“Elon Musk, ever a bundle of contradictions and inconsistencies” (1): Prototypical profile of someone with multiple personality trait
Comment: I’m not interested in Musk, haven’t studied his psychology, and haven’t formed an opinion, but I couldn’t help noting the prototypical characterization in today’s New York Times.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/business/media/elon-musk-politics-twitter.html
John le Carrè was David Cornwell: Pseudonym suggests multiple personality
John le Carrè’s newly published letters. https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-private-spy-book-review-john-le-carre-letter-by-letter-11670605055
2016 past Post
“A Perfect Spy” by John le Carré: In first hundred pages, spy tells how unhappy childhood taught him the “art” of multiple personality.
This is John le Carré’s most autobiographical novel, especially in regard to his childhood.
The following scene takes place when the spy, the protagonist, was a schoolboy, after the latest episode of his chaotic childhood, when he was taking refuge in his school’s staff lavatory:
“He took out his penknife, opened it and held its big blade uppermost before his face in the mirror…He thought of cutting his throat…He pressed his cheek against the wood panelling…The knife was still in his hand. His eyes went hot and blurred, his ears sang. The divine voice inside him told him to look, and he saw the initials “KS-B” carved very deeply into the best panel…
“All afternoon he waited, confident nothing had happened. I didn’t do it. If I went back it wouldn’t be there…
“It was not until evening line-up that the full name of the Honorable Kenneth Sefton Boyd was called out…[Boyd was] Mystified. Mystified himself, [the protagonist] watched [Boyd] go [to get corporal punishment]…
“ ‘It had a hyphen,’ Sefton Boyd told [the protagonist] the next day. ‘Whoever did it [carved ‘KS-B’] gave us a hyphen when we haven’t got one. If I ever find the sod I’ll kill him.
“ ‘So will I,’ [the protagonist] promised loyally and meant every word. Like [his father, he] was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment” (1, pp. 97-98).
Comment
The protagonist had evidently carved the initials in the wood panelling: The initials were carved, and he was right there holding the knife. But he had no memory of doing it—he had a memory gap (search “memory gaps”)—and he did not notice the carving until a voice in his head told him to look.
That is, an alternate personality had carved the letters, and his regular personality had amnesia for what the alternate personality had done. And then a third personality, the voice, told the regular personality to look and see what the alternate personality had done.
“Learning to live on several planes at once” means having several different personalities. As previously discussed in this blog, the “alternate” in “alternate personality” is misleading, because all the personalities are conscious simultaneously, and they alternate only in regard to which one is out in front and is most in control of overt behavior at that moment, “the face you spoke from at that moment.”
It is noteworthy that, even after the protagonist’s regular personality sees, from circumstantial evidence, that he must have been the one who carved the initials in the wood panel, he does not really believe it. Why? Because remembering is believing. And the regular personality does not remember doing it. That is why you can give a person (the regular personality) all kinds of proof, even videotapes showing, that they have multiple personality, and they may still deny it.
In conclusion, this episode in the novel is a description of multiple personality, but since the terminology is not used, the author may not have understood it in those terms.
1. John le Carré. A Perfect Spy. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Voters May Not Have Believed Herschel Walker Had Multiple Personality
Herschel Walker, the candidate endorsed by former President Trump, has lost the election to be United States Senator from the State of Georgia. But none of the commentary on the election that I have seen mentions Walker’s multiple personality (1).
The public and news media may have thought that a person with real multiple personality would obviously and dramatically switch from one personality to another, as they may have seen in movies. However, as discussed in past posts, obvious switching usually occurs only in a crisis.
Comment: As far as I know, Walker, who had been an American football star, has not been a sore loser.
1. Herschel Walker with Gary Brozek and Charlene Maxfield. Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder [multiple personality]. Foreword by Dr. Jerry Mungadze. New York, Touchstone/Howard Simon & Schuster, 2009.
“The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts” by Maxine Hong Kingston: “No Name Woman” [Part 1]
“You must not tell anyone, my mother said, what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself…We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (1, beginning).
The author’s aunt was shunned, because she got pregnant by someone other than her husband. Refusing to address her by name was part of it. I don’t know why the author never uses the words “shun” or “shunning” (2).
The author highlights her aunt’s namelessness, which is a recurring issue in this blog, because multiple personality is the only realm I know where namelessness is relatively common; that is, it is not rare to meet alternate personalities that have no name. Search “nameless,” “namelessness,” and “nameless narrators” for past discussions.
1. Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York, Vintage International, 1976/1989.
