Multiple Personality in Modern Art and Literature

Features of multiple personality became increasingly evident in the work of three major novelists and artists: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves; Picasso’s Cubism; and Jennifer Egan, who started with The Invisible Circus, and later won a major award for A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Picasso’s Cubist figures often appeared to be a conglomeration of multiple people or personalities.

Jennifer Egan’s first novel, The Invisible Circus, had a standard novelistic format, but, as noted in a past post, its characters had unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality. Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad started with a standard format and characterization, but broke away with multiple casts of characters and jumps in time. The latter is like what a person experiences after memory gaps (a cardinal symptom of multiple personality). 

Added 01/11/2023: An example of Jennifer Egan's relating to her characters as if they were alternate personalities is her saying, in a 2011 video interview with Google about A Visit From the Goon Squad, "I flirt with ideas and then I give them to characters [to do something with]."

You may appreciate a novel more if you understand the author's creativity.

Diagnostic Fads: Multiple personality exists, but sometimes it is not fashionable.

And the diagnostic manual is not as helpful as it could have been: Search "diagnostic criteria" and "mental status."

Do novelists think they are crazy? Yes and No.

They probably do, but if they produce works that people want, and if their writing process can be satisfying, they may consider it, in the words of Henry James, “the madness of art.”

The reason I don’t think they are crazy is that more people, but fewer people than they think, think the way they do. More people than they think have multiple personality, but not everybody.

Samuel Fosso: One Photographer, Many Personalities

“Within himself, he finds multitudes” (1).

Comment: I don't know if Fosso has multiple personality trait, but that is the slant Lubow gives to his New York Times article.

1. Arthur Lubow. "Samuel Fosso, African Photographer." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/arts/design/samuel-fosso-african-photographer-princeton.html

Why being a Con Man (1), lying, or believing in “alternative facts” might suggest multiple personality

In multiple personality, the regular, so-called “host personality” usually has a common sense, conventional view of reality, but each alternate personality, like characters in a novel, may have its own characteristic views of itself and reality, which can be quite imaginative. Thus, if a person switches among alternate personalities, according to which one is of most practical use in a particular situation, then one possible result is a confidence man or “con man.” The lies can be quite convincing at the time, because each alternate personality believes what it is saying, while the host personality is not paying attention or thinks, well, that is his view, not mine.

When I read Tom Suozzi’s column (1) this morning, the words “con man” reminded me of past posts in which I discussed novels by Herman Melville (2) and Thomas Mann (3).

Also, a belief in “alternative facts” (4) might suggest alternate personalities.

1. Tom Suozzi. “A Con Man is Succeeding Me in Congress.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/george-santos-congress.html

2. Herman Melville. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade

3. Thomas Mann. Confessions of Felix Kroll, Confidence Man.

4. Wikipedia. “Alternative Facts.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

Search “confidence man,” “con man,” and “lying.”

Review 2014-2018 Isabel Allende wins 2018 National Book Awards’ Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Quotations on Writing and Lying

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/books/national-book-award-sigrid-nunez.html

https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/isabel-allende-gives-rousing-speech-at-national-book-awards.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Allende

October 24, 2014

Isabel Allende: Quotations on Creative Writing

“First of all, I have the feeling that I don’t invent [my characters]. I don’t create them; they are there. They are somewhere in the shadows, and when I start writing—it’s a very long process; sometimes it takes years to write a book—little by little they come out of the shadow into the light. But when they come into the light, they are already people. They have their own personalities, their clothes, their voices, their textures, their smells. I don’t invent them; somehow they are there. They always were there” (1, p. 258).

One of her best-known characters, Eva Luna, “is the woman I want to be. We are so different, in every way but one: we both tell stories. But she is my dreamself” (1, p. 273). She “was always there. I know that the character was within me. She doesn’t resemble me; it’s not my biography. I’m not her. But somehow she was inside me…By writing, [the character] got out of me and existed by itself…So that’s my relationship with my characters—very strange and very powerful. [Sometimes they come out right away, fully formed, and she can’t change them even if she wants to]…sometimes they [start out] ambiguous, but by the end they are so real that my children play with the idea that they are living in the house. And we talk about them as if they were part of the family” (1, p. 259).

Once a novel is started, she hates to interrupt the writing process. For example: “Now, while I’m here in Toronto, the voices keep on talking and I’m not there to take them down. I feel like a traitor when I’m not writing” (1, p. 275).

“I spend ten, twelve hours a day alone in a room writing. I don’t talk to anybody; I don’t answer the telephone. I’m just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me, voices that talk through me. I’m creating a world that is fiction but that doesn’t belong to me. I’m not God there; I’m just an instrument” (1, p. 290).

When she starts one of her novels, does she invent the first sentence?

“When I’ve lighted the candles and turned on the computer, I write the first sentence, which I let bubble up from my intuitions, not from reason. That first sentence opens the door to the story that’s already there—only it’s hidden in another dimension. It’s my task to enter that dimension and to make the story appear. When I wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits, which is “Barrabas came to us from the sea,” I didn’t yet know who Barrabas was or why he had come…It’s something magical that I can’t explain very well, because I don’t control it myself” (1, p. 295).

1. John Rodden (ed.). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Translations by Virginia Invernizzi and John Rodden. Foreword by Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

October 27, 2014

Novelist Isabel Allende said in interviews that she was a liar: The Paradox of the Honest Liar, a Clue to Multiple Personality

Allende: I remember always having told stories—and making them up and inventing and exaggerating and lying all the time.

Interviewer: Lying?

Allende: Yes, they were not lies for me because I thought those things really happened, but my mother says I was a terrible liar. I was always punished for lying.

Interviewer: How would you describe the difference between lies and truth?

Allende: For me, I can no longer say…For example, I just went to Switzerland and I received an award. It was a bronze statue. I no longer know what size the bronze statue is. When I received it I think it was more or less like this (holds hands a foot apart), but then I started telling the story and now it is this big (arms open wide). Very soon it will be a monument. [1, pp. 115-116]

She has a good sense of humor, but don’t let that obscure her serious, lifelong concern with lying.

The obvious problem with Allende’s explanation is that she (the host personality, who is doing this interview) actually does recall the original, true size of the bronze statue. The only way her explanation could make sense would be if the exaggerations in her stories were honestly believed by a separate, story narrator, personality, and it was the latter personality whom her mother and others would accuse of lying.

“So many times I don’t remember people’s names, or the places I have been…I don’t remember the names of the men I have married. At times I even forget the names of my own children…They had always told me that I was a liar…” ( 1, p. 218).

This is seen with a person who has multiple personality, in which life experiences are divided among the separate memory banks of different personalities.

“I have a terrible memory. I’m always inventing my own life, so I find that in different interviews I tell different stories about the same subject…The truth is I’m a born liar” (1, pp. 288-289).

This reminds me of when William Faulkner (see past post) warned interviewers not to ask him personal questions, because he might give different answers when future interviewers ask him the same question.

“…I have a special voice for storytelling, a voice that, although mine, also seems to belong to someone else…” (2, p.  227). When writing, she is “transformed into a multifaceted being, reproduced to infinity, seeing my own reflection in multiple mirrors, living countless lives, speaking with many voices. The characters became so real that they invaded the house…” (2, p. 263).

“We learn early on to wear masks we change so frequently that we are no longer able to identify our own faces in the mirror” (3, p. xiv-xv). [My novel Eva Luna] “is dotted with autobiographical observations about the practice of writing” (3, p. 63). [People with multiple personality may have a problem with mirrors. Search “mirrors” in this blog.]

In conclusion, whenever you have a person who has a reputation for being a liar, or even admits to having repeatedly lied, but this doesn’t make sense to you, because the person seems to be a basically honest and moral person—in short, the paradox of an honest liar—the solution to this mystery may be multiple personality, in which different personalities have different memory banks and different views of reality; which has been seen previously in this blog’s discussion of other great novelists.

1. John Rodden (ed). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

2. Isabel Allende. Eva Luna. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

3. Celia Correas Zapata. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Houston, Arte Publico Press, 2002

Surprisingly Common: Multiple Personality is More Prevalent than Schizophrenia, says American Psychiatric Association

Prevalence of Multiple Personality: 1.5% (1, p. 294)

Prevalence of Schizophrenia:  0.3%-0.7% (1, p. 102)

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

Neglect: Some Psychiatrists and Columnists Neglect Multiple Personality

As a psychiatrist, I have been very strict and careful in diagnosing multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder), but it is in the diagnostic manual, because it does exist, and those psychiatrists who never make the diagnosis may be negligent.

Columnists (1, 2) are not in a position to make psychiatric diagnoses, but are paid to speculate about persons in the news. So when persons in the news have variable personas, but columnists fail to speculate about multiple personality, they may be negligent.

1. David Brooks. “The Sad Tales of George Santos.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/george-santos-lies.html

2. Carlos Lozada. “How the House of Trump Was Built.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/trump-haberman-baker-glasser-draper.html

Colleen Hoover: Past Posts on her bestsellers “It Ends with Us” and “Verity,” highlighting multiple personality

Marital Abuse: Why doesn’t she just leave him?

In the past, when I read the above, cliché question, I often wondered if the abused wife had multiple personality: Maybe she had memory gaps for the episodes of abuse. Maybe she had an alternate personality that was originally, defensively, designed in childhood to appease abusers.

But since reading the novel It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover (1), I realize that it may be the husband who has multiple personality: He may know that he abuses his wife, if he sees her injuries, but he may not actually remember assaulting her if he has multiple personality’s memory gaps. Meanwhile, the wife may never think in terms of multiple personality, per se, because she sees her husband’s regular, loving personality as her true husband, whom she married, but his assaultive, alternate personality as only a temporary aberration triggered by alcohol or stress.

In the novel (1), the husband has multiple personality’s memory gaps, but does not get a correct diagnosis, because, apparently, the author did not know the diagnosis, and was not intentionally writing about multiple personality, per se.

Comment: Many works discussed in this blog—including classics and those written by winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature—have unintended or unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality, probably reflecting the multiple personality trait of most fiction writers.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016. 

“It Ends with Us”  by Colleen Hoover: Lily’s husband assaults her while he has a memory gap

Lily, the protagonist, has recently opened a flower shop and married Ryle, a neurosurgeon.  She has promised herself never to become a physically abused wife like her mother.  But after the second time he assaults her, Ryle confesses that when he was six years old, he accidentally shot his brother to death and “since that happened, there are things I can’t control.  I get angry.  I black out.  I’ve been in therapy since I was six years old.  But it is not my excuse.  It is my reality…I don’t remember the moment I pushed you [down the stairs]…You are my wife.  I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from the monsters.  I’m not supposed to be one” (1, p. 241).

Search “memory gap” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us”  by Colleen Hoover: Lily’s husband assaults her while he has a memory gap

Lily, the protagonist, has recently opened a flower shop and married Ryle, a neurosurgeon.  She has promised herself never to become a physically abused wife like her mother.  But after the second time he assaults her, Ryle confesses that when he was six years old, he accidentally shot his brother to death and “since that happened, there are things I can’t control.  I get angry.  I black out.  I’ve been in therapy since I was six years old.  But it is not my excuse.  It is my reality…I don’t remember the moment I pushed you [down the stairs]…You are my wife.  I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from the monsters.  I’m not supposed to be one” (1, p. 241).

Search “memory gap” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover: Author recalls her traumatic early childhood as partial basis for this novel

Note from the Author

“My earliest memory in life was from the age of two and a half years old…my father picked up our television and threw it at my mother, knocking her down.  She divorced him before I turned three…He was an alcoholic…In fact, he told me he had two knuckles replaced in his hand because he had hit her so hard, they broke against her skull.  My father regretted the way he treated my mother his entire life…and he said he would grow old and die still madly in love with her” (1, pp. 368-369).

