Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson: “She seems almost literally to have had two personalities,” the “poetic madness” of heroine in “The Bird’s Nest”

“Jackson can be very funny in her “housewife” mode—see her domestic

sketches: “Charles” or “The Third Baby’s the Easiest,” or “The Night We All Had Grippe.” She later revised these and included them in her bestselling memoir of family life. In her darker mode—in stories like “The Daemon Lover,” “The Possibility of Evil,” or “The Summer People”—her humor is not so very evident. She seems almost literally to have had two personalities—in one quite large body—the one aiming for a popular readership of primarily women by way of the women’s magazines—the other the “Gothic” writer who perhaps wrote to please her own criteria, and did not aim for any particular magazine market” (1).

“…a ‘poetic’ madness like the madness of the young heroine of Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest, whose subdued personality harbors several selves…” (2).

1. Joyce Carol Oates. The Library of America interviews Joyce Carol Oates about Shirley Jackson. https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/LOA_Oates_on_Jackson.pdf

2. Joyce Carol Oates. “The Witchcraft of Shirley Jackson.” The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/10/08/the-witchcraft-of-shirley-jackson/

“Monsieur du Miroir” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (post 5): The author sees his double, who, if he does know the secret of life, declines to reveal it.

The conceit of this humorous short story is that the author has long known Monsieur du Miroir, who looks exactly like the author, but is someone else. 

“He bears, indisputably, a strong personal resemblance to myself, and generally puts on mourning at the funerals of the family. On the other hand, his name would indicate a French descent; in which case, infinitely preferring that my blood should flow from a bold British and pure Puritan source, I beg leave to disclaim all kindred with M. du Miroir” (1).

To a reader who does not have multiple personality, this story starts out as quite amusing—it is well written—but the one joke soon wears thin, since the premise of seeing someone else in the mirror seems preposterous.

To a reader who does have multiple personality, the story starts out as quite amusing, but the joke may not be just a joke, since alternate personalities are sometimes seen in mirrors. And some alternate personalities do look just like the host personality (hence, the literary term, “double”).

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Monsieur du Miroir” (1837). From Mosses from an Old Manse (1846, 1854). http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/mdum.html

“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker (post 6): Namelessness explained by the two places in life where it occurs; plus how characters are born and named.

Many reviews of this book don’t even mention the lack surnames for Celie’s husband, Mr. ______, and the Reverend Mr. ______.

One literary critic has argued that the lack of a surname was meant to demean Celie’s wife-beating husband. But that would explain neither the lack of a surname for the Reverend Mr. ______ (always a good man) nor the continuing lack of a surname for Celie’s husband even after he reforms at the end of the novel. Not to mention that Celie lacks a surname, too.

Two Places Namelessness Occurs

The only circumstance in which I have ever met a nameless “person” is when, as a psychiatrist, I have met people who have multiple personality and spoken with their alternate personalities: It is very common to find that some of the alternate personalities are nameless.

Thus, there are only two places in life where you find nameless “persons”: in multiple personality and novels. This common feature is one reason I think of characters in novels as being alternate personalities of novelists.

Characters

Characters are psychologically born, not manufactured. Novelists do not stitch together their characters like Frankenstein’s monster. Mark Twain said that neither he nor any other novelist has ever created a character.

In writers’ subjective experiences, characters come not from them, but to them. In her Afterword, Alice Walker implied that she experienced her characters as being like spirits who visit and inhabit a medium.

Characters’ Names

Some characters, when they come to writers, already have a name. Other characters come without names. In the latter case, novelists may assign names. But some characters refuse names. And some novelists feel that if a character comes without a name, then that is how it was meant to be.

“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker (post 5): Celie's ugly, rape, and tree issues may come from author’s traumatic experience from age eight to fourteen.

Multiple personality is a psychological way of coping with traumatic experiences in childhood. When Alice Walker was eight years old, she was accidentally shot in the right eye with a BB gun, causing her to lose vision in that eye and to be disfigured until age fourteen, at which time she had surgery and got a prosthesis.

