“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

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