“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion (post 6): Magical thinking may have been multiple personality

It is surprisingly common for a person to have comforting hallucinations of a deceased, beloved spouse, which is one reason that many people believe in ghosts. For example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2017/07/17/ghosted-im-a-new-widow-living-in-denial-that-my-husband-is-gone/

But what Joan Didion describes in her memoir of the year following the death of her husband is different:

“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant” (1, p. 35).

Didion had been there when her husband collapsed. She called the ambulance, went to the hospital, and consented to the autopsy, cremation, and obituaries. Her regular personality was in no doubt about her husband’s death and its permanence.

However, she deduced from various of her other attitudes and actions that she also had a child-like part of her mind—“covert” and “hidden even from me”—who didn’t understand death as being permanent.

She didn’t think of this covert, hidden part of her mind in terms of multiple personality, but it was probably a child-aged alternate personality, who pulled strings from behind-the-scenes.

1. Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking [2005]. New York, Vintage International, 2007.