“The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah (post 2): Vianne, fifty years later, may show multiple personality symptoms of memory gap and third-person self-reference

The frame of this WWII story is that it is, at least in part, the reminiscence of Vianne, in 1995, who is now old and ill, and living on the west coast of the United States. She has gotten an invitation to attend a reunion in Paris:

“That damned invitation is haunting me. I’d swear it has a heartbeat. For days I have ignored it, but on this bright spring morning, I find myself at the counter, staring down at it. Funny. I don’t remember walking over here and yet here I am. Another woman’s hand reaches out. It can’t be my hand, not that veiny, big-knuckled monstrosity that trembles. She picks up the envelope, this other woman. Her hands are shaking even more than usual…

“Do I make a decision [about attending the reunion]? A conscious, let’s-think-it-out-and-decide-what’s-best kind of decision? No, I make a phone call to my travel agent and book a flight to Paris, through New York. Then I pack a bag…At the last minute, after I have called a taxi, I call my son and get his message machine…When I hang up, I see the taxi pull up out front. And I go” (1, pp. 383-385).

Comment

Does the section in bold, above, describe a multiple personality memory gap and a third-person self-reference to an alternate personality (“another women,” “she”), or is this just forgetfulness due to age and illness, and her sense of humor about her old age?

Since she may have been the one providing at least her part of the story of this long, detailed novel, and since she has just made her new travel arrangements so swiftly and competently, old age and illness may not be the best explanation for her memory gap and third-person self reference.

1. Kristin Hannah. The Nightingale [2015]. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017.

Added March 31: The symptoms cited in these two posts did not recur in the rest of the novel, which suggests they reflect the psychology of the author, not the psychology of these particular characters.

“The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah (post 1): Italics indicate that thoughts or voices arguing with a character come from their alternate personality

Kristin Hannah’s best-selling novel, The Nightingale, has sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide and has been published in 45 languages (1). It is the story of Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol (surname means nightingale) during WWII in occupied France.

In this 564-page novel, it is not until page 173 that the content of a character’s mind is written in italics. Isabelle is tempted to steal a bicycle that the German soldiers had confiscated:

“Normally a bicycle would be guarded by the soldiers in the café, but on this snow-dusted morning, no one was outside at a table.

“Don’t do it.

“Her heart started beating quickly…” (2, pp. 173-174)

Why are those words in italics? As I have discussed in past posts, thoughts or voices that argue with a person are not ordinary thoughts. They come from an alternate personality.

The other sister, Vianne, has a similar experience.

“Beck [a German soldier billeting in her home] sat across from her…

“Stay away from Beck…

“Vianne heard the warning as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud beside her. She knew that in this one thing her sister was right…

“It is different now, with your sister away”…(2, p. 196).

Readers who, themselves, have such experiences may shrug it off as the “voice of reason” or the “voice of conscience.” But people who don’t have multiple personality trait, when they have mixed feelings about something and consider both sides of an issue, don’t have voices or thoughts that argue with them.

Fiction writers may not regard such thinking as involving alternate personalities, per se—and may consider it ordinary, since they themselves experience it—nevertheless, since they do realize that there is something different about it, they put it in italics.

Search “italics” to see it discussed regarding other writers.

1. Wikipedia. “Kristin Hannah.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristin_Hannah

2. Kristin Hannah. The Nightingale [2015]. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017. 

Emily Dickinson’s Dialogue of Nameless Personalities

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Nobody!_Who_are_you%3F 

Fernando Pessoa (post 4): Probably genuine multiple personality, but award-winning translator needs to consult expert on multiple personality

In previous posts, I questioned the validity of Pessoa’s multiple personality, because none of his alternate personalities was nameless, and some were said to be inconsistent. But those problems may be due to honest misunderstandings of the editor/translator.

How did the translator recognize and identify Pessoa’s alternate personalities? By names? So that may be why none is nameless.

And when a personality seemed inconsistent, the inconsistency may have been due to the unrecognized intervention of a nameless personality.

In general, if Pessoa left much of his writings in a trunk, and the editor/translator had to choose which writings made enough sense to publish, an expert on multiple personality might have been helpful in making those choices.

And then there is the issue of childhood trauma. Multiple personality originates as a way to cope with it. And there will be certain alternate personalities who know about it. Of course, memories must be corroborated, because some “memories” may be fantasies. But a history of childhood trauma and its relation to certain of the alternate personalities is necessary to understand where the person is coming from. Are any of Pessoa’s poems about childhood trauma?

In short, books on Pessoa need to be edited by a great translator, but one who is working in collaboration with a bilingual, Portuguese/English-speaking expert on multiple personality. 

