New York Times article on Hearing Voices: Most psychiatrists fail to recognize rational auditory hallucination as voice of alternate personality.

The Times article—“An Alternative Form of Mental Health Care Gains a Foothold” or “Care Without Labels”— says that an anti-mainstream, anti-medication approach to hearing voices is taking root. An example of such an approach is the case of Sarah:

“ ‘I was told I was a ticking time bomb, that I’d never finish college, never have a job, never have kids, and always be on psychiatric medication,’ said Sarah, a student at Mount Holyoke who for years has heard a voice — a child, crying — and in college started to have suicidal thoughts. She was… put on medications that had severe side effects.

“In the [alternative care] group, other members prompted her to listen to the child’s cries, to ask whose they were, and why the crying? Those questions led, over a period of weeks, to recollection of a frightening experience in her childhood, and an effort to soothe the child. This altered her relationship with the voice, she said, and sometimes the child now laughs, whispers, even sings.

“ ‘That is the way it works here,’ said Sarah, who is set to graduate from college with honors.”

The following is from a textbook on multiple personality:

“The majority of MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients will experience auditory and/or visual hallucinations…” which “typically include voices that berate and belittle the patient (usually the host personality) or command the patient to commit self-destructive or violent acts. The voices may discuss the patient in the third person, commenting on his or her thoughts or actions, or may argue among themselves. The patient may hear crying, screaming or laughter. Typically, the crying sounds like an infant or small child in distress. There may also be voices that give solace, support, or advice…The hallucinatory voices of MPD patients often carry on lengthy discussions that seem coherent and logical to the patient” (2, p. 61-62).

“The patient may hear the alter personality speak as an inner voice within, often as one of the voices that the patient has been hearing for years” (2, p. 94).

Initial therapeutic engagement of the alternate personality may be as simple as addressing questions to the voice, with the voice’s answer being heard by the patient (host personality) and relayed to the therapist. If this is done in a way that builds trust, and neither the voice (alternate personality) nor the host (regular personality) feels threatened, then the voice will eventually come out and speak for itself, confirming that it was the voice of an alternate personality.

Sarah’s case (see above) shows that good therapy may be done without knowing that the voice is the voice of an alternate personality, and without pursuing full-blown treatment of the multiple personality. Sometimes less is more, so to speak, and all you want to do is change multiple personality disorder into its normal (distress and dysfunction free) version.

1. Benedict Carey. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/health/psychiatrist-holistic-mental-health.html?hpw&rref=health&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

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

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: Meaning of Title; Relation of Nameless, Unreliable Narrator and Rinehart to Dostoevsky, Melville, Multiple Personality

In the opening paragraph of Invisible Man (1952), the nameless narrator says he is invisible because people refuse to see him. But he is unreliable. Ellison calls him “the hero who is somewhat of a liar” and says “That’s what you have to be alert to whenever you read fiction in the first person” (1, p. 267). Also search “nameless” and “namelessness” in this blog for posts on its relation to multiple personality.

Ellison says, “The invisibility, there is a joke about that which is tied up with the sociological dictum that Negroes in the United States have a rough time because we have high visibility…High pigmentation…But the problem for the narrator of Invisible Man is that he creates his own invisibility to a certain extent by not asserting himself…” (1, p. 96).

“Ellison…modeled his narrator after the nameless narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground” (2). That’s the same Dostoevsky who wrote The Double, a classic multiple personality story (search “Dostoevsky” and “The Double” in this blog).

Regarding another character in Invisible Man, Rinehart, Ellison says, “I was thinking of a character who was a master of disguise…"(1, p. 18). “He’s a descendant of Melville’s Confidence Man” (1, p. 76). Search “Confidence Man” in this blog to read my post on Herman Melville’s novel about a man with multiple personality.

1. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh (Editors). Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

2. Invisible Man. Wikipedia.

Proposal for Teaching Literature, Book Reviews, and Literary Criticism: Find at least one thing that makes no sense either to you or literary theory.

To turn yesterday’s post about advancing the understanding of literature into a practical proposal:

If you teach literature, when you assign a novel, ask each student to find one thing in the novel that does not make sense. Most of the things they don’t understand, you will, but occasionally they will cite something that makes no sense to you, either.

