Patricia Highsmith’s Proclivity for Multiple Personality is Reported in Andrew Wilson’s Biography

“ ‘The individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him, and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself’—Kierkegaard quoted in Highsmith’s 1949 journal…Highsmith herself, a writer fascinated by the concept of split identity” (1, p. 1).

“…her work explores the motif of the double or splintered self. The changeable nature of identity fascinated her both philosophically and personally” (1, p. 7).

“I am a…boy in a girl’s body” (1, p. 46).

“When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities…” (1, p. 119).

“Highsmith revealed that in order to write she often deliberately thought herself into a different frame of mind, by pretending she was not herself…‘I suppose it’s a measure of how professional one is, how quickly one can do this’" (1, p. 123).

“I am troubled by a sense of being several people…” (1, p. 134).

“The Talented Mr Ripley…was written at speed in 1954, taking only six months. ‘It felt like Ripley was writing it,’ she said later, ‘it just came out’…The story is a dark reworking of Henry James’ The Ambassadors (1, p. 191-192)…‘I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing’”  (1, p. 199).

See the past post in this blog on the multiple personality in Henry James’s The Ambassadors.

1. Andrew Wilson. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York, Bloomsbury, 2003

Family Members May Not Mention That They Have Seen Multiple Personality, Because They Assume That the Doctors and Therapists Already Know About It

Although friends and family often don’t know that a novelist (or other loved one) has multiple personality, sometimes they do know, but they don’t tell the doctor or therapist. Why?

There are at least seven possible reasons. First, they may mistakenly assume that the multiple personality is obvious to the doctor or therapist. Second, they may mistakenly assume that the doctor’s diagnosis—e.g., bipolar—includes the multiple personality. (Bipolar does not include multiple personality). Third, they may think of multiple personality as a common, minor, personal quirk that is not worth mentioning. Fourth, they may think of the multiple personality as too crazy and embarrassing to talk about. Fifth, they may think that the doctor or therapist would not be interested in multiple personality. Sixth, they may not be sure about the multiple personality. Seventh, they may have been told not to “interfere” with the treatment.

In today’s New York Times, a novelist describes his mental breakdown: Manic-depression (bipolar disorder)? Multiple personality? Both?

In a personal essay—“A (Manic Depressive) Man’s Best Friend”—published in the Sunday Review section of today’s New York Times, novelist Karim Dimechkie describes his mental breakdown:

“…I graduated, sold my book, and left Austin…for Manhattan…where I would have an inexplicable meltdown. Inexplicable may be the wrong word. There are always explanations. Manic depression for one…But surely the mental downfall had something to do with the void I’d dropped into upon finishing my novel, the end of grad school and that safe identity of ‘student’ it had offered, and the supremacy of New York City over my senses and bank account and of course, the strangers who have always lived inside me, humming threats of destruction, finally making good on their promise to bring the house down. Some combination of these wrapped me in fear, neediness, confusion and anger…

“…I cracked up in the middle of Essex Street, unable to stand, sensory distortions clanging around my head…I barged into a behavioral health clinic…and shrieked for immediate professional supervision, which later led to intensive therapy and medication…I spent the afternoon imploring my brain to switch itself off. Wanting badly to die but unable to kill myself…my delusions made me see my loving partner as a merciless deceiver…four months later…I surfaced from whatever absurd agony I’d been drowning in. Finally able to sleep again. Finally able to trust again…”

Now, he may very well have manic-depression (bipolar disorder), and he may be describing a mixed episode of paranoid mania and suicidal depression. But, inconsistent with that diagnosis, is this: “the strangers who have always lived inside me, humming threats of destruction, finally making good on their promise to bring the house down.” This seems to describe alternate personalities, who have “always lived inside me.”

Manic-depression cannot account for a longstanding, continuous sense of having strangers living inside you. Multiple personality could account for that, but it was never considered.

Any remake of the film, The Maltese Falcon, should reinterpret both Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy as having multiple personality

Throughout the story, the reader is repeatedly told about the two sides of Sam Spade’s personality and the changeability of Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

For example, in a meeting between Spade and Gutman (the fat man, on a quest for the falcon), Spade’s demeanor suddenly changes from calm and civilized to violent and primitive. In the movie with Humphrey Bogart, when Bogart leaves Gutman’s hotel suite, Bogart smiles in a way that suggests he had just been putting on a tough-guy act. But that interpretation is not in the novel.

In the novel, when Spade leaves Gutman’s suite, “His lips were dry and rough in a face otherwise pale and damp” and “he saw his hand trembling” (1, p. 112). Spade, seeing his hand trembling, does grin, but there is nothing in the text to confirm the movie’s interpretation of that grin. My interpretation is different.