Fernando Pessoa (post 3): If Pessoa truly had multiple personality, with many alternate personalities, why aren’t any of them nameless?

At the end of post 2, I questioned whether Pessoa truly had multiple personality, because the editor/translator Richard Zenith had written that the alternate personalities were sometimes inconsistent, which would be atypical.

What else strikes me when I look at the Pessoa entry in Wikipedia is that he had so many alternate personalities and none of them is nameless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa

In many past posts, I have repeatedly said that namelessness of alternate personalities is common in multiple personality. The reason is that most alternate personalities spend most of their time inside, behind-the-scenes, with a named, host personality out front. And there are usually some who don’t need names, because they rarely come out, or they come out only when the person is alone, or they always come out incognito. And even when they do have a name, they may not like to reveal it, because they feel it gives people too much power over them. Multiple personality is designed to keep itself secret.

Either my clinical experience with multiple personality is too limited to encompass a case like Pessoa’s, or the list of his alternate personalities is incomplete, or his diagnosis of multiple personality is invalid. 

Fernando Pessoa (post 2): The Editor and Author are Discouraging, and Pessoa's multiple personality is questionable

As indicated in post 1, Pessoa would seem to be the epitome of what interests me. And I recall looking into Pessoa years ago, but being discouraged; possibly, I thought, because of the translation. So I decided to take a fresh look with The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (1) and The Book of Disquiet (2) in editions that received rave reviews.

Since nothing in my glance through Selected Prose seemed immediately promising, I turned to The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa’s major prose work. The editor’s Introduction includes the following:

“The Book of Disquiet…isn’t a book but its subversion and negation…a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins…If Pessoa split himself into dozens of literary characters who contradicted each other and even themselves, The Book of Disquiet likewise multiplied without ceasing, being first one book and then another, told by this voice then that voice…all swirling and uncertain…Pessoa worked on this book for the rest of his life, but the more he ‘prepared’ it, the more unfinished it became…ever more indefinite and its existence as a book ever less viable…But that consummate disorder is what gives The Book its peculiar greatness. It is like a treasure chest of both polished and uncut gems, which can be arranged and rearranged in infinite combinations, thanks precisely to the lack of a pre-established order…Or we may see it as the ‘factless autobiography’ of a man who dedicated his life to not living…(2, pp. ix-xvi).

Indeed, the book refers to itself as “A Factless Autobiography,” explaining that, “In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say” (2, p. 9).

If he says so.

1. Richard Zenith (Ed. and Trans.). The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. New York, Grove Press, 2001.

2. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). The Book of Disquiet [Posthumous]. Edited and Translated by Richard Zenith. New York, Penguin Books, 2003.

Added later same day: The editor says that the various personalities sometimes "contradicted...even themselves." If that were true, it would bring Pessoa's multiple personality, per se, into question, because each alternate personality is typically quite consistent with itself, which is one reason why, if there are a large number of them, it is, ultimately, hard to fake. 

New York Times Book Club: Patricia Highsmith

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/t-magazine/talented-mr-ripley-patricia-highsmith.html

Persons interested in that author might find it interesting to search “Highsmith” here.

“The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa” Ed./Trans. by Richard Zenith (post 1): The only writer many professors admit may have had multiple personality

from Introduction

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1888. His father died when he was five.

His mother remarried Portugal’s consul to Durban, South Africa, where Pessoa spoke English. His formative literary influences included Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Carlyle. At age seventeen, he returned to Lisbon.

When he died in 1935, the Lisbon newspapers paid tribute to the “great Portuguese poet” Fernando Pessoa. However, he had published his poetry under three different names besides his own, which he said were not mere pseudonyms, but false personalities, with biographies, points of view, and literary styles that differed from Pessoa’s. He called them “heteronyms,” of which he had more than forty.

When Pessoa, the greatest Portuguese poet of the last four centuries, said, “I prefer prose to poetry as an art form for two reasons, the first of which is purely personal: I have no choice, because I’m incapable of writing in verse,” the speaker was his heteronym Bernardo Soares, who wrote only prose (1, xi-xiv).

from Pessoa’s Preface

“The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, though it takes different forms—prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes…All I know is that the author of these lines (I’m not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality…

“Each of the more enduring personalities, lived by the author within himself, was given an expressive nature and made the author of one or more books whose ideas, emotions, and literary art have no relationship to the real author (or perhaps only apparent author, since we don’t know what reality is) except insofar as he served, when he wrote them, as the medium of the characters he created.