2. Wikipedia. “Shunning.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning
Donald Trump and Herschel Walker: Has any prior president ever befriended someone who has published a book proclaiming his own multiple personality?
Former President Trump has often been alleged to have a mental illness; most often, narcissistic personality. Those allegations might be dismissed as politically motivated. But it may not be politically motivated when someone publishes a book proclaiming his own mental illness (1), and a former president befriends him and endorses his candidacy for the United States Senate. What accounts for it?
First, if multiple personality can turn up in such a situation, it reinforces the fact that it is not as rare as most people think. Second, the fact that neither The New York Times nor Democrats have pounced on this coincidence supports my opinion that the Times and most others are willingly ignorant about multiple personality.
I guess Herschel Walker would have to be elected President of the United States for The New York Times and others to pay attention.
1. Herschel Walker with Gary Brozek and Charlene Maxfield. Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder [multiple personality]. Foreword by Dr. Jerry Mungadze. New York, Touchstone/Howard Simon & Schuster, 2009.
Why did former President Trump befriend Herschel Walker, a man with self-acknowledged dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality)?
Their initial connection was that Walker played football for a team in which Trump had a financial interest, but that does not explain the length and depth of their association, including Trump’s endorsement of Walker to be a United States Senator from Georgia.
I would guess that Walker, at least occasionally, showed some of multiple personality’s idiosyncrasies, but that Trump, for some reason, had been comfortable with them.
Of course, Walker probably tried to hide, and divert attention from, any such idiosyncrasies, as most successful multiples do. But since Walker published a book on his dissociative identity disorder, Trump must have been well aware of it. So the question remains as to whether Trump was comfortable with Walker, because he had similar idiosyncrasies.
Since I don’t know either man, I can’t answer the question. And, in any case, people with multiple personality can be very successful.
Added Dec. 7 st 9:13 a. m.: People with multiple personality trait—not the disorder—can be very successful. The difference is that "disorder" implies it is giving the person clinically significant distress and dysfunction. People with the disorder can be very successful if therapy, time, or situational changes cure them or reduce their distress and dysfunction to clinical insignificance.
Skeptics May Fear Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality)
A few dozen multiples with multiple personality trait, not the disorder, have been Nobel Prize winners (search “Nobel Prize”). About one percent of the general public has the diagnosable disorder (1, p. 294), but they are usually harmless and inconspicuous. And multiples are only rarely murderers (2).
Nevertheless, since many characters in novels and movies who are seen as having multiple personality are weird or frightening; are rarely seen as any sort of superhero (3); and since the very idea of having a condition in which you don’t always know who you are or what you’ve done is frightening, most people are predisposed to fear multiple personality.
Therefore, I suspect that many skeptics of multiple personality, no matter how intellectual their stated reasons, are afraid of it.
1. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.
2. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D., et al. “Objective Documentation of Child Abuse and Dissociation in 12 Murderers With Dissociative Identity Disorder.” American Journal of Psychiatry., Issue 12, December 1997, Pages 1703-1710. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.154.12.1703
3. Wikipedia. “Legion (Marvel Comics)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_(Marvel_Comics)
Allusion to Bible’s “Legion” in Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”
Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” is the story of a character named “Alonso Quixano” who has switched to an alternate personality, “Don Quixote,” but at the end switches back to his regular personality, “Alonso Quixano.”
In the course of Cervantes’ story, Don Quixote has an episode in which he bangs his head with stones like Legion does in the Bible (Mark 5:1-20).
I discussed all this previously in this blog in 2017: search “Don Quixote.”
Jesus Cures Legion: Gospel According To Mark, 5:1-20
“They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the 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; and no one could bind him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been bound with fetters and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the fetters he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. 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 worshiped him; and crying out with a loud voice, he said, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’ For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’ And he begged him eagerly not to send them out of the country.
“Now a great herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; they begged him, ‘Send us to the swine, let us enter them.’ So he gave them leave. 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.
“The herdsmen fled, and told it in the city and the country. And people came to see what it was that happened. And they came to Jesus, and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the man who had had the legion; and they were afraid.
“And those who had seen it told what had happened to the demoniac and the swine. And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their neighborhood.
“And as he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged him that he might be with him. But he refused and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.’
“And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and all men marveled” (1, p. 1219).
1. The Oxford Annotated Bible, THE HOLY BIBLE, Revised Standard Version Containing The Old and New Testaments. Edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York, Oxford University Press, 1962.
“Conversations with Jim Harrison”: His mysterious fiction writing process
“While you’re working you totally enter the other person" (1, p. 114).
“…It was a nightmare for me because The Road Home is a voice novel, so the first two hundred pages are completely in the voice of the elderly John Wesley Northridge II, so I had to become seventy-one myself” (1, p. 146).
“…I don’t think I’ve ever written any fiction I haven’t thought about for three or four years…But I know the story before I sit down…I wrote Legends in nine days…but that’s the only time it ever happened like that…I couldn’t stop once I got started. It was truly like taking dictation…But that illusion of taking dictation from wherever always makes you wonder what’s going on, what can this be?…Suddenly the voice is in a perfectly energized marriage with the language and sensibility…I don’t know quite where those gifts come from. I’ve always felt that you shouldn’t over-inquire about the goose that lays the golden egg” (1, pp. 146-147).
“…And since I have one eye [the other eye was blinded in an accident]…I start more from my senses quite often than my mind and so I actually see what I’m going to do. For instance, my problem with the film version of “Legends” was that I’d already seen it in my mind, so there wasn’t quite enough dirt and blood rubbed into it. It wasn’t gritty enough. It got too pretty…” (1, p. 147).
Interviewer: Are there things that you don’t know about your characters?
Jim Harrison: Oh absolutely…I’m not all my characters. How could I be all two hundred or three hundred of them? These are people of their own…A lot of the novel-writing art is conscious, but it’s the emergence of the characters that are sometimes like seizures, even coming out of a dream…In another sense, what keeps me writing is the mystery of human personality…there’s really no accounting for a great deal of it…” (1, p. 150).
1. Robert DeMott (Editor). Conversations with Jim Harrison (Literary Conversations Series). Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2019.
“Christine Falls” (post 4) by Benjamin Black (John Banville)
Concluding Comment: The novel should have explained that the protagonist’s name, Quirke, is an Irish name that means “heart.” Otherwise, I have found nothing further of interest in this novel.
1. Benjamin Black. Christine Falls. New York, Picador/Henry Holt, 2006.
“Christine Falls” (post 3) by John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black: Protagonist’s multiple personality is [seemingly, inadvertently] uncovered in a crisis [revised Nov 30]
“Despite the chill of the ending day Quirke felt the sweat along his hairline under the band of his hat. He was afraid, but at one remove, as if his fear had conjured up another version of him to inhabit, and he, the original he, was obliged to attend to this other, fearing self and be concerned for it, as he would be, he imagined, for a twin, or a grown-up son” (1, p. 199).
Comment: The above is different from the well-known depersonalization that may happen when a traumatized person experiences himself as being separate from, or floating above, himself while he is undergoing trauma.
Here the protagonist is observing and concerned for a “twin” or a “son,” not himself, making it multiple personality that is temporarily uncovered in a crisis.
In real life, undiagnosed multiple personality is usually hidden and covert unless and until it is made overt either by 1. a diagnostic interview that makes the alternate personalities feel that hiding is futile or 2. a crisis that causes alternate personalities to temporarily come out and serve the protective function for which they were designed.
Added Nov. 30: Of course, THE AUTHOR DID NOT MEAN THE ABOVE to be a revelation that Quirke has multiple personality. Quirke does not. It is only an inadvertent reflection of the author's multiple personality trait.
1. Benjamin Black. Christine Falls. New York, Picador/Henry Holt, 2006.
A Case of Pathological Lying: Is It Multiple Personality?
An interesting article in the science section of today’s New York Times discusses a theater producer who can’t stop lying (1).
Nothing in the article makes me think of multiple personality except the issue of lying itself, since adults with multiple personality may have gotten a reputation as liars since childhood, because they denied doing what other people had seen them do. They denied it, because they had a memory gap for doing it.
Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, but people with multiple personality usually don’t mention their memory gaps unless you specifically ask them about it. And since memory gaps are not mentioned in the article (1), I don’t know if the theater producer had undiagnosed multiple personality.
Fiction writers, many of whom have what I call “multiple personality trait,” are, according to the old joke, “professional liars,” but they usually don’t “lie” unless they are going to get paid for it.
Search “lying” for previous discussions.
1. Ellen Barry. “Can This Man Stop Lying?” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/health/lying-mental-illness.html
“Christine Falls” (post 2) by John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black: Protagonist has memory gaps, even when he is not intoxicated
“…all mingled to suggest to Quirke something he could not recall, something from the far past that hovered on the tip of his memory, tantalizingly beyond reach. All of Quirke’s earliest, orphaned past was like this, an absence fraught with consequence, a resonant blank” (1, p. 58).
“…and again something spoke to him out of his lost past” (1, p. 63).