Why does the text make a point of saying that Spade grinned, not because he knew that he had just put on a tough-guy act, but upon seeing that his hand was trembling? The text is describing what a person who has multiple personality does in order to figure out what must have happened during a memory gap. He is looking at his trembling hand and thinking that he must have had another of his episodes in which people have told him that he gets violent, but which he never remembers.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s changeability is pervasive in both the novel and the movie. Is it only because she is always, consciously and willingly, putting on an act and lying? Or does she, too, have multiple personality?

I think it is the latter, for two reasons. First, her changeability and lying are patently obvious to anyone who sees her under more than one circumstance. So her changes seem to be more provoked by circumstances (as in multiple personality) than well calculated. Second, her behavior at any one time can be extremely convincing, because people with multiple personality really believe that they are who they purport to be at that moment. This leads Effie, Spade’s secretary, who sees Brigid only in her help-seeking identity, to think that Brigid is trustworthy and worth saving. This leads Spade, who knows Brigid is a liar, to, nevertheless, admire and respond to how how convincing she can be.

Now, I don’t think that the above arguments, by themselves, are conclusive regarding multiple personality. What convinces me is what I discussed in the previous post on Sam Spade’s story about Flitcraft’s fugue. That story is such an odd thing to include in this detective story that it must have special significance.

What is Spade telling Brigid—and the reader—with the Flitcraft story? Not that life is random, but that Spade knows Brigid changes personalities, just like he does. And I think that any remake of the movie should consider this interpretation.

1. Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon. New York, Vintage, 1929/1992.

Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon: Sam Spade’s story about Flitcraft’s Fugue indicates the Main Theme is Multiple Personality

What is the main theme of The Maltese Falcon? The title—referring to a thing as not being what it seems when perception is distorted by greed—is misleading. No, the main theme is that people may not be who they seem to be, because they have multiple personality.

For example, the novel’s femme fatale has at least three names: Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Miss Wonderly, and Miss LeBlanc. Are these just three of the aliases used by a criminal psychopath and pathological liar? Or is she a criminal psychopath and pathological liar who has multiple personality?

The main character, detective Sam Spade, is described in the novel’s first paragraph as looking like “a blond satan” (1), which suggests a person with a combination of good and evil, a Jekyll and Hyde.

The key to the main theme is the story that Sam Spade tells to Brigid O’Shaughnessy about Flitcraft’s fugue (left out of the movie).

Flitcraft’s Fugue

“Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest…

“At the beginning Brigid O’Shaughnessy listened with only partial attentiveness…but presently, as the story went on, it caught her more and more fully and she became still and receptive.

“A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon…His wife and children never saw him again…There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going…

“Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles—that was his first name—Pierce. He had an automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season…

“Here’s what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him…He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works…Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam…

“He went to Seattle that afternoon…and from there by boat to San Francisco…and settled in Spokane and got married…

“How perfectly fascinating,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said” (1, pp. 61-64).

The Main Theme

A fugue is when a person, often after a traumatic experience, travels to a different location and lives there under a new identity. This was discussed in past posts in regard to Agatha Christie’s real-life fugue. And as with Christie, it often indicates that the person has multiple personality.

So to understand the main theme of The Maltese Falcon, you have to understand the meaning of Sam Spade’s story about Flitcraft. The meaning is not that life is random, but that people switch among multiple identities.

1. Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon [1929]. New York, Vintage, 1992.

Post #2 on the “Hilary Trench” Alternate Personality of Graham Greene, another Great Novelist who had Multiple Personality

“When Vivien [his future wife] first met Greene, three different personalities must have been evident to her: the first what Greene described as ‘the Oxford me’, an undergraduate persona characterized by a devil-may-care, tongue-in-cheek delight in pricking Oxford pomposities, sometimes by the pose of insouciance; the second the richer, more ambiguous person described in this chapter; and the third hinted at in scattered references—the Hilary Trench personality…"

Greene wrote to reassure Vivien that she “need never be afraid of meeting H[ilary] T[rench] in our house. Poor devil, he can never come anywhere near you, even if he is alive, which he isn’t. O it’s no use writing. I’ve got to be with you to convince you that he’s dead. He’s been dying since March 17 [that is, the day they met]…

“But he did not succeed in persuading Vivien that his secret personality would not return, though he deeply regretted the sudden assumption of this secret self…

“…the Hilary Trench personality…usually made its appearance after deep anxiety had been prolonged to a point where Greene could stand it no longer, and this began before he met Vivien…

“On other occasions Greene’s notion of Hilary Trench seems less severe and is more in line with seeking both an escape from intolerable restlessness and also new experiences to use for creative purposes…” (1, pp. 276-277).

