“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller (post 2): Author says that virtually none of the attitudes in the novel are based on his experiences as bombardier in World War II.

Pausing halfway through my 50th anniversary edition to read the appendix, I find the following reflections by the author:

“The concept of the novel came to me as a seizure, a single inspiration…My mind flooded with verbal images…I don’t know were it came from…the unconscious element was very strong…I deliberately looked for contradictory situations…Catch-22 became a law: ‘they’ can do anything to us we can’t stop ‘them’ from doing…

“Virtually none of the attitudes in the book—the suspicion and distrust of the officials in the government, the feelings of helplessness and victimization, the realization that most government agencies would lie—coincided with my experiences as a bombardier in World War II…

“It is the anonymous ‘they,’ the enigmatic ‘they,’ who are in charge. Who is ‘they’? I don’t know…” (1).

1. Joseph Heller. “Reeling in Catch-22.” From The Sixties, ed. Lynda Rosen Obst (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1977, pp. 50, 52). Reprinted in appendix of Joseph Heller. Catch-22 [1961]. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011, pp. 474-476.

If, as Alison Gopnik says, “4-Year-Olds Don’t Act Like Trump,” then perhaps he acts like pseudo-child alternate personalities common in multiple personality.

For the sake of discussion, I will assume that Prof. Gopnik does not present an overly idealized view of children in her New York Times article (1). She implies that New York Times columnists and others have been mistaken to compare some of President Trump’s behavior to that of real children.

But that raises the question of whether Trump’s behavior is like some sort of unreal children.

Unreal children are commonly found in adults with multiple personality. The most common kind of alternate personality is the child-aged alter, because multiple personality starts in childhood.

According to DSM-5 (the psychiatric diagnostic manual), clinical multiple personality (a nonpsychotic, dissociative disorder) is more common than schizophrenia (a well-known psychosis). I argue in this blog that a normal version of multiple personality is probably present in 90% of novelists, and possibly 30% of the general public. And as previously discussed, the latter might include Trump.

1. Alison Gopnik. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/opinion/sunday/4-year-olds-children-trump-gopnik.html

Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Rooster” and “Happy Chicken”: Two very different versions of her life at age five, the latter narrated not by Oates, but by the chicken.

Persons with multiple personality may give multiple versions of their own lives, because some personalities have memory gaps (dissociative amnesia) for things that other personalities remember, and each personality has its own point of view.

The version given in “The Rooster Attacked Me — and Yet I Loved Him” (1) is very different from the version given in “Happy Chicken 1942-1944,” the second chapter of Oates’s memoir, The Lost Landscape (2).

The “Happy Chicken” chapter, both very funny and very psychologically complex, should be read in the original, but here is my brief note from a past post (search “Oates”):

Dissociative Amnesia at Age Five

The chapter “Happy Chicken” has a different narrator from most of the memoir. Here, Joyce Carol Oates is usually referred to by the narrator as “the little girl.” When the little girl was five years old, she was allowed to help “the Grandmother” collect eggs on their family farm. The narrator says:

“Grandma was the one, you know. The one who killed the chickens.

No! I did not know.

Of course you must have known, Joyce. You must have seen—many times…

No. I didn’t know. I never saw.

But…

I never saw” (2, p. 27).

“Sometime the little girl was breathless and frightened but why, the little girl would not afterward recall” (2, p. 29).

This alternate narrator—in the rhetorical, humorous guise of Joyce’s pet chicken, Happy Chicken—may be an alternate personality who knew things that little Joyce did not want to remember, like who killed the cute, innocent chickens on their family farm.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/magazine/the-rooster-attacked-me-and-yet-i-loved-him.html

2. Joyce Carol Oates. The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2015.

“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller: On the same page “Catch-22” is defined, it is mentioned, in passing, that everyone has lied to the protagonist his whole life.

I just started reading Catch-22. The protagonist, Yossarian, who flies air-combat missions in WWII, is told that you can ask to be excused from flying these dangerous missions if you claim to have gone crazy. But the catch—“Catch-22”—is that asking to be excused from flying these suicidal missions proves that you are not crazy.

At the bottom of the same page is the following, mentioned in passing: “…Yossarian’s mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, in-law, teacher, spiritual leader, legislator, neighbor and newspaper, had…lied to him about anything crucial…” (1, p. 46).

Thus, in fact, or at least in Yossarian’s opinion, the lying in his military life is a continuation of the lying by everyone in his civilian life. People have lied to Yossarian his whole life.

Truth is often spoken as if in jest. However, as I just started this novel, I don’t yet know what truth, if any, is behind these jests.

1. Joseph Heller. Catch-22 [1961]. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger says “Discontinuity defines the Trump personality”; it also defines dissociative identity (multiple personality).

“Discontinuity defines the Trump personality, and this won’t change” (1).

Multiple personality “…involves marked discontinuity…Most individuals with…dissociative identity disorder do not overtly display their…[alternate personalities]..for long periods of time…When alternate identity states are not directly observed, the disorder can be identified by…discontinuities…” (2, pp. 292-293).

1. Daniel Henninger. “Let Trump Be Trump.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/let-trump-be-trump-1495061454
2. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

New York Times columnist David Brooks says Trump is improving: In January he said President is like a “5-year-old,” but now says he is like a “7-year-old.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/trump-classified-data.html

However, Brooks does not explain how such a childlike person could run a billion-dollar business and become President.

Maybe Trump also has adult personalities.

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 7): The title expresses contempt for Gatsby as being an alternate personality who will be killed off.

“It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over” (1, p. 113).

Fitzgerald thought of Gatsby as Trimalchio.

Who is Trimalchio? The fictional character “Trimalchio is an arrogant former slave, who has become quite wealthy by tactics that most would find distasteful…The term ‘Trimalchio’ has become shorthand for the worst excesses of the nouveau riche” (2).

Fitzgerald had “preferred titles referencing Trimalchio…but was eventually persuaded that the reference was too obscure and that people would not be able to pronounce it. His wife, Zelda, and [his editor] Perkins both expressed their preference for The Great Gatsby” (3).

However, “The Great Gatsby,” while more marketable, still expresses contempt for the character, since the truly great people in history almost always have “the great” following their names—e.g., Alexander the Great (4)—whereas pretentious entertainers are called “the great” this or “the great” that. 

To understand this novel, you must keep in mind that the original person is James Gatz (see prior post). “Jay Gatsby” is an alternate personality, whose time to be out and in control has come and gone.

In multiple personality, alternate personalities may think of their having control taken away from them and their being forced to go back inside as being killed off, so to speak. The novel translates this into ordinary terms when Jay Gatsby is literally killed off at the end.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimalchio

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_known_as_the_Great

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 6): When the title character is referred to in quotation marks, it implies that he is only an alternate personality.

In the rest of the novel, there is one point at which the title character is referred to in quotation marks:

“It was this night [after Daisy had driven a car that hit and killed her husband Tom’s mistress] that he [Gatsby] told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody [when Gatz changed his name to Gatsby]—told it to me because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out. I think that he would have acknowledged anything now, without reserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy [the woman Gatsby loves]” (1, p. 148).

With those quotation marks, does the author acknowledge that “Jay Gatsby” is only an alternate personality whose time in control had come to an end and was played out? Inadvertently.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 5): At seventeen, James Gatz’s alternate personality, Jay Gatsby, previously behind the scenes, takes over.

“James Gatz of North Dakota…was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen…I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents…unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all…So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end” (1, p. 98).

Multiple personality starts in childhood, and as the narrator says, “Gatsby” had probably first arisen in Gatz’s imagination long before age seventeen, as an alternate identity who was not the child of unsuccessful parents. But it was not until age seventeen that Jay Gatsby, James Gatz’s alternate personality, took over.

A psychological explanation is most likely, because the name change has no socioeconomic advantage. If his family name had been Rocke, and he had changed it to Rockefeller, then that might have been a rational scheme. But the change from Gatz to Gatsby is socially meaningless. Any person from a rich family knows that there is no rich family by that name, and infers that Gatsby’s sudden riches must be based on criminal activity such as bootlegging.

Is there any other psychological explanation? Why not just say that James Gatz wanted a fresh start? But the American dream is rags to riches, or in the political arena, from the log cabin to the White House. A man is proud to be the first successful one in his family.

So why does F. Scott Fitzgerald include the Gatz to Gatsby name change? Does he want to raise the issue of multiple personality? If he doesn’t, then it is an example of what I call “gratuitous multiple personality”: the only reason it is in the novel is that it reflect’s the author’s own psychology.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (post 4): In first third of novel, Gatsby illustrates kinds of lying and changes in demeanor seen in multiple personality.

The three prior posts (search “Fitzgerald”) discussed his novel, Tender is the Night, and this Fitzgerald quote: “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, the first-person narrator, comparing himself to other characters, says, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (1, p. 59). Since I have not yet finished the novel, I don’t know if Nick will turn out to be reliable, but other characters, such as Jay Gatsby, are certainly introduced as great liars.

Before Gatsby is introduced, the reader is told how all the people who attend his extravagant parties speculate about him—How did he get to be so rich? What is his background? Etc.—but nobody seems to know, and the rumors about him are inconsistent and contradictory. Has Gatsby kept his background secret? Or has he told different things to different people?

Gatsby says to Nick:

“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life…I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear…I’ll tell you God’s honest truth…I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West—all dead now…

“What part of the Middle West?” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

Gatsby goes on and on, saying things more and more extraordinary, until the narrator thinks, “My incredulity was submerged in fascination now…” (1, pp. 65-66).

The only thing I know for sure about what Gatsby says is that San Francisco is in California on the west coast, not in the Middle West. And the question is why Gatsby would say something so obviously untrue. This is not an ordinary lie.

Lying in Multiple Personality

Most people with multiple personality do not intentionally lie any more than the average person. But they may get a reputation as a liar 1) when they deny having done something that other people have seen them do, because the host personality has a memory gap for what an alternate personality did, or 2) when different personalities, who have different beliefs about what is true—and some personalities may have rather fanciful beliefs—tell fanciful or contradictory things to various people or to the same person at different times.

Search “lying” for previous discussions related to other writers.

Gatsby may have something to hide. Perhaps he got rich from crime. But only in the alternate reality of an alternate personality could San Francisco be in the Middle West.

Abrupt Change in Demeanor

“He [Gatsby] smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life…It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck…” (1, p. 48).

Now, it is true that when the above was going on, “a butler had hurried toward him [Gatsby] with the information that Chicago was calling.” And perhaps Gatsby had criminal connections in Chicago, which might explain his switch from empathic to roughneck. But the above passage does not portray him as a hypocrite, who is only pretending to be extraordinarily empathic, but who is really a roughneck. No, he appears to be genuinely both: first one, then the other, switching suddenly from one to the other, like a person with multiple personality.

Perhaps, you may think, the above is not an example of multiple personality, but of a con man. But what makes a good con man? Search “confidence man” in this blog for a discussion of multiple personality in two novels with “confidence man” in their titles.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby [1925]. New York, Scribner, 2004.

4th Anniversary of Literary-Psychological blog, whose essays provide evidence that most novelists, many others, have normal version of multiple personality.

This blog has nearly a thousand posts (really, brief essays) on 1) more than a hundred novelists, and 2) multiple personality. These essays help explain how fiction writers write, and how you can recognize multiple personality in people and novels, in spite of the fact that it is usually not labelled as such.

I estimate that about ninety percent of fiction writers and thirty percent of the general public have a normal version of multiple personality.

Old View

For hundreds if not thousands of years, there has been a common view that normal people often have more than one self—e.g., a good self and a bad self—with one or the other self in control at any given time, depending on various factors. It has also been a common view that certain abnormal people have been possessed by demons or controlled by alternate personalities. 

The selves of normal people and the alternate personalities of mentally ill people have usually been thought of as unrelated.

My View

In my view, only a minority of normal people (no more than thirty percent) have more than one self in any meaningful sense, but these selves are essentially the same as alternate personalities. It is just that normal people don’t have sufficient distress and dysfunction to warrant exorcism or a diagnosis. Indeed, without the distress and dysfunction, multiple personality may be an asset; for example, in writing novels.

State of the Blog

The blog continues to be visited from around the world, but since no one submits comments, I do not know what anyone thinks.

Harvard Review of Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality): Not Fad, Not Cultural, Not Rare, Not Iatrogenic, Not Borderline, Not Temporary.