Comment: Memory gaps—which happen even without intoxication, in a person, like Quirke, who has no medical or neurological cause for memory problems, for things that he would have been expected to remember—suggest multiple personality.
However, since there is no indication that either the plot or character development has intended to imply multiple personality, why does the author portray his protagonist this way?
Of course, Quirke’s experience as an orphan may eventually help him to explain how Christine Falls died, and the solution of the mystery must be delayed to hold the reader in suspense. But that did not require Quirke to have memory gaps. He could have had complete memory for his past all along, but only be delayed in connecting what he remembered to the current case. So his memory gaps, per se, would not have been necessary, and there would have to be some other reason for the author to portray his protagonist this way.
1. Benjamin Black. Christine Falls. New York, Picador/Henry Holt, 2006.
“Christine Falls” by Benjamin Black (pseudonym of Booker Prize-winning author, John Banville): Is protagonist’s memory gap an alcoholic blackout or a symptom of multiple personality?
Like Banville’s protagonist (1) (see past post), Black’s protagonist (2) had been a victim of child abuse (2, p. 46). But unlike Banville’s protagonist, Black’s protagonist, Quirke, is a hospital pathologist and a recovering alcoholic.
“Quirke did not eat, but drank more whiskey instead. Suddenly he found himself in the kitchen, with Maggie [the maid at a family gathering]. He looked about in dazed surprise. He seemed to have come to, somehow just at that moment, leaning against the cupboard beside the sink, with his ankles crossed, nursing his whiskey glass to his midriff. What had happened to the intervening time, from when he was standing with the Judge [his relative] to now? Maggie, bustling about, was speaking to him, apparently in reply to something he had said, though what it might have been he could not think” (2, pp. 38-39).
Comment: At first glance, Quirke appears to have had an obvious alcoholic blackout. Nevertheless, it could actually have been a multiple-personality memory gap if Quirke has an alternate personality who likes to drink, which is a surprisingly common scenario. So I will wait to see if Quirke ever gets memory gaps when he is not intoxicated, and if there are any other signs of multiple personality.
1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.
2. Benjamin Black. Christine Falls. New York, Picador/Henry Holt, 2006.
“The Sea” by John Banville: Novel ends without solving protagonist’s problem, that he never had a singular self in the way that others have
“From earliest days I wanted to be someone else…It was not what I was that I disliked…the notion of an essential singular self is problematic…I never had a personality, not in the way that others have. I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone. I know what I mean. Anna [his wife]…would be the medium of my transmutation. She was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight” (1, p. 160).
1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.
Added Nov. 27 (12:25 p.m.):What is your opinion? If book reviewers and Booker Prize judges had not noted the significance of the above—and of the other things I’ve noted in previous posts on this novel and its artistic author, John Banville—had they appreciated what they were reading? Or, in your opinion, are the points I’ve made beside the point?
“The Sea” by John Banville: Author’s Gratuitous Multiple Personality Phraseology Reflects Author’s Multiple Personality Trait
“There I was, suddenly, with a girl in my arms, figuratively, at least, doing the things that grown-ups did, holding her hand, and kissing her in the dark…I was myself and at the same time someone else, someone completely other…” (1, p. 108).
1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.
“The Sea” by John Banville: Protagonist's “problems with mirrors” is textbook multiple personality
“On the subject of observing and being observed, I must mention the long, grim gander I took at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning…There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not any more. Now I am startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never and not at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself…I have many problems with mirrors…” (1, pp. 93-94).
“MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look in a mirror…In some instances, these alterations of perception are so disturbing that individuals may phobically avoid mirrors” (2, p. 62).
Comment: Banville’s protagonist talks about his problems with mirrors for four pages. At times he focuses on a skin condition, and some readers will say that everyone feels this way as they get older, but his concern with mirrors is more than skin deep.
Search “mirror” and “mirrors” for past posts on this recurring subject.
1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.
2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
“The Sea” by John Banville: Why is Booker Prize Novel Disorganized?
Max is the first-person protagonist (1), and “With Max's unreliable, unorganised and omitted iteration of events, we gradually learn…” (2).
Comment: This novel is disorganized, possibly due to the author’s writing process, as discussed in previous posts. For example, Banville would not remember from day to day what he had written the day before, possibly due to multiple-personality memory gaps.
Years ago, I can recall another novel by another author who had won a different major literary prize. I refused to finish reading it, because the story became disorganized; however, reviewers, wanting to appear sophisticated, said the novel's disorganization was a feature, not a bug.
1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.
2. Wikipedia. “The Sea (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_(novel)
