Sherlock Holmes’ multiple disguises reflect the multiple personality of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (post 6)

My previous posts on Doyle made a good case for his multiple personality, but without discussing his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes, whose image is that of the fact-oriented ultra-rationalist, the last person you might suspect of having something as imaginative as multiple personality.

But in the vast literary commentary on, and adaptations of, Sherlock Holmes, there has been speculation about multiple personality, the most common being that super-villain Professor Moriarty didn’t exist, except as an imaginary person (an alternate personality) in Holmes’ mind.

Another source of speculation has been Holmes’ frequent use of disguises:

“Holmes would have made an actor, and a rare one. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed…He had at least five small refuges in different parts of London in which he was able to change his personality…Here is the list of disguises used by Sherlock Holmes: a sailor, an asthmatic old master mariner, an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman, a doddering opium smoker, a common loafer, a venerable Italian priest, an elderly book-collector, an East End familiar known to Captain Basil, a plumber with a rising business named Escott, an unshaven French ouvrier, a workman looking for a job, an old sporting man, an elderly woman, an Irish-American spy named Altamont.” https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Sherlock_Holmes

In the following passage, note the reference to “exorcising” (demon possession is a pre-psychological theory of multiple personality); Holmes’ seeming to hear Moriarty’s voice (people with undiagnosed multiple personality often hear the voices of one or more of their alternate personalities) (even after the alternate personality's supposed death, because, as long as the person remains alive, death of an alternate personality often only means that the "dead" personality must remain inside; and the comparison of Holmes to Dorian Gray, a famous fictional character who has often been suspected of having multiple personality. (Search “Oscar Wilde” on this site.)

“As Watson says in The Final Problem, ‘… if [Holmes] could be assured that society was freed from Professor Moriarty he would cheerfully bring his own career to a conclusion.’ It was as if Holmes were exorcising himself. Yet even after Holmes ostensibly bested the ‘Napoleon of crime’ at the Reichenbach Falls, Moriarty exercised a hold over him. ‘I am not a fanciful person,’ said Holmes, ‘but I give you my word that I seemed to hear Moriarty’s voice screaming at me out of the abyss.’ It was, perhaps, the sound of his own demons that he was hearing. If Holmes is Dorian Gray, Moriarty equates to the picture he hides away in his attic—a grim reflection of the ravages of his soul that the detective keeps hidden from the world 
at large." https://strandmag.com/a-question-of-identity/

Please see my previous five posts by searching “arthur conan doyle.”

Fred Rogers: Was his demeanor both sincere and artificial, in the way that child-aged alternate personalities of adults often are?

Since multiple personality originates in childhood, the most common type of alternate personality is child-aged. They may honestly see themselves as children, and may have an endearing childlike quality, but their behavior, judged objectively, is not perfectly childlike. The impression they make is a combination of sincerity (which they have) and artificiality. And that is my impression when I see Fred Rogers in excerpts from his show, “Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.”

In the first two years of the show, Rogers often implied that the show’s fantasies were real and that he had a direct line of contact with the characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Rogers'_Neighborhood

Was there anything about his childhood to suggest that he created a fantasy world with alternate personalities?

“Rogers had a difficult childhood. He was shy, introverted, and overweight, and was frequently homebound after suffering bouts of asthma. He was bullied and taunted as a child…he made friends with himself as much as he could. He had a ventriloquist dummy, he had [stuffed] animals, and he would create his own worlds in his childhood bedroom” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers

In short, it is possible that he developed multiple personality and that “Mister Rogers” was a personality that helped his other alternate personalities be less frightened and make friends with each other.

An article in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine (print version) by someone who knew Rogers for many years, says, “…he somehow lived in a different world than I did. A hushed world of tiny things — the meager and the marginalized. A world of simple words and deceptively simple concepts…”

“‘L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.’ That was Fred’s favorite quote. He had it framed and hanging on a wall in his office. ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye,’ is from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.”

The context of that quote is that the fox tells the little prince that the true value of his rose is not its outward appearance, but the love he put into raising it. And I would add, since that novel’s relation to multiple personality is evident to me (search “the little prince” on this site) then that quote takes on the additional meaning that Rogers' alternate personalities are invisible to the people who know him.

If you want to begin to understand why alternate personalities are typically invisible to most people, search “diagnosis” on this site. Most alternate personalities like their privacy and intentionally evade diagnosis. But after their cover is blown (by asking the right questions and knowing what to look for), they come out of hiding and become obvious. Multiple personality is not just a theory. It is directly observable.

