Multiple Personality: Nonsense? Rare Mental Illness? Fakery? Demon Possession?

Most educated people dismiss multiple personality as nonsense. It doesn’t seem possible for a person to have other people inside them. Actually, multiple personality doesn’t mean having other real persons inside you, but whether the alternate personalities are real or imaginary, the whole idea seems preposterous; although, most educated people do allow for the possibility that a person could have multiple personality as a rare mental illness. They don’t know why, if it exists at all, that it would be rare, but they think it must be.

Since movies show actors faking multiple personality, it is obviously something a person could fake. It is harder to fake than most other mental illnesses, because correctly remembering the ideosyncracies of a dozen or more personalities is not easy, but it is easy to fake in the short run.

Most psychiatric patients do not want to fake or be diagnosed as having multiple personality, because they think it is crazier than other mental illnesses like schizophrenia, because it is only in multiple personality that you don’t even know who you are or remember what you do. 

Traditionally, religious people think of multiple personality as being possessed by spirits or demons, which may make the very idea of multiple personality seem frightening or even satanic.

So it is easy to understand why relatively few people can read this blog with an open mind.

My Belated Interest in Multiple Personality

In 1972, after graduating from college in Boston and from medical school in Richmond, Virginia, I returned to Brooklyn, New York, where I had been born and raised. My father was a family physician, but I wanted to specialize in psychiatry, so I went to a psychiatric residency training program at a hospital in Brooklyn.

The Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry was an eminent Freudian psychoanalyst, but the Director of Psychiatric Residency Training was a psychopharmacologist, because diagnosis and treatment revolved mainly around medication. Neither of these psychiatrists had any interest in multiple personality, which was never diagnosed in any of the patients.

My idea of multiple personality was based on the 1957 movie, “The Three Faces of Eve” and the 1976 movie, “Sybil.” I thought that there must be rare cases like that, but I didn’t expect to ever see any.

As a psychiatrist in the 1970s and 1980s, I occasionally came across a psychiatric journal article about multiple personality, but I never saw a patient who looked like they had it, and didn’t expect that I ever would.

Toward the end of the 1980s, working in a psychiatric outpatient clinic, I found a new patient puzzling, and asked her if she ever had memory gaps, which was the only thing I recalled from the journal articles on multiple personality, and which I had never asked any patient previously. When she said that she did have memory gaps, I was shocked, and the patient evidently was, too, because she reacted like I had stumbled on a sensitive secret that frightened her, and she didn’t return to the clinic.

I continued to ask puzzling patients about memory gaps, and found that the percentage of my patients who had them varied from 0-5%. When I asked the patient what had gone on during the missing period of time, I would often see them switch to an alternate personality, who knew about that time. Then the patient would switch back to the regular personality, with a memory gap for the conversation I just had with the alternate. However, sometimes the alternate was antagonistic toward the regular, host personality and toward me, too, since it considered me the host’s ally.

In short, I discovered that multiple personality was surprisingly common, but was designed to keep itself hidden and avoid diagnosis.

Meanwhile, over the years, I had been reading interviews of fiction writers, since I thought I might one day write a novel. I had always thought the writers were joking when they spoke of communicating with their characters, who seemed to have minds of their own. But now that I had seen multiple personality, I realized they were not joking, although they said it in a joking manner, so they could deny it if anyone took them seriously and thought they were crazy.

Then I looked at fiction writers’ essays, biographies. and works. Some writers had actually acknowledged multiple personality. But mostly I found unlabeled, unintentional symptoms of multiple personality, which reflected how the author’s mind worked.

The difference between the patients and the writers was that the patients were having distress and dysfunction from the multiple personality, but the novelists weren’t. In fact, since alternate personalities are often imaginative and like to make up stories, this was a core asset for fiction writing. So I made the distinction between multiple personality disorder and multiple personality trait (surprisingly common, especially in fiction writers).

The New York Times Book Review continues to make a fool of itself regarding both multiple personality disorder and multiple personality trait

Today’s Sunday print edition of The New York Times Book Review begins a book review by citing the case of Mary Reynolds from the beginning of the nineteenth century as “the first well-documented case of multiple personality disorder” (1).

The Times’ review then ignores that history by saying that multiple personality disorder is a social phenomenon, “spawned” in 1980, based on a 1973 case history and movie.

Of course, as a literary review, the Times’ principal ignorance is not multiple personality disorder, a mental illness, but multiple personality trait, an asset in fiction writing.