“Neither this work nor those to follow have anything to do with the man who writes them. He doesn’t agree or disagree with what’s in them. He writes as if he were being dictated to…

“That this quality in the writer is a manifestation of hysteria, or of the so-called split personality, is neither denied nor affirmed by the author of these books. As the helpless slave of his multiplied self, it would be useless for him to agree with one or the other theory about the written results of that multiplication…

"In the vision that I call inner merely because I call the ‘real world’ outer, I clearly and distinctly see the familiar, well-defined facial features, personality traits, life stories, ancestries, and in some cases even the death, of these various characters. Some of them have met each other; others have not…" (1, p. 1-4).

Also search the related post on “Pessoa Syndrome” by Mitova.

1. Richard Zenith (Ed. and Trans.). The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. New York, Grove Press, 2001. 

Multiple Personality in Fiction Writers—the Trait, not the Disorder—is a Feature, Not a Bug

“The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” by James Hogg (post 4): Why does this novel have symptoms of multiple personality?

Since this novel never mentions “multiple personality” (or its synonym, in those days, “double consciousness”), and since most literary reviews of this novel don’t say that the protagonist has multiple personality, it is evident that the author did not intend to write a novel about multiple personality, per se.

Thus, this is one more novel with unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality. And the question arises as to why these symptoms (see post 3) are in this novel.

My theory is that it reflects multiple personality trait in most fiction writers. 

“The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” by James Hogg (post 3): Memory Gaps—Lost Time—Unique to Multiple Personality

“…I seemed hardly to be an accountable creature; being thus in the habit of executing transactions of the utmost moment, without being sensible that I did them. I was a being incomprehensible to myself. Either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which I had no controul, and of whose actions my own soul was wholly unconscious. This was an anomaly not to be accounted for by any philosophy of mine, and I was many times, in contemplating it, excited to terrors and mental torments hardly describable. To be in a state of consciousness and unconsciousness, at the same time, in the same body and same spirit, was impossible. I was under the greatest anxiety, dreading some change would take place momentarily in my nature; for of dates I could make nothing: one-half, or two-thirds of my time, seemed to me to be totally lost” (1, pp. 136-137).

But there are fifty-two more pages to read.

1. James Hogg. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner [1824]. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ian Duncan. New York, Oxford University Press, 2010. 

“The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” by James Hogg (post 2): Introduction, Doubling and Diagnosis, Impersonation

Introduction

“After a century of neglect following its first appearance in 1824, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is more alive than it has ever been…A strong force in the novel’s resurgence has been its influence on contemporary fiction” and it has “displaced Walter Scott…to become the world’s favorite nineteenth-century Scottish novel…one which keeps company with the great nineteenth-century fables of the crisis of the modern self: tales of the doppelgänger, by Hoffmann, Poe, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Stevenson; the pact with the Devil in Goethe’s Faust; the poor youth who commits murder in the belief that he transcends moral law, in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment…” (1, Introduction, ix).

Doubling and Diagnosis

The author might have been inspired by a famous contemporary case of multiple personality, but voices, visions, and delusions could also mean schizophrenia (2). However, since schizophrenia has no symptoms that are unique to it—e.g., voices are also heard in multiple personality—the question will be whether the protagonist has any symptoms that do not occur in schizophrenia, but only in multiple personality.

Impersonation

This peculiarity of one of the characters is not typical of any diagnosis:

“My countenance changes with my studies and sensations,” said he. “It is a natural peculiarity in me, over which I have not full control. If I contemplate a man’s features seriously, mine own gradually assume the very same appearance and character. And what is more, by contemplating a face minutely, I not only attain the same likeness, but, with the likeness, I attain the very same ideas as well as the same mode of arranging them, so that, you see, by looking at a person attentively, I by degrees assume his likeness, and by assuming his likeness I attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts. This, I say, is a peculiarity in my nature, a gift of God that made me…I can never be mistaken of a character in whom I am interested” (1, p. 95).

Perhaps the author got to know his characters by impersonating them.

1. James Hogg. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner [1824]. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ian Duncan. New York, Oxford University Press, 2010.

2. Allan Beveridge. “The confessions of a justified sinner and the psychopathology of the double.” Psychiatric Bulletin (1991), 15, 344-345

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/B1244C5E9F7EC6D554ADA193A929774B/S0955603600021218a.pdf/div-class-title-the-confessions-of-a-justified-sinner-and-the-psychopathology-of-the-double-div.pdf

“The Life of the Mind” (A Novel) by Christine Smallwood: Narrator May be Alternate Personality of Dorothy, the Protagonist

During the first half of this novel, Dorothy—an adjunct professor of English, meaning poorly paid and ineligible for tenure—is often preoccupied with her recent miscarriage, which, privately, to herself, she sometimes jokes about, as she often does about things that are serious to her.

