative Disorders, which includes Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder). But I am addressing the textbook’s first chapter, The Psychiatric Interview and Mental Status Examination, which is the textbook’s basic approach to making all psychiatric diagnoses.

The mental status examination includes an evaluation of memory. According to chapter one, it “screens for three types of memory dysfunction. Immediate recall…Recent or short-term memory…Long-term memory…Many patients with dementia will retain long-term memory, whereas patients with a dissociative disorder often present with clinically relevant memory gaps…” (p. 26).

It is saying that you should think of memory in the three traditional categories of immediate, short-term, and long-term, and that you should make sure to assess every patient for these types of memory. In the course of making that assessment, and in conducting the general interview, you may note a discrepancy characteristic of dementia (short-term worse than long-term). And if a patient “presents” with memory gaps, you should think of dissociative disorders like multiple personality.

When the textbook says that dissociative disorder patients “often present” with memory gaps, the implication is that memory gaps would be part of the patient’s “presenting problem” (the reason they came to see a psychiatrist) and/or it would be fairly obvious in the general interview.

Neither of those assumptions is true. You have to think of memory as having four categories: immediate, short, long, and gaps. And you have to explicitly ask patients (and people who know them) if they have memory gaps. Otherwise, you may never know, and never suspect that the patient has a dissociative disorder like multiple personality.

For previous discussions, search “memory gaps” and “mental status.”

“Trauma, Creativity, and Trance: Special Ability in a Case of Dissociative Identity Disorder [Multiple Personality Disorder]” by Vedat Sar, M.D., et al.

This brief article—click link below—includes an impressive portrait drawn by the patient.

American Journal of Psychiatry 175:6, June 2018

https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17121347

“Crazy Brave: A Memoir” by Joy Harjo (post 2): In childhood, her protector personality, “the knowing”; as an adult, her “spirit of poetry” personality

People with multiple personality trait have their own unique systems of personalities. And all I know about Joy Harjo’s system is what little she mentions in passing.

One of the most common types of alternate personality is the protector personality. And although some alternate personalities do have names, many others are referred to by a descriptive phrase.

Joy Harjo refers to her protector personality as “the knowing.”

“The Knowing”

“The knowing was a powerful warning system that stepped forth when I was in danger…My knowing said to me in a loud, distinct voice, Do not walk alone with this boy. To do so would put you in danger. I must be imagining things, I said to myself. I walked with him. He knocked me down and attempted to rape me. Someone came on us and I leaped up and got away.

“The knowing was always right. It could never be disarmed. It stood watch over me.

“Still, I tried. I told the knowing to remember that my stepfather could be nice sometimes. He sang show tunes to my mother. The knowing didn’t respond. Truth does not lower itself to small-time arguments or skirmishes” (1, p. 74).

“The Spirit of Poetry”

As Joy Harjo became older, her protector personality, “the knowing,” may have evolved into the alternate personality she called “the spirit of poetry”:

“It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love…

“…the spirit of poetry came to me.

“To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning…

“ ‘You’re coming with me, poor thing. You don’t know how to listen. You don’t know how to speak. You don’t know how to sing. I will teach you.’

“I followed poetry” (1, p. 163-164).

1. Joy Harjo. Crazy Brave: A Memoir. New York, W. W. Norton, 2012.

Added July 13: On rereading the above, I see that she may not have been equating "the knowing" and "the spirit of poetry," except in that she could visualize each of them. I'm not sure.

Joy Harjo, USA Poet Laureate (2019): In published interviews, she describes features of multiple personality trait in her creative process

“Joy Harjo…is a poet, musician, and author. She is also the first Native American United States Poet Laureate…She…earned an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in its Creative Writing Program…” (1).

In published interviews from 1989 and 1990, she describes her subjective experience of a “muse” or “presence”; alternate “very alive worlds”; and how she came to write her poem, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window”:

“You said today that when you write an old Creek Indian enters the room and stands over you.”

“Yes, that does happen sometimes. I think my muse takes different forms, but I have often felt this presence. Sometimes it seems to be a singular presence and other times it seems to be multiple…

“Do you ever feel the presence of ancestors? Of grandparents or greatgrandparents?”

“Oh, sure I do. You might think I’m crazy, but I do feel the presence of such a world…I have a sense of all those worlds as being very, very alive…I feel that my poems have become travels into that other space…

“…there is not just this world, there’s also a layering of others” (1, pp. 37-39).

“ ‘The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor [Window]’ is written around an imaginary woman. You could call her imaginary. But within that space she is real, also. I made a trip to Chicago, oh, about eight years ago, and one of the places I went to while I was there was the Chicago Indian Center…in one room I noticed a rocking chair…the image stayed with me…So, a few years after that trip, the image stayed with me, and I would see this woman, rocking and rocking, for her life, and she compelled me to write the poem. And I felt her standing behind me, urging me on as I wrote…” (1, p. 67).

1. Wikipedia. “Joy Harjo.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Harjo

2. Joy Harjo. The Spiral of Memory: Interviews. Edited by Laura Coltelli. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1996.