If you write book reviews, make it a feature of all your positive reviews—especially your most positive, rave reviews—to mention one thing in the novel that made no sense to you.

And in literary criticism, demonstrate your intimate knowledge of the work, and show your mastery of literary theory, by citing things that make no sense to you and are not adequately explained by any established theory.

E. L. Doctorow on Writing (post 2): a “mysterious" process in which “characters do the writing” for a “repertory company” of alternate personalities.

“It’s hard for me to isolate my own motives and feelings. I can tell you that I started to write the book [The Book of Daniel] in the third person…And after one hundred fifty pages I was terribly bored. That was a moment of great despair in my life…That moment, when I threw out those pages and hit bottom, was when I became reckless enough to find the voice of the book, which was Daniel…and it turned out Daniel was talking…I don’t know why that happened or how it happened, but that is the experience I had in composing the book. I don’t know if it’s possible for a writer really, truthfully to describe as a conscious decision a process that is really mysterious to him and largely irrational” (1, p. 46).

“There are always characters in the books who do the writing. I like to create the artist and let the artist do the work” (1, p. 95).

“The experience of writing is not a particularly intellectual experience. You don’t know what you know. You don’t know anything when you write. You work inductively from the text that you happen to produce, and when you see what you don’t want or can’t use, you begin to dimly see what you need. And you don’t consciously learn all that much as you write, because each book is so specific and precise in its being that it basically gives you very little instruction that you can take away from it” (1, p. 173).

“One of the things I’ve found myself realizing is almost the sense that I have a repertory company of characters, and I keep changing their costumes and their looks, and maybe even altering their relationships. But they’re my company of players and they play different roles, but they’re beginning to appear to me as my loyal troop” (1, p. 196).

What Doctorow calls “a repertory company of characters,” who “do the writing” and play the roles, I would call alternate personalities.

1. Christopher D. Morris (Editor). Conversations with E. L. Doctorow. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

When Certain Things in Novels Do Not Make Sense to Book Reviewers, Literary Critics, and Professors of Literature, What Should They Do About It?

If something in a novel makes no sense to you, what do you do about it?

It probably depends on whether you think the writer is legitimate; that is, whether the writer has won an award or other acclaim, or, at least, whether you think that some of the writing is obviously very good. If you do think the writer is legitimate, then when something makes no sense to you, you probably ignore or excuse it.

In the many novels discussed here, I have cited many examples of things that make no sense without the perspective of multiple personality that I have brought to it; for example, the signs and symptoms of multiple personality in the protagonist of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Those signs and symptoms were not understood by reviewers, but no reviewer mentions these things about the protagonist that they did not understand.

If the understanding of literature is to progress, readers must have the courage to acknowledge that certain things do not make sense to them.

Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” (post 4): Further symptoms of multiple personality that was diagnosable at the beginning of the novel (post 3)

Hearing Voices

The first-person narrator and protagonist, Esther Greenwood, never complains of, mentions to a doctor, or is ever treated for, auditory hallucinations. It is not considered one of her symptoms. Why not? Apparently, she had heard voices for a long time and they were not associated with distress or dysfunction. She mentions them only in passing:

When she is about to ski dangerously, she hears an “interior voice nagging me not to be a fool” and says she has had “year after year of doubleness” (1, p. 97).

“I summoned my little chorus of voices.

Doesn't your work interest you, Esther?

You know, Esther, you’ve got the perfect setup of a true neurotic.

You’ll never get anywhere like that, you’ll never get anywhere like that, you’ll never get anywhere like that” (1, p. 146).

These are the voices of some of her alternate personalities.

Alternate Personalities

“I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people…From another, distanced mind, I saw myself…(1, pp. 119-120).

“I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off” (1, p. 126).

Alternate Handwriting

“And then, I thought, [the doctor] would help me, step by step, to be myself again…I told Doctor Gordon about not sleeping and not eating and not reading. I didn’t tell him about the handwriting, which bothered me most of all…when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child…” (1, pp. 129-130).

Alternate personalities may have different handwritings. The “letters like those of a child” suggest that some of her distress and dysfunction may have been due to the presence of a depressed, child-aged, alternate personality.