She has said of the whole experience, “It was very like a rape” (1, p. 40) and “For a long time I thought I was very ugly and disfigured” (1, p. 43).

In the previous post on Celie’s mediumistic experience, she says that her first message “seem to come to me from the trees.” So it is interesting to learn that when Alice Walker got shot in her right eye, “The sturdy trunk and sprawling limbs of a tree growing in the yard would be the last image the eye would ever discern” (1, p. 37).

1. Evelyn C. White. Alice Walker: A Life. New York, WW Norton, 2004.

“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker (post 4): Reflecting novel’s Afterword by “A. W., author and medium,” Celie is described as having a mediumistic experience.

Celie is speaking to her husband, who is almost always referred to as “Mr. ______” (see prior post). Celie says it is not her words coming from her mouth. She says the words come to her and through her, from trees, air, dirt, and a voice:

        “Until you do right by me, I say, everything you even dream about will fail. I give it to him straight, just like it come to me. And it seem to come to me from the trees.

        “Whoever heard of such a thing, say Mr. ______. I probably didn’t whup your ass enough.

        “Every lick you hit me you will suffer twice, I say. Then I say, You better stop talking because all I’m telling you ain’t coming just from me. Look like when I open my mouth the air rush in and shape words…

        “Shug come over to where us talking. She take one look at my face and say Celie!…

        “I’ll fix her wagon! say Mr. ______, and spring toward me.

        “A dust devil flew up on the porch between us, fill my mouth with dirt. The dirt say, Anything you do to me, already done to you.

        “Then I feel Shug shake me. Celie, she say. And I come to myself.

        “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here” (1, pp. 206-207).

Such messages are from alternate personalities.

1. Alice Walker. The Color Purple. New York, Harcourt, 1982.

“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker (post 3): Are Sofia and Shug so assertive because they are feminist, bisexual, or split personalities?

When the Mayor’s wife asks Sofia to be her maid, an offer meant as a compliment, Sofia answers “Hell, no,” which gets Sofia a horrific beating, imprisonment, and twelve years of hell. And since, in the Jim Crow South, what happens to Sofia was predictable, why did she say it?

What seems to happen is that when Sofia is threatened—treated subserviently or physically attacked—it triggers a sudden switch to an insolent, violent, protector personality. Sofia is primarily a split personality, and secondarily a feminist.

In contrast, Shug is more philosophical, and thinks through what she should do in terms of feminist principles. She is portrayed as primarily a feminist, but even Shug is described as possibly having a split personality:

“Shug say, Girl, you look like a good time, you do. That when I notice how Shug talk and act sometimes like a man. Men say stuff like that to women, Girl, you look like a good time. Women always talk about hair and health. How many babies living or dead, or got teef. Not bout how some woman they hugging on look like a good time” (1, p. 81).

Does the above indicate bisexuality rather than a split personality? I don’t know enough about bisexuality to answer that question. Nor can I confirm my speculation about Sofia’s multiple personality, because, at least in the part of the novel I’ve read so far, very little of Sofia’s point of view is given.

1. Alice Walker. The Color Purple. New York, Harcourt, 1982.

“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker (post 2): Naming Male Characters with Honorifics, but No Surnames, highlights Male Dominance in Jim Crow South.

Most male characters in this novel are given honorifics:

“Mr. __________”

“Mayor ________”

“Reverend Mr. _______”

Since the setting of this novel is the pre-civil rights, Jim Crow South, the meaning of honorifics—who gets them and who does not—is explained by Jim Crow Etiquette:

“Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to Blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma’am. Instead, Blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to Whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names” (1).

Thus, the naming of male characters, even black male characters, with honorifics serves to highlight and emphasize male social dominance. Omitting their surnames, it might be argued, only serves to make the honorifics stand out.

But was it really necessary to omit their surnames?

No, it was not necessary. And as I have argued in past posts, regarding other novels, namelessness of characters is probably indicative of the author’s multiple personality. But as I am only halfway through this novel, I reserve further comment.

1. Jim Crow Etiquette. http://www.africanamerica.org/topic/jim-crow-etiquette

“The Three Donald Trumps Speak” by New York Times columnist Gail Collins: Previously she said two alternate personalities, but now she says three.

