Dangers in Interviewing and Not Interviewing Family and Friends of Patients with “Schizophrenia” or Multiple Personality

The well-known danger in multiple personality is that the family member or friend may be an abuser, and so speaking to them may be seen by your patient as a blatant betrayal.

But some patients with multiple personality, because they had reported hearing voices (of alternate personalities) have been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia for years, while the family knew they had multiple personality, but mistakenly assumed the doctors knew that, too, because it was so obvious at home, and because they mistakenly thought the doctor’s diagnosis of schizophrenia included multiple personality.

“Losing the Atmosphere” by Vivian Conan (post 3): Missing memory gaps may make this memoir misleading

In post 1, Vivian spoke of having “two Mommies” in childhood, a love mommy and a hate mommy, but her mother usually seems benevolent in the rest of the memoir, so I wonder if Vivian might have done things in childhood to anger her mother, then lied about it, because she had a memory gap for doing it, which is why some people with multiple personality have had a reputation for being a liar in childhood.  Search “lying.”

Neither her mother nor anyone else who has known Vivian is ever asked if they know Vivian to have done things she didn’t remember. [Maybe her mother thought there were "two Vivians."]

While there may be exceptional cases without memory gaps, this memoir may be misleading regarding the issue.

1. Vivian Conan. Losing the Atmosphere, a Memoir: A Baffling Disorder, a Search for Help, and the Therapist Who Understood. Afterword by Jeffery Smith, MD. New York, N.Y., Greenpoint Press, 2020.

Added next day: The author says she attended a writers' workshop for many years for help in writing this memoir, and that one of her alternate personalities is a fiction writer. Her therapist, with his patient's permission, should have interviewed people who knew her. Did he?

“Losing the Atmosphere” a memoir by Vivian Conan (post 2): Therapist diagnoses multiple personality, infers “attachment trauma,” but fails to report memory gaps

“Losing the Atmosphere,” says Jeffery Smith, MD, “is more than an account of living with multiple personalities…what made Vivian split into distinct parts was attachment trauma” (due to problems with parenting in childhood) (1, pp. 441-442).

Comment: I don't know if attachment theory improves treatment of multiple personality.

Dr. Smith says Vivian clearly has multiple personality, which, he adds, “is far more common than many people, even experts, realize" (1, p. 442), but his overview of the case (1, pp. 441-450) makes no mention of memory gaps, a required criterion for making the diagnosis (2, p. 292).

Comment: I do know that awareness of memory gaps will improve a therapist's results.

The memoir itself supports the diagnosis of multiple personality; for example, Vivian sees other personalities when she looks in the mirror.

Search “mirror,” “mirrors," and "memory gaps” for past posts on these symptoms.

1. Vivian Conan. Losing the Atmosphere, a Memoir: A Baffling Disorder, a Search for Help, and the Therapist Who Understood. Afterword by Jeffery Smith, MD. New York, N.Y., Greenpoint Press, 2020.

2. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA., American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

Added next day: The question arises as to whether Dr. Smith's failure to find any memory gaps means he never became aware of all her personalities.

Why did Trump repeatedly pause to make parenthetical remarks?

Speaking at a recent political rally, former President Trump repeatedly paused to comment on points he had just made. My first reaction was that it was a clever technique. He not only made his point, but then suggested what his audience should think about it.

My second reaction was that it reminded me of an old-fashioned comedy routine in which a ventriloquist’s “dummy” would comment on what the ventriloquist had just said.

Were Trump and the ventriloquists merely being clever and entertaining or were they giving voice to alternate personalities? I don’t know. Do you?

Novelist Elif Batumans’s ideal reading experience: Novels that put her to sleep

Interviewer: "Describe your ideal reading experience."

Batuman: "Reading novels in bed before sleep. I love reading in the dark, which is possible on an e-reader. Occasionally, I manage to drift to sleep while actually reading. That’s when I know I’m living the dream."

link to the Interview in New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/books/review/elif-batuman-by-the-book-interview.html

“Losing the Atmosphere (a Memoir) by Vivian Conan (Chapter 1, “Two Mommies”): Multiple Personality May Run in Families

As a young child, the author had only one mother, but her mother apparently had a split personality. And to adapt, the author developed her own, corresponding, split personality. “It was as if I had two mommies: a love mommy and a hate mommy…When the mommy who loved me was there, I didn’t know about the mommy who hated me, and when the mommy who hated me was there, I didn’t know about the mommy who loved me” (1, p. 11).

