Seventh Anniversary of Literary-Psychiatric Blog: "Great Fiction Writers & Multiple Personality Trait"

My seven-year survey of over 240 great fiction writers, including literally dozens of winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has found that most of them have what I call “multiple personality trait.” The trait differs from the disorder, the mental illness, multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative identity disorder), in that the trait does not entail clinically significant distress and dysfunction. Indeed, for fiction writers, multiple personality trait is a core ability, not a disability, since their characters and narrators, whom they often experience as having minds of their own, are equivalent to alternate personalities.

Why is it worth knowing that most successful fiction writers have multiple personality trait? Because it is key to understanding how their fiction writing is done and is often reflected in their works, not as characters with overt, labelled multiple personality disorder, but as gratuitous or unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality, such as memory gaps, alien impulses, puzzling self-contradiction, a voice heard in the character’s head with a mind of its own (whose words are often printed in italics), stories of children who never grow up (like the child-aged alternate personalities in clinical cases of multiple personality disorder), seeing someone else (an alternate personality) in the mirror, or namelessness (alternate personalities in clinical cases of multiple personality disorder are often nameless).

Fiction writers, who seem to be joking when they say in interviews that their characters develop minds of their own, are not joking. They are reporting their subjective experience of multiple personality, but doing so in a joking manner, so that if anyone accuses them of being mentally ill, they can deny it as only a joke.

Some characters in literary classics have diagnosable multiple personality disorder that is often not recognized by professors of literature when they teach those classics; for example, Dr. Manette in Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” and the title character of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” See past posts. Other famous characters, like Anna Karenina, do things (like commit suicide) that cannot be understood unless you realize that they have multiple personality. See past post. This is true not only of classics, but also of popular, contemporary novels, like Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” (see past post).

Added July 9, 2020: Why is it worth knowing that most successful fiction writers have multiple personality trait? Another reason it is worth knowing is that fiction writers have to come from somewhere. I infer that there must be a substantial minority of the general public that has multiple personality trait, that fiction writers had been members of that minority, but have self-selected themselves to be fiction writers. I have guessed that up to 30% of the general public has multiple personality trait and that 90% of fiction writers have it. The 90% figure is also based on the study by Marjorie Taylor, cited in past posts.https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf