“Pathological: The True Story of Six [Psychiatric] Misdiagnoses” by Sarah Fay
I haven’t seen this memoir (1), but it’s theme interests me, because most persons eventually found to have multiple personality have had previous misdiagnoses.
So I’ll buy the book and look for clues.
1. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sarah-fay/pathological/
“Finding Me” a memoir by actress Viola Davis (post 4): Says most sex abuse survivors like her have “dissociative disorder” (1, p. 282) and since the ultimate dissociative disorder is dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality) (2), it may be her self-diagnosis
However, since Viola Davis is not mentally ill, I would not call it multiple personality disorder, but, rather, multiple personality trait, which is seen in many successful, creative artists.
1. Viola Davis. Finding Me (memoir). New York, HarperOne/Ebony, 2022.
“Finding Me,” a memoir by actress Viola Davis (post 3): She is aware of two alternate personalities, but has not been diagnosed by her therapist
“…after being in therapy for seven years…I was thirty-eight…I always seemed to be carrying either the eight-year-old or the twenty-eight-year-old with me, as if I was calling on them to help me. The eight-year-old was mad for not being acknowledged and the twenty-eight-year-old was dead” (1, pp. 232-233).
In multiple personality, child-aged personalities may be frozen in time, and like Peter Pan, never grow up; although, in therapy for multiple personality, if the goal is to merge all the personalities, the child-aged personalities may be age-progressed to the person’s actual age to prepare them for merger.
Personalities thought of as “dead” may only be inactive, and may be reactivated if their special talents or memories are needed.
1. Viola Davis. Finding Me (a memoir). New York, HarperOne/Ebony, 2022.
“Finding Me” a memoir by actress Viola Davis (post 2): “A huge part of me, my pathology, was a big secret…I had compartmentalized me”
“…deep inside there was a demon, and another part of me that was wrestling with the ‘alive’ me. She, the demon, kept whispering, ‘You’re not good.’ But the other part, the fighter, the survivor, screamed back a resounding, ‘No!’” (1, p. 60).
“…happy moments would soon be followed by trauma—the rage of my dad’s alcoholic binges, violence, poverty, hunger, and isolation…I wished I could elevate out of my body. Leave it. One time, when I was about nine years old, I succeeded…I floated up to the ceiling, looking down at myself…Then I faced myself, staring directly into—me” (1, p. 70).
“…And eventually other inappropriate [sexual] behavior occurred that had a profound effect. I compartmentalized much of this at the time. I stored it in a place of my psyche that felt safely hidden. By hiding it I could actually pretend it didn’t happen. But it did” (1, p. 76).
“…A huge part of me, my pathology, was a big secret” (1, p.130).
“When I graduated from Rhode Island College, a voice somewhere far in the recesses of my psyche, which was always true, honest, and in hindsight, beautifully cognizant, that I didn’t have the courage to always listen to, but when I did, it served me perfectly, steered me to apply to a six-week summer program at Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City. I got accepted…” (1, p. 135).
“Juilliard forced me to understand the power of my Blackness. I spent so much of my childhood defending it, being ridiculed for it. Then in college proving I was good enough. I had compartmentalized me…” (1, p. 164).
1. Viola Davis. Finding Me (a memoir). New York, HarperOne/Ebony, 2022.
“Finding Me” by award-winning actress Viola Davis (post 1): Davis sees her child-aged alternate personality; novelist Charles Dickens had done the same thing
In chapter one, Davis recalls that as an 8-year-old Black schoolgirl, she always had to run home after school to escape white racist schoolboys, who would always chase her.
“At the age of twenty-eight, I woke up to the burning fact that my journey and everything I was doing with my life was about healing the eight-year old girl…until a therapist a few years ago said, ‘Why are you trying to heal her…she survived.’ (Her therapist thought the 8-year-old was now 28.)
“I sat there with my arms crossed. No way! I’m the one who made it out…I looked over at the empty space next to me on the couch and saw my younger self so clearly. She sat there waiting…I saw that young girl so clearly that day in my therapist’s office. I could hear her saying, ‘You are my home. Let me in’ ” (1, pp. 1-9).
