What does a person with multiple personality look like? If you google that question, you will probably not learn the truth (unless you get a link to this post).

If you google that question, you will be told what a person with multiple personality looks like, their signs and symptoms, after they have been diagnosed, when the alternate personalities have had their cover blown, so to speak, not what the person looked like or how they behaved before that.

Before a person with multiple personality has been diagnosed, they do have all those signs and symptoms, and have had them since childhood, but not for show. You will probably meet only the person’s host personality, not their alternate personalities, who are usually not “out.” Thus, the signs and symptoms, though present, are inconspicuous.

So what does a person with multiple personality look like? They usually look like everyone else.

(For past posts on diagnosis, search “mental status,” “diagnostic criteria,” and “memory gaps.”)

Anne Sexton (post 3): Her psychiatrist tells her “Elizabeth” alternate personality to get lost, and her host personality says “Elizabeth” was a lie.

“Early in Sexton’s therapy [1957], the Elizabeth persona began making appearances while Sexton was in a trance by scrawling messages in childlike handwriting…By September, she was typing letters which she left unsigned, though ‘Elizabeth’ appeared in the return address on the envelopes. Somewhat comically, the writer claimed that she had to type her introductory letter in the dark so Anne wouldn’t read it” (1, p. 55).

Note: Although the biographer thought that the above was comical, readers of this blog know better, since they recall the recent post on Shirley Jackson in which she describes her alternate personalities as leaving notes when her host personality was not looking.

Sexton’s psychiatrist, Dr. Orne, considered “Elizabeth” to be a dangerous symptom for a patient he had diagnosed as having hysteria. He feared that “Sexton was perilously close to developing multiple personality disorder” (1, p. 60), so he ignored “Elizabeth” and she no longer appeared. Moreover, Anne denounced “Elizabeth” as having been a lie (1, p. 63).

Dr. Orne had also expressed concern that Sexton was such a suggestible hysteric that if he had left her hospitalized on a ward with patients who had schizophrenia, she might falsely adopt their psychotic symptoms. But since Sexton had not been exposed to any patients with multiple personality (completely different from schizophrenia), from where did he think she was coming up with the idea of an alternate personality? And his belief that a person can develop multiple personality for the first time in adulthood is wrong; it has a childhood onset.

Moreover, Orne seems to equate having multiple personality with the overtness of an alternate personality. He does not know that that is not how multiple personality ordinarily looks (before it is diagnosed). In the typical case, the alternate personalities are incognito (answering to the regular name and pretending to be the host personality).

You typically discover the alternate personalities in the process of accounting for the person’s memory gaps. And Orne had never understood why Sexton had memory gaps for their therapy sessions (see previous post).

In multiple personality, undiagnosed alternate personalities typically become overt only in some sort of crisis. “Elizabeth” became overt, because she felt that Dr. Orne did not understand his patient (1, p. 55). But when Dr. Orne intentionally ignored her, she reverted to her usual life behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Anne, the host personality, was only too glad to call “Elizabeth” a lie, in compliance with Dr. Orne’s opinion about it.

As quoted in the previous post, from an interview years later, Sexton knew that she was “many people.”

1. Diane Wood Middlebrook. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Anne Sexton (post 2): “It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people…I become someone else…even in moments when I’m not writing the poem”

“It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it. Many times I assume these guises; I attack it the way a novelist might. Sometimes I become someone else, and when I do, I believe, even in moments when I’m not writing the poem, that I am that person. When I wrote about the farmer’s wife, I lived in my mind in Illinois; when I had the illegitimate child, I nursed it—in my mind—and gave it back and traded life. When I gave my lover back to his wife, in my mind, I grieved and saw how ethereal and unnecessary I had been. When I was Christ, I felt like Christ. My arms hurt, I desperately wanted to pull them in off the Cross. When I was taken down off the Cross and buried alive, I sought solutions; I hoped they were Christian solutions.”

from Anne Sexton interview with Barbara Kevles in 1968, published in The Paris Review, 1971. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4073/anne-sexton-the-art-of-poetry-no-15-anne-sexton

Anne Sexton’s Memory Gaps: Phi Beta Kappa, Pulitzer Prize poet repeatedly had amnesia for what she had said during psychotherapy sessions.

