“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