Charles Dickens
As quoted in the first chapter of Forster’s biography, Dickens tells about when he was once on his way to Canterbury, was nearing the house called Gadshill-place, and he thought he saw, standing by the road, a strange young boy:
“Holloa!” said I [Dickens], to the very queer small boy, “where do you live?”
“At Chatham,” says he.
“What do you do there?” says I.
“I go to school,” says he.
I took him up [into his carriage] in a moment, and we went on [Dickens recalls]. Presently, the very queer small boy says, “This is Gads-hill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran away.”
“You know something about Falstaff, eh?” said I.
“All about him,” said the very queer small boy. “I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!”
“You admire that house?” said I.
“Bless you, sir,” said the very queer small boy, “when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now I am nine, I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it. Though that’s impossible!” said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his might.
I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy [Dickens recalls]; for that house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true.
Thus, Dickens, in real life, conversed with a “ghost,” which was actually a child-aged alternate personality. This doesn’t surprise me. Child-aged alters (alternate personalities) are one of the most common kinds, because multiple personality starts in childhood. And people with multiple personality do sometimes converse with their alters like Dickens did (which is similar to the way many novelists talk with their characters). In terms of his writing, his child-aged alters may have helped Dickens write certain things from a child’s perspective. And since Dickens saw “ghosts,” it is not surprising that one of his most famous and beloved works, “A Christmas Carol,” is a ghost story.
1. Viola Davis. Finding Me. New York, HarperOne/Ebony, 2022.
“Inspired: Understanding Creativity” by Matt Richtel: Author was scared of the multitudes within…before finding the voice of his alternate personality muse
“…people get locked into identities, narrowed by fears that…limit our access to our own natural capacities…I know this firsthand, having resisted creative impulses for years, scared of the multitudes within, resistant to them—a defiance that caused me to implode emotionally, before finding my voice” (1, pp. 21-22).
“…I went through significant transformation from ignoring my voice, to hearing and then expressing it” (1, p.71).
“What many creators discover as they emerge—and learn to hear their voices—is to listen to their voices and impulses without judgment or fear…” (1, p. 84).
“…creators emerge and begin to hear the voice, the muse” (1, p. 85).
“I mentioned earlier that I began to hear my own voice after I had a good, old-fashioned emotional collapse in my late twenties” (1, p. 221).
Comment: The author refers to the voice of an alternate personality that is his "muse." "Multitudes within" suggests he has more alternate personalities than just his "muse" alternate personality.
If you read his book quickly, you may not realize he is talking about an audible, rational voice in his head, which, in a sane, productive person like Matt Richtel is probably the voice of an alternate personality.
1. Matt Richtel. Inspired: Understanding Creativity, a Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul. Boston, Mariner Books, 2022.
“A Strange Loop” by Michael R. Jackson: Six actors embody protagonist’s competing thoughts in this multiple personality (unlabeled, unacknowledged), Pulitzer Prize-winning musical
Maya Phillips’ New York Times Theater Review. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/theater/a-strange-loop-review-broadway.html
“The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’ ” by Pamela Paul: Limited Perspective
Pamela Paul, known until today as editor of The New York Times Book Review, is now a columnist for The Times, but she has not changed her perspective on multiple personality: she ignores it (1).
Persons with “multiple personality trait” (2) — probably 90% of fiction writers and up to 30% of the general public — imaginatively experience the world from the various perspectives (different genders, etc.) of their alternate personalities. Their virtual-reality experience may sometimes be, in the words of some fiction writers, “more real than real.”
1. Pamela Paul. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/opinion/lived-experience-empathy-culture.html
2. Kenneth A. Nakdimen, MD. https://multiplewriters.blogspot.com/
NOBODY LIKED THESE PAST POSTS on "TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD"
Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” reveals racism and multiple personality behind her “To Kill a Mockingbird”
2018 (post 1)
Since Go Set a Watchman (written mid-1950's; published 2015) was actually written before, but, mandated by an editor, was revised into what eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the former may be a less polished, but more authentic, reflection of the author.
