“A Little Life” (post 2) by Hanya Yanagihara: More Clues to Multiple Personality

—Novel: “You know he cuts himself, don’t you? [asked the doctor]. “No,” his friend says (1, p. 80).

—Textbook: “Suicidal behavior is extremely common in MPD patients…Self-mutilation—typically cutting with glass or razor blades, or burning with cigarettes or matches—occurs in at least a third of MPD patients. The percentage of self-mutilators is probably much higher, because the behavior is often not reported to therapists (2, p. 64).

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

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

“A Little Life” (post 1) by Hanya Yanagihara: Character perceives his mirror image as being its own person who also feels disgust for him

—from Novel

“ ‘You’re a coward,’ he said to his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His face looked back at him, tired with disgust” (1, p. 25).

—from Textbook

“MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror” (2, p. 62).

Comment: The novelist could have simply said that the mirror reflected the character’s own opinion. But: “His face looked back at him” suggests that the person in the mirror had his own opinion, which happened to agree with the character’s opinion. Thus, the novel has a milder form of the textbook’s multiple personality symptom. Whether or not my interpretation has gone too far may be judged by what I do or don’t find in the rest of the novel.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

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

“Splinters” (post 3) a memoir by Leslie Jamison: “Losing time” (memory gaps), added to her multiple selves (post 1), confirms multiple personality

—Quote from “Splinters”

“To lose time, to lose myself, to lose the tight orbit of my own looping thoughts, just for an afternoon—these were the things I‘d once wanted from booze. But it was always writing that offered the purest form of this surrender” (1, p. 158).

—Quote from Textbook

“Amnesia or time loss is the single most common dissociative symptom in MPD patients" (2, p, 59). It happens when the regular personality can’t remember the period of time that an alternate personality had taken control.   If amnesia is explained away as an alcohol blackout, ask patients if it ever happens when they have not been drinking.

1. Leslie Jamison. Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2024.

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

“Splinters” (post 2) a memoir by Leslie Jamison: Nameless italicized voice of alternate personality from her past

“By the time our daughter arrived, we’d already been in couples therapy for three years…Once a week, we went to a basement office and sat together on a loveseat that never felt large enough. The harder our home life got, the more guilty I felt for wanting to leave it. This was the same deluded faith in difficulty that made me starve myself at eighteen…This same voice rose up again to say, The harder it feels, the more necessary it must be” (1, p 67).

Comment: First, note the author’s use of the convention of italics to indicate a voice in her head. Second, note that the alternate personality is nameless, which is an example of the fact that namelessness is more common in, and therefore suggests, multiple personality.

1. Leslie Jamison. Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2024.

“Splinters” (post 1) a memoir by Leslie Jamison: Three Selves

“When I recorded bits and pieces from our days in a journal, my inner critic and mother argued. The critic wanted to choose lyrical details—my daughter getting her little hands covered with wet cherry blossoms—while the mother in me wanted to choose…everything. Wanted not to choose.

“Meanwhile, a third self—the woman who hadn’t had more than a few hours of sleep in many weeks—wanted to leap twenty years into the future. Not stuck inside these days, but remembering them all” (1, pp. 24-25).

Comment: Multiple “selves” are multiple personality, but I wouldn’t make a formal diagnosis without the additional symptom of memory gaps.

1. Leslie Jamison. Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2024. 

Transgender Health: The need to evaluate for Multiple Personality before treating Gender Dysphoria: A Case Report and Review of Literature (1)

"A 27-year-old person questioned his gender and wondered whether he should begin a transition including a femininization of the body. However, in a psychiatric evaluation, he described 8 distinct personalities with different gender identities (2 female and 6 male). The patient also described numerous memory lapses sometimes linked to traumatic events, and was experiencing difficulty to fit in socially and professionally…” (1).

“Gender Dysphoria is usually a self-diagnosis…In contrast, people with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) frequently hide their symptoms and therefore these symptoms must be actively looked for. Sometimes alternate personalities who wish for surgery may actively try to keep other personalities out of sight…” (1).

“The prevalence of Dissociative Identity Disorder is not higher in Gender Dysphoria than in the general population (1%—3%)” (1), but it is not negligible.

1. Soldati L, Hasler R. Recordon N, et al. “Gender Dysphoria and Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Case Report and Review of Literature. Sex Med 2022; 10:100553.

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

“I Heard Her Call My Name” (post 2) by Lucy Sante: Lucy says Luc is like an “ex-husband”

“I was still very much aware of the presence of Luc, whom I sometimes liked to think of as my sad-sack ex-husband” (1, p. 170).

Comment: Do any transgender persons have multiple personality? Does Lucy still have a “dual personality” (post 1), since ex-husbands are usually alive. And in real-life multiple personality, most alternate personalities are usually behind-the-scenes.

1. Lucy Sante. I Heard Her Call My Name (a memoir of transition). New York, Penguin Press, 2024.

“I Heard Her Call My Name” (post 1) by Lucy Sante

“Who am I?…I’m a writer before I’m anything else…I had been stifling my doubts…But that very insistence was a clue to the fragility of my impulse…The process violated my innate sense of the dialectic, or perhaps I just mean my fundamentally dual personality…Lucy lives on inside me and always will…But that’s the way I’ve always been. For example. I couldn’t write—anything—if I knew in advance what was actually going to happen on the page…I’m too thorny and various and contradictory…So I’m sticking with Luc for now…I will be in daily conversation with Lucy.” The above note (from 12 March 2021) was hooey, (he says) or largely so…It contained…what he would later learn is called “internalized transphobia” (1, pp. 19-34).

Comment: Was the voice who called his name an alternate personality? Search “contradictory” in this blog for past posts on this characteristic of persons with undiagnosed multiple personality.

1. Lucy Sante. I Heard Her Call My Name (a memoir of transition). New York, Penguin Press, 2024.

“First Lie Wins” by Ashley Elston: Protagonist continually changes her name and identity in a confidence-man kind of criminal enterprise

Comment: Search “confidence-man” and “lying” in this blog for related past posts. Other novels with similar psychological issues are by Herman Melville (2) and Thomas Mann (3).

1. Ashley Elston. First Lie Wins. London, Viking, 2024.

2. Herman Melville. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. Edited by Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

3. Thomas Mann. Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Translated from the German by Denver Lindley. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. 

After Sex-Change Surgery, Lucy Sante Is The Same Writer She Has Always Been, She Says in Her Memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/books/lucy-sante-gender-transition-memoir.html

Comment: Does the title of her memoir mean she’d heard an opposite-sex voice in her head? Since that may happen in the multiple personality trait of high-functioning persons, I’ve ordered her memoir.

“The Hours” Pulitzer Prize novel by Michael Cunningham: Describes Virginia Woolf’s multiple personality, but does not name it

“She [Virginia Woolf] can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences…It is an inner faculty…and when she is very fortunate she is able to write directly through that faculty. Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen…and find that she’s merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen, afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea about where to begin or what to write (1, pp. 34-35).

Comment: Virginia Woolf, based on the real, historical novelist, is one of the characters in this novel. In an earlier scene, she committed suicide, as she did in real life.

The above passage describes Virginia Woolf as having an alternate personality to do her writing, but until Michael Cunningham explicitly mentions multiple personality, I can’t give him credit for understanding it.

Search “Virginia Woolf” in this blog and then scroll down for relevant past posts.

Added same day: The rest of the novel did not hold my attention.

1. Michael Cunningham. The Hours. New York, Picador USA, 1998.

“Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury: When a character in a novel hears a voice, it really may reflect the novelist’s multiple personality trait

“Again she paused as if a voice had said STOP to her” (1, p. 124).

1. Ray Bradbury. Dandelion Wine. New York, Bantam Books, 1957/1976.

From June 12, 2019 post

“Praise Other Me” by Ray Bradbury: Acknowledges and Gives Credit to His Alternate Personality

I do not write—

The other me

Demands emergence constantly.

But if I turn to face him much too swiftly

Then

He sidles back to where and when

He was before

I unknowingly cracked the door

And let him out.

Sometimes a fire-shout beckons him,

He reckons that I need him,

So I do. His task

To tell me who I am behind this mask.

He Phantom is, and I facade

That hides the opera he writes with God,

While I, all blind,

Wait raptureless until his mind

Steals down my arm to wrist, to hand, to

fingertips

And, stealing, find

Such truths as fall from tongues

And burn with sound,

And all of it from secret blood and secret soul on

secret ground

With glee

He sidles forth to write, then run and hide

All week until another try at hide-and-seek

In which I do pretend

That teasing him is not my end.

Yet tease I do and feign to look away,

Or else that secret self will hide all day.

I run and play some simple game,

A mindless leap

Which from sleep summons forth

The bright beast, lurking, whose preserves

And gaming ground? My breath,

My blood, my nerves.

But where in all that stuff does he abide?

In all my rampant seekings, where’s he hide?

Behind this ear like gum,

That ear like fat?

Where does this mischief boy

Hatrack his hat?

No use. A hermit he was born

And lives, recluse.

There’s nothing for it but I join his ruse, his game,

And let him run at will and make my fame.

On which I put my name and steal his stuff,

And all because I sneezed him forth

With sweet creation’s snuff.

Did R.B. write that poem, that line, that speech?

No, inner-ape, invisible, did teach.

His reach, clothed in my flesh, stays mystery;

Say not my name.

Praise other me.

https://arsene.quora.com/Praise-Other-Me

Ray Bradbury. “The Other Me.” In Zen in the Art of Writing. Santa Barbara, Joshua Odell Editions, 1994, pp. 162-164.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury 

“The Lady of the Camellias” by Alexandre Dumas fils: Gratuitous symptoms of multiple personality

The main characters are 1. a nameless narrator; 2. Marguerite, the title character; and 3. Armand, the co-narrator and Marguerite’s young lover.

Namelessness is suggestive of multiple personality, because that is the only situation in which it is commonly seen; whereas, real people almost always have names or numbers. When an author splits his narration, and especially when one narrator is nameless, it suggests that the author had multiple personality trait.

What do we know about Marguerite, other than that she is “the most beautiful, brazen, and expensive courtesan in all of Paris” (back cover), and that she carries red flowers when she is menstruating and white flowers when she is not? She says that her mother “had beaten me for twelve years of her life” (1, p. 116). And a history of childhood trauma is common in persons with multiple personality (2, pp. 46-50). In addition, she refers to herself in the third person as “that lost girl” (1, p. 167), which is something that persons with multiple personality may do (2, p. 84).

Comment: Two narrators suggests that the author was split. Namelessness, childhood trauma, and speaking of oneself in the third person emphasize the multiple personality issue. These gratuitous suggestions of multiple personality suggest that the author may have had multiple personality trait.

1. Alexandre Dumas fils. The Lady of the Camellias. Trans. Liesl Schillinger. New York, Penguin Books, 1848/2013.

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

“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” (post 2) by Edgar Allan Poe: Voice and figure of alternate personality come to the rescue

“But now there came a spinning of the brain; a shrill-sounding and phantom voice screamed within my ears; a dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure stood immediately beneath me; and, sighing, I sunk down with a bursting heart, and plunged within its arms. I had swooned, and Peters had caught me as I fell…although my confusion of mind had been so great as to prevent my hearing what he said, or being conscious he had even spoken to me at all” (1, pp. 206-207).

Comment: Is this the same alternate personality he may have seen in a mirror (post 1)?

1. Edgar Allan Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. New York, Penguin Books, 1838/1999.

“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” by Edgar Allan Poe (post 1): Protagonist is in “awe” when he looks in a mirror, a symptom of multiple personality

“As I viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass… I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance…” (1, p. 80).

Comment: The protagonist-narrator couches the above in a paragraph that makes it seem like a person could be in awe of his own appearance in a mirror, but the word “awe” should be used in phrases like “awe of God” (2); that is, awe of someone else. Therefore, when a character looks in a mirror and feels like he is seeing someone else, it may be a symptom of multiple personality (3, p. 62), probably a symptom of the author’s multiple personality trait.

Search “Poe” in this blog for a past post.

1. Edgar Allan Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. New York, Penguin Books, 1838/1999.

2. Wikipedia. “Awe.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awe

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

“The Three Musketeers” (post 5) by Alexandre Dumas: Milady is accused of demon possession, a pre-psychological concept of multiple personality

“Anne de Breuil, Countess de La Fére, Lady de Winter,” Athos said, “your crimes have gone beyond the endurance of men on earth and God in heaven…” (1, p. 620). “You’re not a woman,” he said coldly. “You don’t belong to the human race: you’re a demon from hell, and we’re going to send you back there” (1, p. 622).

Since dissociation, the modern psychological mechanism of multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder) was first formulated in France by Pierre Janet (1859-1947) (2), it is understandable that this 1844 novel (1) failed to discuss Milady in terms of her dissociative identity.

1. Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York, Bantam Classic, 1844/1984.

2. Wikipedia. “Pierre Janet” (1859-1947). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Janet 

“The Three Musketeers” (post 4) by Alexandre Dumas: Mirror Scene during Milady’s captivity suggests she has multiple manipulative personalities

“The first moments of her captivity had been terrible for her, but…She had gradually brought her feelings under control…Now she turned inward on herself… ‘It was foolish of me to let myself be carried away like that, she thought as she stood facing her reflection in a mirror…As though to convince herself that she had not lost her ability to control her face, she made it take on a series of expressions, from a ferocious scowl to a sweet seductive smile…” (1, p. 508).

Textbook

“MPD patients…may describe seeing themselves sequentially change into several different people while looking into a mirror” (2, p. 62).

Comment: Search "mirror" or "mirrors" in this blog for relevant past posts concerning other novels.

1. Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York, Bantam Classic, 1844/1984.

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

“The Three Musketeers” (post 3) by Alexandre Dumas: The self-contradictory character from post 2 hears the voice of an alternate personality in his head

“D’Artagnan had reached the height of his desires: this time, Milady did not love him in the belief that he was someone else, but seemed to love him as himself. An inner voice told him that he was only an instrument of revenge that she was caressing before using it against her enemy. But his pride, his vanity, and his mad passion silenced that voice” (1, p. 375).

Textbook

“The patient may ‘hear’ the alternate personality speak as an inner voice within, often as one of the ‘voices’ that the patient has been hearing for years” (2, p. 94).

1. Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York, Bantam Classic, 1844/1984.

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