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.