Anne Sexton saw Dr. Martin Orne, a psychiatrist, two to three times a week from 1956 to 1964:

“From the start, it was clear to Orne that Sexton was unable to remember much from one session to the next. From his point of view, Sexton’s ‘memory trouble’ proved the biggest obstacle to her progress. To address this problem, he eventually suggested (at the end of 1960) that they tape her sessions so that she might listen to what they discussed and reflect upon it in between sessions. Orne believed that transcribing the sessions would help Sexton ‘understand what she was doing’ (Middlebrook, 1991). Faithfully transcribing each tape, Sexton arrived at a session prepared to discuss what had transpired in the previous hour. She commented that she often only ‘heard’ his part of the dialogue when she wrote it down” (1, Introduction, p. xvi).

“Some of the tapes feature the long silences of Sexton’s trances, the dissociated states she entered when angry or upset, presumably in an attempt to manage her feelings. We can hear Orne's soothing voice as he attempted to coax her back to consciousness, and the flare of his anger when she refused to do so, even though the appointment had come to an end and another patient was waiting outside” (1, p xx).

“Her father, whose personality changed completely when he was drunk, once beat Anne with a riding crop because she had stolen her sister’s birthday money…Later, Sexton was to speculate about whether she had been sexually abused by…her father, a question which returned in her therapy sessions dozens of times and which is the subject of many of her poems (as well as her Broadway play, Mercy Street)” (1, p. xiv).

Comments

The only psychological condition with recurrent amnesia (search “memory gaps”) or spontaneous trances or complete personality changes (the latter attributed to Sexton’s father) is dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality).

Furthermore, after Sexton listened to the recordings of her psychotherapy sessions, “She commented that she often only ‘heard’ [the psychiatrist’s] part of the dialogue.” That is, she could not “hear” the voices of her alternate personalities, with whom she was not co-conscious. Indeed, it was her lack of co-consciousness with these alternate personalities that had accounted for her host personality’s memory gaps for the parts of sessions in which the alternate personalities had been in control.

As any clinician who is familiar with multiple personality knows, alternate personalities (who have not had their cover blown by diagnosis) typically try to remain incognito (they answer to the persons’s regular name and pass for the host personality). So the clinician has to recognize clues, such as memory gaps, and find out what accounts for these gaps; i.e., meet the alternate personalities who had been in control for these periods of time. 

Sexton’s memory gaps should have prompted an evaluation for multiple personality. But, to be fair to Dr. Orne, those were Freudian days, and since Freud’s theories were antithetical to understanding multiple personality (as I have previously discussed), most clinicians would have missed the diagnosis.

As to Sexton’s father, if it is true that when he drank he had a complete change in personality, then he may have had multiple personality, too. Multiple personality is sometimes multigenerational. Alcohol itself does not completely change the personality, but if a person has multiple personality, alcohol may prompt a switch to an alternate personality who drinks.

1. Dawn M. Skorczewski. An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton. New York, Routledge, 2012.

“Two Girls, Fat and Thin” by Mary Gaitskill: Two women who were sexually abused in childhood now have multiple personality, but it is unacknowledged. 

Dorothy (fat) and Justine (thin) are two young women who had been sexually abused in childhood (1, pp. 26-27). This psychological novel depicts its aftereffects.

Since the association between childhood sexual abuse and multiple personality is well known, the following questions should be in the mind of any reader: Will the characters have signs of multiple personality? If so, will these signs be labelled as such by a narrator or character? Or will these signs be unacknowledged? (Most multiple personality in novels is unacknowledged.)

Dorothy

“The boundaries of my inner world—[when a person’s alternate personalities are not ‘out,’ they are nevertheless conscious, and are living in the person’s ‘inner world’]—did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded, like the force field of clouds and limitless night sky that surrounded the island of Never-Never Land” (1, p. 111). [See posts on J. M. Barrie.]

“Those dinner tribunals occurred with such frequency that I developed the ability to divide myself while they occurred; the external person who sat and cried while her father reviled her and the internal person who helped herself to more salad as he ranted, and noticed that the scalloped potatoes were particularly succulent tonight” (1, p. 117).

[Following her father’s sexual abuse the night before, she has had a multiple personality type of memory gap, a dissociative fugue, in which she finds herself somewhere else, without memory of how she got there:] “I became conscious again as I sat in study hall the next day before a pile of books” (1, p. 124).

“She said, ‘Oh, wait, you haven’t told me—what is your name? I mean your real name, not the one your parents gave you.’ And I said, ‘Dorothy. Dorothy Never’ ” (1, p. 183). [“Dorothy Never,” as in Never-Never Land, is not the character’s real name, but is evidently the name of an alternate personality.]

[Told her duties as a secretary] “I wanted to cry, I can’t do it! I can’t! But fast after this feeling came another, a deep dark surge of ‘Oh yes you can’ that seemed to come from my lower body…It was a proud, stubborn, angry feeling that made me picture a harsh thin-lipped mouth setting itself in determination. My will, usually wandering my body in various pieces…After the first few hours had passed, my frayed perception forked into two—one navigating the landscape of words, phrases, and ideas, the other absorbing the sounds, inflections, and tonal habits of the voices” (1, p. 201).

“It was as if I had divided into two people: one hungrily embracing the dangerous world of emotional contact and power play, enjoying the game of move, counter move, the unpredictable changes of feelings, the other a terrified child unable to bear the carnivorous spirit of this world, weeping with fear at the sight of adults savagely copulating on their beds, on desks, in elevators” (1, p. 268).

“A voice of reason coughed nervously and interjected that perhaps I had misinterpreted the message of her eyes. But I had not!…I felt like there was an animal trapped in my lower body, pacing furiously, wanting to come out and tear the nearest living creature to pieces” (1, p. 287).

“The chattering voices [of various alternate personalities] in my head stopped, confused…The voices lunged forward, all talking at once, knocking each other down and climbing over each other to explain” (1, p. 295).

Justine

“A tough little person [child-aged alternate personality] within her rose and asserted itself” (1, p. 101).

“She remembers a strange thing she said one night at the dinner table, without knowing why she said it. Her mother asked her how school had been that day, and, recalling a study hall conversation, she answered, ‘Sally Hinkel is going to fuck Jim Thorn tonight.’ Her father’s eyes opened in alarm, her mother’s mouth opened in mid-bite…” (1, p. 139). [An alternate personality had spoken up, inappropriately.]

“One part of her stepped forward like a first grader in a starched dress with her hands clasped behind her back…and yet another part of her tried to puzzle out why she was talking to this prick…” (1, p. 193).

“The child Justine [one of her child-aged personalities] pouted flirtatiously as he eyed her” (1, p. 243).

“Even the rampaging child [another child-aged personality] paused, wondering” (1, p. 248).

[Child-aged alternate personalities are the most common kind, since multiple personality starts in childhood, and such personalities are often frozen in time.]

“Justine pressed her face into the floor [as an adult, she is, at her own request, engaging in a sadomasochistic scene], rubbing her cheek against the porous smelly wood, trying to scrape through her drunkenness. Blackness roared around her; she could barely feel the welts rising on her back. Her knees hurt, she thought. He beat her as she squirmed on the floor, caught in the steel trap that had closed on her when she was five years old. The upper strata of her thoughts and feelings had ruptured, and the creature long trapped beneath [an alternate personality] was out and gnawing her with its teeth” (1, p. 270). [This passage connects her adult interest in sadomasochism with her child abuse at age five and its resulting alternate personalities.]

Concluding Comments

Both of the novel’s two main characters had a history of child abuse, and now have manifestations of alternate personalities. However, since there is no narrator or character who labels it as multiple personality, per se, its presence in the novel seems to be unintentional, and may reflect the author’s own psychology.

Most reviewers of this novel completely missed these issues, but they should not have: When a psychological novel’s set-up is two main characters, both with histories of child abuse, reviewers should stop to consider the implications (multiple personality).

1. Mary Gaitskill. Two Girls, Fat and Thin. New York, Poseidon Press, 1991.

“People Have Limited Knowledge. What’s the Remedy? Nobody Knows”: New York Times review of “The Knowledge Illusion” forgets “The Unconscious”

“In The Knowledge Illusion, the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach hammer another nail into the coffin of the rational individual. From the 17th century to the 20th century, Western thought depicted individual human beings as independent rational agents…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/books/review/knowledge-illusion-steven-sloman-philip-fernbach.html

But Western thought has long given up on the idea that people are always rational, that they always know why they think what they think or do what they do. I discussed the centuries-old Western idea of “the unconscious” in a recent post:

March 31, 2017

“The Unconscious”: First, Freud did not discover it (it was already well known); Second, it’s a misnomer, since it refers to conscious, alternate personalities.

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind

“The term ‘unconscious’ was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Influences on thinking that originate from outside of an individual's consciousness were reflected in the ancient ideas of divine inspiration, and the predominant role of the gods in affecting motives and actions. Unconscious aspects of mentality were referred to between 2500 and 600 BC in the Hindu texts known as the Vedas. Paracelsus is credited as the first to make mention of an unconscious aspect of cognition in 1567. William Shakespeare explored the role of the unconscious in many of his plays, without naming it as such. In addition, Western philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche used the word unconscious. In 1880, Edmond Colsenet supports at the Sorbonne, a philosophy thesis on the unconscious. Elie Rabier and Alfred Fouillee perform syntheses of the unconscious ‘at a time when Freud was not interested in the concept.’ In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, William James, in his monumental treatise on psychology (The Principles of Psychology), examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and ‘subconscious.' Historian of psychology Mark Altschule observes that, 'It is difficult—or perhaps impossible—to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.' ”

The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberger (Basic Books, 1970)

“During the entire nineteenth century, hypnosis remained the basic approach to the unconscious mind. However…it was supplemented by [the study of]…mediums…automatic writing…multiple personality…Chevreul’s pendulum…[etc.]” Freud came later.

“The Unconscious”: Misconception and Misnomer

The idea of “the unconscious” assumes, incorrectly, that a person may have only one consciousness. Posthypnotic amnesia demonstrates two states of consciousness: 1. what the person knows and remembers when in hypnosis, and 2. what the person knows and remembers when not in hypnosis. What the person knows and remembers only in hypnosis is “unconscious” only from the point of view of the person when not in hypnosis. Hypnosis that involves posthypnotic amnesia might be viewed as artificially-induced multiple personality.

In multiple personality, per se, what an alternate personality knows and thinks may be “unconscious” from the point of view of the host personality, but it is quite conscious to the alternate personality (who is conscious simultaneously with, but outside the awareness of, the host personality).

Of course, there are certain types of truly unconscious processes. For example, there are physiological processes of which a person is not conscious. Also, there are some cognitive functions, such as recognizing faces, of which a person is conscious of the result, but not of how it was done (assuming there is no face-recognizing personality, per se).

Most things that a writer’s host or editorial personalities attribute to their “unconscious” are things that one or another of their alternate personalities consciously thought up. Give credit where credit is due.

Editors of The New York Times Book Review, 1896-2017: Why have so few of them written novels or poems? Has Times been prejudiced against fiction writers?

After my previous post—which contrasted the cognitive styles of Pamela Paul, Book Review Editor, and Nicole Lamy, the Match Book columnist—I wondered if past Editors had been like Pamela Paul, nonfiction writers.

As the following list indicates, of the nineteen Editors since The New York Times Book Review became a separate section in 1896, I could find only two, John Leonard and Harvey Shapiro, who had published novels or poems:

  1. Francis Whiting Halsey (1896-1902)

 2. Edward Augustus Dithmar (1902-1907)

 3. John Grant Dater (1907-1910)

 4. Joseph Benson Gilder (1910-1911)

 5. George Buchanan Fife (1911-1912)

 6. Louis H.[?] Wetmore (1912-1913)

 7. Clifford Smyth (1913-1922)

 8. Brooks Atkinson (1922-1925)

 9. J. (James) Donald Adams (1925-1943)

10. Robert Van Gelder (1944-1946)

11. John K. Hutchens (1946-1948)

12. (Ernest) Francis Brown (1949-1971)

13. John Leonard (1971-1975) (novels)

14. Harvey Shapiro (1975-1983) (poems)

15. Mitchel R. Levitas (1983-1989)

16. Rebecca Pepper Sinkler (1989-1995)

17. Charles McGrath (1995-2004)

18. Sam Tanenhaus (2004-2013)

19. Pamela Paul (2013-present)

So I wonder if those who have chosen Editors for The New York Times Book Review have been prejudiced against fiction writers. And if so, I wonder on what that prejudice is based: on the way fiction writers, in contrast to nonfiction writers, think?

New York Times Book Review Editor Pamela Paul and Literary Advice Columnist Nicole Lamy: Contrasting Cognitive Styles, Nonfiction vs. Fiction?

Nicole Lamy has a literary advice column in The New York Times Book Review. She matches people with books they would like.

Pamela Paul recently urged people to read books they hate (1).

It struck me that Lamy and Paul have different attitudes. I hypothesized that Lamy has a multifaceted cognitive style typical of fiction writers, and Paul has an analytical cognitive style typical of nonfiction writers. So I looked to see what else they have written.

I found that Paul has written a number of books, all nonfiction; while Lamy has a personal essay in The American Scholar (2000) about memory and identity issues, which, as discussed in this blog, are more typical of fiction writers.

from “Life in Motion” by Nicole Lamy

“Three years ago I took pictures of all the houses I’ve lived in…twelve houses before I turned thirteen. For me the moves had always resisted coherent explanation…I wanted to gather the photos as charms against fallible memory…

“…by…age thirteen I seemed to have passed directly to thirty-five…”

“Now when I leave my apartment for vacation…I experience numbing panic — will I ever see home again?…Each time I return home from vacation, rooms don’t appear the same as I left them…

“When the photo project was complete…I had gathered the proof of my life…” (2).

1. Pamela Paul. “Why You Should Read Books You Hate.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-hate-reading.html

2. Nicole Lamy. “Life in Motion.” http://www2.hawaii.edu/~facoba/readings/lamy.htm

“Mary McCarthy: Ice Queen” by Sam Sacks in Wall Street Journal: His essay on the eminent novelist and critic does not mention her split personality.

As an epigraph for the print version of his essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks quotes Mary McCarthy: “Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.” This quote is a metaphor for McCarthy’s multiple personality, which his essay does not mention (1).

Carol Brightman’s biography of Mary McCarthy does mention her multiple personality:

“A fatal ambiguousness has crept into her twelve-year-old mind. Now she begins to see everything in doubles…And that is when she seems to split into two people…For Mary McCarthy, this doubling of consciousness, this splitting of one mind into two warring halves, is the very breath of life” (2, pp. 40-41).

“With [Harold] Johnsrud a new cycle had begun, one that would repeat itself when McCarthy settled down with Edmund Wilson, a much older man. In the first stage of these relationships, the persona of the brash young intellectual began to unravel under the pressure of a darker self, one that McCarthy characterizes in The Company She Keeps as ‘the fugitive, criminal self [who] lay hiding in a thicket’ of half-remembered terrors from childhood” (2, p. 84).

“Like Byron, Mary McCarthy is also aware of the division in her nature. At the end of The Company She Keeps, the heroine…begs the ‘Ghostly Father’ of the tale to allow her to repossess herself, all of herself, the ‘sick,’ impulsive, attention-craving, love-starved side, along with the conscience-stricken side that reasserts itself, coldly reasoning, the morning after. ‘Preserve me in disunity,’ she implores” (2, p. 170).

“With the publication of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, McCarthy was relieved of some of the burden of personality, one might say; of that peculiar fragmentation of personality that was her lot” (2, p. 413).

“…a Jekyll and Hyde drama far from unusual among writers…” (2, p. 266).

1. Sam Sacks. https://www.wsj.com/articles/mary-mccarthy-ice-queen-1492189399

2. Carol Brightman. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York, Clarkson Potter, 1992.

NY Times Book Review asks “Which Force is More Harmful to the Arts: Elitism or Populism?”: Adam Kirsch answers, “Writers write as their minds compel.”

“The truth is, however, that few writers ever make a conscious choice between elitism and populism, difficulty and accessibility. Writers write as their minds and fates compel them to: Virginia Woolf could not have written a populist epic like ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ any more than John Steinbeck could have written a modernist study like ‘To the Lighthouse’ ” (1).

Now the Book Review should ask Adam Kirsch and other contributors to explain how writers’ minds compel them to write as they do.

1. Adam Kirsch. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/books/review/which-force-is-more-harmful-to-the-arts-elitism-or-populism.html

“In Praise of Agatha Christie’s Accidental Sleuths” in New York Times does not wonder how she became a great fiction writer: a multiple personality mystery. 

Radhika Jones’s essay (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/books/agatha-christie-literary-obsessions.html) means to praise Christie, not analyze her, and so does not address the mystery of Christie herself: How did her mind work? What enabled her to become a great fiction writer?