In this novel, twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise returns home from New York City to Alabama to visit her aging father, Atticus, and also to renew her romantic relationship with Henry Clinton, who says to Jean Louise:
“You’re a Jekyll-and-Hyde character” (1, p. 47).
“In the years when he was away at the war and the University, she had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. He began dating her on her annual two-week visits home, and although she still moved like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment, he found something so intensely feminine about her that he fell in love” (1, p. 13).
“ ‘Want to drive?’ said Henry. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. Although she was a respectable driver, she hated to operate anything mechanical more complicated than a safety pin: folding lawn chairs were a source of profound irritation to her; she had never learned to ride a bicycle or use a typewriter” (1, p. 11).
At age eleven, when she got her first menstrual period, “It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had become one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing…and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess.” And so she felt “a cruel practical joke had been played upon her: she must now go into a world of femininity, a world she despised, could not comprehend…” (1, p. 116).
“Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee (post 2): Jean Louise’s multiple personality indicated by her dissociative fugue after finding father racist.
Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise is shocked, disillusioned, angered, and nauseated—she literally vomits—when she discovers that her idolized father, Atticus, is a racist.
However, in view of the obvious racist hierarchy of their community, and how freely Atticus and her other close relatives acknowledge their racist attitudes, I think that the only way Jean Louise could not have been aware of her family’s racism would have been for her to have compartmentalized awareness of it in an alternate personality. But that is just my opinion.
The main textual evidence for her multiple personality (aside from her duality, described in the previous post), is her dissociative fugue:
She thinks to herself, “Two solid hours and I didn’t know where I was.”
And when her Aunt asks her where she has been, she replies, “I—I don’t know” (1, pp. 120-121).
Search “fugue” and “dissociative fugue” for previous posts on this common symptom of multiple personality.
I would also interpret the episode at the end of the novel—when her uncle convinces her not to leave town and not to estrange herself from the family—as further evidence of multiple personality, because both his backhand to her mouth (p. 260) and his giving her whiskey appear to have changed her mind not by intimidation or intoxication, but by altering her state of consciousness (pp. 262, 269) and causing a switch to a more pliant personality.
1. Harper Lee. Go Set a Watchman. New York, Harper, 2015.
Viola Davis: Oscar-winning actress is asked “What character from literature would you most like to play?” (1)
She says, “Hedda Gabler from the play by Henrik Ibsen. Hedda is the King Lear for women. When you meet her, you cannot figure her out. There’s an angst, an unsettled quality that you begin to judge. In the ending, you find that it’s just a cover. It reminds me of life. Anyone you meet is a ‘representative’ of themselves until they make themselves known” (1).
If Hedda Gabler had multiple personality, Viola Davis may mean that when you meet someone, it is only their host personality, until their alternate personalities are known.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/books/review/viola-davis-memoir-finding-me.html
2019
“Hedda Gabler” by Henrik Ibsen: Does Hedda have multiple personality?
According to Ben Brantley’s New York Times review of a 2006 production, Hedda has “multiple personality disorder” (1). I don’t know whether Brantley was being serious or sarcastic. But is there any evidence in the original play that Hedda has a split personality?
At the play's end, after Hedda has just committed suicide by shooting herself in the head, another character comments, which are the last words of the play: “People just don’t act that way!” (2).
Ibsen is reminding us, emphasizing the point, and leaving us with the thought, that Hedda’s behavior is puzzling, and has been for many years. In an old example from earlier in the play, one of the other characters says she has been afraid of Hedda since their school days:
HEDDA: Afraid of me?
MRS. ELVSTED: Horribly afraid. Whenever we’d meet on the stairs you always used to pull my hair…and once you said you’d burn it off.
Hedda says she doesn’t recall that. But at a later point in the play, she indicates that she does recall it. Was she just lying the first time, or does she have one personality who doesn’t recall it and another personality who does?