Comment: Multiple personality disorder may run in families (2), apparently due to psychological adaptation of the younger generation to the behavior of the older generation.

1. Vivian Conan. Losing the Atmosphere (a Memoir): A Baffling Disorder, a Search for Help, and the Therapist Who Understood. Afterword by Jeffery Smith, MD. New York, Greenpoint Press, 2020.

2. Catherine A. Yeager MA, Dorothy Otnow Lewis MD. “The Intergenerational Transmission of Violence and Dissociation.” Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Volume 5, Issue 2, April 1996, Pages 393-430. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1056499318303730 

Multiple Personality: Four temporary benefits from benevolent therapists who don’t know how to diagnose and treat it

1. The therapist is a safe harbor from family, friends, or even another well-meaning therapist, who have unintentionally provoked various alternate personalities.

2. The patient also has another condition that the therapist does know how to treat.

3. The medication for the other condition inadvertently makes it harder for a problematic alternate personality to take control.

4. The therapist unknowingly supports one or more of the better-functioning alternate personalities.

Video: Vivian Conan discusses “Losing the Atmosphere”

After a brief introduction, Vivian Conan, a clear-spoken, 78-year-old librarian, discusses her memoir about life with, and recovery from, multiple personality disorder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6kopI96Fcs

I haven't read her memoir yet, but I may soon.

High Quality of Blog Visits

In the last twenty-four hours, the twenty most-visited posts have been a well-chosen assortment of entertaining posts that elaborate the blog’s thesis. And there remain literally thousands of other good posts.

THE WORD "NORMAL" IS OBSOLETE

Racism, sexism, and prejudice are attitudes toward people who are different from you; who are, in that sense, abnormal.

Children should be taught, not that they are “normal,” but that they are "a variety,” with a variety of traits, which is good, because “variety is the spice of life.”

Instead of saying someone is “normal” in the sense of healthy, say they are in good health.

My Letter Submitted to New York Times on Batuman’s borrowing the title for her novel Either/Or from a work written by Kierkegaard’s alternate personalities

TO THE EDITOR:

Elif Batuman borrowed the title of her [new] novel Either/Or from Kierkegaard, who said that [his original work] Either/Or had been written by three of his pseudonyms: “Victor Eremita,” “A,” and “Judge William.”

Kierkegaard insisted that “in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader…It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me.”

Did Elif Batuman mean to imply the same kind of thing about her own writing process or did she borrow the title without knowing how Kierkegaard's work had been written?

Comment: The New York Times has now published two separate reviews of Elif Batuman’s recent novel Either/Or. Both reviews mention Kierkegaard, but neither review mentions his multiple personality and famous pseudonyms. (Search "Kierkegaard" here and/or see Wikipedia.)

Amy Tan (post 3): Multiple Personality Trait

Her reports (see prior posts) of “fugue” (memory gap) + “doppelgänger” (alternate personality) = multiple personality (trait, not disorder, since she is not mentally ill).

SHOCKING: Most psychiatrists and psychologists would be shocked to learn that normal, productive people like successful novelists have multiple personality trait

“Where the Past Begins (post 2)” by Amy Tan: Her novels are written by a doppelgänger who wants to be acknowledged

“…the first-person fictional consciousness is not me, unless you think my doppelgänger should get credit as a separate entity. And now, in just raising the rhetorical question, she evidently thinks she should be acknowledged.

“So let me rephrase: I am the author of a novel told by a doppelgänger in possession of my thoughts, who inserts her subconscious into my subconscious, which is rather like being unaware that someone has deftly slipped her hands into mine. My hands are not the ones tapping the keyboard, although I still believe they are, and these words you are reading are entirely hers, which I still believe are mine” (1, p. 226).

1. Amy Tan. Where the Past Begins (a Writer’s Memoir). New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2017.

2018

“Where the Past Begins (A Writer’s Memoir)” by Amy Tan: In interview, Amy Tan says, “I write in a fugue state, and I don’t remember what I’ve written”

Amy Tan says she writes in a fugue in an interview on this book with Publisher’s Weekly (1).