1. Norman Sherry. The Life of Graham Greene. Volume I: 1904-1939. New York, Penguin Books, 1989.

Novelist Graham Greene’s Multiple Personality: His Alternate Personality “Hilary Trench” and the Teddy Bear he carried in his luggage

The diagnoses most commonly mentioned in regard to Graham Greene are depression, manic-depression (bipolar disorder), and alcohol abuse. And he certainly did get depressed and drink too much. But it is multiple personality, not depression or alcohol, that helps explain his literary genius.

Teddy Bear

“Greene’s image as a man’s man was simply another cover—perhaps his most convincing one…Anyone could figure that out from Greene’s attachment to his toy bear Ted. In the 1950’s, and later, Ted went to all kinds of fascinating places with Greene. They were even caught up in some shooting between Israeli and Egyptian troops during a visit to the Sinai desert. To comfort Ted in that frightening incident, Greene held him close…

“Long after he had left the nursery, Greene still felt the need to carry around a teddy bear. The tough-talking, hard-drinking adventurer, the expert on opium dens and brothels, had a toy animal in his luggage. Greene’s attachment to the bear is not a complete surprise. True to form, he left clues in his work…An early, obscure story called The Bear Fell Free (1935) is about a doomed young man and his good-luck charm, a teddy bear. In A Burnt-out Case a priest asks Querry whether he has a favorite prayer, and he replies that all his prayers are ‘for a brown teddy bear’ " (1, p. 59).

Of course, the biographer misinterprets the teddy bear. It does not mean that Greene is an unmanly weakling. What it does mean is that Greene has a child-aged alternate personality, which is common in multiple personality.

Hilary Trench

“Hilary Trench was…an imaginary companion who conveniently embodied for Greene all his dark moods. He sometimes used the name as a pseudonym—his poem ‘If You Were Dead’ first appeared under the name. Vivienne [his future wife] was one of the few people to whom he admitted that Hilary was like a second self. Whenever he went into a dark mood, it was Hilary who did the thinking for him. If he pushed things too far with Vivienne, he liked to blame it on Hilary. It was wicked Hilary who planted terrible ideas in his head and made him want to hurt other people. Hilary was his personal devil” (1, p. 95).

This illustrates how easy it is to confuse multiple personality with a mood disorder like depression or even with demon possession. And the biographer accuses Greene of almost everything other than actual demon possession. But he doesn’t recognize Greene’s multiple personality.

[Please search "Graham Greene" in this blog to see all four posts about him.]

1. Michael Sheldon. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. New York, Random House, 1994.

All literary theories—except Multiple Identity Literary Theory—assume that novelists create what most people can’t create, but do not think differently

Standard literary theories are approaches to the interpretation of literary text. They are not theories about how literature is done. Their tacit assumption is that the novelist’s mind works, basically, the same way that everyone else’s mind does.

Most literary theorists allow that certain proclivities and experiences might inspire, enhance, and influence literary creativity—e.g., trauma, depression, gender, childhood, culture, socio-economic conditions, imagination—but they do not believe that the way novelists think is essentially different.

Do novelists themselves have a theory for their creativity? Henry James spoke of “the madness of art”; Doris Lessing of the “creative trance”; and Margaret Atwood of “duplicity,” a split between the writer’s everyday and writing personalities. All three novelists wrote fiction involving multiple personality, as have other novelists discussed in past posts.

Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the theory of this blog, is the only literary theory that addresses how novelists think (which sometimes helps you to understand what they wrote).

Failure to make the correct diagnosis, far from being unique to psychiatry, is all too common in other medical specialties

I have repeatedly made an issue of how psychiatrists miss the diagnosis of multiple personality, and of how they overdiagnose other mental disorders, which are more vaguely defined than multiple personality.

However, to be fair to psychiatry, it must be said that misdiagnosis is a problem with medical diagnosis in general:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/misdiagnosis-is-more-common-than-drug-errors-or-wrong-site-surgery/2013/05/03/5d71a374-9af4-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html

And people with multiple personality are not the only ones who don’t tell their therapists the whole truth. It is a common problem, for a number of reasons:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/02/06/10-common-reasons-to-lie-to-your-therapist/

However, there are two additional difficulties in the diagnosis of multiple personality: First, the doctor has probably never learned how to make this diagnosis. Second, the patient is not providing all pertinent information because of the host identity’s amnesia for the comings and goings of the other identities, and the alternate identity’s belief that they are another person and not an alternate identity.

If creativity is said to be related to bipolar disorder, but bipolar disorder is wrongly diagnosed, what is creativity really related to?