Harvard Review of Psychiatry. 2016 July; 24(4): 257-270.

“Separating Fact from Fiction: An Empirical Examination of Six Myths About Dissociative Identity Disorder”

Bethany L. Brand, PhD, Vedat Sar, MD, et al.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4959824/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4959824/pdf/hvp-24-257.pdf

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger (post 3): Holden Caulfield, not “crazy” or “mad”—such terms are meaningless—says “People never notice anything.”

Holden frequently calls himself “crazy” and “mad.” On the first page, he says, “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff” (1, p. 3). On the last page, he says, “I don’t know what to think about it” (1, p. 234). One reason that Holden and most literary critics don’t know what to think about his “madman stuff” is that they use terms like “crazy” and “mad,” which do not refer to any specific mental condition.

Holden is inexplicably changeable and emotional. He has a prodigious memory for small details, but memory gaps in certain instances. He is a self-confessed liar, often for no personal gain, sometimes almost believing his own lies, which are more like fantasies than psychotic delusions. He occasionally feels like he is fading out of existence. He does things and feels things he can’t explain. He is not paranoid or incoherent. He recognizes that things he does and feels are peculiar and puzzling.

The above is not a description of schizophrenia or psychosis. It is consistent with multiple personality’s changeableness, personality switches, memory gaps, lying, and alternate personalities’ pulling the emotional and behavioral strings of the host personality from behind the scenes.

I will conclude with a comment that Holden makes (but it may not be regular old Holden): “People never notice anything” (1, p. 12). This is a common thought of alternate personalities. They like to remain incognito—by answering to the person’s regular name and pretending to be the host personality—but are continually surprised that this works, because most alternate personalities see themselves as looking quite different from the host personality, and they can’t understand why people never notice.

1. J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye [1951]. New York, Little Brown, 2014.

New York Times Gail Collins “Way Too Many Trumps”: Once again, she describes President Trump as having multiple personality, but does not say so.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/opinion/too-many-donald-trumps.html?_r=0

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger (post 2): Holden switches back and forth between his host personality and a younger alternate personality.

A sixteen or seventeen year old may or may not be on his best behavior. He may act more or less mature, depending on the circumstances. Nevertheless, he and others always think of him as being sixteen or seventeen, not as switching back and forth between being sixteen or seventeen and being twelve or thirteen.

Unless he has multiple personality.

A sixteen or seventeen year old who has multiple personality usually has a younger alternate personality, whose mental age corresponds to the year of a traumatic experience. If the trauma happened when he was twelve or thirteen, then the mental age of his alternate personality may be twelve or thirteen.

Holden Caulfield

“…I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then and I’m seventeen now, and some times I act like I’m about thirteen. It’s really ironical because I’m six foot two and half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head…I’ve had [gray hair] ever since I was a kid. And I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true. People always think something’s all true…Sometime I act a lot older than I am—I really do—but people never notice it. People never notice anything” (1, pp. 11-12).

“I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them, I really don’t. I slept in the garage the night [his younger brother died, from leukemia], and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon…but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it…” (1, p. 44).

Comments

It is not clear to what the gray hair is related. Did it happen when his bother died, making it a mark of that trauma? Or is it related to fact that he sometimes acts “a lot older than I am” and may also have an older alternate personality? Perhaps he got the gray hair from the traumatic experience, but then the gray hair prompted the development of an older alternate personality.

In regard to his breaking the windows after his brother died, it is significant that he “hardly didn’t even know I was doing it.” That is, he may have had a memory gap for breaking the windows—because an alternate personality did it—and what he is telling us about it is mainly from what other people told him, from his later seeing the broken windows, and from the evidence of his broken hand.

1. J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye [1951]. New York, Little Brown, 2014.

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger: Holden Caulfield’s Bible favorite, after Jesus, is Legion, who is popularly seen as having multiple personality.

“If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones” (1, p. 111).

The above may be Holden’s self-diagnosis of multiple personality.

Here is his biblical reference and its interpretation in popular culture:

Mark 5:1-13

“They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of Gerasenes. And when he had come out of the boat, there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who lived among the tombs…Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out, and bruising himself with stones. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshipped him…And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many’…And the unclean spirits came out, and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.”