Mirrors

Mirrors have been a recurrent subject in this blog, because persons with multiple personality may see an alternate personality when they look in the mirror. A previous instance in this novel—Esther saw a Chinese woman when she looked in the mirror—was cited in a previous post. Here is another example:

“I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it [committed suicide], it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or play. But the person in the mirror was paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing” (1, p. 148).

Unreliable Narrator

Esther’s main complaints to psychiatrists (other than her suicidality) were her insomnia, anorexia, and inability to read, already mentioned above. Her claim not to have slept for a month is not only impossible, but belied by the fact of her reserves of energy when she was swimming in the ocean, and by the fact that a nurse in the hospital witnessed that she slept. She claimed not to be able to read, but then she admits reading books on abnormal psychology. She claims to have no appetite, but then realizes she has just demonstrated a good appetite. She is not knowingly lying. It is just that one personality often does not know what other personalities are doing.

“…I must be just about the only person in the world who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion…I thought drowning must be the kindest way to die…[She is at the beach, and she challenges the young man she is with to swim out into the ocean with her] out to that rock out there. Are you crazy? That’s a mile out [he says]. What are you?, I said. Chicken?” (1, p. 157). They swim out, but he turns back due to exhaustion. She continues to swim out, and tries to drown herself, but she keeps bobbing up to the surface. “I knew I was beaten. I turned back” (1, p. 161).

“The only thing I could read, besides the scandal sheets, were those abnormal-psychology books. It was as if some slim opening had been left, so I could learn all I needed to know about my case to end it in the proper way” (1, p. 159).

“I can’t sleep…

They interrupted me. “But the nurse says you slept last night.”

“I can’t eat” [but] “It occurred to me I’d been eating ravenously ever since I came to” [after her recent, near-fatal, suicide attempt] (1, p. 177).

Pseudonym

The novel was originally published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas,” with the explanation that it would protect the feelings of people on whom characters were based. Another reason might have been that the author’s main writing personality did not identify with the author’s regular name.

Diagnosis and Treatment

No diagnosis is ever mentioned in the novel. Hospital treatment includes a supportive environment, insulin injections, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and ECT.

Based on what I have cited from the text in this and prior posts, I am sure that Esther had multiple personality. She also had major depression, but, based on available information, I cannot be sure of whether her depression was a separate condition or was secondary to the multiple personality (confined to only certain personalities, and would have remitted with appropriate psychotherapy for the multiple personality).

Esther proclaims her recovery in terms of a restoration of her regular personality:

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am” (1, p. 243).

However, for Sylvia Plath, the cure was only temporary, because multiple personality was rarely diagnosed and treated in those days.

1. Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar [1963/1971]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

David Brooks in New York Times says Donald Trump has many mental problems: What does it mean when a person gets multiple psychiatric diagnoses?

Previously, Brooks had said, as I mentioned in a previous post, that Trump has “multiple personality disorders.” It was not clear what Brooks meant.

Now, having spoken to “one trained psychiatrist,” Brooks says Trump is manic with “inflated self-esteem, sleeplessness, impulsivity, aggression,” with “speech patterns…straight out of a psychiatric textbook,” demonstrating the manic’s uninhibited “flight of ideas.”

Brooks also says Trump is “childlike” with a “fragile identity” and lacks “empathy.”

Brooks doesn’t mention Trump’s history of using pseudonyms (which I discuss in previous posts).

I cannot assess the validity of any of Brooks' assertions, because he has not provided sufficient information to support any of them. For example, if Trump has a “flight of ideas” on stage, does he still have a flight of ideas when he leaves the stage? A manic person would. Has he also had depressive episodes (since mania is usually part of bipolar disorder, aka manic-depression)? Has he ever been treated for mania or depression?

And how are Brooks’ assertions about Trump consistent with what Trump has accomplished in life? This is not to say that Trump has not, at various times, behaved in the ways Brooks says, but none of Brooks' psychological labels satisfactorily accounts for it all.

I cannot diagnose Trump, if any diagnosis is warranted, because I don’t have enough information. All I wish to add to the discussion is that it is common for a person who is eventually diagnosed with multiple personality to have a history of multiple prior psychiatric diagnoses that were at odds with each other.

Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” (post 3, postscript): Do any of the three—hotel worker, Doreen, protagonist—realize that the protagonist has multiple personality?

The protagonist (one of her personalities) has said that the hotel worker and Doreen have addressed her as though she had multiple personality. But, at least as yet, there is no indication that any of the three women actually thinks that she has multiple personality.

I’m not sure what Doreen and the hotel worker think at this point, but they probably think that the erratic behavior of the protagonist is due to alcohol/drugs and/or lying and/or some nonspecific craziness. Most people do not think in terms of multiple personality, per se.

As to the protagonist, since she has amnesia for the erratic behavior that Doreen and the hotel worker remember, she thinks that they have misunderstood her. And since, unknown to herself, she has had multiple personality since childhood (that’s when it starts), she has had other people “misunderstand” her since she was a child. It is nothing new. It has happened from time to time, and she has learned to ignore it.

But, even if the characters don’t realize that the protagonist has multiple personality, doesn’t the author realize it? After all, hasn’t Plath given her protagonist the symptoms of multiple personality, and hasn’t she had the character explicitly raise the issue by using the informal term for it, “split personality”?

Well, most novelists are not puppeteers. They don’t create their characters as much as they experience their characters arrive, come alive, and speak for themselves (subject to rewrite and revision). And if none of the characters (including the first-person narrator) knows that the protagonist has multiple personality, the author probably didn’t either.

Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” (post 3): The protagonist fulfills clinical criteria for multiple personality and sees Chinese alternate personality in mirror.

Multiple Personality

The first-person narrator/protagonist has been out on the town (New York City) with her friend Doreen, during which they are picked up by a man, a stranger, to whom the protagonist gives a false name, “Elly Higginbottom,” because “I didn’t want anything I said or did that night to be associated with me and my real name” (1, p. 11).

However, when she is back in her hotel room, a woman who works at the hotel and Doreen come knocking at her door, the former saying “Elly, Elly, Elly, let me in”, but the protagonist doesn't respond, because “I didn’t know any Elly.” When the other woman outside her door says, “Miss Greenwood, your friend wants you,” “I knew it was Doreen.” The protagonist comments on the fact that one woman was addressing her as “Elly” and the other woman was addressing her as “Miss Greenwood” “as if I had a split personality or something” (1, pp. 20-21).

The protagonist apparently has amnesia for having consciously used “Elly” as an alias. Indeed, she apparently has amnesia for having previously identified herself as “Elly” to that member of the hotel staff. Moreover, her present personality does not see herself as being, or remember having been, a close friend of Doreen, as she clearly was in earlier pages.

Thus, at the beginning of this novel, the protagonist is portrayed as having more than one personality plus memory gaps (amnesia), fulfilling the clinical diagnostic criteria for multiple personality.

Chinese Personality

“I slid into the self-service elevator and pushed the button for my floor…and I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course, I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I was” (1, p. 18).

The protagonist was apparently looking in a mirror in the elevator. Seeing an alternate personality in the mirror is a known phenomenon in multiple personality (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog).

In a previous post, I mentioned Sylvia Plath’s poem “In Plaster.” Its first two lines are:

“I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:

This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one” (2).

So Plath is consistent, in both novel and poem, as having a Chinese or yellow alternate personality.

1. Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar [1963/1971]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

2. Sylvia Plath. “In Plaster.” http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1401 

Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” (post 2): What is the significance of the title? Plath’s father was an entomologist. Bell jars are used in entomology.

The conventional view seems to be that the title is only a metaphor for entrapment: http://www.shmoop.com/bell-jar/title.html

However, Plath’s father was an entomologist, and bell jars are used in entomology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R_GKoiCloI

https://books.google.com/books?id=oBENAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA470&lpg=PA470&dq=bell+jar+entomology&source=bl&ots=3tISHlXlJq&sig=r35YKaQRVkCHun3w7Nvs6AssAsE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjAoYLis6XOAhUDQiYKHWYEAg8Q6AEIOjAG#v=onepage&q=bell%20jar%20entomology&f=false

So the title may be a reference to the author’s father.

Three Possible Contributing Causes to Sylvia Plath’s Suicide at Age Thirty: Depression, Multiple Personality, Her Father and His Death When She Was Eight

Since I plan to read Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, and I want to read it in context, I have tried to orient myself to some of Plath’s interests and issues.