Creative people, such as novelists, are said to have more than their fair share of mental disorders, especially bipolar disorder:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity_and_mental_illness#Other_studies

The problem is, bipolar disorder is frequently overdiagnosed; that is, the diagnosis may be made in error:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080506074440.htm

Does this mean that creative people might have something other than bipolar disorder? What might be mistaken for bipolar disorder? It would have to be a condition in which the person could have dramatic changes in mood like bipolar. And it would also have to be a condition that the average psychiatrist rarely thinks of, and does not know how to diagnose, like multiple personality.

The first clinic outpatient that I ever diagnosed as having multiple personality had been under my care for several years under the wrong diagnosis, bipolar disorder. Having taken over her treatment from a psychiatrist who retired, I had continued the other psychiatrist’s diagnosis. I saw the patient monthly, renewed the medicine, and the patient was happy with the diagnosis and treatment.

True, the patient did occasionally come to her appointments in bright colored clothing and with an elevated mood, but that seemed perfectly consistent with the bipolar diagnosis.

However, I subsequently discovered that when she came dressed and behaving that way, she saw herself as literally being a different person, with a different name. And I learned that her regular self—who used her regular name, dressed conservatively, and had a reserved demeanor—had amnesia for those other sessions.

So, all in all, it became clear why bipolar disorder had been misdiagnosed, and that multiple personality was the correct diagnosis. And this kind of misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder is never considered by studies of creativity.

WARNING: If you are on medicine for bipolar disorder, continue your medicine, for three important reasons. First, bipolar disorder might be your correct diagnosis. Second, you might have both bipolar and multiple personality, in which case you would still need the medicine for the bipolar. Third, even if you don’t have bipolar, the medicine might be helpful to you if it happens to be sedating the alternate personalities who have been disruptive, and so it is useful to continue the medicine until specific psychotherapy to help those identities can replace the medicine. To repeat, continue the medicine prescribed by your doctor.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: Hester and Pearl are Alternate Personalities of a Single Person

Pearl, Hester’s daughter, is not an ordinary little girl. First, she is a symbolic incarnation of the scarlet letter (“A” for adultery). Second, especially in the forest, she is portrayed as supernatural. Third, “Pearl is not an independent character so much as an abstraction of elements of Hester’s character: a kind of ‘double,’ or ‘other self,’” says Nina Baym in an online excerpt from The Scarlet Letter: A Reading (1986). In other words, Pearl is Hester’s alternate personality.

“…the woman [Hester] hath been like a possessed one…” (1, p. 51). As discussed in past posts, “possession” is an old theory for multiple personality.

“[Pearl], drawing [her] sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which pervaded the mother’s system. [Pearl] now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day” (1, pp. 50-51).

“Pearl” is actually the name for a number of alternate personalities

“Pearl’s aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children…the warfare of Hester’s spirit…was perpetuated in Pearl…Hester could not help questioning…whether Pearl was a human child…the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence” (1, pp. 62-63).

“Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal…In the mere exercise of the fancy…there might be little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties…The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offspring of her own heart and mind. She never created a friend…” (1, p. 65). But on other occasions, “it seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement” (1, p. 134).

Hester and Pearl are Inverse

If a person were a pie, multiple personality is not more than one pie; it is one pie divided into a number of pieces. Where that analogy fails, however, is that, in multiple personality, none of the pieces are the same, and there is only so much of any ingredient to go around. For example, if one identity is more angry, other identities will be less angry, or perhaps even unable to feel anger.

Throughout the novel, Pearl has all the confidence, pride, and exuberance that penitent Hester lacks. And at the end of the novel, when you think Hester will have put her somber, penitent persona behind her, she resumes that persona, almost as if she were still wearing the scarlet letter. Why?

The reason is that Pearl has bloomed into a successful, worldly, confident woman. If they were really two separate people, Hester could have bloomed, too. But as alternate identities of a single person, what is added to Pearl is subtracted from Hester (and vice versa).

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Edited by Leland S. Person. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.

Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther: Main Character Has Both Depression and Multiple Personality

In Goethe’s autobiography, he says that he wrote “Werther in four weeks,” and that he wrote it “more or less unconsciously, like a sleepwalker” (1, p. 116). That is, more or less, he had dissociative amnesia—a symptom of multiple personality—for doing the writing.

That the novel was inspired by real-life experiences and events is well known. Goethe, himself, had been infatuated with a married woman. And a man Goethe had known had committed suicide in a similar situation. Moreover, the main character is given the exact same birthday as the author.

The novel itself is about Werther, a young man who commits suicide, because he is infatuated with a young woman (Lotte) he can’t have. This seemingly simple scenario is extremely puzzling for four reasons: First, before Werther meets Lotte, he is explicitly told that she is already engaged to be married. Second, she is maternal, not flirtatious. Third, he has no sexual feelings for her: “She is sacred to me. All lust falls silent in her presence” (1, p. 29). Fourth, his moods, attitudes, and even his abilities are puzzlingly inconsistent and contradictory.