1. ”https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/23/books/review/the-sleeping-beauties-suzanne-osullivan.html

“The One You Want To Marry (And Other Identities I’ve Had)” a memoir by Sophie Santos (post 1): Preface

“…I was sitting across from my retired lieutenant colonel dad at a stripmall Mexican restaurant. He had taken me to lunch on my break from rehearsing for one of the spring college plays…

“So, kiddo—you got a boyfriend?”

“No,” I said…

Without missing a beat, he said, “You got a girlfriend?

BOOM. Just like that, my casual, avoid-everything lunch had turned into a high-stakes interrogation…

“Well, kiddo—you always had good female relationships.”

Female friendships.” It was the final nail in the coffin of gaydom. I was in a trance as we walked out of the restaurant, got into his car, and drove back to campus. I have no memory of getting out of the car and walking into the building for rehearsal, but suddenly I was sitting in the lobby of the theater building.

Alone. No one had returned from break yet, and it was just, me, myself…

All of a sudden, I let out a huge laugh.

I had accepted that I was gay. I mean, I was in a relationship, HELLO! But this was different. My dad had called out something that appeared to have been there all along…

What I wanted to know was, how the fuck did I not see the signs? (1, pp. xvii-xix).

Comment

Persons with multiple personality trait are more likely to enter trance states, have memory gaps, and to both know and not know things about themselves.

1. Sophie Santos. The One You Want To Marry (And Other Identities I’ve Had). New York, TOPPLE Books & Little A, 2021.

“Vaccine Refusers Dig In”: Is the voice of an alternate personality the “noise” behind this flaw in human judgment?

Front Page,Today’s New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/health/covid-boosters-unvaccinated.html

I have no evidence that multiple personality trait is involved in vaccine refusal. But the issue reminded me of the following past post:

May 19, 2021

“Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein: Is Multiple Personality Noisy?

Judging from the book’s index (1) and reviews (2, 3, 4), the authors have not considered multiple personality as one possible cause for seemingly random or idiosyncratic judgment.

1. Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. New York, Little, Brown Spark, 2021.

2. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/books/review/noise-daniel-kahneman-olivier-sibony-cass-sunstein.html

3. Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-kahneman/noise-flaw/

4. Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316451406 

Please relate my findings and ideas to your own interests and expertise. Please contribute something beyond my scope and ability. Please submit brief relevant essays.                                                                                                                                

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Its unlabeled, unintentional, unacknowledged evidence of multiple personality is significant, because there is nothing unusual about this novel and author

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Protagonist has episodes of self-mutilation, a common symptom of multiple personality disorder

For example, “Then I scratched my arm open until it bled, just a faint spot of blood, widening into a droplet” (1, p. 201). Self-mutilation is a hidden behavior in at least a third of MPD patients (2, p. 64). Search “self-mutilation” for elaboration of this subject regarding other novels in past posts.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Protagonist has episode including memory gap, typical of young writer with undiagnosed multiple personality

Frances, first-person protagonist, is a university student and poet.

“I didn’t have class until three…I didn’t plan to write a story, I just noticed after some time that I wasn’t hitting the return key and that the lines were forming full sentences and attaching to each other like prose. When I stopped, I had written over three thousand words. It was past three o’clock and I hadn’t eaten…It was the first story I ever wrote” (1, p. 202).

She has a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, a memory gap, for the period of time during which an alternate personality evidently took over and wrote the story.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Why does the novel say and repeat that the protagonist has “no real personality”?

It does not say she is “finding herself” or “in the closet.”

It does say she is bisexual in that she has had both lesbian and heterosexual relationships. But if she were a bisexual, per se, then she would have a real personality: Her single, consistent, personality would be bisexual. However, she is not described as consistently attracted to both men and women, so that is not her real personality.

My answer as to how someone can have no particular single personality is that they have multiple personality.

As I proceed to read the last third of this novel, I will see if it provides a better explanation.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney (post 2): Some of the protagonist’s peculiar, multiple personality-related thoughts that are rarely, if ever, mentioned in reviews

Approaching the midpoint of this novel, I look back at some of the interesting things that Frances, the first-person protagonist, has said [in bold with added comments]:

“I liked to sit in the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve…” (1, p. 33).[host personality allows switch to alternate personality]

“Even looking in the mirror made me nervous…Eventually the features of my face seemed to come apart from one another or at least lose their ordinary relationships to each other…” (1, p. 35). [Persons with multiple personality see odd things in mirror due to mixture of images of various personalities.]