Legion in popular culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_in_popular_culture  For example, in Marvel Comics: “David Charles Haller / Legion is the name of Charles Xavier’s son in X-Men. He’s a mutant suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder), with each personality possessing a different power, thus being ‘one and many.’ ”

1. J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye [1951]. New York, Little Brown, 2014.

New York Times says President Trump has “split-personality” approach to press, but assumes Trump’s two faces are “calculated” by one consciousness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/politics/trump-cbs-interview.html?_r=0

Dashiell Hammett (post 4, update 2): Why did he have writer’s block for the last decades of his life? Why did he fail in his attempt to write literary novels?

In The Dain Curse, the literary novelist character turns out to be the main villain, a criminally insane, multiple murderer.

However, since there is nothing in the plot that requires this character to be a writer of any kind, let alone a literary novelist, the question arises as to whether Dashiell Hammett, a detective novelist, wrote this book to express contempt for literary novelists.

One possibility is that this novel’s choice of villain was an inside joke among Hammett and his literary friends. Another possibility is that the Dashiell Hammett, detective novelist personality did have contempt for literary novelists.

Both possibilities could be true. But to the extent that the second possibility was true, and to the extent that his literary-minded personalities knew it was true, his attempts to write literary novels under the name of Dashiell Hammett would be problematic.

Dashiell Hammett (post 4, update): Why did he have writer’s block for the last decades of his life? Why did he fail in his attempt to write literary novels?

I’m up to page 141 in The Dain Curse. The protagonist, who is a detective, says to another character, who is a writer:

“Don’t be literary with me, building up to climaxes and the like. I’m too crude for that—it’d only give me a bellyache. Just spread it out for me.

“ ‘You’ll always be what you are,’ he [the writer] said.”

I don’t think this dialogue proves my speculation as to why Hammett had writer’s block when he tried to write more literary novels; however, in the context of my speculation in yesterday’s post about “artistic differences” between personalities, I do find it funny.

Dashiell Hammett (post 4): Why did he have writer’s block for the last decades of his life? Why did he fail in his attempt to write literary novels?

After Hammett’s great success in writing detective stories and novels, he sought to prove that he could write novels of a more literary kind. Was his writer’s block related to his attempt to write literary novels; if so, why?

One possibility is that Hammett did not have any storytelling, alternate personalities suited to writing literary novels. However, I have just started to read his novel, The Dain Curse, and aside from the nameless protagonist, hero-detective, Continental Op, there is a character who is a writer. This writer, as far as I can see so far, does not write detective stories, and seems to be an intellectual. So I think that Hammett probably did have alternate personalities suited to making the switch to literary novels.

Another possibility is that his detective and literary personalities had artistic differences, so to speak. And since “Dashiell Hammett” was the author of detective novels, the personality known by that name could not be the author of any other kind. For example, when Agatha Christie wrote novels that were not detective novels, she wrote them under a pseudonym. So Hammett’s block might have been resolved by writing under a pseudonym. But maybe he tried that; I don’t know.

Mark Twain on Writer’s Block: Writers cannot write if their alternate personalities are not “filling up the tank.” This implies you must speak to them.

The following two past posts are not quick fixes, but they might be helpful:

April 29, 2016

Mark Twain’s avowed alternate personality, outside Twain’s awareness, explains how Twain’s books would “write itself” with “unconscious cerebration”  

In yesterday’s post, I quoted from Mark Twain’s notebook, in which he said that he had multiple personality:

“The two persons in a man do not even know each other and are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other—have never even suspected each other’s existence…I am not acquainted with [have no conscious awareness of] my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me…”

You may wonder what his having an alternate personality—a “wholly independent personage who resides in me,” who does whatever he does, totally out of his regular self’s awareness—has to do with his writing?

The answer is, Everything, according to what he says about how his creative process works, for example:

“As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag; but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind…

“…when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again, in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work on other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on” (1, p. 196).

Of course, the “unconscious…cerebration” was unconscious only in the sense that his regular self was not conscious of it. But his “partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me” was evidently busy “contriving [the novel’s] situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations,” to fill up the tank from which Mark Twain drew.