First, she had a history of recurrent depression, for which she was treated with ECT and psychotherapy.

Second, Plath’s undergraduate thesis was “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels.” She related the literary theme of the Double to “contradictions in man’s character” and “the complex question of identity,” and she discussed conflict between “real” and “counterfeit” selves (1).

Consistent with Plath’s interest in the theme of the double, there is multiple personality in some of her poems; for example, “In Plaster.” The poem begins:

“I shall never get out of this!  There are two of me now…”

It ends with the idea that her alternate personality should “perish” (which, since they share the same body, might be suicide):

“I used to think we might make a go of it together --

After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.

Now I see it must be one or the other of us.

She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,

But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit.

I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,

And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.”

How can the alternate personality both perish and miss her? Multiple personality has its roots in childhood, when death was not conceived of as final and permanent, a dangerous notion.

Third, her relationship with, and loss of, her father, when she was eight, may have been traumatic. She wrote the poem “Daddy,” expressing fear and hate of him, not long before she committed suicide.

1. Maria Theresa Ib. “Mind Over Myth?: The Divided Self in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/dividedself.html 

James Patterson’s “The Thomas Berryman Number”: Does the bestselling author’s Edgar Award winning first novel reveal anything about his writing process?

This 1976 novel won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, but the plot is not a mystery. I was expecting there to be some twist at the end as to who killed the mayor. But there was none. The title character is a professional assassin, and it turns out that he, as the reader has been led to expect, did, in fact, do it.

Although the murder is not a mystery to the reader, it was, in the story, to the public, who thought that someone else had done it. The truth is uncovered when a psychiatrist contacts a newspaper reporter (the narrator) to say that a hospitalized mental patient had told a story about who was going to kill the mayor before the murder took place. The mental patient turns out to have been a partner of Thomas Berryman, the killer.

The peculiar thing about this story set-up is that the psychiatrist calls a reporter, not the police. To state this another way: two kinds of storyteller personalities (a violent, psychotic killer and a psychiatrist) communicate with a writer personality to produce the book.

James Patterson. The Thomas Berryman Number. New York, Warner Books, 1976.

Psychologists and Psychiatrists know that there is a normal version of multiple personality (dissociative identity), but they choose to ignore it.

The diagnostic criteria for dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality) in the official psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-5 (1), includes these two requirements:

“The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of function” (p. 292).

“In children, the symptoms are not better explained by imaginary playmates or other fantasy play” (p. 292).

Why are these two cautionary statements necessary? Obviously, because there are adults who have the signs and symptoms of multiple personality, but who are not distressed or impaired by it, and so are not mentally ill; and because the imaginary playmate in childhood is, essentially, the same phenomenon as multiple personality, but most of these children are normal and healthy.

Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists know that there is a normal version of multiple personality in both adults and children, but they don’t care, because, as clinicians, they are interested only in mental illness.

But why do nonclinical, academic psychologists ignore the normal version of multiple personality? There are two reasons. First, they may have no clinical experience with multiple personality, and so may not even believe it exists. Second, they don’t know where they would find normal people with multiple personality to study. This blog is a hint.

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

David Brooks in New York Times says Trump (post 7) “haunted by multiple personality disorders.”  Multiple Personality disorders, or multiple  Personality Disorders?

Brooks says that Donald Trump “is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders” (Op-Ed, July, 29, 2016).

Brooks does not read this blog. He is not a psychiatrist. And he may not distinguish between multiple personality (a dissociative disorder) and the completely separate diagnostic category of personality disorders (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive).

Ordinarily, since most people do not think of multiple personality, I would assume that Brooks means Trump has more than one Personality Disorder.

However, Brooks’ use of the word “haunted” raises the possibility that he does mean multiple personality, since, in the popular mind, multiple personality is often thought of as being possessed.

E. L. Doctorow says “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia” (meaning multiple personality), and he has had “two minds” since age nine.

In his Paris Review interview (1), Doctorow says “Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author’s. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book.”

The interviewer asks, “Does that change you at all? The voice, for example, in Loon Lake is very different from the voice in Ragtime. Do you change…yourself?…sitting around the house you don’t behave like Joe of Paterson, for example, the hobo in Loon Lake.”