Another inadvertently revealing quotation: “We arrived late, skipping the cocktails, and entered a ballroom at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Fred was scanning the room as if expecting ghosts to pop out.

     “You O.K. there, Fred? I asked.

     “I just don’t know what to expect,” he said. “You know that’s why I sing that song, ‘Children like to be told.’ ” His answer seems to include himself among those children.

On another occasion, Rogers was giving a commencement address at Carnegie Mellon University. After he delivered the last line, he sang his song “It’s You I Like,” and hundreds of students joined in.

“Fred told the crowd that he wrote the song ‘for the child in all of us — that part of us which longs to help in the creation of a new and better world’ ”

Did he mean “the child in all of us” as in child-aged alternate personalities? Or did he only mean “that part of us which longs to help in the creation of a new and better world”? After all, there are other ways he could have expressed that thought than with a phrase that could refer to a child-aged alternate personality. And he did not have to refer to it as “that part of us,” considering that people with undiagnosed multiple personality often refer to their vague awareness of alternate personalities as “parts.”

If new to this site, you might misconstrue the above as disparagement. But I have discussed literally hundreds of great fiction writers, including literally dozens of Nobel Prize winners. For them, their multiple personality trait—multiple personality without clinically significant distress or dysfunction from it—is a creative ability. Including Rogers among them is high praise.

Jeanne Marie Laskas. “The Mister Rogers No One Saw.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/magazine/mr-rogers.html

Added Nov. 24, 2019: I just corrected my misspelling of the show’s title. I had instinctively written it as “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” But the abbreviation, “Mr.,” which American adults instinctively use, was never used for the title of this show. From 1968-1970, it was spelled “MisteRogers’ or “Misterogers’ (sources differ), and in 1971, it was changed to “Mister Rogers’.” Why was “Mr.” never used?

Was Fred Rogers an expert on children’s cognitive development? Had he read a study which found that young children don’t use abbreviations? But most children that young probably wouldn’t be reading the show’s title anyway. So I infer that “Mister” instead of “Mr.” reflected Fred Rogers’ subjective sense of himself as someone too young to be using abbreviations. 

NY Times theater review of “The Underlying Chris” by Will Eno: Protagonist is extremely self-transforming, but review fails to recognize multiple personality

The protagonist is described as continually changing names, gender, and body. Whereas, in multiple personality, alternate personalities often differ in names, gender, and body-image. Thus, the review describes a dramatized multiple personality scenario, but the reviewer never mentions multiple personality.

Here is the review: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/theater/the-underlying-chris-review-will-eno.html

Most of the surprisingly common symptoms of multiple personality in novels and plays are unlabeled and unacknowledged, because authors seem not to have thought of what they have written in terms of multiple personality, per se. What, then, are these unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality doing there? They are a literary or dramatized reflection of authors’ own psychology.

(As discussed on this site during the past six years in over 1700 posts, most fiction writers have multiple personality trait. For them, it is a special ability, and an integral part of their creative process.)

And since fiction writers usually do not think in terms of multiple personality, per se, and so have not labeled the symptoms of multiple personality in their novels, poems, and plays, most reviewers fail to think of it, even when it is blatant, as in this case.

“Nothing to See Here,” Kevin Wilson’s bestseller: Author interview suggests possible connection between his novel and Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects”

Wilson’s current bestseller, “Nothing to See Here,” was recently reviewed in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/books/review/nothing-to-see-here-kevin-wilson.html?module=inline 

In a single paragraph from today’s author interview (quoted below), Wilson’s first sentence is in the present tense. His second sentence is in the past tense. His last sentence is an abstract generalization. Evidently, one part of his mind continues to have his childhood obsession with spontaneous human combustion. Another part of his mind takes a retrospective, psychological view. And a third part of his mind has an empathetic and social point of view:

“Since I was a kid I’ve been obsessed with spontaneous human combustion,” Wilson says. “Sometimes I’d be afraid I might burst into flames and other times I wanted to be a human torch. I wanted to manifest my anxiety physically. But what I’m always trying to figure out with my writing is, how can I create a story where people survive dark things? I don’t want anyone to ever get hurt.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/review/dont-hate-kevin-wilson-but-he-wrote-his-best-seller-in-10-days.html

He says he had severe anxiety in childhood. It was emotionally intolerable, so he coped with it by imagining it was converted into something physical (but which evidently didn’t burn him like real fire would). And he hopes nobody else will get hurt like he was.