1. [Samuel L. Clemens]. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, et al., Editors. A publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. Berkeley Los Angeles London, University of California Press, 2013.

October 21, 2016

Curing Writer’s Block: Implications of Multiple Identity Literary Theory, which holds that writers have and use a normal version of multiple personality.

What is blocked in writer’s block? That which normally goes on in the writer’s mind: a cooperative participation of the writer’s alternate personalities.

Thus, when writer’s block does occur, writers who are familiar with their alternate personalities will know with whom to discuss the problem.

There are two ways to communicate with alternate personalities: talking and writing. When writers talk with their characters, narrators, muses, and other voices, they are talking with their alternate personalities. When writers keep extensive journals, and sometimes find entries responding to their inquiries, expressing alternate views (which, if handwritten, may be in different handwritings), those mysterious entries are from their alternate personalities.

The cooperative participation of alternate personalities might be blocked by anything that causes, in the view of the alternate personality, a hostile work environment. For example, if a particular alternate personality is facilitated by a moderate blood-alcohol level or a mild depression, they may be blocked by excessive drinking or severe depression. Or an alternate personality might have artistic differences, and want to publish independently, under a pseudonym.

Since the possible kinds of complaints are infinite, it is best to ask your alternate personalities what is bothering them. If you think you have spoken to all your alternate personalities, but still have writer’s block, you may have alternate personalities whom you have not yet met. You may, in the words of Walt Whitman, contain multitudes.

New York Times columnists inadvertently describe President Trump as having behavior suggestive of multiple personality: “6-year-old” and “protean man.”

As I’ve noted in past posts (search “Trump”), a number of Times columnists have unintentionally suggested that President Trump has multiple personality.

There is a difference between calling someone immature and saying he is like a 6-year-old. The latter suggests the presence of a child-aged alternate personality (the most common kind of alternate personality, because multiple personality starts in childhood).

And to say that Trump is a “protean man” is to say that he changes like a person with multiple personalities.

Here is what they say:

“Fans of the old TV series may remember a classic ‘Twilight Zone’ episode…It featured a small town terrorized by a 6-year-old who for some reason had monstrous superpowers…And now you know what it must be like working in the Trump administration. Actually, it feels a bit like that just living in Trump’s America” (1).

“He is the ultimate protean man” (2).

Of course, none of this proves that Trump has multiple personality (a normal version). But it continues to raise the question, inadvertently.

1. Paul Krugman. “Living in the Trump Zone.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/living-in-the-trump-zone.html?_r=0

2. David Brooks. “The Pond Skater Presidency.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/the-pond-skater-presidency.html

Dashiell Hammett (post 3): Recurring hero-detective, Continental Op, is referred to by his function, not by any name, typical of nameless alternate personalities.

In the two previous posts (search “Hammett”), I discussed multiple personality in The Maltese Falcon, which was most obviously implicated in “the novel’s most important passage” (1, p. 76) about the dissociative fugue of Mr. Flitcraft, which was left out of the movie starring Humphrey Bogart. In regard to naming, multiple personality was suggested by Brigid’s multiple names and changeability. But see those two past posts for more about it.

Names, Signatures, and Identity

“Hammett, who answered to several names himself (Dash, Sam, Dashiell, Hammett), was as cagey about his identity as he was savagely protective of his privacy. He signed himself in an early story as Peter Collinson, which in the underworld slang of the time meant ‘Nobody’s Son.’ Hammett’s first detective is the nameless hero known merely as the Continental Op. He gave later detectives names like Sam, his own first name, and other characters were named for people he admired, such as a former fellow patient nicknamed Whitey. Curiously, he signed several letters with the names of his characters, like Spade, Nicky, and Whitey…” (1, p. xx).

“Before Hammett, the goal had been solving the crime. After Hammett, the detective himself would become a central subject. Hammett’s…premise was that the biggest mystery was the self” (1, p. 44).

Continental Op

“The Continental Op is a fictional character created by Dashiell Hammett. He is a private investigator employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office. His name is never mentioned in any story…He appeared in 36 short stories…” and the novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (2).

To repeat, Dashiell Hammett’s most frequent protagonist is referred to, not by any name (he is nameless), but in terms of his function: He is an operative of the Continental Detective Agency.

