“Einstein” by Jürgen Neffe: Occasionally called “split personality” or “childlike,” Einstein may have named one of his alternate personalities “Captain Carefree”

“There was something enduringly childlike in Einstein’s appearance and manner…Even when quite old, he never lost the carefree manner of the child…Einstein grew to be a man, a father, and a towering intellect…He retained his childlike essence, however…Albert Einstein was living with two personalities in the guise of a single individual…

“His sense of fun comes through in his limericks and other witty poems:

                               Duty in mind, pipe in hand

                               That’s how Captain Carefree stands

                               Smiling wide, with eyes ablaze

                               Nothing can escape his gaze…

“…Katia Mann, who was a neighbor of the Einsteins in Princeton when she was there with her husband, Thomas Mann, huffily remarked that he [Einstein] had ‘such big goggle eyes’ and ‘something childlike in his nature…

Einstein said that his attitude of childlike “naïveté” was only “20 percent deliberate…” (1, pp. 27-29).

“His fellow student Byland believed ‘he was one of those split personalities who know how to protect, with a prickly exterior, the delicate realm of their intense emotional life.’ Deep in his shell, however, the perpetual child sought refuge in the cosmos” (1, p. 34).

Comment: In multiple personality, since it starts in childhood, the most common kind of alternate personality sees itself as child-aged. Indeed, like Peter Pan, they may be frozen in time and never grow up, unless they are age-progressed in therapy. And when one does come out and control overt behavior, they are seen by other people as childlike, not as simply immature or childish; indeed, sometimes so childlike that a few therapists have mistakenly tried to parent them.

1. Jürgen Neffe. Einstein, A Biography. Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.