This seems to be a variation of the scenario of coping with overwhelming, probably posttraumatic, emotions, starting in childhood, by cutting or burning the skin, two usually secret activities that may be more common in people with multiple personality disorder. Search “Sharp Objects” by Gillian Flynn, which (along with her “Gone Girl”) involves multiple personality.

“Enemies, A Love Story” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (post 6): Protagonist’s probable multiple personality is unacknowledged by narrator or characters

This novel, originally published in Yiddish (like all Singer’s works), was first published in English in 1972, six years before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The story, which takes place in New York City shortly after WWII, sometimes seems like a comedy, but its youthful main characters are holocaust survivors.

Herman, the protagonist, is depicted as probably having multiple personality, but Singer evidently didn’t intend to do so, since it is unacknowledged: No narrator or character recognizes the significance of his memory gaps (a cardinal symptom of multiple personality). He has a job as a ghostwriter (which is symbolic of the role that characters play in the fiction-writing process as co-writers or ghostwriters); and his trigamy—three wives at the same time, living separately, in New York City—like any multiplication of things that are usually single, is a metaphor for multiple personality, not to mention that only a person with multiple personality would get himself into such a predicament.

The following passages describe Herman’s memory gaps, his trigamy, and his sense of unidentified personalities inside him:

“These mistakes in the subway, his habit of putting things away and not remembering where, straying into wrong streets, losing manuscripts, books, and notebooks hung over Herman like a curse. He was always searching through his pockets for something he had lost. His fountain pen or his sunglasses would be missing; his wallet would vanish; his own phone number would slip from his mind. He would buy an umbrella and leave it somewhere within the day. He would put on a pair of rubbers and lose them in a matter of hours. Sometimes he imagined that imps and goblins were playing tricks on him” (1, p. 20). Search “memory gaps” and “absent-mindedness” for discussions related to diagnosis and other writers.

“He had two wives and was about to marry a third. Even though he feared the consequences of actions and the scandal that would follow, some part of him enjoyed the thrill of being faced with ever-threatening catastrophe. He both planned his actions and improvised. The ‘Unconscious,’ as von Hartmann called it, never made a mistake. Herman’s words seemed to issue from his mouth of their own accord and only later would he realize what stratagems and subterfuges he had managed to invent. Behind this mad hodgepodge of emotions, a calculating gambler throve on daily risk” (1, pp. 130-131). “The unconscious” is a misnomer. Herman evidently has alternate personalities inside him, who are fully conscious and have their own agendas.

When two of his wives had missed their menstrual periods, “Herman thought of the Yiddish saying that ten enemies can’t harm a man as much as he can harm himself. Yet he knew he wasn’t doing it all by himself; there was always his hidden opponent, his demon adversary” (1, p. 176).

Puzzling Ending

Herman simply disappears. Is he in hiding? Did he commit suicide? Nobody knows. Perhaps he is just one of the author’s alternate personalities; his services are no longer required; and he has gone back inside, where most alternate personalities live most of their lives.

1. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Enemies, A Love Story. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1972.

Robert Oxnam (post 2): Not all successful people who have multiple personality are successful as fiction writers

In yesterday’s post, I revisited Freud, an example of a successful person who probably had multiple personality, but whose success was not as a fiction writer (although critics of psychoanalysis might joke that he was a fiction writer).

Today’s post revisits another very successful person—Robert Oxnam, an eminent China scholar—who definitely has had multiple personality. He did try writing novels, but was not successful at it.

My point is that not all successful people with multiple personality are successful as fiction writers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Oxnam

https://www.wqxr.org/story/22790-the-eleven-personalities-of-robert-oxnam/ 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C12QD4A5bDE

https://asiasociety.org/video/robert-oxnam-asia-societys-60th-anniversary?page=7

Sigmund Freud, in a personal letter, confessed his longstanding fear that he had a real-life double, a doppelgänger: Was Freud delusional?

First, search “Freud” on this site, to see my essay discussing the evidence that Freud had multiple personality (the trait, not the mental illness). This explains his fear that he had a doppelgänger.

Second, search “unconscious,” which Freud neither discovered nor understood.

Freud acknowledged that valid cases of multiple personality had been reported, but his theory of mind could not explain their existence.