Another example of Hedda’s puzzling behavior—puzzling even to herself— is an incident regarding a hat belonging to her husband’s aunt:
BRACK: What were you saying about a hat?
HEDDA: Oh, just a little run-in with Miss Tesman this morning. She’d put her hat down there on that chair (Looks at him smiling.) and I pretended I thought it was the maid’s.
BRACK: (Shaking his head.) My dear Mrs. Hedda, how could you do such a thing to that harmless old lady?
HEDDA: (Nervously walking across the floor.) Oh, you know—these things just come over me like that and I can’t resist them. (Flings herself into the armchair by the stove.) I can’t explain it, even to myself.
Puzzling behavior—puzzling even to those who know the person well, and even to the person herself—and inconsistent memory, may be clues to multiple personality, but there is nothing definitive in this play. In the future, I will look to see if any of Ibsen’s other plays is more explicit.
1. Ben Brantley. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/theater/reviews/a-heroine-in-a-hurry-via-ibsen.html
2. Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen’s Selected Plays [including Hedda Gabler, 1891]. Edited by Brian Johnston. Translated by Rick Davis and Brian Johnston. New York, W. W. Norton, 2004.
2019
“The League of Youth” by Henrik Ibsen (post 2): Interpretation that Hedda Gabler had split personality is supported by Ibsen’s thinking in those terms
In my previous post on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, I cited clues in the play that suggest Hedda had multiple personality. But is there evidence in any of Ibsen’s plays that he ever actually thought in those terms?
The League of Youth, an early Ibsen play, is usually cited today for having one situation and a bit of dialogue that anticipate A Doll’s House. But the following passage shows that Ibsen had also been thinking about split personality.
“A patchwork! I’ve known him all his life. His father was a little wizened idler — a scarecrow, a nobody. He ran a little general shop, with some pawnbroking on the side — or, more accurately, it was his wife who ran it. She was coarse and gross — the most unwomanly woman I’ve ever known. She had her husband declared unfit to manage his affairs. She hadn’t a kindly thought in her…That was the home where Stensgård grew up. He went to the grammar school. ‘He must be educated,’ said the mother, ‘he’ll make a fine debt-collector.’ An ugly life at home — high ideals at school; his mind, his character, his will, his talents, all pulling different ways…what else could it lead to but a split in his personality?” (1, Act 5, p. 126).*
* [translator’s note] “a split in his personality: This looks like an anachronism now that ‘split personality’ has become such a part of our fashionable psychological jargon, but ‘splittelse i personligheden’ is what Ibsen wrote” (1, p. 332).
Why had Ibsen been thinking about split personality? Had he read about it? Did he know anyone who had it? Did he have it? If you are an Ibsen scholar, maybe you can answer those questions.
1. Henrik Ibsen. “The League of Youth: A Comedy in Five Acts” [1869], pp. 23-143, in A Doll’s House and Other Plays by Henrik Ibsen. Trans. Peter Watts. London, Penguin Books, 1965.
Comment: Viola Davis identifies with a classic literary character who probably had multiple personality.
Some people disagree with you, because of what their alternate personalities advise them
As the title of this blog indicates, a minority of the public has multiple personality trait, meaning they have multiple personality, but, in most regards, are in touch with reality and well-functioning.
And who are they going to believe, the sources you rely on, or voices in their own head?
Of course, they probably won’t admit that they hear voices, unless they attribute the voices to spiritual or religious guidance.
Caution: Don’t ignore multiple personality, but don’t upset people
If you are not a licensed mental heath professional and have not been engaged by someone to diagnose and treat them, do not ask them if they have memory gaps or hear voices in their head that seem to have minds of their own. They may feel these questions are offensive, upsetting, and none of your business.
If you are a licensed psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, etc., your professional training probably omitted, or gave only passing, dismissive mention, to multiple personality (also called “dissociative identity”). So I suggest you begin by reading Putnam for the usually missed and undiagnosed, clinical disorder (1).
