“This Exquisite Loneliness” by Richard Deming: Amnesia and Mirror Symptoms of Multiple Personality (a.k.a. Dissociative Identity Disorder)

“I first began drinking and using drugs when I was about thirteen; at fifteen people started saying I was a nice guy until I got a drink in me; it was sixteen when I began to drink so heavily that I lost hours and whole days to amnesia (2, p. 59) A few years later, someone asked what it was like. I compared it to the sci-fi TV drama from the 1990’s: Quantum Leap. My whole body buzzed and I reappeared in myself, unsure of where or sometimes even who I was”(1, p. xiv).

“Behind this impulse to learn about my own loneliness by way of other people’s experiences is the idea that there are at least two distinct categories of loneliness. There is acute loneliness…The other kind of loneliness is what I’m hoping to drag into the light: the kind of loneliness so deeply felt that it not only is what we might describe as chronic but is somehow the very stuff of a person’s emotional DNA” (1 pp.13-14).

“During the worst period of my active addiction, I was a blackout drinker because I wanted to make myself disappear. The loneliness that I have wrestled with since I was a little kid stood at the core of my substance abuse…Even before the drinking, I had come to feel that I was a ghost haunting my own life. Looking into a mirror (2. p. 62) was like seeing a shadowy figure pass by an empty window at midnight, and the drinking and the drugs were a way to either propel myself through that emptiness or slip inside it, as if stepping into that mirror” (1. p. 135).

Comment: Professor Deming, director of Creative Writing at Yale University, does not raise the possibility of a creative form of multiple personality, the thesis of this blog.

1. Richard Deming. This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and The Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity. Viking, 2023.

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