In the book itself, she says that she had her most extensive and intensive fugue while writing her third novel: “Looking back, those fifty pages seem like a miracle to me. I have never been in a similar fugue state since, neither in length [twelve hours] nor intensity” (2, p. 38).

The Publisher’s Weekly interview also includes the following:

Q. You’ve observed that the process of writing is “the painful recovery of things that are lost.” Was this book painful?

A. Extremely. I think that’s why I was very reluctant to have it published, because everything about it was so fresh and painful and I needed to protect it more. During the writing I was often left shaking, crying, and dazed. But I was also able to go back and be with the person I was at the time and say, “Yeah that was wrong and shouldn’t have happened,” and cry about it. At the same time I’m an adult saying, “How interesting that you resisted people’s expectations, and how good is that!” (1).

I have just started reading this memoir, and will be interested to see how Amy Tan understands: 1. her fugue states, and 2. conversing with her child-aged self.

1. PW Talks with Amy Tan, October 6, 2017. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/74982-discovering-the-past-pw-talks-with-amy-tan.html

2. Amy Tan. Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2017.

“The Idiot” by Elif Batuman: Protagonist's Conclusion

“I hadn’t learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn’t learned anything at all” (1, p. 423).

1. Elif Batuman. The Idiot. Penguin Books, 2017.

Elif Batuman (post 3): Title of her latest novel “Either/Or” (1) is borrowed from Kierkegaard (2, 3), who is famous for his multiple personality

1. Wikipedia. “Elif Batuman.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman

2. Wikipedia. “Søren Kierkegaard.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

3. Wikipedia. “Either/Or.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Either%2FOr

2019

Kierkegaard’s influence on 20th Century Writers, and his Well-Known, Pseudonymous, Alternate Personalities

From Wikipedia

“Kierkegaard [1813-1855] has also had a considerable influence on 20th-century literature. Figures deeply influenced by his work include W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, David Lodge, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D. Salinger and John Updike…

“Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonyms that he used to present distinctive viewpoints and to interact with each other in complex dialogue. He explored particularly complex problems from different viewpoints, each under a different pseudonym…

“Kierkegaard's most important pseudonyms, in chronological order, were:

— Victor Eremita, editor of Either/Or

— A, writer of many articles in Either/Or

— Judge William, author of rebuttals to A in Either/Or

— Johannes de silentio, author of Fear and Trembling

— Constantine Constantius, author of the first half of Repetition

— Young Man, author of the second half of Repetition

— Vigilius Haufniensis, author of The Concept of Anxiety

— Nicolaus Notabene, author of Prefaces

— Hilarius Bookbinder, editor of Stages on Life's Way

— Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding

— Unscientific Postscript

— Inter et Inter, author of The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress

— H.H., author of Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays

— Anti-Climacus, author of The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity.”

Kierkegaard Said:

“I suffer as a human being can suffer in indescribable melancholy, which always has to do with my thinking about my own existence…Only when I am producing do I feel well. Then I forget all life’s discomforts, all suffering, then I am absorbed in my thought and happy. If I let my work alone for a couple of days I immediately become ill, overwhelmed, troubled, my head heavy and burdened.” It was due to his melancholy, he tells us, that he “discovered and poetically traveled through a whole fantasy world.” His writing was not an agreeable amusement, but “the product of an irresistible inward impulse, a melancholy man’s only possibility…As Scheherazade saved her life by telling stories, so I save myself or keep myself alive by writing…

“…in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them…My wish, my prayer, is that if it occur to anyone to cite a particular saying from the books, he do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonym…

“Each time I wish to say something, there is another who says it at the very same moment. It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me…” (1, pp. 135-151).

1. Josiah Thompson. Kierkegaard. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

“Two-Headed Poems” by Margaret Atwood

“The heads speak sometimes singly, sometimes

  together, sometimes alternately within a poem…

  but we are not foreigners

  to each other; we are the pressure

  on the inside of the skull…

  

 “You can’t live here without breathing

  someone else’s air,

  air that has been used to shape

  these hidden words that are not yours…” (1, pp. 59-69)

  Search “Margaret Atwood” for posts on other works.

  1. Margaret Atwood. Two-Headed Poems. NewYork, Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1978.

“The Idiot” by Elif Batuman (post 2): Possible signs of multiple personality that most readers tend to gloss over or explain away

“He said ‘my love for you’—and then he said it was for someone else, the person writing my letters” (1, p. 133). The female protagonist, a Harvard college freshman, is commenting on email correspondence with Ivan, whom she may love. He differentiates between the woman he had met in class and her personal-letter-writing personality.