Part of the solution to that mystery is found in Unfinished Portrait, one of the novels Christie wrote under the pseudonym, Mary Westmacott, and in Christie’s An Autobiography, both cited in two past posts:

October 13, 2014

Agatha Christie’s Unfinished Portrait Describes Lifelong, Normal, Multiple Personality as Leading to Both her Literary Career and "Gone Girl" Fugue

Agatha Christie’s discussion of her mysterious, sensational, real-life disappearance in 1926—see my post of October 5, 2014—was not in her autobiography, but in Unfinished Portrait, one of the novels she published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

The novel tells the story of Celia.

Age 3: “Nobody knew that as Celia walked sedately along the road she was in reality mounted upon a white palfrey…She was on different occasions a duchess, a princess, a goose girl, and a beggar maid…Most of her world was inside her head” (1, p. 33-34).

That is, she switched into the subjectively-real identities of a duchess, etc., and experienced herself as having these alternate personalities for various periods of time. This is usually lumped together with “imaginary companions” or “imaginary playmates” or “imaginary friends,” but, to be more precise, this was imaginary impersonation (in which the child switches into alternate personalities).

Age 5½: “Celia displayed an insatiable curiosity about words…By the time she was five and a half Celia could read all the story books…Fairy stories were her passion. Stories of real-life children did not interest her” (1, p. 40).

Age 10-19: “Celia still spent much of her time alone. Although she had [real friends to tea]—they were not nearly so real to her as ‘the girls’ [which] were creations of Celia’s imagination. She knew all about them—what they looked like, what they wore, what they felt and thought” (1, p. 101-102) They included Ethelred Smith, Annie Brown, Isabella Sullivan, Ella Graves, and Sue de Vete. At age 19, when Celia herself was engaged to be married, “she married off ‘the girls’” (1, p. 172).

Age 24: “Celia invented a new person. Her name was Hazel,” and also a young man, Owen (1, p. 221). “Whenever Celia had a little leisure, or when she was wheeling [her daughter] to the Park, [their] story went on in her mind. It occurred to her one day that she might write it down. She might, in fact, make a book of it…It wasn’t quite so easy when it came to writing it down. Her mind had always gone on about six paragraphs farther than the one she was writing down—and then by the time she got to that, the exact wording had gone out of her head” (1, pp. 221-222).

Then, when she had had some initial success in getting published, and there appeared to be no problem in her family life, her husband shocked her by announcing that he had found someone new and he wanted a divorce.

Celia’s Fugue: “She walked for a long time—it was raining and wet…She couldn’t remember what she was walking for…What was her own name? How frightening—she couldn’t remember…” (1, p. 261).

The writing career and fugue are mentioned only very briefly. But the novel is interesting for its portrait of the psychological development, since early childhood, of a person who could have a real writing career, and, in a crisis, a real fugue.

Why did “Mary Westmacott” write about this, and not Agatha Christie? Maybe Agatha Christie never did remember what happened, but her Mary Westmacott personality did.

1. Mary Westmacott [pseudonym of Agatha Christie]. Unfinished Portrait [1934]. New York, Jove Books, 1987.

October 15, 2014

Agatha Christie’s Autobiography: “The Girls,” not just imaginary companions, lived on, but never grew old, since child-aged alternate personalities, like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, don’t

Yesterday’s post discussed “the girls” as they were portrayed in a novel written by Agatha Christie under a pseudonym. This post is about “the girls” as discussed by Agatha Christie in her autobiography, which she wrote between ages sixty and seventy-five.

It is the same seven girls, including Isabella, whom Agatha did not like, because she was too “worldly” (1, p. 90). But here, instead of discussing the personal conflict in terms of music, it is discussed in terms of croquet.

“I used to arrange tournaments and special matches. My great hope was that Isabel would not win. I did everything short of cheating to see that she did not win—that is, I held her mallet for her carelessly, played quickly, hardly aimed at all—yet somehow the more carelessly I played, the more fortunate Isabel seemed to be. She got through impossible hoops, hit balls from right across the lawn, and nearly always finished as winner or runner-up. It was most annoying” (1, p. 91).