Last month (see previous post) Collins said, “Have you ever noticed that [Donald Trump] tends to refer to the hero of all his stories as 'Trump'? Perhaps he thinks of 'Trump' as a separate person.”

But now she says he has three personalities:

“Unscripted Trump is the one who obsesses about crowd size and expresses complete astonishment that constructing a national health care plan is hard. That’s the one we worry will start a nuclear war.”

“Reasonable Chatting Trump is the one who had pre-speech gatherings with journalists in which he mused about passing immigration law reform and making the Dreamers legal. Everyone was very excited until it became clear this had no relation to anything he was actually planning to say in public…He’s…totally open to all your suggestions, nod frequently and leave you with the impression that you’ve scored a huge breakthrough. But he will not remember a thing that you discussed.”

“Somewhat Normal Republican Trump, the guy with the teleprompter.”

Note multiple personality’s cardinal feature of amnesia (memory gaps): Reasonable Chatting Trump “will not remember a thing that you discussed.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/opinion/the-three-donald-trumps-speak.html?_r=0

“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker: Re Novel’s Dedication “To the Spirit” and Afterword “I thank everybody in this book for coming.—A.W., author and medium”

Alice Walker dedicates her novel, The Color Purple (New York, Harcourt, 1982), to “the Spirit,” and she thinks of her creative process as being, in part, mediumship.

Spiritualism and mediumship were nineteenth and early twentieth century theories for what is now understood as multiple personality, as discussed in the following past post: 

September 25, 2015

Mythopoetic Function of Alternate Personalities: Illustrated by Famous Medium, Helene Smith, in Théodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars

How does the mind create fiction and myth? And how can we ever find out? Fiction writing is done in private. And even fiction writers, themselves, are not entirely sure how they do it, which suggests that it takes place in “the unconscious.”

What goes on in “the unconscious”? And why study mediums to find out? Because mediums make a public spectacle of what usually takes place in private and out of awareness. Mediums turn off their regular consciousness by going into a trance, allowing their “unconscious” to come out and have its say.

“The mythopoetic function”…”Its great explorer was Flournoy with his research on Helen Smith and other mediums” (1, p. 318).

From India to the Planet Mars

According to historian Sonu Shamdasani, in his Introduction (which has what is relevant to this post): “At the end of the nineteenth century, many of the leading psychologists—Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, Bleuler, James, Myers, Janet, Bergson, Stanley Hall, Schrenck-Notzing, Moll, Dessoir, Richet, and Flournoy—frequented mediums…What took place in the seances enthralled the leading minds of the time, and had a crucial bearing on many of the most significant aspects of twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and painting, not to mention psychical research…

“For [Frederic] Myers, whom Flournoy called the founder of subliminal psychology…in contradistinction to his contemporaries such as Freud and Janet, the unconscious, or as he termed it, the subliminal—the secondary personalities revealed in trance states, dreaming, crystal gazing, and automatic writing—potentially possessed a higher intelligence than one’s waking or supraliminal personality and often served to convey messages of guidance…

“Myers ended up embracing the spiritist hypothesis and attempted to unite science and religion in an overarching synthesis…Flournoy, by contrast, attempted to maintain a purely psychological viewpoint…

“For [William] James and Flournoy, the investigation of trance states was a central question if a psychology worthy of the name was to develop. Within this enterprise, the investigation of mediums held pride of place…

“The innovation of From India to the Planet Mars was that it was the first major study of what Myers called pseudo-possession, whose main goal was to disprove the supernatural origin of the phenomena and to give an account of their psychogenesis. In such a manner it established a devastating skeptical paradigm in psychical research…

“Cryptomnesia plays a crucial role in Flournoy’s analysis as the main alternative paradigm to the spiritualistic hypothesis…For Flournoy what was presented as a memory—in the case of Helene, of an anterior existence—in actuality represented a hidden and forgotten memory that had been through a process of subconscious elaboration…Spiritualists were up in arms about the book, for understandable reasons…