The inconsistency of his moods is illustrated by the fact that during the same period of time that he says “I’ve never been happier” (1, p. 30), he also has “moments when I feel like putting a gun to my head!” (1, p. 29). This kind of inconsistency cannot be accounted for by clinical depression or bipolar disorder, but it could represent the contrary attitudes of two alternate identities.

The inconsistency of his abilities—he is an artist—is illustrated by the fact that on the same day he says he’s never been happier, he says “I’ve begun Lotte’s portrait three times, and three times I’ve made a mess of it. That depresses me all the more because not long ago I was very good at doing likenesses” (1, p. 30). Inconsistency of abilities may be a symptom of multiple personality, since different identities may not have the same talents.

An illustration of out-of-character behavior: On one occasion, “I become boisterously foolish and play pranks and do a lot of confused stuff,” which comes across as so odd that the next day Lotte comments, “You are frightful when you’re so merry” (1, p. 32). His behavior makes no sense to either Werther or Lotte, because it is probably done by an alternate identity, possibly child-aged, whom neither of them recognizes.

Werther says, “My diary, which I have neglected for some time, fell into my hands again today, and I am amazed at how knowingly I went into all this, step by step! How I have always seen my situation so clearly and yet have acted like a child” (1, p. 33). His behavior may have been by a child-aged alternate identity, but his diary was written by an adult self. And the identity telling us about this is apparently different from both of them.

“The ease with which we turn over a hand: that’s the way I change” (1, p. 59).

“I am in a state that must have been experienced by those unfortunate creatures who were once thought to be ridden by an evil demon. At times it takes hold of me…” (1, p. 76). “I frighten myself! Isn’t my love for her the most sacred, chaste, brotherly love?…Oh, how truthfully those men felt who attributed such contradictory effects to alien powers!” (1, p. 77). See past posts on “possession” as really being multiple personality.

Conventional wisdom, psychiatrically speaking, is that Goethe is an example of the relationship between depression and creativity (2). And both he and his character, Werther, certainly did have depression. But depression, per se, cannot explain the puzzling inconsistencies and contradictions discussed in this post. Multiple personality can.

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Sufferings of Young Werther. Translated and Edited by Stanley Corngold. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, WW Norton & Company, 2013.

2. Holm-Hadulla, R.M., et al., Depression and creativity—The case of the german poet, scientist and statesman J. W. v. Goethe, J. Affect. Disord. (2010), doi:10.1016/j.jad.2010.05.007

Comorbidity Between Multiple Personality and Depression: Creativity is More Related to the Dissociative Disorder than the Affective Disorder

Since novelists and poets, as a group, are more likely to have a history of being depressed—even suicidal—than the average person, it is conventional wisdom that depression and bipolar disorder may foster creativity.

Although creativity is impaired during severe depression, the experience is thought to enhance the artist’s sensibility. And the creative process may be therapeutic.

Conventional wisdom does not take into account what has been discussed in this blog: that artists may also have multiple personality. And it may be the multiple personality, not the depression, that is mostly responsible for the enhancement of creativity.

Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir: Third-person narrative of his years in hiding from a death-threat for The Satanic Verses

Rushdie’s pseudonym in hiding was “Joseph Anton”: “Joseph” taken from Joseph Conrad, author of the “The Secret Sharer” (see past post).

I don’t know whether Rushdie’s use, in a memoir, of a third-person narrator reflects the author’s multiple personality or is a purely technical choice. It never felt natural to me.

Nor am I sure who vandalized his college room—probably a racist and not an alternate personality:

“…a few nights before his [Rushdie’s own] graduation, some anonymous wit…chose to redecorate his…college room, in his absence, by hurling a bucketful of gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture, to say nothing of his record player and clothes. With that ancient tradition of fairness and justice upon which the colleges of Cambridge prided themselves, King’s instantly held him solely responsible for the mess…” (1, pp. 45-46).

“He was a migrant…The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogeneous…multiple rather than singular…” (1, pp. 53-54).

He calls the following alternate perspective his “unconscious,” but it sounds like a second self who has artistic differences: “His conscious mind was, as usual, at odds with his unconscious which kept throwing angels and miracles at his rationality and insisting that he find ways to incorporate them into his way of seeing” (1, p. 73).

Near the end of his memoir, he says: “In the pages of a novel it was clear that the human self was heterogeneous not homogeneous, not one thing but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory…” (1, p. 627).