Case history of Jeanne Fery, sixteenth-century French nun with multiple personality: Her need to write her story

“This discussion reinterprets a sixteenth-century case of possession and exorcism as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). This is perhaps the earliest historical case in which DID can be diagnosed retrospectively with confidence. Jeanne Fery, a 25-year-old Dominican Nun, wrote her own account of her exorcism which took place in Mons, France in 1584 and 1585. Her exorcists produced an even more detailed account describing both identity fragmentation and a past history of childhood trauma. Also well described in both accounts are major criteria and associated features of DID as described in present day diagnostic manuals…The 109-page description of her treatment course was republished in French in the nineteenth century by Bourneville (1886), a colleague of [Pierre] Janet, who also diagnosed Jeanne's disorder as "doubling of the personality," (the term then in use for DID). This article is the first English-language presentation of these documents…

“…at the end of her 21 months of treatment, Jeanne Fery, on her own initiative, wrote her autobiography…Jeanne’s urge to write may have been to facilitate recovery from trauma by restoring continuity to her life history…Modern therapists also rediscover writing as an important means to this end…Writing was necessary even while Jeanne was ill…to allow communication among the fragmented ego states and bridging of her dissociative amnesia. Jeanne and her exorcists were wise to tame this strategy and adapt it to the ends of integration. The way in which Jeanne told her story was dependent in part on her perception of the audience…Jeanne’s insistence on publication and public proclamation of her ‘story’ involved also an element of family disclosure and confrontation; her great aunt as mistress of the convent was part of the audience, so Jeanne was breaking the family rule of silence in a direct way every time she told her story” (1).

NOTE: To see the whole 12-page case history, click the link below.

1. Onno van der Hart, Ruth Lierens, Jean Goodwin. “Jeanne Fery: A Sixteen[th] Century Case of Dissociative Identity Disorder.” The Journal of Psychohistory 24(1) Summer 1996. http://www.onnovdhart.nl/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/jeanne_fery.pdf

Comments (added the same day): Other psychiatric diagnoses like schizophrenia are relatively new. Cases that would satisfy today’s diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia were not reported in the medical or psychiatric literature until the nineteenth century (Wikipedia, “History of schizophrenia”).

Moreover, the official DSM-5 criteria for making the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) are much shorter and simpler than the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, because multiple personality is a more clearly defined, specific condition.

Of course, the main point of this post is that the essential features of multiple personality have been consistent for more than four hundred years. And this includes a need by people with multiple personality to write their stories.

“Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer” (post 5): Fiction writer’s superior memory and special “daydream” (commonly called “waking dream”)

Memory

As noted in post 4, memory gaps or lapses of memory in writers are especially remarkable, because their general powers of memory are often superior, as noted by Singer:

“Art generally, and literature specifically, are connected with memory. The real writers have all had good memories, they remember their childhood, while many people don’t…I remember things that happened when I was three years old and I even have proof that I remember things that happened when I was two and a half years old, because we lived in a little village called Leonczyn and we moved out when I was less than three years old. I once spoke to my mother and described this place and the names of the people and she could not believe it. I still see all this as if it happened yesterday” (1, pp. 2-3).

Unusually vivid childhood memories may be the memories of child-aged alternate personalities.

Daydreams

“Yes, I’m a daydreamer. I was a daydreamer when I was a child and in this respect I haven’t changed at all. I’m daydreaming now in the ridiculous way that I did when I was seven or eight years old. In a way, some of my stories grow out of these [day]dreams. While I forget my night dreams, I remember my daydreams more or less because they keep repeating themselves and there is a kind of system in them” (1, p. 4)

NOTE: He does not say that he keeps repeating his daydreams and that he has a kind of system in them. Rather, he says that they keep repeating themselves and there is a kind of system in them, as though the daydreams were not initiated by him, but were provided to him. And he emphasizes the fact that these are not ordinary daydreams when he says that he daydreams in a “ridiculous way.”

Special “daydreams” are one way that behind-the-scenes, storytelling alternate personalities provide imaginative scenarios to the writing personality (who makes appropriate revisions until the stories are ready for publication).

Waking Dream

What Singer refers to as a peculiar kind of daydream may be what fiction writers more commonly refer to as a waking dream. Search “waking dream” for previous discussions.

1. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Richard Burgin. Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer. Garden City N.Y., Doubleday & Company, 1978-1985.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (post 4) and Mark Twain: Intermittent, puzzling disorientation or absent-mindedness as clue to multiple personality

As I approach the end of Singer’s memoirs (see prior post), the last section of which is his emigration from Poland to New York, titled “Lost in America,” he gets temporarily lost on the ship crossing the Atlantic, and also when taking a walk in his brother’s Brooklyn neighborhood. At one point he can’t remember the number of his cabin on the ship, but later it suddenly pops into his mind and he easily finds it. And he can’t find his way back to his brother’s house, but then his memory of how it looks suddenly pops back into his mind and he easily finds it.

