“The Women’s Room” (post 3) by Marilyn French: When an adult character suddenly sounds Childlike, the author wants a psychological explanation

When one of Mira’s women friends, Natalie, is acutely upset, she says she hates her husband and children. But what is most striking about the author’s description of Natalie’s behavior is that “Her voice changed: it went higher and thinner, it sounded like a child’s voice” (1, p 111), which is what may happen to the voice of an adult when she switches to a child-aged alternate personality.

Natalie’s behavior is so worrisome to Mira (the author’s main character) that Mira finished reading “the Jones biography of Freud and several Freud monographs” (1, p. 113). The author apparently wanted her characters to be understood psychologically.

Unfortunately, Freud was not the best one to consult about multiple personality, because the main psychological defense in classic Freudian theory was “repression,” while the main psychological defense in multiple personality is “dissociation,” which is why “multiple personality disorder” was renamed “dissociative identity disorder” in DSM-5, the current diagnostic manual of The American Psychiatric Association.

Search “Freud” in this blog for further discussion of why Sigmund Freud mostly missed multiple personality.

1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009.