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