If you and the other person are interested in the psychology of fiction writers and how their multiple personality trait (a nonclinical, literary asset) is reflected in their works, refer them to this blog (2).
1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
2. Kenneth A. Nakdimen, MD. https://multiplewriters.blogspot.com/
Novelists Philip Roth, Lisa Halliday, and the memory gaps of people with multiple personality
In my posts on Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, I quote a character with memory gaps in a section of the novel that Halliday has said is somewhat autobiographical. Memory gaps, if present, would suggest multiple personality trait, like most successful novelists.
Coincidentally, there is another character in Asymmetry that represents novelist Philip Roth, who, in real life, also had memory gaps, such as the several-month memory gap discussed in another past post on a memoir by Roth’s former wife, Claire Bloom:
2014
In her memoir, the last time they met, Claire Bloom had hoped that she and Philip Roth could reconcile.
He began by asking her how she had been doing in recent months. She told him, and then asked how he had been doing in recent months. He replied that he couldn’t tell her, because he had “amnesia” (1).
Bloom—who didn’t know that Roth had multiple personality, or that multiple personality is known for its memory gaps and amnesia—thought that Roth’s claim of amnesia was absurd, dismissive, and insulting. As for Roth, he was disinclined to pursue the issue. Indeed, like most people with multiple personality, he would usually do his best to ignore his memory gaps, because they were nothing new, he couldn't do anything about it, and people might think he was crazy. Better to be thought insulting than crazy.
But why hadn't Bloom ever realized that Roth had multiple personality, since for eighteen years, she had repeatedly observed perplexing changes in his attitude and behavior? There are two main reasons. First, neither she nor any psychiatrist to whom she had ever spoken had seriously considered it. Second, alternate personalities usually don’t like to identify themselves or acknowledge their existence. They like to remain in disguise—for example, as being “only” a “literary alter ego”—or, better yet, they like to remain totally incognito. For when people don’t know about them, people can’t interfere with them, or, their worst fear, try to get rid of them.
1. Bloom, Claire. Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir. Boston, Little Brown, 1996.
Search “Philip Roth” for other past posts discussing evidence of his multiple personality trait.
“Asymmetry” by Lisa Halliday: People keep visiting my 2018 post (below), with its quotation from this novel about a character’s memory gaps, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality
2018
“Asymmetry” by Lisa Halliday: Parts 1 and 2 differ, not only in people and culture, but in punctuation and memory; one character has memory gaps
Part I of this novel begins: “…what is the point of a book…that does not have any quotation marks?” (1, first paragraph), meaning not just that dialogue is interesting, but that punctuation clarifies.
One hundred and twenty-five pages later, Part 2 of this novel, with a new cast of characters, has plenty of dialogue. But there are no quotation marks. It intentionally obfuscates.
And whereas people in Part 1 seem to know what they’re doing, at least one character in Part 2 does not. In spite of keeping a journal, and with no drugs or alcohol involved, he says that time and events go missing (which I notice, because memory gaps may be a symptom of multiple personality):
“It’s as if I blacked out for entire weeks at a time…What don’t I remember? Lots. Contemplating the blackouts in their aggregate makes my breath come short…writing things down does not work” (1, pp. 137-138).
In an interview, the author has said that, in some ways, Part 2 is autobiographical (2). Are memory gaps an example?
Only halfway, I will keep reading.
1. Lisa Halliday. Asymmetry. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2018.
2. https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/lisa-halliday-discusses-her-novel-asymmetry.html
The Poet's Mind: John Keats, W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth
Note: Prompted by the observance of National Poetry Month by tomorrow's edition of The New York Times Book Review, I offer this post to quote and discuss these poets' point of view.
“In the letters Keats coined ideas such as the “Chameleon Poet,” which came to gain common currency and capture the public imagination…The poetical mind, Keats argued:
“has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade…What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures” (1).