“‘The girls,’ I may say, stayed with me for many years…Even when I was grown up I spared them a thought now and then, and allocated them the various dresses in my wardrobe…Even now, sometimes, as I put away a dress in a cupboard, I say to myself: ‘Yes, that would do well for Elsie, green was always her colour.’ It makes me laugh when I do it, but there ‘the girls’ are still, though, unlike me, they have not grown old” (1, pp. 91-92).

As I have previously discussed in regard to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, child-aged alternate personalities may never grow old.

1. Agatha Christie. An Autobiography. New York, Dodd Mead & Company, 1977.

Recently recognized, Normal Version of Multiple Personality adds to understanding of fiction writing, literary criticism, normal psychology, creative genius.

Of the thousands of people who have visited this blog from around the world, very few immediately believe its thesis that most novelists (and many others) have a normal version of multiple personality.

And why should most people want to believe it? Alternate personalities try to avoid detection by remaining incognito when they talk to you; and meanwhile, the person’s regular self usually has only a vague sense of “losing time” or having memory gaps. Thus, most people think they have never known a person who has multiple personality.

However, if you read the blog in its entirety (starting with the first post in 2013), you will slowly come to believe it, since you will discover multiple personality in the life and work of over one hundred writers, including Nobel Prize winners.

And it stands to reason that there must be more people than just writers who have multiple personality, due to the same predisposing factors that predisposed those writers: other adults in the general population who as children had traumatic experiences (which are relatively common) and had sufficient imaginative abilities to be able to use a dissociative identity-multiple personality, psychological defense, for which many children have a natural talent, as indicated by the normal occurrence of imaginary companions and imaginary identities in childhood.

Of course, individual posts vary from one to another in how convincing they are. Some writers have made their multiple personality quite clear, while others are more camouflaged. But if you read the blog in its entirety, it proves its thesis beyond a reasonable doubt.

Why write a blog that very few will immediately believe and too few will read in its entirety? First, I enjoy discovering things in literature; e.g., what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality.” Who would have thought that so many novels include signs of multiple personality that are unacknowledged, unintentional, and reflect the author’s own psychology? Second, my Multiple Identity Theory (about the normal version of multiple personality, etc.) adds to the understanding of fiction writing, literary criticism, normal psychology, and creative genius.

“My Ántonia” by Willa Cather (post 3): Jim speaks to Ántonia, not as a man would speak to a woman, but as male host personality to female alternate personality.

In the following passage, Jim says he likes Ántonia so much that she would have made a wonderful person in her own right. But the fact is, she is a part of his own mind.

No man would say to a real woman that he’d be equally happy to have her as a sweetheart, wife, mother, or sister:

“Do you know, Ántonia…I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me” (Book IV, Part IV) (1, p. 312).

The title of this novel is not “Ántonia,” a person in her own right, but “My Ántonia,” Jim’s alternate personality, Ántonia.

Willa Cather’s signatures and pseudonyms (see past post) suggest that she had both female and male personalities.

1. Willa Cather. My Ántonia. Edited by Charles Mignon with Kari Ronning. Historical Essay and Explanatory Notes by James Woodress with Kari Ronning, Kathleen Danker & Emily Levine. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

“My Ántonia” by Willa Cather (post 2): Ántonia is a split personality; she and Jim imagine people as vividly as imaginary companions or alternate personalities.

Ántonia

Ántonia is first portrayed as having a masculine temperament—“ ‘I like to be like a man.’ She would toss her head and ask me to feel the muscles swell in her brown arm” (1, p. 133)—but is later portrayed having “the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world” (1, p. 229) and as being an Earth Mother with ten children.

When most reviews of this novel say she is just a strong woman adapting to circumstances, they are rationalizing a distinctly contradictory portrayal.

Ántonia and Jim have such vivid imaginations and memories that people they have known become like imaginary companions they talk to, or alternate personalities inside them:

Ántonia: “Of course it means you are going away from us for good,” she said with a sigh. “But that don’t mean I’ll lose you. Look at my papa here; he’s been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him” (1, p. 311-312).

Jim (first-person narrator): “But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how” (1, p. 254).

1. Willa Cather. My Ántonia. Edited by Charles Mignon with Kari Ronning. Historical Essay and Explanatory Notes by James Woodress with Kari Ronning, Kathleen Danker & Emily Levine. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Willa Cather’s 18 Signatures, 6 Pseudonyms: Like Twain’s 17 signatures, Hemingway’s 20 nicknames (see past posts), some are probably alternate personalities.

