Multiple Personality May Hide Behind Alcohol Abuse

Let’s say that someone has reported episodes of out-of-character behavior; for example, the person has acted violent or promiscuous or spendthrift or suicidal or crazy. Furthermore, these episodes have occurred only when the person was drinking, and there was amnesia for the episodes afterwards. (They know about the incidents from partial memory, circumstantial evidence, or witnesses.)

What happened? Uninhibited behavior during alcoholic blackouts? Is alcohol abuse the person’s only problem?

They might have two problems, alcohol abuse and multiple personality, if the latter includes an alternate personality who drinks.

If the problem is only alcohol abuse, then the person really doesn’t have any memory of the episodes, since the toxic effect of alcohol on the brain prevented any memories from being formed in the first place. [added July 11, 2014: Some books do say that memories of true alcohol blackouts, by definition, are not recoverable. But it may not be true. And if it is really not that uncommon for blackout memories to be recoverable—such as during the next time the person drinks, or just spontaneously after a period of time—then either "state-dependent memory" can easily happen apart from multiple personality or multiple personality hides behind alcohol abuse more often than I thought. So I will come back to this issue after reading more about alcoholic blackouts.]

But in multiple personality, the amnesia is only from the perspective of the person’s non-drinking personality. The alternate personality who drinks, and who was in control at those times, remembers everything.

Incidentally, when you interview anyone who gives a history of alcoholic blackouts, you should ask them if they’ve ever had either out-of-character behavior or amnesia when they weren’t drinking. (True alcoholic blackouts happen only during intoxication.) And when you ask, emphasize that you want to know about even small, tiny “blackouts” that happened when they weren’t drinking, since they might think that small ones don’t count. They do.

Nonalcoholic memory gaps are a primary clue to the presence of multiple personality. Of course, nonalcoholic memory gaps would be due to alternate personalities other than the one who drinks. (It is rare for a person with multiple personality to have only two personalities.)

In short, alcohol is sometimes blamed for the out-of-character behavior and/or amnesia that is really caused by unsuspected, hidden, multiple personality.

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Marital abuse
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Survey of 181 Writers

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They think, therefore they are
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Conversations With Eugene O’Neill: His Best Friends are Puzzled

“Interviewing Eugene O’Neill is like extracting testimony from a reluctant witness” (p. xi).

“Even his interviews thus confirm the repeated marks of dual personality observed in O’Neill in other contexts by his later critics and biographers, those irreconcilable character conflicts expressed in such key works as The Great God Brown (a play he consistently tells interviewers is a personal favorite)…” (p. xiv).

O’Neill says, “People do recognize…that every one wears a mask—I don’t mean only one, but thousands of them…I don’t think The Great God Brown had a long run merely because it was a novelty” (p. 112).

George Jean Nathan says, “The way to lose O’Neill’s friendship is to ask him for oral expressions of opinion on anything (if he feels like expressing an opinion, he will write a letter, and a satisfactorily long one)…” (p. 124).

[Is he afraid of what one of the people behind one of the masks might say?]

“My plays are about life as I’ve known it,” says O’Neill (p. 160).

Because his plays include “murder, disease, suicide, insanity, and incest…O’Neill…has gained the reputation of being privately a rather morose fellow. His best friends are not so sure he is. They are not sure he isn’t, however. Nor are they sure that the truth lies somewhere in between. He merely puzzles them.” A friend who has known him for twenty-five years says, “His face is a mask. I don’t know what goes on behind it, and I don’t think anyone else does.” Another friend says, “We’ll be talking, and he’ll go into one of those long, staring silences of his” (p. 224).

Mark W. Estrin (Ed.). Conversations with Eugene O’Neill. University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

Eugene O’Neill won Nobel Prize in Literature as Playwright of Multiple Personality

He won the Nobel Prize in 1936, having written his two plays that were most overtly about multiple personality, The Great God Brown, in 1926, and Days Without End in 1933.

The Great God Brown was a commercial success, but Days Without End was a flop. And O’Neill had such a deep emotional investment in Days Without End, and felt so bad after its poor reception, that he did not put another play on the stage for more than a decade.