She currently has two separate psychotherapists, the significance of which in the novel seems mainly to be as a joke about doubling. In a similar vein, “Dorothy read half a page of Rebecca. It was odd that no one in this book had children. Perhaps that was the meaning of the double. By reproducing the individual, the double interfered with the reproduction of a generation” (1, p. 74). Is she is joking about her own doubling’s having caused her miscarriage? In any case, the double is a metaphor for multiple personality (whether or not the author was thinking of it in those terms).

When Dorothy is reading, a book converses with her, like a critical and conceited, alternate personality:

“Look at me! the book said.

“What? said Dorothy…

“I have read all of Stendhal in French, the book informed her nonchalantly…

“That’s not my field, Dorothy started to say, but the book talked over her.

“Greater minds than yours, it said, minds more serious, more synthetic, with better recall, more command of foreign languages…You…are a dilettante, a prosaic clog in the pipes of discourse…Don’t you know anything, you joke of a humanist, you walking fatberg of consumer debt?” (1, pp. 112-113).

But the main doubling, or talkative alternate personality, in the first half of this novel may be the narration. The third-person narrator has had almost nothing to say from the perspective of any other character than Dorothy’s. Indeed, the perspective has been so much Dorothy’s, I have had to keep reminding myself that Dorothy is not a first-person narrator.

Why wasn’t Dorothy made the first-person narrator? My tentative conclusion is that the narrator in this novel is a narrative alternate personality of Dorothy, the protagonist, which would be the first time, that I recall, seeing that in a novel. Does the author, herself, have a narrative alternate personality? I don’t know.

1. Christine Smallwood. The Life of the Mind: A Novel. New York, Hogarth, 2021.

Added March 21: The second half of the novel has nothing of relevance here.

Added March 22: Does the triple exposure of the image of the woman on the novel's cover imply that the publisher thought the novel had something to do with multiple personality?https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/books/review-life-of-mind-christine-smallwood.html

Survey of 181 Writers Finds They Have Multiple Personality Trait, But Survey Doesn’t Call It That or Even Mention Multiple Personality

John Foxwell, Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough, Angela Woods.

‘I’ve learned to treat my characters as people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices.

Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 79, March 2020.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810019304155

A Novelist on Fiction Writing: “possession,” “trance,” “spell,” “you can’t be entirely sure where it came from” but “You made it up. It’s made of you”

“…the novel-writing process…requires a degree of possession…you need to forget what you are doing, to fall into a trance, and when the spell breaks, you can’t be entirely sure what you’ve unearthed, where it came from…And however much of what results is pure invention (or so you think), your subjectivity is all you have. You made it up. It’s made of you…” (1).

1. Jessica Winter. “Our Autofiction Fixation.” New York Times, March 14, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/books/review/autofiction-my-dark-vanessa-american-dirt-the-need-kate-elizabeth-russell-jeanine-cummins-helen-phillips.html

“Stuart Little” by E. B. White: Like “The Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James, this children’s classic has an unresolved ending

After discussing Charlotte’s Web, I obtained the author’s earlier children’s classic, Stuart Little, which I have just read. The title character is born to Mr. and Mrs. Little, human parents, and is accepted as their child (along with their older, normal human son), even though Stuart has the tiny body of a mouse. He thinks and speaks like a normal human.

Stuart befriends a female bird, who is taken into the Little family’s New York City apartment. But when a neighborhood cat threatens to eat her, she flies away. Stuart, driving a gasoline-powered miniature car, sets out on the road to find her. At the end of the novel his quest is unresolved: “As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction” (1, p. 131).

As to an animal alternate personality, if Kafka (search “Kafka”) can have an insect, then E. B. White can have a mouse.

It is purely coincidental that Stuart Little has an unresolved ending, like the novel I had just finished, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. The main difference is that E. B. White knew what he was doing.

1. E. B. White. Stuart Little. Pictures by Garth Williams. New York, HarperTrophy, 1945. 

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 10) by Henry James: Two Characters, Besides the Protagonist, with Multiple Personality; and the Abrupt Ending

Ralph’s Other Person

“He had caught a violent cold, which fixed itself on his lung and threw him into dire confusion. He had to give up work and apply, to the letter, the sorry injunction to take care of himself. At first he slighted the task; it appeared to him it was not himself in the least he was taking care of, but an uninteresting and uninterested person with whom he had nothing in common. This person, however, improved on acquaintance, and Ralph grew at last to have a certain grudging tolerance, even an undemonstrative respect, for him” (1, p. 52).