As noted in my introduction to this blog, most adults with multiple personality have had childhood trauma, either as a victim or witness.  Search “childhood trauma” for past posts.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover: Author misunderstands her novel and possibly herself

“He knows what he’s done.  He’s [the nice] Ryle again” (1, p. 266).

Lily, the protagonist, recognizes that there are two Ryles, one that is angry and assaults her, and the other, a nice Ryle, whom she loves. But the author has forgotten that the angry Ryle blacks out (post 3), leaving the nice Ryle with a memory gap. That is, the nice Ryle knows what he’s done only indirectly, through circumstantial evidence (Lily’s injuries, etc.).

Thus, the author does not recognize that she has written a multiple personality scenario, with two Ryle personalities.

Search “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which is a multiple personality scenario that is unlabeled, and is probably a reflection of the author’s own psychology (search “multiple personality trait”).

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover: Dissociative (multiple personality) talk

“…too many pieces of me are invested in you now…” (1, p. 89).

“You make me want to be a different person…” (1, p. 93).

“I walked straight to the kitchen and I opened a drawer.  I grabbed the biggest knife I could find and…I don’t know how to explain it.  It was like I wasn’t even in my own body.  I could see myself walking across the kitchen with the knife in my hand…” (1, p. 154).

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“Verity” by Colleen Hoover: New York Times bestseller’s characters are writers with dissociative symptoms (multiple personality is a dissociative disorder)

Lowen and Verity are two female fiction writers.  Verity may or may not be a murderer, since she writes both a confession and a retraction.  It is also unclear whether Verity’s muteness after a car accident is brain damage, faking, or a posttraumatic, dissociative symptom (multiple personality is a dissociative disorder).

Lowen, the narrator, also has dissociative states of mind.  She has a history of sleepwalking since childhood.  One morning, she awoke “with a broken wrist and covered in blood” (1, p. 119).

The author has a sense of humor: "I was good at spewing bullshit.  It's why I became a writer" (1, p. 206).

1. Colleen Hoover. Verity. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

“The novelist as voice hearer” by Patricia Waugh

“…Summoning voices with such intensity, living in the head for years at a time, would for most of us disorder our personalities, to say the least. But novelists control absorption or creative dissociation. They harness the power of the inner voice to create imaginary characters…The assumption that voice-hearing is inevitably a feature of psychiatric disorders, notably schizophrenia, is now changing…(1).

A condition that features inner voices (3, p. 94) and a very wide range of personal function has been known for many years. Many novelists appear to have multiple personality (also known as dissociative identity) but without having clinically significant distress and dysfunction from it, what I call “multiple personality trait” (not disorder).

1. Patricia Waugh. “The novelist as voice hearer.” Lancet, Dec. 05, 2015.

2. Wikipedia. “Patricia Waugh.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Waugh

3. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

2021 post

Survey of 181 Writers Finds They Have Multiple Personality Trait, But Survey Doesn’t Call It That or Even Mention Multiple Personality

John Foxwell, Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough, Angela Woods.

‘I’ve learned to treat my characters as people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices.

Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 79, March 2020.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810019304155 

“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/books/charles-dickens-a-christmas-carol-archives.html

Search “Christmas Carol” and "ghosts."

Unconscious Content: Thomas Hardy said, “No doubt there can be more in a book than the author consciously put there”

In Thomas Hardy’s 1912 Preface to Jude the Obscure, he said “no doubt there can be more in a book than the author consciously put there” (1, p. 4)

Comment: Memory gaps suggest multiple personality trait.

1. Rosemary Sumner. Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist. London, Macmillan Press LTD, 1981.

“Far from the Madding Crowd” by Thomas Hardy: Gratuitous Multiple Personality

History of childhood trauma

“…An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me” [Bathsheba] (1, p. 202).