Did Hammett have any reason for his character’s namelessness? Apparently, he had no particular reason. This was just the way the character had come to him, and since the character was getting along fine, he was not going to meddle:

“Hammett told his…editor on October 10, 1923, that he hadn’t deliberately kept his hero nameless. But as the Op had got through two stories without needing a name, he would let him continue…

Indeed, the character was not only nameless, but singleminded:

“The Op is a strange hero-detective. He has no home, no interests except his job, no goal except to get the job done…” (1, p. 46).

Namelessness in Multiple Personality

In multiple personality, while many alternate personalities do have their own names, many other alternate personalities are 1) nameless, and 2) referred to by their function, because they are rather singleminded.

Clinical example: A woman, who was not a writer, was puzzled to have occasionally found handwritten poems in a drawer at home, which she had no interest in or memory of writing. I persisted in asking her about these poems, which made her increasingly uncomfortable, until her demeanor suddenly changed.

Now she knew all about the poems, said she wrote them, and said that that was the only thing she cared about or did. She had no name. So I referred to this alternate personality by her function, as the Poet, which made sense to her.

When I then addressed the woman by her regular name, her demeanor suddenly changed back to the way it was usually. She had no memory of what had just happened, and still could not account for finding those poems in her drawer at home.

For further discussion of names and namelessness, prompted by other writers and works, search “nameless,” “nobody,” and “pseudonyms” in this blog.

1. Sally Cline. Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery. A Biography. New York, Arcade Publishing, 2014.

2. Wikipedia. “The Continental Op.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Continental_Op

What does a person with multiple personality look like? (post 2): Quite different from what most psychiatrists, psychologists, and other people expect.

“My first case was encountered serendipitously…This raised my index of suspicion, and I found four additional cases…This caused me to wonder if, perhaps, multiple personality disorder was not as rare as it was alleged to be. I undertook a detailed study of these five patients. All five cases had extensive histories in the mental health care delivery system; all had been diagnosed borderline or schizophrenic (some had received both diagnoses from different clinicians); and all but one had been given an affective disorder diagnosis [depression or bipolar], as well. None had responded well to prior therapy. All were either trying to hide their multiple personality disorder or to deny it. None were exhibitionistic or inclined to flaunt or augment their pathology…All admitted they had withheld relevant data at the time of their initial assessments, and all had initially denied amnesia or covered over their amnestic periods. Hence, the patients’ actual presentations were counterexpectational to the then-stereotypic picture of multiple personality disorder…

“Multiple personality disorder patients in treatment often denied their disorder. In the face of powerful evidence and confrontation, they offered convincing alternative rationalizations to explain away signs and symptoms.  They often evaded rather than sought out therapeutic assistance. It became clear that personalities often passed for one another, could emerge and recede so rapidly that the only trace they left was a brief fluctuation in facial expression…Often several months passed during which personalities did not emerge fully. They influenced one another by hallucinated inner voices, or in some way by imposing themselves upon alters [alternate personalities] ostensibly in control of the body.

“I realized that a patient withholding or unaware of data, or who initially presented in the manner I often saw in sessions with individuals known to be classic multiple personality disorder patients, would never fall under suspicion for multiple personality disorder. This, and the alleged rarity of multiple personality disorder, led me to believe that multiple personality disorder is considered unusual because 1) clinicians expect to see and confirm a steady and public history of certain dramatic phenomena…2) the phenomena they expect to see are not displayed in an ongoing and continuous basis by the majority of multiple personality disorder patients, who try to keep their condition concealed…” (1, pp. 204-206).

Comment: Since this blog is about the normal version of multiple personality, and is not about the clinical, mental illness, is the above relevant? Yes, because the normal version is the same as the clinical version, except that the normal version is not causing the person a clinically significant amount of distress or dysfunction, and may even be an asset (e.g., in writing novels and winning Nobel prizes). Many more people have the normal version.

1. Richard P. Kluft, M.D., Ph.D. “The Natural History of Multiple Personality Disorder,” pp. 198-238, in Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality, Edited by Richard P. Kluft, M.D., Ph.D. Washington DC, American Psychiatric Press, 1985.