October 16, 2016

The New Yorker “magazine’s fiction editor…asked George Saunders, T.C. Boyle and Joyce Carol Oates to discuss why so much of modern fiction is negative, even nihilistic…

“Let’s not forget,” Boyle said, “that the three of us suffer from multiple personality disorder. We sit in a room five hours a day talking to ourselves. This is the result” (1).

[He should have said (if my term had been available) “multiple personality trait,” not “multiple personality disorder.” See the next post for a description of multiple personality disorder.]

1. Nathaniel Stein. “The Dark Side of Contemporary Fiction.” The New Yorker,  October 1, 2011.

September 1, 2016

After 20 Hospitalizations, 12 Wrong Diagnoses, Patient Says She Is Someone Else 

I include this very short clinical case history of multiple personality disorder (1) to show why many psychiatrists think they have never seen a case: they have missed the diagnosis.

“When this particular patient initially came to see me, she was a competent-appearing young woman who was working fairly successfully as a psychiatric nurse. The presenting personality did not reveal to me, nor did she even know, that in her off-duty hours another personality was working as a prostitute and using fair amounts of ‘speed’ and other illicit drugs.

“Nor did she reveal that in the 10 preceding years she had been hospitalized 20 times under 12 different psychiatric diagnoses and had been treated with eight antipsychotics, three tricyclic antidepressants, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), lithium carbonate, three antianxiety drugs, four anticonvulsant drugs, and prolonged individual and group psychotherapy with five different therapists (four psychiatrists and one nurse practitioner).

“Following neurologic, metabolic, and endocrinologic evaluations in a general hospital, she was transferred to my service in a psychiatric hospital. Her behavior had become alternately: hostile and demanding; fearful, tearful, and shaking; or depressed and suicidal. Two months later she led us to suspect her correct diagnosis when she told a nurse she was really someone with a name different from the one we knew her by, and that there were five others as well. There is no telling how much longer she would have remained misdiagnosed if [one of her alternate personalities] had not revealed herself” (1, p. 243).

Comment

Although the patient makes a candid statement which reveals that she has multiple personality—that she is not the person the doctors think she is, that she is another person with a different name, and that there are five others—and this leads to the discovery of unsuspected past history and contemporary activities, the patient has not claimed to have multiple personality.

The alternate personality has claimed to be a person in her own right (and the regular, host personality, having no memory of it, would probably deny the whole thing).

Fortunately, the psychiatrist finally knows what’s been going on. The patient has multiple personality disorder. And psychotherapy specifically for it is often successful.

1. Richard E. Hicks, MD. “Discussion: A Clinician’s Perspective,” Chapter 10, in Richard P. Kluft, MD, PhD, Editor, Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality. Washington DC, American Psychiatric Press, 1985.

July 11, 2016

W. B. Yeats, 1923 Nobel Prize winner, hoped his “double” and “anti-self” “Leo” was a genuine spirit, but admitted “Leo” might be “a secondary personality”

“It was at Wimbledon, in 1912, that Yeats felt himself contacted by the spirit claiming to be ‘Leo’…’Leo’…said he had been with Yeats since childhood as his ‘opposite’…’Leo’ thereafter frequently reappeared to Yeats, who was so stirred that he began composing a correspondence with this alternate self…This imaginary dialogue was not wasted. It inspired the great antiphonal poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ written in 1915,” which included the following lines:

“I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self…”

“Yeats freely confessed that his useful sparring partner ‘Leo’ might come from his own imagination. As he explained in 1917 to Sir William Barrett, past President of the Society for Psychical Research, ‘I think one should deal with a control on the working hypothesis that it is genuine. This does not mean that I feel any certainty on the point, but even if it is a secondary personality that should be the right treatment’ " (1, pp. 9-10).

1. Brenda Maddox. George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats. London, Picador, 1999.

July 8, 2016

“Emily Dickinson’s Use of the Persona” by John Emerson Todd: But is it more likely that she constructed personae or had alternate personalities?

Todd points out that in many of Dickinson’s poems, the “I” speaking is not Emily. It is a persona. He says she has four kinds: 1. The “Little Girl” Persona, 2. The “Lover-Wife-Queen” Persona, 3. Personae in Death and Eternity, and 4. Personae involving Psychology and the Divided Personality (1). He gives an example of the latter:

“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind —

As if my Brain had split —

I tried to match it — Seam by Seam —

But could not make them fit” (1, p. 83).

Todd uses the word “persona” to imply that Dickinson “more or less consciously adopted” those four kinds of “non-Emily” (1, p. xv) narrators.

But is that how most poems are written? Is that how Dickinson wrote? Where did her personae come from? Did she purposely, intellectually, construct them? I’m guessing that she didn’t construct her personae any more than most novelists mechanically construct their characters and narrators.

And that’s the trouble with concepts like persona, voice, alter ego, double, etc.: they are misleading about the creative process and uninformative psychologically. Emily Dickinson probably had alternate personalities.