Memory gap 

“Bathsheba” knelt beside the coffin…“she knew not how long she remained engaged thus. She forgot time, life, where she was, what she was doing” (1, p. 291).

Voice like “another woman”

“What have you to say as your reason?” [Bathsheba] asked, her bitter voice being strangely low—quite that of another woman now” ( 1, p. 293).

Women are “rum things”

“But knowing what rum things we women be…” (1, p. 354). Search “Casterbridge” regarding another of Hardy’s novels, in which a man changes personalities whenever he has rum.

Comment: “Gratuitous Multiple Personality” means symptoms or features of multiple personality that do not appear to be in the novel intentionally (to suggest multiple personality for plot or character development) and so may be in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.

1. Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1874/2002.

Thomas Hardy is interested in a character with multiple personality disorder, but misdiagnoses it as alcoholism

“Alcoholism appears to be a particularly common presentation for male MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients” (1, p. 128).

“Unfortunately, many MPD patients would rather admit to the more socially acceptable drug or alcohol blackouts than admit that they do not really know why they ‘lose time’ ” (1, p. 61). Search "memory gaps."

1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press. 1989.

past post from 2018

“The Mayor of Casterbridge” by Thomas Hardy: Did Michael Henchard sell his wife because he was drunk or because he had multiple personality disorder?

As husband, wife, and daughter walked along the country road, they were not very affectionate, but they were tired and hungry, he was between jobs, and they were low on money.

When they finally came to a town fair and got something to eat, each time Michael Henchard had rum added to his food, his demeanor changed: first he became serene, then jovial, then argumentative, and “at the fourth, the qualities signified by the shape of his face, the occasional clench of his mouth, and the fiery spark of his dark eye began to tell in his conduct; he was overbearing—even brilliantly quarrelsome” (1, p. 9).

Then, he offered to sell his wife and daughter.

Neither the crowd nor his wife could shrug off his behavior, because he seemed coherent and sincere. His wife had seen him act like this on a number of prior occasions, and she knew he did this only when he drank, but she was fed up.

The next morning, when Henchard awoke, his wife and daughter were gone. He found her wedding ring. And he found the money he’d been paid for them in his pocket. All this circumstantial evidence convinced him that his “dim memories…were not dreams” (1, p. 14).

He set out to find them, thinking, “she knows I am not in my senses when I do that!” (1, p. 15).

Comment

It appears that when Henchard drank, he switched to an alternate personality, who was angry with Henchard, and considered the woman to be Henchard’s wife, not his wife, anyway.

1. Thomas Hardy. The Mayor of Casterbridge [1886]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2001.

2. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayor_of_Casterbridge

“Getting Lost in Your Own Sense of Multiple Selves” (today's print edition title) with the Lensa AI app

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/style/lensa-ai-selfies.html 

Reading Fiction: Would you want to know how the writer thinks?

“Siddhartha” by Nobel Prize novelist Hermann Hesse

Since Siddhartha (1, 2) is not as recognizably about the author’s version of multiple personality as is another novel by Hesse that I read previously—search “Steppenwolf”—I will briefly focus only on Siddhartha’s most obvious symptom of multiple personality, hearing voices, which, in non-psychotic persons, are probably the voices of alternate personalities (search “voices”).

“He would only strive after whatever the inward voice commanded him, not to tarry anywhere but where the voice advised him” (1, pp. 47-48).

“He only noticed that the bright and clear inward voice, that had once awakened him and had always guided him in his finest hours, had become silent” (1, p. 78).

“Onwards, onwards, this is your path. He had heard this voice when he had left his home and chosen the life of the Samanas, and again when he had left the Samanas and gone to the Perfect One, and also when he had left him for the unknown” (1, p. 83).

1. Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha. Trans. Hilda Rosner. New York, Bantam Books, 1922/1951.

2. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_(novel)

3. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(novel)

Herschel Walker had multiple personality (1). “Donald Trump loved Herschel Walker” (2). Did they have more than celebrity in common?

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.

2. Charles M. Blow. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/walker-georgia-senate-trump.html