Singer was neither old nor intoxicated nor a person with a generally bad memory nor suffering any medical or neurological problem. Indeed, the above instances would be too trivial to note if I had not read about a much more dramatic example of this with Mark Twain.

December 10, 2013

Mark Twain Had Both Excellent Memory and Absent-Mindedness: A Common Combination in Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

In previous posts (Dec. 1, 6, 7, 2013), I argued that Mark Twain had multiple personality. And I highlighted the issue of memory gaps, which is a key clue to multiple personality, since one personality may have amnesia for the periods of time that other personalities were out.

One way a memory gap can manifest itself is that the person does not remember something that you would expect him to remember, because that knowledge is known by a different personality than the personality who is out at the time. When this happens, if you don’t think of multiple personality, you are likely to shrug off this memory lapse as absent-mindedness.

For example, in Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by his thirteen-year-old daughter Susy Clemens (Doubleday, 1985), she says, “He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent minded!”

Meanwhile, Twain was also known for his excellent memory. As Ron Powers tells us in Mark Twain: A Life (New York, Free Press, 2005), Twain had powers of memory that were “legendary” and “prodigious.”

The following dramatic incident is from Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography, Volume 2, Chapter CXXVIII. The chapter is titled:

“Mark Twain’s Absent-Mindedness”

“…By no means was Mark Twain’s absent-mindedness a development of old age. On the [occasion] following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength…One day [he] set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of billiards. Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens had been there time and again. It was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. But when he reached the corner where the house…was in plain view he stopped. He did not recognize it…He stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned [home] and got the coachman…to show him the way.”

Evidently, the personality who played billiards was not the same personality who knew the way to Whitmore’s house.

“Love and Exile” (memoirs) by Isaac Bashevis Singer (post 3): As young man in Poland, notes puzzling inconsistency, makes self-diagnosis

“In some book or magazine, I had stumbled upon a phrase, ‘split personality,’ and I applied this diagnosis to myself. This is precisely what I was—cloven, torn, perhaps a single body with many souls each pulling in a different direction…Some kind of enemy roosted within me or a dybbuk who spited me in every way and played cat-and-mouse with me…Some maniac uttered crazy words inside my brain and I could not silence him. At the same time I held myself in such check that not even Gina [his lover] knew what I was going through. Older writers at the Writers’ Club often told me that they envied my youth and I said: ‘Believe me, there is nothing to envy.’ ” (1, p. 94).

Search “puzzling inconsistency,” a clue to multiple personality, for discussions related to other writers.

1. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Love and Exile [memoirs published 1975-1981]. Garden City N.Y., Doubleday & Company, 1984.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (post 2): As readers, do people with multiple personality trait go with the flow, and not complain about unclear writing?

So far, in my preliminary reading about Singer, he appears to be another writer with multiple personality trait. And I have previously thought that such a person, as a reader, might tend to go with the flow, and not make an issue of unclear writing. So I was surprised to read the following:

“I am not happy with bad writing…I still demand that a writer should write clearly, should have a story to tell, should write it well…and that the story should be more or less convincing in its own terms. In other words, I’m not fooled by all these coverups” (1, pp. 130-131).

“The modern writer is so eager to be profound, to be symbolic, to show off his greatness, that the reader cannot enjoy him anymore. Never before in the history of literature have the readers been so fooled, so hypnotized against their will, to call mediocrity greatness…The masters [e.g. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky] were all great storytellers, and they wrote in a very clear way, they tried their best to be clear. Language is made to communicate, it has to make itself understood, not become a mystery which has to be explained by other language…I don’t hide behind puzzles, riddles, symbols which mean nothing” (1, pp. 150-151).

Are there any group differences between people with and without multiple personality in how they are as readers? Or are individual differences much greater than group differences?

1. Grace Farrell (Editor). Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations. Jackson and London, University Press of Mississippi, 1992.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (Nobel Prize): Believed in “demons,” “ghosts,” probably due to “made behavior” and memory gaps from alternate personalities

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991), Polish-American who wrote in Yiddish, emigrated to New York City in 1935. Became known to English readers when his story, “Gimpel the Fool,” was translated by Saul Bellow in 1953. Later won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1978) and two U.S. National Book Awards. Film adaptations of his works include “The Magician of Lublin” (1979) and “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy” (1983). Published 18 novels, 14 children’s books, memoirs, and essays. —Wikipedia

Since many of Singer’s stories include the supernatural, many interviewers have asked him if he really believed in it. His answers reflected two, mutually contradictory, opinions. First, he honestly did believe in it, had believed in it since childhood, and continued to be afraid of demons, etc., as an adult. But he also saw it as a subjective phenomenon of the personality.

