“The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner (post 3): First half has theme of multiple personality, but it is unacknowledged and seems unintentional

The two key components of multiple personality are memory gaps and independent identities. The memory gaps are due to the fact that the various personalities often operate on different tracks of the mind.

Adam’s Memory

The story of Adam’s concussion from falling off his skateboard at age eight is that, upon his awakening from unconsciousness, he was asked where he was, and he promptly replied, correctly, that he was in the hospital. So why could he not also promptly identify his parents or even state his own name? (1, pp. 96-99).

The situation described, in which Adam doesn’t know who he or his parents are, sounds less like brain injury, and more like a dissociation of identity—in which he has switched to an unnamed alternate personality, who does not identify with the parents or the regular personality’s name—indicative of multiple personality.

Mother’s Memory

Earlier in the same chapter, Adam’s mother broaches the subject of her having been sexually abused by her father when she was a child. At the beginning of the paragraph, she speaks of “recovering the memory of what my father had done.” However, at the end of the same paragraph, she refers to “the knowledge I’d both always and never had” (1, p. 78).

Thus, the beginning of the paragraph seems to be raising the issue of “recovered memory,” which is based on the Freudian idea of “repression” into “the unconscious.” However, the only way that she could have “always” both known about it and not known about it would be to have had a host personality who never knew about it and an alternate personality who always knew about it.

Adam’s “Multiple Track” Mind

“He was always practicing something like freestyling [debate technique] in his head…There were multiple tracks in his mind and he could conduct a conversation with, say, his grandmother using one track while on another he would be in an imaginary cipher [cryptography]…Yet to say he was ‘practicing’ implies that he could choose to stop; in fact…he did not feel he could turn it off” (1, pp. 127-128).

To have such different tracks of thought going on, simultaneously and independently, you need at least two personalities. And this illustrates the fact that the word “alternate” in “alternate personality” is somewhat misleading, because, in multiple personality, it is typical for more than one personality to be conscious at the same time. They alternate only in regard to which one is out front and in control of overt behavior. In fact, alternate personalities are conscious simultaneously, but on different tracks.

Comment

The front book flap includes the phrase “a culture of toxic masculinity,” and the phrase “toxic masculinity” does appear on page 94, but otherwise, judging from the first half of the book, I can’t see why book reviews mention it as a major theme. Perhaps it will be a major theme in the second half of the novel. But, as discussed above, the first half has more to do with multiple personality, however unacknowledged and unintentional.

1. Ben Lerner. The Topeka School. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019.