The “transition from spiritualism to multiple personality is very clearly developed in From India to the Planet Mars. While Flournoy rejects the extrapsychic existence of the figures in Helene’s trances, and regards them as intrapsychic, he still regards them as personalities…the psychologization of mediumship leads to a multiple personality model. From India to the Planet Mars was the first psychological study of multiple personality to become a best-seller…

“Throughout From India to the Planet Mars, Flournoy never ceases to marvel at the artistic and dramatic powers of Helene’s subconscious creative imagination. On one reading what is left of her romances when shorn of their spiritualistic garb is precisely art…"

The Introduction to From India to the Planet Mars concludes with this quotation from Ellenberger (Psychology Today, March 1973, p. 56), the historian of the unconscious quoted at the beginning of this post:

“Flournoy was a great explorer of the mythopoetic unconscious, particularly in his book From India to the Planet Mars…Today we seldom hear of the mythopoetic unconscious. What psychoanalysts call fantasies represent a minute part of mythopoetic manifestations. We have lost sight of the importance of this terrible power—a power that fathered epidemics of demonism, collective psychoses among witches, revelations of spiritualists, the so-called reincarnations of mediums, automatic writing, the mirages that lured generations of hypnotists, and the profuse literature of the subliminal imagination…unfortunately neither Freud nor Jung became aware of the mythopoetic unconscious” (2, pp. xi-li)

And note: The thing that mediumship makes public is that the mythopoetic “unconscious" is populated by, and is a function of, alternate personalities, who, even when behind-the-scenes, and out of the awareness of the regular self, are usually conscious, and often busy making things up.

1. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York, Basic Books, 1970.
2. Théodore Flournoy. From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages [1899/1901]. With a Forward by C. G. Jung and Commentary by Mireille Cifali. Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994.

“Saving Agnes” by Rachel Cusk (post 4): Gratuitous multiple personality—identity changes, secret selves, pseudonyms, voices, self-persecution—in first novel.

Rachel Cusk’s award-winning first novel, Saving Agnes, has symptoms of multiple personality in its first half, but none in its second half. Why?

After finding a similar thing in the work of a number of novelists, I previously coined the term “gratuitous multiple personality” (search “gratuitous”).

Think about why an author would have gratuitous symptoms of multiple personality in a novel, as you read the following:

“Agnes Day was her real name” but “As a child Agnes had been imaginative—a word often used to explain the character of a compulsive liar—and had enjoyed frequent changes of identity…

“ ‘Bathsheba, could you please pass the salt?’ her father would politely inquire…(1, p. 13).

“As Agnes approached puberty her identity crisis…grew…she chose her own middle name, Grace…Grace was an honored guest in their house…Only her brother…Tom missed Agnes and had little time for her double…(1, pp. 14-15).

“…she sometimes wondered why the proliferation of selves she would have liked to be and lives she would have liked to live remained locked inside her, prisoners of utmost secrecy…” (1, p. 16).

“As a child she had often been mistaken for a boy…” (1, p. 19).

“Agnes had lived most of her life in constant fear and loathing of her own sex. The convent school where she had grown up had been red in tooth and claw with female cruelty” (1, p. 54)…Agnes’s wistful longings for sisterly love had been if anything intensified by her years in the convent…Agnes’s imaginary sister [Grace], who looked something like Doris Day…just smiled and sang as she lay beside Agnes in the dark…” (1, p. 61).

“She examined her fellow passengers…Women in saris…West Indian women…Could they not get together and solve each other’s problems? Agnes seemed to hear, as if from around her, dissenting voices…Condescending! they cried. Racist!…It was so hard sometimes, having to think for oneself…She got off the bus and walked” (1, p. 66).

“Agnes…recalled [that at the age of thirteen] things had…ceased to be real for her…She had, at the moment in question, been neither happy nor particularly unhappy…In any case, what she did remember was that…she had suddenly felt her mind disengage and float away…It was most unexpected…something irrevocable had taken place…‘I don’t feel as if I’m here,’ she had said to Christine Poole [her school friend]; and she remembered very clearly what had happened next. First of all, she realised her voice sounded distant, as if she were listening instead of speaking. Secondly, Christine had looked at her as if she were mad. These two events now seemed to have characterised much of her later life” (1, pp. 88-89).