He goes on to illustrate his comment with things that could represent ordinary roles in life, and not alternate personalities. But a person who has various ordinary roles in life—like most people—usually experiences himself as multifaceted, and the roles as complementary.

However, if a person feels himself to be “not one thing, but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory,” it sounds less like ordinary roles and more like multiple personality. 

1. Salman Rushdie. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York, Random House, 2012/2013.

Two Theories About the Voice of God and Religious Experience: Salman Rushdie’s Telepathic Radio and William James’s Alternate Personality

Various people in the Old and New Testaments hear the voice of God. But why doesn’t everyone hear the voice of God when God speaks? Two theories have been presented in this blog.

Salman Rushdie’s theory in Midnight’s Children is that a person’s brain is like a radio receiver: If your brain can tune in the right frequency, you can hear voices telepathically. Applying the radio theory to religious experience (which Rushdie does not do): Some people can hear the voice of God, because they can tune in to God’s frequency; or, because God broadcasts on a frequency specially tuned to the brains of certain people.

The other theory was proposed by William James in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I discussed in a previous post. James’s theory is that religious experience comes from a person’s subconscious self, an alternate personality: Since an alternate personality is subjectively experienced as another person, it is interpreted as coming from an outside source. And if the message is religious, the outside person and source is inferred to be God.

A particularly interesting thing about William James is that, in spite of his scientific views, he, himself, remained a believer in God. Evidently, his own religious experiences were more compelling to him than his scientific conclusions. He rationalized that if God wanted to communicate with people through their alternate personalities, God was certainly capable of doing so.

Model of Mind in The New Testament: Possession (Multiple Personality), Not only by demons, but by the Spirit of God

In the last post—after noting that what psychiatry refers to as multiple personality is considered possession in some cultures—I discussed a case of demon possession found in three gospels.

But demon possession puts possession in a bad light. To be fair, I must emphasize that possession (multiple personality) is just a model of how the mind works. Whether it is good or bad depends on what the mind is possessed by: Demons bad. God good.

Good possession is discussed in The Letter of Paul to the Romans (7:22-8:9). It is the solution to this problem: One of a person’s selves may “delight in the law of God,” but that self may be at war with another self who serves “the law of sin.” The way to shift the balance of power and win the war is to become possessed by the “Spirit of God” (1).

Note: I am not referencing The New Testament for any religious reasons, but only to indicate that multiple personality has been a model of the mind for literally thousands of years.

1. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (Editors). The Oxford Annotated Bible: Revised Standard Version Containing the Old and New Testaments. New York, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Theme of the Double (Multiple Personality) in The New Testament: Jesus’s Exorcism of Two Demoniacs in The Gospel According to Matthew

Dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) is defined as a “disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession” (1, p. 292).

The most famous case of possession in The New Testament is that of the Gerasene demoniac, described in Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20, and Luke 8:26-39.

In Mark: “Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’”

In Luke: “Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him.”

However, in Matthew, when Jesus came, “two demoniacs met him” (2).

Thus, Mark and Luke represent multiple personality as one person who has more than one identity. But Matthew, in describing the same event, uses the literary device known as the theme of the double, in which two identities of one person are incarnated as separate people, as in Dostoevsky’s The Double.

Of course, by the time Matthew used the theme of the double, it was already an old literary device, having been used by Euripides in his play Helen—Helen of Troy had multiple personality—as mentioned in a past post.

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

2. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (Editors). The Oxford Annotated Bible: Revised Standard Version Containing the Old and New Testaments. New York, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (post #4): Literary Criticism by Scholars Ignores the Main Character’s Prominent Psychiatric Symptoms

I have read three analyses of this novel: one in a textbook of literary theory and two in an anthology of literary criticism. One of the three mentions that the protagonist hears voices, but the interpretation appears to be sociological. The other two don’t mention the voices at all.

Thus, if I had not read the novel myself, but had only read these three analyses—which are consistent with what I have seen online—I would not know that the main character, Saleem Sinai, has prominent psychiatric symptoms.

And as I pointed out in a previous post, the character’s parents and girlfriend explicitly call him crazy, and on at least one occasion trick him into being seen by doctors because of it.

Moreover, the novel’s genesis was this:

“I had wanted for some time to write a novel of childhood, arising from my memories of my own childhood in Bombay” (1, p. ix).

His plan became much more ambitious—he also has a lot to say about India, Pakistan, and history—but his wanting to write a novel about his memories of his own childhood was its origin, and is still its core.

Of course, as I concluded in a previous post, the voices were due to multiple personality, not psychosis, which makes multiple personality one of this novel’s themes.