1. Wikipedia. “John Keats.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats
July 11, 2016
W. B. Yeats, 1923 Nobel Prize winner, hoped his “double” and “anti-self” “Leo” was a genuine spirit, but admitted “Leo” might be “a secondary personality”
“It was at Wimbledon, in 1912, that Yeats felt himself contacted by the spirit claiming to be ‘Leo’…’Leo’…said he had been with Yeats since childhood as his ‘opposite’…’Leo’ thereafter frequently reappeared to Yeats, who was so stirred that he began composing a correspondence with this alternate self…This imaginary dialogue was not wasted. It inspired the great antiphonal poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ written in 1915,” which included the following lines:
“I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self…”
“Yeats freely confessed that his useful sparring partner ‘Leo’ might come from his own imagination. As he explained in 1917 to Sir William Barrett, past President of the Society for Psychical Research, ‘I think one should deal with a control on the working hypothesis that it is genuine. This does not mean that I feel any certainty on the point, but even if it is a secondary personality that should be the right treatment’ " (1, pp. 9-10).
1. Brenda Maddox. George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats. London, Picador, 1999.
2016
“Emily Dickinson’s Use of the Persona” by John Emerson Todd: But is it more likely that she constructed personae or had alternate personalities?
Todd points out that in many of Dickinson’s poems, the “I” speaking is not Emily. It is a persona. He says she has four kinds: 1. The “Little Girl” Persona, 2. The “Lover-Wife-Queen” Persona, 3. Personae in Death and Eternity, and 4. Personae involving Psychology and the Divided Personality (1). He gives an example of the latter:
“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind —
As if my Brain had split —
I tried to match it — Seam by Seam —
But could not make them fit” (1, p. 83).
Todd uses the word “persona” to imply that Dickinson “more or less consciously adopted” those four kinds of “non-Emily” (1, p. xv) narrators.
But is that how most poems are written? Is that how Dickinson wrote? Where did her personae come from? Did she purposely, intellectually, construct them? I’m guessing that she didn’t construct her personae any more than most novelists construct their characters and narrators.
And that’s the trouble with concepts like persona, voice, alter ego, double, etc.: they are misleading about the creative process and uninformative psychologically. Emily Dickinson probably had alternate personalities.
1. John Emerson Todd. Emily Dickinson’s Use of the Persona. The Hague, Mouton, 1973.
T. S. Eliot: Multiple personality in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and in Eliot’s real-life identity as “The Captain,” possibly an alternate personality
This post continues my poetry-post retrospective. I want to make it clear that multiple personality is not an isolated quirk of any particular poet.
June 14, 2017
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: In the first line—“Let us go then, you and I”—the “you and I” may refer to Prufrock’s alternate personalities.
“Eliot offered different identifications. At some time in the 1950s, he answered the enquirer that ‘anything I say now must be somewhat conjectural, as it was written so long ago that my memory may deceive me; but I am prepared to assert that ‘you’ in The Love Song is merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex, whom the speaker is at the moment addressing…’ On the other hand, in a 1962 interview, Eliot said that Prufrock was in part a man of about forty and in part himself, and that he was employing the notion of the split personality…
“But the immediate source for ‘you and I’ is likely to have been Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), published in translation in 1910…In the Essai, Bergson develops the idea of a double self: one aspect being the everyday self, experiencing common reality; the other, a deeper self, attuned to profound truths, and normally in subjugation to the superficial self” (1, pp. 48-49).
“Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from multiple personalities of sorts…” (2). Laurence Perrine writes "The 'you and I' of the first line are divided parts of Prufrock's own nature” (2).
Comment
Why did Eliot, speaking about the poem in a 1950s interview, have to conjecture and presume what he had meant? Why didn’t he know for certain who “you” is in his poem? And why did he give a different explanation in the 1962 interview? Perhaps different personalities were answering the question in the two interviews. Prufrock.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock
1. B. C. Southam. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th ed. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1996.
2. Wikipedia. “The Love Song of J. Alfred
June 18, 2017
T. S. Eliot: In a secret life, Eliot called himself “The Captain,” who may have been the alternate personality responsible for his pornographic poems.