(Self-) Persecutor Personality

Agnes’s supposed friends, including Christine Poole, subsequently betray Agnes by reading passages from Agnes’s personal diary to school officials. Moreover, “Her friends’ terror campaign was a Mafia-style affair…when, for example, precious objects would disappear from other girls’ rooms, to be discovered hoarded beneath Agnes’s bed…[and when Agnes’s] expensive winter coat, while hanging in her wardrobe, had come to grief…involving…time-consuming application of sharp scissors to heavy cloth” (1, pp. 94-95). 

        Note: In the context of what had been described about Agnes, psychologically, earlier in the novel, this stealing, hoarding, and cutting at school could conceivably have been the work of a self-persecutory, alternate personality, with Agnes having a memory gap (amnesia) for having done it herself. (Search “memory gap” and “persecutor personality,” a common kind of alternate personality.)

        As if purposely designed to support this multiple personality interpretation, what follows on pages 101-102 is that Agnes and her two roommates go for a walk in the park, and Agnes, strangely, gets separated from them. The narrator gives this multiple personality explanation: “[Agnes] had heard them calling for her, [but] had had a strange sense then of being someone else: a lone jogger…who had heard two friends calling to a girl lost in the woods. She had pitied that poor girl and wondered if she would read about it the papers tomorrow” (1, p. 102).

Gratuitous Multiple Personality

There are no more symptoms of multiple personality in the whole second half of the novel. Evidently, the symptoms of multiple personality in the first half of the novel had not been integral to either character development or the plot. The multiple personality had been gratuitous. Why was it in the novel? Because, as seen in the previous three posts, it reflected the author’s own normal psychology.

1. Rachel Cusk. Saving Agnes. New York, Picador USA, 1993/2000.

“Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation” by Rachel Cusk (post 3): She again cites her multiple personality as though it had just popped up from nowhere.

“I remember, when my own children were born, when I first held them and fed them and talked to them, feeling a great awareness of this new, foreign aspect of myself that was in me and yet did not seem to be of me. It was as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to speak Russian: what I could do — this women’s work — had so much form of its own, yet I didn’t know where my knowledge of it had come from. In some ways I wanted to claim the knowledge as mine, as innate, but to do that seemed to involve a strange kind of dishonesty, a pretending…I felt inhabited by a second self, a twin whose jest it was — in the way of twins — to appear to be me while doing things that were alien to my own character…

“And so I did two things: I reverted to my old male-inflected identity; and I conscripted my husband into care of the children. He was to take the part of that twin, femininity…My notion was that we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female…He gave up his law job, and I gave up the exclusivity of my primitive maternal right over the children” (1, pp. 18-19).

Comment

Cusk’s regular self — or, at least, her writer personality — is male or masculine. Recall Cusk post 1, in which I quoted her referring to basic female experiences as alien and disgusting: “…Is it disgusting to be a woman? Menstruation, lactation, childbirth, the sexualisation of the female body…In becoming female she must cease to be universal, and relinquish the masculine in herself that permitted her as a child to find the idea of these things disgusting indeed…”

Now she says that her alien, female personality seemed to know about maternal things, “yet I didn’t know where my knowledge of it had come from.” Evidently, her female personality had been present and gathering such information all along, probably since childhood, but her male personality had not been aware of it.

Multiple personality starts in childhood, but the regular personality is usually not aware of it until and unless there is a life change or crisis that brings the alternate personality to the regular personality’s attention. After the crisis, the alternate personality may go back to its life behind-the-scenes, and the regular personality may assume that the alternate personality was just a temporary disturbance.

My first Cusk post had been prompted by reading a review of her recent novel, in which issues of identity and narrative structure had been prominent. Unlike the reviewer, who may have thought that such issues are present in novels because writers seek to be experimental, I suspected it reflected the author’s own psychology (which in no way detracts from the quality of the novel). Search “experimental” for past posts in regard to other writers.