For example, asked about the “great deal of demonology in your writing” and whether it is a literary tool or a real belief, Singer replies, “It’s both. It’s a tool and also a belief.” At the same time, he believes that Satan is not an objective reality, but an aspect of “human nature. We are born satans…sometimes I mention demons just instead of saying ‘a bad man’…[But, he then reiterates his belief that it is probably objective reality], there may be powers—there may be demons. How do we know that they don’t exist?” (1, pp. 191-192).

In short, Singer both believed and disbelieved in “demons.” Is it possible for “demons” to honestly seem objectively true to a sane person, but actually be subjective? Yes, if the “demons” were alternate personalities, which would make them seem like they were independent, objectively existing beings, but were only subjective aspects of the person’s mind.

In the following two passages, Singer tells two amusing anecdotes (truth is often spoke in jest) about seemingly supernatural forces in his life, one in his writing process and another involving the mysterious misplacement of his citizenship papers.

“I have a Yiddish typewriter [he actually did, since he had always written everything in Yiddish, later to be translated for publication] which is very capricious and highly critical,” he says, partly whimsical, mostly serious. “If this typewriter doesn’t like a story, it refuses to work. I don’t go to a man to correct it since I know if I get a good idea the machine will make peace with me again. I don’t believe my own words saying this, but I’ve had the experience so many times that I’m really astonished. But the typewriter is 42 years old. It should have some literary experience, it should have a mind of its own” (1, p. 148).

“Singer takes his ghosts seriously. He has often said that they inhabit his apartment and hide things from him—manuscripts, books, glasses, even his checkbook. ‘But they give everything back. Once I thought they stole my citizenship papers and I was mad at them. I thought about an exorcist. Then after a year and a half, I found them' ” (1, p. 166).

Like many people, Singer didn’t believe in alternate personalities. He believed in ghosts and demons.

It is more likely that an alternate personality stopped his typing when it didn’t approve of the story, and that a demonically mischievous alternate personality sometimes hid things in places that his host personality was unlikely to look. 

The first case is an example of made behavior (aka made actions), which is when an alternate personality controls the host personality’s behavior by pulling strings from behind the scenes. In the second case, an alternate personality had taken over, hid things, and left the host personality with memory gaps for those periods of time. Or, you can believe in ghosts and demons.

1. Grace Farrell (Editor). Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations. Jackson and London, University Press of Mississippi, 1992.

Multiple Personality in “Motherless Brooklyn”: Novel by Jonathan Lethem and New Movie by Edward Norton

Edward Norton is known for past movies featuring multiple personality; for example, “Fight Club.” Is that issue what prompted him to make a movie out of Lethem’s novel? Is anything of the novel’s multiple personality in the movie? I don’t know. The issue is not discussed in The New York Times movie review: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/movies/motherless-brooklyn-review.html

The New York Times review of Lethem’s novel does not discuss its major, but unlabeled, depiction of multiple personality: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/17/books/what-makes-him-tic.html

Search “Lethem” on this site to read about multiple personality in Motherless Brooklyn.

Traits vs. Disorders: multiple personality trait is normal, but most people don’t have it, although many more people have it than have the disorder

Psychological traits do not cause clinically significant distress or dysfunction.

Mental disorders (mental illnesses) do cause clinically significant distress and dysfunction.

Thus, multiple personality trait is normal, as distinguished from multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative identity disorder).

Traits are normal, but not universal. For example, perfect pitch (aka absolute pitch) is normal, but most people don’t have it (1).

Multiple personality trait is common among fiction writers. Ninety percent probably have it. Why? Where do fiction writers come from? Some of the people with multiple personality trait self-select themselves to become fiction writers, because the trait is conducive to the fiction writing process.

But most people don’t have multiple personality trait: probably less than thirty percent of the general public has it (although that is still a lot more than most psychologists realize).

1. Wikipedia. “Absolute Pitch.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch

New York Times has fine new essay on Edith Wharton’s “Age of Innocence”: But if interested in creative process and “House of Mirth,” search “Wharton” here

Elif Batuman’s essay is an appreciation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/books/review/age-of-innocence-edith-wharton-elif-batuman.html

My past posts (search “Wharton”) are about Wharton’s writing process and The House of Mirth.