“The flat Tom rented in early 1923 was to be the hub of his secret life…At Burleigh Mansions he underwent a metamorphosis: here he was no longer ‘Mr. Eliot,’ banker and dutiful husband, but ‘Captain Eliot,’ hero of the Colombo verses, captain of his crew…
“Osbert Sitwell noticed, when he visited Eliot in the ‘bizarre’ atmosphere of the Charing Cross Road flat, that ‘Visitors on arrival had to enquire at the porter’s lodge for ‘The Captain,’…
“ ‘Noticing how tired my host looked, I regarded him more closely, and was amazed to notice on his cheeks a dusting of green powder…I was all the more amazed at this discovery, because any deliberate dramatisation of his appearance was so plainly out of keeping with his character, and with his desire never to call attention to himself, that I was hardly willing, any more than if I had seen a ghost, to credit the evidence of my senses.’
“Osbert was almost ready to disbelieve what he had seen, but he went to tea with Virginia Woolf a few days later. ‘She asked me, rather pointedly, if I had seen Tom lately, and when I said ‘Yes’ asked me—because she too was anxious for someone to confirm or rebut what she thought she had seen—whether I had observed the green powder on his face—so there was corroboration!’ Osbert and Virginia were apparently equally astounded, and although they discussed Tom’s use of cosmetics at considerable length, could find no way of explaining his ‘extraordinary and fantastical pretence’…He remained mystified: Osbert never did discover why T. S. Eliot called himself ‘The Captain’ and wore make-up…(1, pp. 356-358).
“As a student at Harvard, he began circulating his Columbo and Bolo jingles between about 1908 and 1914. For men only, and degrading women, Jews and blacks, they offer the spectacle of a penis so mighty it can rip a “whore” “from cunt to navel”. This revel in violence is varied by the antics of the sex-mad King Bolo and his Big Black Kween, whose bum is as big as a soup tureen…
“At first, when I came upon the Bolovian Court and Columbo and his crew, I assumed that they were a juvenile aberration. The third volume of Letters (covering the period of Eliot’s conversion to the Anglican faith in June 1927) presents a challenge to this. For the obscene verse that Eliot continued to write and disseminate as late as the age of 44 is not, in his own post-conversion view, an aberration” (2).
Perhaps “The Captain” was an alternate personality responsible for Eliot’s Colombo poems.
1. Carole Seymour-Jones. Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of T. S. Eliot. New York, Anchor/Random House, 2001.
2. Lyndall Gordon. “T S Eliot and the sexual wasteland.” NewStatesman, 20 November 2015. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2015/11/t-s-eliot-and-sexual-wasteland
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Two Voices” in “The Poet’s Mind” by Gregory Tate: Poem demonstrates “double consciousness,” which means multiple personality
Professor Tate says that Tennyson’s “view of the embodied mind in his early writing, epitomized in ‘The Two Voices’, is of a fragmented and fluctuating compound of mental states whose operations often defy conscious control; a view that was also partly formed through personal experience…
"‘The Two Voices’ comprises a dialogue between a depressed speaker and an insidious inner voice that urges suicide” (1, p. 45).
The poem refers to states of consciousness that differ in what they remember, so that the relation of the poem to the psychological concept of “double consciousness…is evident in the emphasis that both place on the separation of the two states of consciousness through the fragmentation of memory” (1, p. 48).
Double Consciousness
Tate credits the concept of double consciousness to the work of 19th century doctor Henry Holland, who defined it as a condition in which “the mind passes by alternation from one state to another, each having the perception of external impressions and appropriate trains of thought, but not linked together by…mutual memory” (1, p. 48).