1. Salman Rushdie. “Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition,” in Midnight’s Children. New York, Random House, 1981/2006.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (post #3): Neither Plot-Driven Nor Character-Driven, it is an Autobiography of Alternate Personalities

There is neither a plot with a climax nor a character who grows. The story ends when the protagonist and his alternate identities are worn out and used up: At the end, Saleem Sinai is “only a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street, because I have been so-many too-many persons…Yes, they will trample me underfoot…just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son…and a thousand and one [midnight’s] children have died…” (1, p. 533).

So why is this considered one of the best novels of the 20th century? It is a humorous, magical tale of amazing complexity. Readers can’t imagine how a writer could come up with a story like this. And the only way that a writer could come up with a story like this is if it were not constructed or made up, but reflected the author’s inner world of multiple identities. As suggested by the author’s comments quoted in a previous post, the characters were largely autonomous and told their stories.

As to whether Saleem’s voices and telepathy indicated psychotic schizophrenia or nonpsychotic multiple personality, the latter proved to be the case. Saleem’s ability to hear the voices of, and communicate with, his midnight’s children (alternate identities) waxed and waned for psychologically understandable reasons—such as whether he was in India or Pakistan, and whether or not the alters felt they could trust Saleem—which is what you would expect in a nonpsychotic, psychological condition like multiple personality. And although Saleem's family did have him hospitalized at one point, they evidently came to accept his thinking as creative rather than psychotic.

The episode when he gets total amnesia for who he is after a head injury, while it could have been neurological, could also have been the kind of amnesia sometimes seen in people with multiple personality, as discussed in a past post about the real-life amnesic episode of Agatha Christie.

The fact that Saleem meets one of the midnight’s children—Parvati-the-witch—does not mean that she was not an alternate identity. In multiple personality or “double” stories, it is a common literary convention to incarnate the alternate identity as if it were a real, separate person.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator comments: “The process of revision should be constant and endless; don’t think I’m satisfied with what I’ve done! [However, he really can’t revise it, since] It happened that way because that’s how it happened” (1, p. 530). That is, since he wasn’t creating or imagining the story in any ordinary sense, but was getting the story from the lives of his alternate identities, their lives were what they were, take it or leave it.

1. Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children. New York, Random House, 1981/2006.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (post #2): The narrator says he hears voices and reads minds, which his family and girlfriend think is crazy

His Family

“I heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio…at nearlynine [years old]…inside me, the voices rebounded against the walls of my skull…I had discovered that the voices could be controlled—I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off my newly-discovered inner ear…

[With his family assembled] “I told them. ‘I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think…that Archangels have started to talk to me’…”

But his mother called him crazy, his father hit him “a mighty blow on the side of my head,” and his father declared, “Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me? Let him enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!”

So Saleem decided to keep his voices to himself and pretend it had been “a stupid joke, like you said” (1, pp. 185-188).

“I was wrong about the Archangels, of course…the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels…Telepathy, then…In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening…All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father’s wrath…I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy, the difficulties of concealing knowledge are almost insurmountable…I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing…” (1, pp. 191-194).

His Girlfriend

“I am coming to the fantastic heart of my own story…during the first hour of August 15th, 1947—between midnight and one a.m.—no less than one thousand and one children were born within the [newly] sovereign state of India…endowed with features, talents or faculties which can only be described as miraculous…By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all nearing their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant…of one another’s existence…And then, as a result of a jolt received in a bicycle-accident, I, Saleem Sinai, became aware of them all…

“…So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry…but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem…to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war…and to me, the greatest gift of all—the ability to look into the hears and minds of men…

“Padma [his girlfriend, and the audience for most of his narration] is looking as if her mother had died… ‘O baba!’ she says at last. ‘O baba! You are sick…’

“No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don’t make the mistake of dismissing what I’ve unveiled as mere delirium; or even as the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated before that I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and read aloud to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother’s-head truth…”

“…On my tenth birthday, abandoned by one set of children, I learned that five hundred and eighty-one others were celebrating their birthdays, too…a gang which was spread over the length and breadth of the country, and whose headquarters were behind my eyebrows…That is how it was when I was ten: nothing but trouble outside my head, nothing but miracles inside it” (1, pp. 224-237).

Blog Comment

I am still reading the novel. So, at this point, I can only say two things: First, I am surprised to find that the narrator’s sanity is the novel’s central question. And that it is a seriously posed question, since the text says that the people who know him best—from his own family and culture, his parents and girlfriend—think his claim of hearing voices and reading minds is crazy. Second, if Saleem does not have a psychosis like schizophrenia, but, rather, has the nonpsychotic condition, multiple personality, then the above scenario is a very good illustration of why multiple personality is so hard to diagnose: When the symptoms first arise in childhood, the child soon finds that disclosing the symptoms causes problems, so the child becomes good at keeping the symptoms secret.

1. Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children. New York, Random House, 1981/2006.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: Multiple Personality is Why the Narrator, in Regard to Gandhi’s Death, is Unnecessarily Unreliable

In his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of his “best of the Booker” novel, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie explains the principles of its magic realism: “I have written…elsewhere about my debt to…Dickens for his…ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyperrealistic background, out of which the comic and fantastic elements of his work seem to grow organically…” (1, p. xi).

To repeat: “…almost hyperrealistic background…”

The mentality that wrote the introduction believes that the magical elements of the story should have a very realistic background.

So it is startlingly inconsistent when Saleem Sinai, the first-person narrator, says, “The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But…in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times…Today, in my confusion, I can’t judge…” (1, pp. 189-190).

Thus, the mentality behind the introduction is not the same mentality that is behind the first-person narration. Had the former been in charge of writing this novel, the date of Gandhi’s death would have been, at the very least, corrected in a re-write, because the background should be very realistic, and there is no literary necessity, in plotting or characterization, to get the date of Gandhi’s death wrong.

I have written in past posts that the unreliable narrator is suggestive of multiple personality. My argument is even stronger when the narrator is unnecessarily unreliable, and is in clear violation of the author’s own principles.

1. Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children [1981]. New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006.

Magical Realism and Telepathy: Persons with Multiple Personality May Believe in Telepathy due to Anonymous Thought-Transference

In yesterday’s post on magical realism in literature, I mentioned that persons with multiple personality, like novelists, may be familiar with telepathic (mind-reading) kinds of experience, because one of their identities may be co-conscious with another of their identities, and so can read the other identity’s mind.

But what if the co-consciousness between two identities is one-way (which often happens)? Suppose identity A can read the mind of identity B, but B doesn’t even know that A exists (and A wants to keep it that way). In that case, A could communicate with B anonymously, in either of two ways. First, A could speak to B audibly, in which case B would “hear voices.” Second, A could transfer thoughts or information directly into B’s mind, which B may interpret as having magically learned something by telepathy.

Thus, when characters in a magical realism novel experience telepathy, it may reflect the author’s experience with multiple personality.

Magical Realism and Multiple Personality: A Character’s Telepathy is based on Co-Consciousness of the Author’s Alternate Personalities

In my post of May 20, 2014 (search “magical realism”), I quoted Gabriel Garcia Marquez as rejecting the label of magical realism. He explained that what people call magical realism is just the way he thinks.

Why would he think that way? Because great novelists have multiple personality.  And one way of describing multiple personality is to say that it is magical thinking by a person who is grounded in reality.

For example, suppose that a character in a “magical realism” novel is telepathic; that is, he can read another character’s mind. Well, that is routine in multiple personality—when one identity reads another identity’s mind—only instead of “telepathy,” it is called “co-consciousness.”

Why, then, don’t all great novelists write magical realism novels? Literary fashion and self-control.

American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 says Imaginary Playmates are the Normal Multiple Personality of Childhood

DSM-5, the official psychiatric diagnostic manual, prohibits the clinician from making the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) in children on the basis of “imaginary playmates” (1, p. 292).

The manual doesn’t give a reason, but the implication is that imaginary playmates are common and normal.

The manual does not disqualify imaginary playmates by specifying any observable differences between it and multiple personality. Indeed, if imaginary playmates and multiple personality did not look quite similar, there would be no reason for the manual to mention it.

Of course, DSM-5 is a manual of mental disorders, not normal psychology. A person could very clearly have multiple personalities, but unless “the symptoms cause clinically significant distress and impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” (1, p. 292), DSM-5 is not interested.

Skeptics about multiple personality think that they are being clever when they ask, “If multiple personality is real and begins in childhood, why is it found so infrequently in childhood?” The answer is that multiple personality is so common in childhood that it is considered normal.

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

What would happen if novelists publicly announced that they had multiple personality? Some have, but few take them seriously.

As previously discussed in this blog, a few writers have—more or less, directly or indirectly—gone public. But when J. M. Barrie spoke publicly about his alternate personality, it was treated as a joke. When Sue Grafton said that she had alternate personalities, the public mostly ignored it. When Margaret Atwood wrote that all fiction writers have a split personality, and when she, Philip Roth, Dean Koontz, and others published novels that featured multiple personality, few made much of it.

The public probably doesn’t believe that novelists have multiple personality, because they think it would interfere with a person’s ability to function. And since J. M. Barrie, Sue Grafton, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, and Dean Koontz have obviously functioned very well—indeed, at a very high level—how could they have had multiple personality? The answer is that most people with multiple personality are normal. And some are gifted.