“The Caine Mutiny” by Herman Wouk: Captain Queeg, famous character of Pulitzer Prize bestseller, has puzzling inconsistency

During WWII, Captain Queeg of the U.S.S. Caine, is removed from command—the so-called Caine mutiny—because the ship’s officers consider him mentally unfit.

But at the court-martial of executive officer Maryk, who had taken command of the ship, psychiatrists who have examined Captain Queeg testify that he is sane.

In court, Captain Queeg’s behavior ranges from perfectly normal to obviously disturbed.

This degree of puzzling inconsistency may be seen in undiagnosed cases of multiple personality. Search “puzzling inconsistency” for past posts on this recurrent issue.

Rational Personality

“The captain shook his head. ‘I’ve got my methods, Tom, and they’re the result of a hell of a lot of observation of human nature. What’s more I’m a damn softhearted guy, strange as that may sound to you, and if I make one exception I’ll start making more and my whole system will fly to pieces, and whatever you may think of the way I run this ship at least it’s been run properly and I’ve made no mistakes yet’ ” (1, p. 307).

When he says he’s made no mistakes, is he lying (to people who were there and saw his mistakes) or does the personality speaking have multiple-personality memory gaps? The reader is not told, but should wonder.

Glowering Personality

“Queeg…resumed his glowering address to the invisible audience in front of and a little above him” (1, p. 184).

“Queeg was at the head of the table, slouched in his purple robe, glowering strait ahead at nothing…” (1, p. 316).

“Queeg’s head was down between his shoulders, and he squinted up at the air in front of him. He suddenly looked much more familiar to Maryk” (1, p. 424).

Comment

Captain Queeg is the most famous character of this Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling novel, but the author does not appear to know what Queeg is thinking. And Queeg is hardly mentioned in the novel’s last fifty pages, as if the author wanted to avoid him.

As noted above, Queeg appears radically different at different times. Sometimes he sounds like a rational, even sensitive, person. Other times he appears to “address,” or “glower” at, an “invisible audience” (other personalities?).

There is no indication that Herman Wouk intended to portray Queeg as having multiple personality, but it is the diagnosis most consistent with the character’s puzzling inconsistency, which is so great that sometimes he seems perfectly sane (even to psychiatrists), but at other times seems crazy. Multiple personality is not a psychosis, but it can sometimes look that way.

1. Herman Wouk. The Caine Mutiny [1951]. Pleasantville NY, Reader’s Digest Association, 1992.

God as Author with Multiple Personality Trait: God created people with free will, so they are not puppets, but alternate personalities

God seemed to create things simply by imagining them. For example, God imagined light, and there was light. And the same with creating people. But God’s creative process was not ordinary imagination.

What is the difference between creation by ordinary imagination and creation in multiple personality? In ordinary imagination, imagined people are mere puppets, but in multiple personality, they have independent agency, minds of their own, free will: they are alternate personalities.

So if God created people to have free will, then people are God’s alternate personalities, psychologically speaking.

I am not starting a new religion. But it just occurred to me that what distinguishes alternate personalities—having minds of their own—is free will.

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (post 2): Novel about “man falling in love with books” reflects author’s multiple personality

The title is the temperature at which books burn. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman of the future, when the job of fire departments is to set fire to, and destroy, the homes of people who own books, most of which are illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

Author’s Comment

“I’m a preventer of futures, I’m not a predictor of them. So Montag is myself running through the future, as afraid as I am at times…And along the way, meeting other people who are really myself…

“And all this goes back into my own background…I’m a library-educated person; I’ve never made it into college. When I left high school, I began to go to the library every day of my life…And my books are full of libraries and librarians and book people…I have written a book about a man falling in love with books” (1, pp. 195-196).

Gratuitous Multiple Personality

In my previous post on Bradbury, I quoted a poem by him, which is a virtual declaration that he had multiple personality. And I was curious to see whether it would be reflected in his best-known novel, Fahrenheit 451.

The novel makes no mention of multiple personality. It is not necessary to the plot. But the following descriptions of characters’ thoughts, behavior, and subjective experience are typical of multiple personality.

“‘What?’ asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience” (1, p. 8).

“He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other” (1, p. 21).

“Montag had done nothing. His hand had done it all, his hand, with a brain of its own, with a conscience and a curiosity in each trembling finger, had turned thief” (1, p. 35).

“But that was another Mildred [Montag’s wife], that was a Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met” (1, 49).

“Montag’s hands picked up the Bible. He saw what his hands had done and he looked surprised” (1, p. 84).

“Montag felt himself turn and walk to the wall slot and drop the book in through the brass notch to the waiting flames” (1, p. 97).

Several of the above are made actions, in which persons feel that they are made to act in certain ways. If persons feel they were made to act that way by an outside force, then it may be psychotic. But if, as in the above examples, they feel they were made to act against their will, or in an out-of-character way, by something inside them, then it is probably an alternate personality, pulling the strings from behind the scenes.

1. Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 [1953]. 60th Anniversary Critical Edition. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2013.