Madame Merle, Confidence Woman

Madame Merle is a completely trusted friend and mentor of the protagonist. And she is a welcome guest in the homes of many reputable people.

But it is she who facilitates Isabel’s meeting and marrying the sinister, two-faced, Mr. Osmond.

And near the end of the novel, it is revealed that Madame Merle and Osmond had conspired to arrange the marriage in order to get Isabel’s large inheritance. Moreover, Merle is revealed to be the mother of Osmond’s teenage daughter.

Is Madame Merle a confidence woman or a split personality? Search “confidence man,” especially the novels by Herman Melville and Thomas Mann, to understand that the best confidence people are the ones with multiple personality.

Abrupt Ending

James wrote in his notebook: “The obvious criticism of course will be that it is not finished—that I have not seen the heroine to the end of her situation…This is both true and false. The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity…It is complete in itself—and the rest may be taken up or not, later” (1, pp. xxv-xxvi).

However, the problem with the ending is not its irresolution, but the narrative inconsistency (see post 2). And, unlike most of the novel, the writing doesn’t flow, it has become awkward, for no apparent reason. 

I suspect that the personalities of Henry James who did his literary criticism were not the same as the ones who wrote his novels, and that the ones who wrote the beginning and middle of this novel were not the ones who wrote the abrupt ending.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. 

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 9) by Henry James: Isabel hears the rational voice of an alternate personality, who advises her that Madame Merle is a villain

“More clearly than ever before Isabel heard a cold, mocking voice proceed from she knew not where, in the dim void that surrounded her, and declare that this bright, strong, definite, worldly woman [Madame Merle], this incarnation of the practical, the personal, the immediate, was a powerful agent in her destiny” (1, p. 508).

Since this voice is mentioned by the narrator only in passing, and since the author does not intend to imply that his protagonist has multiple personality, this is a symptom of what I call “gratuitous multiple personality” (search it), which is in the novel only as a reflection of the psychology of the author.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 8) by Henry James: Famous Chapter 42, Isabel’s “meditative vigil,” called novel’s “best thing” in author’s Preface

Based on James’s writing process, which he describes in his Preface, you would not expect him to have any deep understanding of his characters. He says he (his host personality) doesn’t create them or invent what happens to them. They arrive in his mind as visions and apparitions, and then he watches to see what happens:

“It was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken, and all in response to my primary question: ‘Well, what will she [Isabel, who had arrived as a vision] do? Their answer seemed to be that if I would trust them they would show me; on which, with an urgent appeal to them to make it at least as interesting as they could, I trusted them” (1, p. 13).

What Isabel meditates about in Chapter 42 is that she is miserable in her marriage. She had misjudged the man she married. He hates her because she is not his puppet.

“She knew of no wrong she had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: She simply believed he hated her” (1, p. 421). “The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his…Nothing was a pleasure to her now; how could anything be a pleasure to a woman who knew that she had thrown away her life?” (1, pp. 427-429).

Isabel’s interpretation of the failure of her marriage, based on the information then available to her, is valid. But the psychological explanation that James gives her for not having married the two men who had previously proposed to her is weak. He did not have a good explanation, because he didn’t understand where she was coming from.

James didn’t understand Isabel, because he (his host personality) didn’t create her. She had come to him as a vision or apparition. Who gave James his apparition? There are various speculations as to his outside inspirations. But outside sources did not give him a vision or apparition.

What inside source could there have been? An alternate personality, who may have been influenced by outside sources, presented James with a vision of Isabel. And then the narrators and characters, who were also alternate personalities (since they seemed to have minds of their own) carried on.

If you have a better way to explain the creative process that Henry James describes in his Preface, please submit your comments.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. 

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 7) by Henry James: Isabel’s mind has a “capacity for ignorance” and her consciousness has “different parts”

The basic mental mechanism of multiple personality is dissociation (division of consciousness). If an alternate personality knows about something, but the host (regular) personality does not know about it, that is multiple personality’s capacity for ignorance.

“With all her love of knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking in unlighted corners. The love of knowledge coexisted in her mind with the finest capacity for ignorance” (1, p. 205).

In dissociation, disturbing knowledge is not repressed into “the unconscious,” but is dissociated (split off, segregated) into an alternate consciousness. In other words, consciousness has different parts. And since these different parts, these alternate personalities, seem to have minds of their own, they can lead in different directions.

“Her consciousness was so mixed that she scarcely knew where the different parts of it would lead her…” (1, p. 289).

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.