1. Rachel Cusk. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012/2013.

“A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” by Rachel Cusk (post 2): She thinks that becoming a mother has given her a temporary case of multiple personality.

“I am surprised to discover how easily I have split in two. I worry; I console. Like a divided stream, the person and the mother pay each other no heed, although moments earlier they were indistinguishable: they tumble forwards, each with its separate life, driven by the same source but seeking no longer to correspond” (1, p. 56).

“…my desire to shed my motherly persona, a persona I cannot seem to support without injury to what I have come to know as my self. I remember reading a magazine article about people whose brains housed two or more alternative personalities; how these personalities just arrived one day, with their own thoughts and memories and impulses, and took up tenancy in a person’s mind. Long arguments could occur between host and tenant; parties could be held if there enough people in there. This is, I suppose, what is more commonly known as madness. Am I, then, going mad? If so it is a madness that has its genesis in pregnancy; it is the whole reproductive act, not just its postscript in breastfeeding, that has shaken my sanity” (1, p. 106).

1. Rachel Cusk. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. New York, Picador, 2001/2003.

Donald Trump’s Use of Epithets (Alternate Names): Why would Trump use epithets as his favorite tactic to undermine, confuse, and disable opponents?

During the presidential primaries and general election, Trump was famous for attaching epithets to his opponents: “Low energy-,” “Lying-,” etc.

He would not have thought that epithets would be a successful tactic against others if he had not felt that epithets would have been a successful tactic against himself. So the question is: Why would Trump, himself, feel vulnerable to epithets?

I will answer this question in terms of my speculation in past posts that Trump might have a normal version of multiple personality (like the many successful writers I discuss in this blog).

Question: Why would people with multiple personality be particularly vulnerable to epithets?

Answer: You can cause people with multiple personality to switch to one of their alternate personalities by addressing them with an alternate name.

For example: If Adam has an alternate personality named Bob, and you address Adam as Bob, Adam will switch to Bob. If Adam has an alternate personality known as The Writer, and you address Adam as The Writer, Adam may switch to The Writer personality. If you don’t know the names of Adam’s alternate personalities, and you address Adam as Low Energy or Liar, you may cause a switch to whatever alternate personalities see themselves as having low energy or having been called a liar.

In short, calling people with multiple personality by alternate names, even if you don’t know the specific names of their alternate personalities, can prompt switches among personalities, which can undermine the person’s ability to function.

If you were to try this tactic on Trump, what epithet would you use? Kellyanne Conway, before she became a Trump advisor, referred to Trump’s comments as “unpresidential”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRlJ3UoDuzs

However, calling him “Unpresidential Trump” would be disrespectful, so I can’t recommend it.

“The Girl Before” by J. P. Delaney: Raises question of how you can tell whether lying to reader is cheap trick or a manifestation of multiple personality.

One Folgate Street is the address of a unique house, built by a world-famous architect and his technology-wizard partner. From the beginning of the novel and for hundreds of pages, everyone agrees that this house has cutting-edge technology and is built like a fortress. Yet it turns out that the man who murdered Emma had been able to breach the house’s security like a cheap toy.

If the impregnability of the house were the only lie in the novel, it might be shrugged off as a cheap trick. But one of the main characters, Emma (the first-person narrator of alternate chapters) is explicitly portrayed as a pathological liar. For example, she lies to the police about having been raped. And then, after the police catch her in the lie, she lies to them again, which, as the police detective comments, is very unusual.

Indeed, Emma has been lying since childhood. As she says at one point, “I hear my mother’s voice, that thing she always said when I was caught lying as a child. Liars shouldn’t be criers” (1, p. 219).

And Emma repeatedly hears voices. Another example: “And what if he’s really angry? a voice inside my head whispers” (1, p. 177).

Search “liar,” “lying,” and “voices” for past posts on lying and voices in multiple personality.

And three characters—the architect’s deceased wife, Emma, and Jane (the other first-person narrator)—are described as look-alikes.

Search “double” and “theme of the double,” literary metaphors for multiple personality.