1. John Emerson Todd. Emily Dickinson’s Use of the Persona. The Hague, Mouton, 1973.

July 9, 2016

“Invisible Guests”: Czeslaw Milosz, 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us

how difficult it is to remain just one person,

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,

and invisible guests come in and out at will.” — from “Ars Poetica?”

from The Paris Review, Winter 1994, No. 133

Czeslaw Milosz, The Art of Poetry No. 70

INTERVIEWER

In your poem “Ars Poetica?” you stated that the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.

MILOSZ

My poetry has been called polyphonic, which is to say that I have always been full of voices speaking; in a way I consider myself an instrument, a medium. My friend Jeanne Hersch, who introduced me to the existentialism of Karl Jaspers, used to say, “I have never seen a person so instrumental,” meaning that I was visited by voices. There is nothing extraterrestrial in this, but something within myself. Am I alone in this? I don’t think so. Dostoyevsky was one of the first writers, along with Friedrich Nietzsche, to identify a crisis of modern civilization: that every one of us is visited by contradictory voices, contradictory physical urges. I have written about the difficulty of remaining the same person when such guests enter and go and take us for their instrument. But we must hope to be inspired by good spirits, not evil ones.

INTERVIEWER

You have called yourself a medium, but a suspicious one. What do you mean by this? Of what are you a medium?

MILOSZ

I suppose, looking back, that everything was dictated to me, and I was just a tool. Of what I don’t know. I would like to believe that I am a tool of God, but that’s presumptuous. So I prefer to call whatever it is my “daimonion.” I have written a new poem that describes this relationship:

Please, my Daimonion, ease off just a bit,

I’m still closing accounts and have much to tell.

Your rhythmical whispers intimidate me.

Today for instance, reading about a certain old woman

I saw again—Let us call her Priscilla,

Though I am astonished that I can give her any name

And people will not care. So that Priscilla,

Her gums in poor shape, an old hag,

Is the one to whom I return, in order to throw charms

And grant her eternal youth. I introduce a river,

Green hills, irises wet with rain

And, of course, a conversation. “You know,” I say,

“I could never guess what was on your mind

And will never learn. I have a question

That won’t be answered.” And you, Daimonion,

Just at this moment interfere, interrupt us, averse to

Surnames and family names and all reality

Too prosaic and ridiculous, no doubt.

So, this voice involves my purification from the past by time and distance. It interferes and stops me from writing about my life too realistically, too prosaically. I am able to move to another dimension.”

April 2, 2016

from Preface to “Six Characters in Search of an Author” by Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello (post 2): On Creative Process and Multiple Personality.

“Many years ago…a nimble little handmaid entered the service of my art…Her name is Fantasy. She is a bit of a joker and somewhat malicious and, though she likes to dress in black, it cannot be denied that she is often downright bizarre…And she amuses herself by bringing home the most discontented folk in the world for me to draw stories, novels, and plays out of them…

“Well now, several years ago, this handmaid Fantasy had the unfortunate inspiration or ill-omened whim to bring home a whole family…the six characters who are seen coming onto the stage at the beginning of the play…

“What author can ever say how or why a given character is born in his fantasy?…I can only say that, without having consciously looked for them, I found them there before me, so alive that they could be touched, so alive that I could even hear them breathe…Born alive, they wished to live…So much so that, when I persisted in my determination to drive them from my mind, they continued to live on their own account…like characters from a novel, escaped by some miracle from the pages of the book that contained them. They chose certain moments of the day to reappear before me in the solitude of my study…

“ ‘Now why,’ I said to myself, ‘why don’t I represent this extraordinary situation of an author who refuses to give life to some of his characters, and the situation of those characters who, born of his fantasy and already infused with life, cannot resign themselves to exclusion from the world of art? They have already detached themselves from me, have their own life, have acquired voice and movement; on their own, therefore, in this struggle for life that they have had to wage against me, they have already become dramatic characters, characters who can move and speak on their own; they already see themselves as such; they have learned to defend themselves from me; they will also know how to defend themselves from others. Well then, let them go where dramatic characters usually go to have life—on a stage. And let them see how it turns out.’ That is what I did…

“Without wishing it, without knowing it, in the strife of their troubled souls, each one of them defends himself against the accusations of the others by expressing, as his own living passion and torment, the same pangs that I myself have suffered over so many years: the illusion of mutual understanding, irremediably based on the empty abstraction of words; the multiple personality of every individual…”

Pirandello exaggerates when he says that everyone has multiple personality. About 1.5% of the general public has the mental disorder (according to DSM-5), while about 90% of fiction writers and perhaps 30% of the general public have a normal version (according to this blog).

Luigi Pirandello. “Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author” (1925), pages 186-196, in Luigi Pirandello Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author [1921], Henry IV, The Mountain Giants. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Anthony Mortimer. New York, Oxford University Press, 2014.

March 30, 2016

“The Waves” by Virginia Woolf (post 3): Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis are alternate personalities of a person with multiple personality.

“In their attempt to come to terms with the strangeness of the narrative of The Waves, many readers have understood the six voices as aspects of a single character, a point of view apparently endorsed by Woolf herself…Woolf wrote in 1931 to Goldie Dickinson that she ‘did mean in some vague way we are the same person, and not separate people. The six characters were supposed to be one.’ ” (1, p. 358).

1. Mark Hussey. Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers and Common Readers to Her Life, Work and Critical Reception. New York, Facts On File, 1995.