Doctorow replies, “Well, how do you know? Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia” [multiple personality].

Doctorow is saying that he experiences multiple personality when he writes. But does he mean it is merely a literary technique that he uses, or does he mean that he has a normal version of multiple personality, and has had it since childhood?

Doctorow explains, “I really started to think of myself as a writer when I was about nine. Whenever I read anything I seemed to identify as much with the act of composition as with the story. I seemed to have two minds: I would love the story and want to know what happened next, but at the same time I would somehow be aware of what was being done on the page. I identified myself as a kind of younger brother of the writer. I was on hand to help him figure things out.”

Thus, as early as age nine, Doctorow experienced himself as having at least “two minds.” While his regular personality attended to what was happening in the story he was reading, his other personality, his writer personality, who felt like “a kind of younger brother” of the story’s author, and who attended to “the act of composition,” was "on hand to help [the author] figure things out.”

1. George Plimpton (interviewer). “E. L. Doctorow, The Art of Fiction No. 94.” The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101.

“Donald Trump Assures Voters That They’ll Never Know What He’ll Do As President”: Why would anyone brag about unpredictability or have puzzling inconsistency?

[Search "Trump" in this blog to read the five previous posts.]

According to an article in New York Magazine, Mr. Trump is proud of being unpredictable (1).

Unpredictability to gain a competitive advantage is a well-known tactic. But what if a person were unpredictable in ways that were not a competitive advantage?

A person could be unpredictable due to stupidity, or because of hidden motives and interests. But what if the person is not stupid, and his changes in opinion cannot always be explained by plausible motives and interests?

For all I know, Trump’s alleged unpredictability may always be completely explainable by his wish to gain a competitive advantage. But it is unusual for a person who is seeking political office to brag about his unpredictability. It makes me wonder if it is a cover story to explain away behavior that he, himself, sees as puzzlingly inconsistent. (Search “puzzling inconsistency” in this blog.)

1. Eric Levitz, New York Magazine, January 5, 2016. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/trump-voters-want-unpredictability.html

Iain Reid’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”: Female nameless narrator gets telephone messages from a male caller, but the calls originate from her own number.

If the author understood what he was writing about, and if he meant the ending to be a surprise, why does he reveal (page 23) and repeat (page 24) near the beginning of the novel that the telephone calls come from the protagonist’s own phone number? Since she lives alone, it could mean only one thing.

Readers of this blog would have an even earlier clue as to what was going on. Beginning on page one, the first-person narrator and protagonist is nameless. And there is only one psychological condition in which nameless personalities are common.

Also on page one is this very interesting question: “What if this thought wasn’t conceived by me but planted in my mind, predeveloped?” (The thought being referred to is the title and first line, “I’m thinking of ending things.”) In the history of psychiatry, the subjective experience that a thought was planted in your mind was once seen as a typical, psychotic symptom of schizophrenia. But it is now understood to be more common in multiple personality, when one personality puts a thought in the mind of another personality.

“What if this thought wasn’t conceived by me but planted in my mind, predeveloped?” may also be the author’s reflection on his writing process. I have quoted a number of writers in this blog—e.g., Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Sue Grafton—who say that they discover rather than create their stories, as if they were, somehow, predeveloped.

Iain Reid. I’m Thinking of Ending Things. New York, Scout Press/Simon & Schuster, 2016.

Multiple Personality Euphemisms: alter ego, anima, inner child, literary double, double consciousness, doppelgänger, imaginary companion, multiplicity, muse, personae, voices (character, narrative, nonpsychotic), second self, shadow, subpersonalities, the unconscious.

When people who have little or no clinical experience with multiple personality come upon its much more common, normal version, they don’t recognize it as such, so they use all kinds of other terms. The above terms are not always used this way, but they often are.

The essence of an alternate personality, by whatever name, is that it has thoughts, feelings, memory, and sense of personhood which are subjectively experienced as being more or less independent of the thoughts, feelings, memory, and sense of personhood of the person’s regular self.

Although alternate personalities may be quite talkative and obvious once their cover is blown, so to speak, they may, ordinarily, remain behind the scenes, coming out, if they do, only in private. And when they do come out in public, they usually do so incognito (sometimes causing the person to seem puzzlingly inconsistent).