“I couldn’t work or sleep. I didn’t understand what the point of anything was, or what was supposed to happen. I was writing all the time, either in the spiral notebook or on the laptop, as close as I could to nonstop, often noting down what time it was, because I wanted to feel that I had all the time accounted for…” (1, p. 137). People with multiple personality may have memory gaps, and so may worry about “losing” periods of time.

“The phone rang. It was the editor of the literary magazine. I had won first prize in the fiction contest…I liked that I had won a contest and that they thought I was a boy…But I didn’t want my story to be published, or to read from it. (1, pp. 149-150). If she has multiple personality and her fiction-writing personality is male, he may have liked that the judges for the writing contest recognized his male gender. But since he is not a public, host personality, he wants to remain behind-the-scenes. (While her fiction-writing personality may be male, her personal email-writer personality to Ivan is probably a romance-oriented female personality.)

1. Elif Batuman. The Idiot. Penguin Books, 2017.

“The Idiot” by Elif Batuman (post 1): Inadvertent allusions to multiple personality in the opening

“The year is 1995, and Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard…” (1, back cover). A Bulgarian freshman borrows her copy of Dostoevsky’s The Double (1, pp. 7-8).  And “It was hard to decide on a literature class. Everything the professor said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna [Karenina] had to die, and instead they told you…the implication was that it was somehow naïve to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important…I wanted to know what books really meant…[My mother] believed, and I did, too, that every story had a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely” (1, p.16).

Search Dostoevsky, The Double, and Anna Karenina. The only association I have to Turkey is that there is an eminent Turkish psychiatrist (2) who is prominent in the study of multiple personality. But I don’t know if this novel will intentionally raise the issue of multiple personality.

1. Elif Batuman. The Idiot. Penguin Books, 2017.

2. Wikipedia. Vedat Sar, MD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedat_%C5%9Ear 

How can multiple personality be like a novel?

In yesterday’s post, I said that multiple personality is like a novel, with the alternate personalities’ being the characters.

Did I mean that multiple personality is faked, and that the alternate personalities are manufactured? No, I meant that, like multiple personality, novelists don’t create their characters: In the post before that, I had quoted Mark Twain as saying, “Writers don’t create characters.” And he did not merely mean they plagiarize from life. Twain said that he’s too lazy to create his characters, dialogue, and stories, so he waits for “the tank” to be filled up, and then he takes these things out of the tank and writes them down.

So how do people with multiple personality get their major alternate personalities, and how do writers get their major characters? Similarly, how do children get their imaginary companions? Only the brain knows for sure, and maybe, one day, neuroscientists will figure that out.

Persons with multiple personality trait are superior novelists, because multiple personality, itself, is like a novel with characters (first chapter, traumatic childhood)

Indeed, a novelist's major characters, especially recurring ones, may be among the author's alternate personalities.

In addition, the novelist may have unnamed storytelling and muse personalities working behind the scenes.

And if the novelist also publishes under a pseudonym, that may be the name of another alternate personality; although, the regular name of some authors is already a pseudonymous alternate personality.

Literary Prizes: Reasons for Fiction Writers’ Cynicism

As Charles Dickens said, “I don’t invent it.” 

As Mark Twain said, “Writers don’t create characters.” 

As Stephen King has said, his stories are “found objects.”

In short, the fiction writer's host personality, who accepts the award, is probably not the writer's most creative personality.

See past posts on those writers for sources of those quotations.

Review: Psychological depth in a great novel may be based on its undiagnosed multiple personality

For example, search “anna karenina” and then scroll down.

“All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque (post 1): Why does protagonist hear a voice?

Two-thirds through this classic WWI novel, the protagonist, a young German soldier, is scared when a bomb lands near him. He had not heard it coming and is terrified. His thoughts are a “whirling confusion” and “I hear the warning voice of my mother” (1, p. 210).

Considering all that has been written about this novel (2), it seems a very trivial question, but why does this novelist (3) think this young, nonpsychotic soldier hears a voice? Since the author, himself, was in combat during WWI, the author, himself, may have heard a voice either while in combat or in his private life.

The most likely reason for a nonpsychotic soldier or novelist to hear voices would be multiple personality trait. Search “voices” for discussion in past posts.