Here is another history of “double consciousness”:
“…the term "double consciousness" was applied to cases of split personality; by the late nineteenth century, it had come into quite general use not only in professional publications but also in discussions of psychological research published for general audiences as well…
“In 1817, in a New York professional journal called the Medical Repository, an account headed ‘A Double Consciousness, or a Duality of Person in the same Individual’ made use of the term in a way that remained fairly constant for psychology through the nineteenth century. The account was of a young woman—later identified as Mary Reynolds—who at about age nineteen fell into a deep sleep from which she awoke with no memory of who she was and with a wholly different personality. A few months later, after again falling into a deep sleep, she awoke as her old self. At the time of the 1817 account, she had periodically alternated selves for a period of about four years. As it turned out, this was to continue for about fifteen or sixteen years in total, until in her mid-thirties she permanently entered the second state. Her two lives were entirely separate; while in one, she had no knowledge or memory of the other. Such utter distinctiveness of the two selves was what made the editors of the Medical Repository refer to hers as a case of ‘double consciousness.’
“As a result of the Mary Reynolds case, the term ‘double consciousness’ entered into fairly extensive use. For example, Francis Wayland's influential mid-nineteenth-century textbook Elements of Intellectual Philosophy treated the concept of double consciousness as part of a general discussion of consciousness as such and recounted the Mary Reynolds case along with a few others by way of illustration. An 1860 article in Harper's also focused on the Reynolds case and on double consciousness as a medical and philosophical issue. As a medical term, then, it was hardly confined to the use of medical professionals.
“During the time Du Bois was formulating his ideas of African American distinctiveness, there had been renewed interest in double consciousness as a medical and theoretical issue. Most important for Du Bois was the role of his Harvard mentor William James. James stimulated this interest, not only in his Principles—in describing what he called ‘alternating selves’ or ‘primary and secondary consciousness,’ he drew on a body of contemporary French work which had been widely publicized in the United States as well—but also as a result of his own experience about 1890 with a notable American case of double consciousness, that of Ansel Bourne. James's work with Bourne (whose discoverer, Richard Hodgson, did use ‘double consciousness’ to label the case), as well as the American publication of the French studies on which James drew, occurred at the same time Du Bois's relationship with James was at its closest. Whether James and Du Bois talked about it at the time is impossible to say, but based on Du Bois's use of ‘double consciousness’ in his Atlantic essay he certainly seems to have known the term's psychological background, because he used it in ways quite consistent with that background” (2).
“The Two Voices” (3).
1. Gregory Tate. The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.
2. Dickson D. Bruce Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG03/souls/brucepg.html
3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. “The Two Voices.” http://www.philaletheians.co.uk/study-notes/constitution-of-man/the-two-voices-of-lord-tennyson.pdf
William Wordsworth on his Multiple Consciousness: “often do I seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself And of some other Being.”
Wordsworth is famous for saying that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility,” which is from his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. But he says something quite different in The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem.
His Preface may be quoted more often than his Prelude, because of prejudice against multiple personality (multiple consciousness).
August 3, 2014
William Wordsworth on his “Two Consciousnesses” and “other Being”
It is natural to believe that everyone has the same sense of self that you do. If you have a single sense of self, then you may suspect that anyone who claims otherwise is joking, lying, or crazy. If you have a multiple sense of self, then you may suspect that anyone who claims otherwise is lying or in denial.
So you might find it interesting to show the following quotation to people you know and get their reactions.
It is from Wordsworth’s The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem, Book Second, School-time (1850 version):
A tranquillising spirit presses now
On my corporeal frame, so wide appears
The vacancy between me and those days
Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,
That musing on them, often do I seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other Being.
Wordsworth J, Abrams MH, Gill S (Eds). William Wordsworth The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception; Recent Critical Essays. New York, WW Norton, 1979.
August 4, 2014
Wordsworth footnote:
I almost did not write the last post, because the first time I read those lines from Wordsworth’s Prelude, I misread them.
At first, I thought he was making the trivial point that he had seen things differently when he was younger. But rereading, I realized that he was not making that trivial point.
Rather, he is saying that, now, as an adult, he is subjectively aware of two distinct, conscious Beings within him, one of which originated in, and relates to, his childhood; in other words, a child-aged alternate personality (the most common kind of alternate personality, because multiple personality starts in childhood).
Multiple consciousness—each with its own sense of “I”—is the essence of multiple personality. And that is what Wordsworth is describing.
Note: Please excuse some glitches in my reassembling of the above past posts.