Days Without End is one of O’Neill’s two most autobiographical plays. Other than his hurt feelings after it flopped, my reason for saying this is outrageously superficial. Out of his more than fifty plays, the only two that have the word “days” or “day’s” in the title are Days Without End and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the latter generally considered his most autobiographical play. The titles are almost the same, except that one was written in the prime of life, for immediate publication, while the other was written toward the end of life and published posthumously.

Obviously, the two plays are not autobiographical in the same sense. Long Day’s Journey is factually autobiographical. And if Days Without End is autobiographical, it is so psychologically.

The title of the multiple personality play, Days Without End, suggests timelessness, since multiple personality, especially in regard to its child-aged alternate personalities, has a timeless quality. As discussed previously in regard to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, child-aged alters never grow up. They are frozen in time. They experience life as days without end.

Novelist Philip Roth and Actress Claire Bloom: Why Didn’t She Know That Her Ex Had Multiple Personality?

—Please, first, read my prior posts on Philip Roth.

In her memoir, the last time they met, Claire Bloom had hoped that she and Philip Roth could reconcile.

He began by asking her how she had been doing in recent months. She told him, and then asked how he had been doing in recent months. He replied that he couldn’t tell her, because he had “amnesia.”

Bloom—who didn’t know that Roth had multiple personality, or that multiple personality is known for its memory gaps and amnesia—thought that Roth’s claim of amnesia was absurd, dismissive, and insulting. As for Roth, he was disinclined to pursue the issue. Indeed, like most people with multiple personality, he would usually do his best to ignore his memory gaps, because they were nothing new, he couldn't do anything about it, and people might think he was crazy. Better to be thought insulting than crazy.

But why hadn't Bloom ever realized that Roth had multiple personality, since for eighteen years, she had repeatedly observed perplexing changes in his attitude and behavior? There are two main reasons. First, neither she, nor any psychiatrist to whom she had ever spoken, had seriously considered it. Second, alternate personalities usually don’t like to identify themselves or acknowledge their existence. They like to remain in disguise—for example, as being “only” a “literary alter ego”—or, better yet, they like to remain totally incognito. For when people don’t know about them, people can’t interfere with them, or, their worst fear, try to get rid of them.

So when you see recurrent puzzling changes—in a person’s attitude, behavior, knowledge, memory, etc.—you can inquire as to who is doing that, who is involved. For example, suppose Bloom had seen Roth on a subsequent occasion, and in the course of that conversation, she saw that Roth definitely did have memory for everything that he had previously claimed to have amnesia. The relevant question would be, who had had the amnesia, and who is it with whom she is now speaking?

So she would respectfully, gently, but confidently, confront the one who remembers such and such (be specific), saying (the exact words are not critical): “You are clearly not the same person as the one who didn't remember this (be specific as to what this one remembers). You, obviously, do remember this (be specific). Aside from memory, how else do you differ from the other one? What do you do? What are you interested in?”

If, from what this one has been remembering and talking about, you already have an idea as to what this one does and is interested in, ask specifically about that. Because if you get off the subject of what this one does and is interested in, you will likely precipitate a switch to some other personality. (If you sense such a switch, ask, in a friendly, non-threatening way, “Hello, who are you?”)

Often it is best not to immediately ask for something as personal and powerful as their name, until they trust you, and know that you won’t try to get rid of them. As I said, that fear is one reason they like to remain hidden.

Now, if all this reminds you of how you might relate to a child’s imaginary companion, remember that multiple personality begins in childhood. And, incidentally, one of the first questions you should ask any alternate personality that you haven’t met before is, how old they are, which can range from child-aged, to the person’s actual age, to sometimes older.

And so, if this personality—who does remember the things that the other one didn’t—does identify himself, and does provide further information that explains other things that had been puzzling, then Bloom would know that Roth had multiple personality.

Which should not be a big surprise, since, after all, Philip Roth is a great novelist, and great novelists have multiple personality.