“The Saga of Gösta Berling” by Selma Lagerlöf (post 3): Protagonist has nocturnal personality-switch and memory gap indicative of multiple personality

Throughout the first half of this 400-page novel, I have wondered why the protagonist—Gösta Berling, a young, handsome, defrocked minister (due to alcoholism)—has remained so ill-defined.

The back cover says that “His defiant and poetic spirit proves magnetic to a string of women.” One of these women was Marianne, discussed in the two previous posts. It had been unclear to me why he broke up with her. There was something about his personality that I could not understand. And contrary to what the back cover said, I could see nothing “poetic” about him.

But the mystery of his personality has suddenly become clear, because of the following:

“He tells them that last night he dreamed as vividly as seldom before, dreamed that he had written verse. He, whom people called ‘the poet,’ although up until now he had not deserved such a nickname, got up in the middle of the night and, half asleep, half awake, started to write. It was a complete poem that he found on his writing table in the morning. He would never have believed any such thing about himself. Now the ladies [with whom he is speaking] would hear it. And he reads”: (1, pp. 186-188) [The poem is two pages long in the novel].

The above is a typical multiple personality scenario:

You find that the person’s life story is puzzling and inconsistent, because different personalities have been doing their own things and the host personality, who is trying to give you his life story, doesn’t remember everything that the various alternate personalities had been doing.

For example, Gösta Berling didn’t know why he had been given the nickname, “the poet.” Apparently, his poet personality had written previous poems, but his host personality hadn’t known about it, because of memory gaps, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

In the present example of writing the poem last night, he has a vague memory of starting to write, but when his regular personality finds the completed poem the next morning, he is surprised and doesn’t identify with having written it (“he would never have believed any such thing about himself”).

 

Thus, screening for multiple personality includes such questions as this: Do you ever find evidence that things have happened that nobody else could have done, but you don’t remember doing it? It may be something that you don’t even identify with; it may happen, at times, even without intoxication; and your actual behavior may sometimes seem like a dream.

1. Selma Lagerlöf. The Saga of Gösta Berling [1891]. Translated by Paul Norlen. New York, Penguin Books, 2009.