Barbara Kingsolver (post 2), when writing, goes to “novel-neverland”: an allusion to J. M. Barrie’s Neverland and child-aged alternate personalities?

In yesterday’s post, I quoted Kingsolver as saying that when she has a good day of writing, she goes to “novel-neverland” where “time disappears.”

It could be that her allusion to J. M. Barrie’s Neverland was only to its timelessness, but it is hard to believe that any allusion to Neverland does not also allude to Peter Pan and children who never grow up, especially since Kingsolver wants children as main characters.

As I discuss in my four posts on J.M. Barrie (search “Barrie”), Peter Pan is a multiple personality story, since the only kind of children who live but never grow up are child-aged alternate personalities.

Barbara Kingsolver raises the question of why a novelist would have a child as a main character. An author of children’s literature may have the answer.

In her review of a novel for adults in tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, Barbara Kingsolver praises the fact that two of its three main characters are children. She says this is uncommon, because novels used to be written by “men and childless women. Writers lacking an everyday acquaintance with children are less likely to conceive them as literary personalities…But in the era of attachment parenting…why should modern writers fail to include child characters in fiction for adults?”

Is “an everyday acquaintance with children” the key determinant of whether a writer features children? What is the process of writing fiction? All I know about Kingsolver’s writing process is that, as she says on her website, she goes into an altered state of consciousness, with “words flooding into my brain” (she doesn’t say from where):

“I tend to wake up extremely early with words flooding into my brain.  If I don’t get up, they’ll continue to accumulate in puddles, so it’s a relief to get to the keyboard and dump them out.  I’ll take a break to have breakfast with my daughter and walk her to the school bus.  In the afternoon I’ll break again to meet with my assistant, Judy, to review the day’s mail pile and decide how to respond to requests.  But if I’ve really gone into novel-never-land, the time disappears.  I sometimes look at the clock and am stunned to see that six or eight hours have passed while I sat motionless in my chair.”

So I will have to look elsewhere for a clue as to what makes a writer focus on children. My theory is that the key determinant would be the writer’s relationship with his or her own child-aged alternate personalities, as illustrated in a past post about an award-winning author of children’s literature, reprinted here:

Monday, January 11, 2016

Katherine Paterson: Award-winning author of children’s literature writes to comfort and change her “frightened, lonely, nine-year-old” alternate personality.

“With every book I have written there is a reader whose life I have been determined to change…there is an audience from the very beginning…that reader is myself…

“But why children? If I am, in fact, writing to change myself, a forty-six-year-old woman, why don’t I have the decency to publish for other forty-six-year-old women and leave the innocent children out of it?

“…Let me explain. When I walk into a room full of well-dressed people, I never walk in alone. With me is a nine-year-old who knows her clothes are out of a missionary barrel, her accent is foreign, and her mannerisms peculiar—a child who knows that if she is lucky she will be ignored and if unlucky she will be sneered at…I can [never] excise that frightened, lonely nine-year-old or [do I] even want to…

“The reader I want to change is that burdened child within myself. As I begin a book, I am in a way inviting her along to see if there might be some path through this wilderness that we might hack out together…some sheltered spot where we might lay our burden down…” (1, pp. 55-60).

Paterson knows, objectively, that the child is a product of her own mind, but, subjectively, she experiences the child as different from her regular, adult self and not just a metaphor.

She and the child are not how she feels in different circumstances or moods. Rather, she and the child are often present and conscious at the same time; for example, while she’s writing and the child is her audience, or when she and the child walk, together, into a crowded room. This is an example of “double consciousness,” an old term for multiple personality, discussed in past posts.

The nine-year-old child is an “alternate personality,” but the word “alternate” is somewhat misleading, because, in multiple personality, more than one personality is usually conscious and present at any given time. The personalities “alternate” in the sense that only one is “out” and predominantly in control of behavior at any given time. But another personality is usually present and monitoring the situation from behind the scenes.

Some personalities are not co-conscious (are not aware of each other), but other personalities are co-conscious, as are Paterson and her child-aged personality.

Since multiple personality begins in childhood, child-aged personalities are common.

1. Katherine Paterson. A Sense of Wonder: On Reading and Writing Books for Children. New York, Plume/Penguin, 1981-1995.