“I was aware of the fact that he [Nick, a professional actor] could pretend to be anyone he wanted to be, and I wondered if he also lacked ‘a real personality’ the same as I did” (1, p. 37). [Reiterates protagonist's host personality facade.]

“I tried stamping my feet as loudly as I could to distract myself from bad thoughts, but people gave me curious looks and I felt cowed. I knew that was weak of me. Bobbi [her girlfriend and former lover] was never cowed by strangers” (1, p. 50). [Bad thoughts from alternate personalities.]

At the end of a visit with her father, she cleaned his kitchen. “Watching the soap bubbles slide silently down the blades of the kitchen knives, I had a sudden desire to harm myself. Instead I put away the salt and pepper shakers…” (1, p. 51). [From an alternate personality.]

Visiting Melissa’s and Nick’s house, “For a few seconds I imagined that this was my house, that I had grown up here, and the things in it belonged to me” (1, p. 53). [Odd fantasy from an alternate personality.]

“Eventually Nick looked over and I looked back. I felt a key turning hard inside my body, turning so forcefully that I could do nothing to stop it…Neither of us gestured or waved, we just looked at one another, as if we were already having a private conversation that couldn’t be overheard” (1, pp. 64-65). [From an alternate personality.]

“I hadn’t really wanted to feel sympathetic to Melissa, and now I felt her moving outside my frame of sympathy entirely, as if she belonged to a different story with different characters. When we went upstairs I told Nick I had never had sex with a man before…But when he asked me if I was sure I wanted to do all this, I heard myself say: I didn’t really come over just to talk, you know” (1, p. 68). [Out of character attitude from an alternate personality.]

“…what I found most endearing about him…was that he was attracted to plain and emotionally cold women like me” (1, p. 81). Her personalities differ with each other in their sexual feelings.] 

“I fantasized about punching myself in the stomach” (1, p. 132). [Arguing with or impulses to assault oneself are typical of persons with more than one personality.]

Comments [added Oct. 5] 

Peculiarities and inconsistencies above in bold with added comments. Most readers gloss over these things that make no sense to them and which they do not recognize to be a kind of thing explainable by the presence of alternate personalities.

They are not labeled in the novel as having to do with multiple personality, because the author did not think of it in those terms and had no intention of raising that issue, which evidently reflected the author's own psychology. 

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

The Host Personality Facade: Sally Rooney’s protagonist and in Joyce Carol Oates’ video

In Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, “Bobbi (the first-person narrating protagonist’s best girlfriend) has told Frances that “she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’…Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am” (1, p. 18).

In Joyce Carol Oates’ video, she says that her personality comes and goes. Her husband thinks she always has a personality, because one always comes out when she’s with him, but when she’s not with him, that personality disappears and she’s like “a transparent glass of water” (2).

In short, the false appearance that this character and writer have single, continuously present personalities is a host personality facade.

Nevertheless, both character and writer are highly intelligent, well-functioning people.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

2. Writer Joyce Carol Oates at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEnROS8bcTI

“Conversations With Friends” (post 1) by Sally Rooney (post 3): Protagonist unintentionally introduced as student and poet with multiple personality

In “A Conversation with Sally Rooney”( 2018) at the back of this edition of her first novel, she says, “The four central characters came to me almost fully formed, long before I had any real idea of a plot, voice, or setting…People often accuse me of talking about my characters as if they’re real people, truly an unfortunate habit—and my only defense is that, to me, they are” (1, pp. 313-315).

If the author doesn’t recall creating the four central characters, then I can think of two possibilities: Either an alternate personality did create them and provide them to her for this novel, or these “characters” were some of the author’s alternate personalities, who agreed to be used as characters. But I have no way of knowing the actual details.

The first-person narrator, Frances, who says she has “a rich inner life, believe me” (1, p. 14), virtually declares having multiple personality: “Bobbi [her best girlfriend] told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality,’ but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am” (1, p. 18).

Frances’s host personality “could do or say anything,” depending on which of her alternate personalities had taken control.

Moreover, the host or regular personality is usually not the person’s original personality, may be only a facade, and may itself be composed of several personalities, addressing different social situations.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

Added Oct. 2: Reading a little further, with Frances as the first-person narrator, I'm wondering how that worked, if the characters are real people, to her, Sally Rooney (see above). Did Rooney experience herself as switching personalities to become Frances, to narrate as her? Or did Rooney just write down what she heard Frances say? Interviewers should ask Rooney what she meant.