1. Erich Maria Remarque. All Quiet on the Western Front. New York, Ballantine Books, 1929/1982.

2. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front

3. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Maria_Remarque

At the end of this edition, there is a note about the author that ridicules any reader who has faithfully read it until the end, when the young protagonist dies in the war. It says the author lived to age 70, that this novel had made him rich and famous, and does not say that his experience in the war had had any ill after-effects.

Ninth Anniversary of this blog: Visited from around the world, literary, & thought-provoking

“Animal Farm” by George Orwell: Multiple personality issues are more apparent in Orwell’s “Why I Write” and “1984” (See below). In “Animal Farm,” it is only this:

When repeatedly faced with the refrain, “Squealer was soon able to convince them that their memories were at fault” (1, p 98), readers tend to accept totalitarian intimidation as the only issue, but if that were the case, then they would privately remember the truth and only pretend not to remember. So the intimidation is evidently causing them to switch to an alternate personality that, even privately, does not remember.

1. George Orwell. Animal Farm. New York, Signet Classics, 1946/2020.

Note added May 5: Another explanation would be that intimidation induced hypnosis, and then suggestion modified memories; however, some people with multiple personality are among the most highly hypnotizable. Indeed, one old theory for multiple personality is that it involves self-hypnosis as an escape from trauma in childhood.

2017

“Why I Write” by George Orwell: He is “driven on” and must "efface one's own personality” due to alternate personalities he “can neither resist nor understand”

He converses with, or gets out of the way of (“efface one’s own personality”), alternate personalities (“imaginary persons,” “demon”) who take over and which he “can neither resist nor understand”:

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer…

“I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons…

“…for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise…the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind…This habit continued till I was about twenty-five…Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside…

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand…And…one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality…” (1).

Why did Eric Arthur Blair continue to use a pseudonym (George Orwell) after everyone knew who he was?

Judging from what he says about why he writes, the pseudonym would seem to have been an acknowledgement that his regular personality, Eric Blair, was not the personality mainly responsible for his serious writing.

Search “pseudonyms” for past posts on other writers.

1. George Orwell. “Why I Write” (1947), pp. 243-248 in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism, second edition, edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

2017

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell: In Chapter One, Winston Smith’s alternate personality writes “Down With Big Brother” in his diary.

Winston Smith, the protagonist, begins a diary, about which, two things—the origin of what he writes and his handwriting—are specified:

 

1. “The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.” 2. “His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops” (1, p. 7).

The origin of the content of Winston Smith’s diary recalls what George Orwell had written in his essay “Why I Write” (see previous post), which I again quote: “…for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise…the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind…This habit continued till I was about twenty-five…Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside…”

In the novel, why is Winston Smith’s style of handwriting specified? Because seven pages later, his handwriting changes: “His eyes refocused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals— DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” (1, p. 14).

Thus, in both Orwell’s nonfiction essay and his novel, writing is described as not being under the control of the person’s regular personality; rather, it is “against my will, under a kind of compulsion” and “by automatic action.”

Indeed, the novel takes this two steps further. Winston Smith has amnesia, a memory gap, for having written “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.” And he writes it in a different handwriting.

These things—automatic (nonvolitional, involuntary, dissociated) writing, amnesia, and a change in handwriting style—are evidence of the presence of an alternate personality.

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

2017

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell: Only multiple personality could account for the switches, memory gaps, and contradictory beliefs about war.

It is a running joke in this novel that the nation’s enemy and ally frequently switch places; that the people immediately change which nation they hate; and that the people immediately forget that they have made that switch. This could only happen if each person had two personalities who differed in their view of who was the enemy.

The attitude toward war also illustrates that multiple personality is present, perhaps even more present, in the most powerful members of the Party:

“The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members…is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously…(1, p. 128).

“Splitting of the intelligence” (see above) is a euphemism for split personality (an informal term for multiple personality).

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

2017

“Doublethink” of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell is taken from multiple personality: Alternate personalities have alternate views of reality. 

It is a basic feature of multiple personality that one personality will know something that another personality does not; that two personalities will hold contradictory opinions; and that different personalities will differ in their views of reality. With that in mind, consider these definitions of “doublethink” from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth” (1).

1. Wikipedia. “Doublethink.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink