“My Brilliant Friend” (post 4) by Elena Ferrante: Of the two main characters—Elena (first-person narrator) and Lila—which one is the title’s “brilliant friend”?

—Wikipedia describes the novel’s beginning—

“To everyone's surprise, the very rebellious Lila turns out to be a prodigy who has taught herself to read and write. She quickly earns the highest grades in the class, seemingly without effort. Elena is both fascinated and intimidated by Lila, especially after Lila writes a story which Elena feels shows real genius. She begins to push herself to keep up with Lila” (1).

—But toward the end of the novel itself—

“I [Elena] gave a nervous laugh, then said [to Lila] ‘Thanks, but at a certain point school is over.’

‘Not for you: you’re [Elena] my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls” (2, p. 312).

Comment: Is “Elena” the author’s regular personality, while “Lila” is one of Elana’s genius, story-teller, alternate personalities? But the author’s system of alternate personalities is probably more complex, including both males and females.

1. Wikipedia. “My Brilliant Friend.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Brilliant_Friend

2. Elena Ferrante. My Brilliant Friend. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa Editions, 2011/2024. 

“My Brilliant Friend” (post 3) by Elena Ferrante: Metaphors suggestive of undiagnosed multiple personality

“Lila was malicious: this, in some secret part of myself, I still thought…But if it was a childish self that unleashed these thoughts in me, they had a foundation of truth” (1, p. 143).

Comment: The regular personality of most people does not think that the person has a “secret part” or “childish self.” It is the “regular" or “host” personality of the person with undiagnosed multiple personality who tends to infer that the person has hidden “parts” (alternate personalities) (2, p. 92). And a common type of alternate personality is child-aged, because multiple personality usually begins in childhood.

1. Elena Ferrante. My Brilliant Friend. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa Editions, 2011/2024.

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

“My Brilliant Friend” (post 2) by Elena Ferrante: Author switches from “multiple personality” perspective to “dissociative identity” perspective

Comment:The psychiatric condition that used to be called “multiple personality” changed its official psychiatric name to “dissociative identity,” but both names are useful, depending on the circumstances. I used the older term in post 1, because the character, Elena, implied that she did not feel that her regular personality was always in full control of her actions. But years later, in 1958, her brilliant friend, Lila, had her first episode of “dissolving margins.” Lila said that on those occasions “the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared” (1, p. 89).

Elena Ferrante is well-known for having hidden her true name. The beginning of this novel suggests that multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity) may have been involved. Of course, her very high-functioning suggests it would be what I call a “trait,” not a disorder or mental illness.

1. Elena Ferrante. My Brilliant Friend. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa Editions, 2011/2024. 

“My Brilliant Friend” (post 1) by Elena Ferrante: Elena, the protagonist, inadvertently suggests she’d always had Multiple Personality

“I always felt slightly detached from my own actions” (1, p. 34).

Comment: She’s always had a subtle subjective sense that there was other personal consciousness within her that had independent agency regarding her actions, a sense shared by most novelists (2).

1. Elena Ferrante. My Brilliant Friend. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa Editions, 2011/2024.

2. Marjorie Taylor, Sara D. Hodges, Adèle Kohányi. “The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?” Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol. 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003.

https://pages.uoregon.edu/hodgeslab/files/Download/Taylor%20Hodges%20Kohanyi_2003.pdf 

“You Can’t Go Home Again” by Thomas Wolfe: Gratuitous Symptoms of Multiple Personality are Not Found, Suggesting Author Lacked Multiple Personality Trait

Comment: Either Thomas Wolfe did not have the creative asset of “multiple personality trait,” which past posts in this blog have found in about ninety percent of the novels I’ve discussed, or the symptoms may be present in his other works, but not in this one.

I may read more by and about Thomas Wolfe in the future, but I want to publish this negative finding now to make the point that the things I look for in this blog are not so common that they can always be found, even if the novel is about six-hundred pages like this one (1).

1. Thomas Wolfe. You Can’t Go Home Again. New York, Scribner, 1934/1990.

“My Murder” (post 2) by Katie Williams: A Different Gratuitous Symptom of Multiple Personality in Another Character

“What she didn’t say, what none of them said, what was left for a small traitorous voice inside me to say was: He’d be relieved if he’d gotten away with it, too” (1, p. 184).

Comment: A voice in one’s head (often italicized) with a mind of its own is an alternate personality. And since no character has been labelled as having multiple personality, this symptom of multiple personality is gratuitous, probably reflecting what I call “multiple personality trait” of the author. In this blog, search “gratuitous” to see posts on this issue for other novels with other authors.

Added Aug. 20: In conclusion, what I've explained in terms of multiple personality, the author explains in terms of clones. Your choice.

1. Katie Williams. My Murder. New York, Riverhead Books, 2023

“My Murder” (post 1) by Katie Williams: Women killed by a serial killer have been restored to life by cloning, but one of the cloned women refers to herself in the third person (suggesting multiple personality)

“You talk about yourself in the third person?

“Not myself. Her…

“She went on to explain that she, like me, had woken up in the hospital without any memory of how she got there…Also, like me, Fern had been assured that she was the same woman she’d been before, that she shouldn’t think of herself differently. But even though she was the same person she’d always been, her family wanted her to drop out of graduate school and move back to Arizona.

“But I didn’t drop out of school. Or move back to fucking Arizona,” Fern said. Not that they could have made me. They’re not my family.”

“Not your—?” I stopped at Fern’s look.

“They aren’t,” she said.

“I mean, aren’t they?”

“That’s not how I like to look at it.”

“Then who are your parents?… “The doctors? The replication commission?

“Not them.” Fern shrugged. Maybe I don’t have parents. Maybe I’m a self-made woman…” (1, pp. 38-39).

Comment: The book has not mentioned “multiple personality.” The above might reflect the novelist’s creative psychological asset that I call “multiple personality trait” to distinguish it from the mental disorder.

1. Katie Williams. My Murder. NewYork, Riverhead Books, 2023.

“Night Watch” (Pulitzer Prize Novel) by Jayne Anne Phillips: Undiagnosed Multiple Personality of mother in rural, previously terrorized, mid-19th century family

Eliza, the mother of 12-year-old ConaLee, hasn’t spoken in more than a year. The father had left for the Civil War and never returned. But after having been terrorized by a stranger called "Papa,” they now reside in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, where Eliza is known as Miss Janet and ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid.

“Miss Janet conversed now, even played the piano for musical afternoons. People thought her ‘quiet,’ but she seemed, after near nine month as Miss Janet, so sure a woman of quality that I [ConaLee] wondered if I remembered wrong…You are quiet today, ConaLee, Mama said” (1, p. 201)…

“Mama, I asked, why are you not afraid, that he [‘Papa’] is here, so near us? (1, p. 202).

“She turned, surprised. ‘ConaLee, I don’t fear him. I was only shocked…to find him here, so changed…

“But he only pretended not to know us, Mama—I saw my mother’s eyes change expression…like a child hiding in plain sight, afraid my words would set him bounding toward us…

“She embraced me, speaking low and soothing. ‘ConaLee, that man is bound in a cell stronger than any jail. Likely he pretends madness…

“Look around you, ConaLee…I am Miss Janet and you are Nurse Connolly…” (1, p. 202).

1. Jayne Anne Phillips. Night Watch. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. 

New York Times Review. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/books/review/jayne-anne-phillips-finds-anguish-and-asylum-in-civil-war-america.html

“Anxious People” (1) by Fredrik Backman: Author’s Dedication note supports the multiple personality interpretation in my 2020 post on A Man Called Ove (2)

"This book is dedicated to the voices in my head.

And to my wife, who lives with us" (1).

1. Fredrik Backman. Anxious People. Trans. Neil Smith. New York, Washington Square Press, 2019/2021.

2. Fredrik Backman. A Man Called Ove. Trans. Henning Koch. New York, Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 2014. [Search “Backman” in this blog]

“Long Island Compromise” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Character’s Memory Gap or “blackout,” a common symptom of multiple personality

Novel

“But that’s making this sound like the decision was logical and inevitable. It was not. For as long as he could remember, Nathan’s habit was to black out a little when Mickey berated him, his body playing possum to endure the strike. Nathan often emerged from this blackout to find that he’d agreed to whatever Mickey wanted just to make it stop" (1, p. 178).

Textbook

“Amnesia or 'time loss' is the single most common dissociative symptom in MPD [a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder] patients” (2, p. 59).

Comment: Since multiple personality, per se, is not mentioned in this novel, why is a character given one of its major symptoms? Possibly as a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.

1. Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Long Island Compromise. New York, Random House, 2024.

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

Alanis Morisette, singer, has “No Bad Parts”

 

In an interview with Morisette in today's print edition of The New York Times (1), she reports having written the foreword to Richard Schwartz’s "No Bad Parts,” a popular psychotherapy book:

4 “I wrote the foreword to Richard Schwartz’s “No Bad Parts,” she says, and I love that book because it gives us a mechanism to interact with the various parts of ourselves as opposed to just being subject to their vicissitudes. Instead of having this angry part of me act out and ruin all my relationships, the theory is that I can dialogue with it rather than just losing it on people” (1).

Comment: As readers of this blog know, persons with undiagnosed multiple personality (a.k.a. “dissociative identity disorder”) often think of their alternate personalities as “parts,” a euphemism often used early in therapy (2. p. 92). Creative, high-functioning persons with multiple personality have the “trait,” not the disorder, and are not mentally ill.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/27/arts/music/alanis-morissette-favorites.html

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

“Being Transgender (What You Should Know)” by Thomas E. Bevan, PhD (a.k.a. Dana Jennett Bevan): Trans author asks and tries to answer:

“Do Transgender People Have “Split Personalities”?

“No. The key feature of dissociative identity disorder or “split personalities” is that people cannot remember important information about what they did in one personality when they are in another personality. Part-time transgender people do assume two alternative behavior “roles” when cross presenting and not crosspresenting…However…transgender people seem to be able to recall what happens in both their crosspresenting and not crosspresenting roles” (1, p. 223).

Comment: The author says “seem to be able to recall,” because, apparently, no expert interviewer of multiple personality disorder has studied trans persons for memory gaps. The expert interviewer knows that persons with dissociative memory gaps for many years have become quite adept at ignoring and hiding them, especially when the novice interviewer speaks only to the regular or “host” personality (2).

1. Thomas E. Bevan, PhD. Being Transgender (What You Should Know), Praeger, 2017.

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