In multiple personality, alternate personalities may be named or unnamed. It is very common for some alternate personalities to have names that are simple variations in spelling of the person’s regular name. This is a great form of camouflage, since other people tend to attach little significance to seemingly trivial differences in spelling, and so don’t realize when they are talking to an alternate personality.

Willa Sibert Cather (born, Wilella Sibert Cather) signed her name in at least eighteen ways (1):

William Cather

William Cather, MD

Wm Cather

Wm Cather Jr.

Willa Cather

William

W. Cather

Cather

Willa

Willie

Willa S. Cather

Willa S.C.

Willa Sibert Cather

W.S.C.

W.

Aunt Willie

[No signature]

Aunt Willa

Cather is also known to have used at least six pseudonyms:

Henry Nicklemann

George Overing

Helen Delay

John Esten

Elizabeth L. Seymour

Charles Douglass

Search “pseudonyms” for past posts on this recurring subject.

1. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (Editors): The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

Fiction Writing: Novelists, like others with multiple personality, may keep journals and have “waking dreams” to communicate with their alternate personalities.

Novelists often keep journals, which happens to be a common technique used in the treatment of multiple personality. In a journal, alternate personalities, who might not otherwise be aware of each other, can read each others entries.

In a past post, I discussed keeping a journal and having “waking dreams.” The latter is a way that alternate personalities who are not known to the host personality may initiate communication.

August 31, 2015

Novelists keep journals and have “waking-dreams” so that alternate personalities who are usually not co-conscious can communicate

In multiple personality, many alternate personalities are not co-conscious (they are not aware of each other). Or, they may have one-way awareness: “B” is aware of “A,” but “A” is not aware of “B.” Or, they may have indirect knowledge: “C” has seen books bearing “A’s” name. Or, personalities may just want to express themselves.

There are several ways for an alternate personality to send a message. If “B” hates “A’s” necktie, “B” can throw it out, but that is dysfunctional. A better way is for “B” to verbalize his complaint, which “A” will experience as a voice in his head or a loud thought.

Since novelists may be keeping a journal anyway—to collect and work on things of potential use in their writing—“B” can make an entry in the journal for “A” to see. Seeing the entry, “A” might realize that he has an alternate personality, but most novelists probably think of it as a message from their “unconscious” or “shadow,” a new character, or their literary muse.

When voices and journal entries do not suffice, the novelist may have a “waking-dream,” in which they meet the alternate personality and see what the alternate personality wants them to see.

Fiction Writing: Ideas come from alternate consciousness (alternate personalities, not “the unconscious”), so learn how many you have and consult them.

As a fiction writer, you already confer with some of your alternate personalities: muses, characters, narrators, voices. (They are alternate personalities if they are autonomous and have minds of their own.)

However, in the course of writing, you have probably noticed that some creative input cannot be attributed to either your regular self or any of the above, known sources. Where does the mysterious input come from?

It comes from alternate personalities you have not yet met. There are two ways to meet them.

First, when you are in the altered state of consciousness that you normally use to write, you can ask the alternate personalities you already know (see above) to introduce you to others, whom they know; and if you are given their names, ask for them by name. Second, when you are in the altered state of consciousness that you normally use to write, you can think of the specific, unaccounted for input, and ask to speak to whomever deserves the credit.

You may have to persevere and repeat such inquiries until your more hidden and reticent personalities feel they can trust you. The reason you may have to inquire about them in terms of the specific things they have done rather than by name, is that many alternate personalities are either nameless or reveal their names very reluctantly.

Your “Unconscious” vs. Your Alternate Consciousness in Fiction Writing: Which concept is more likely to free up and make use of your full creative potential?

Most fiction writers believe that a major part of their best writing comes from their “unconscious.” What do they mean by their “unconscious”? They mean they do not remember thinking some of their best ideas, and so they must have thought it unconsciously.

But how can a mind think things if it is unconscious? Your mind must have been conscious when it thought these things, but you were not aware of it.

This implies you must have more than one consciousness: a regular consciousness and an alternate consciousness, and that the former is usually unaware of what the latter has been thinking.

What am I talking about? What are its implications? Do you expect instant gratification? You will have to read this whole blog, from the last four years, if you want to understand and make use of your full creative potential.