And the novel is published under a pseudonym, which is another gratuitous lie, since various reviews and interviews reveal the author’s real name, and when you google the pseudonym, you get the author’s real name and picture.

Search “pseudonym” for past posts on pseudonyms and multiple personality.

And, finally, the back cover features blurbs by writers Lee Child and Lisa Gardner. Search their names in this blog for past posts.

1. J. P. Delaney. The Girl Before. New York, Ballantine Books, 2017.

Thomas L. Friedman in “Meet the 5 Trump Administrations” is fourth New York Times columnist to inadvertently suggest that Trump has multiple personality.

In previous posts, I noted that three New York Times columnists (David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins) have inadvertently suggested that President Trump has multiple personality. Today they are joined by Thomas L. Friedman, whose column begins:

“It should be clear by now that there are five different Trump administrations swirling before our eyes — Trump Entertainment, Trump Cleanup, Trump Crazy, Trump G.O.P. and the Essential Trump — and no one can predict which will define this presidency, let alone make a success of it” (1).

The column goes on to describe how Trump himself, together with various of his representatives, act out his five personalities.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/opinion/meet-the-5-trump-administrations.html?_r=0

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell (post 6): Only multiple personality could account for the switches, memory gaps, and contradictory beliefs about war.

It is a running joke in this novel that the nation’s enemy and ally frequently switch places; that the people immediately change which nation they hate; and that the people immediately forget that they have made that switch. This could only happen if each person had two personalities who differed in their view of who was the enemy.

The attitude toward war also illustrates that multiple personality is present, perhaps even more present, in the most powerful members of the Party:

“The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members…is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously…(1, p. 128).

“Splitting of the intelligence” (see above) is a euphemism for split personality (an informal term for multiple personality).

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell (post 5): Society’s posttraumatic multiple personality after trauma of nuclear war, not just totalitarian mind control.

Most interpretations of Nineteen Eighty-Four jump to the conclusion that it is basically an extrapolation from Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. However, the novel itself is about the double-thinking multiple personality developed by society after the trauma of nuclear war. (Real multiple personality is a posttraumatic condition.)

Toward the end of the novel, O’Brien pauses in his torture of Winston to say, “And now let us get back to the question of ‘how’ and ‘why.’ You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power…

“You are ruling over us for our own good,” [Winston] said feebly…

“That was stupid, Winston, stupid!…Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake…The object of power is power…It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual…if he can escape his identity…” (1, pp. 174-175).

And when Winston objects that there are certain objective realities that the Party cannot control, O’Brien explains that “Reality is inside the skull…We make the laws of nature…Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them…Have you forgotten doublethink?” (1, pp. 176-177).

Thus, Big Brother and the Party are not eating power food while they feed totalitarian poison to everyone else. Leaders of the Party like O’Brien are eating their own cooking: They, too, lose their individual identities and engage in doublethink (double consciousness, multiple personality).

(Search previous post on Orwell’s “doublethink.” And past posts on “double consciousness,” “double,” and “theme of the double.”)

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

“Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?” by psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman in New York Times is accompanied by graphic suggesting multiple personality.

As noted in previous posts, three columnists of The New York Times (David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins) have inadvertently suggested that President Trump has multiple personality. Now, a call by psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman for mental health professionals to educate the public, but avoid making long-distance diagnoses, is accompanied by a graphic which inadvertently suggests that Trump has multiple personality (1).

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/opinion/is-it-time-to-call-trump-mentally-ill.html

Re President Trump’s News Conference Today, His Easily-Checked Lie About Electoral College Win: Does multiple personality or cynicism explain it?

Here is what happened at President Trump’s news conference of February 16, 2017, as reported by Politifact, a fact-checking website:

“Trump opened his remarks talking about his accomplishments, starting with the election itself.

‘We got 306 because people came out and voted like they've never seen before so that's the way it goes,’ Trump said. ‘I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.’

“This is incorrect. Trump received a smaller share of the Electoral College votes (56.88 percent)  than former presidents George H. W. Bush (79.18 percent), Bill Clinton (68.77 percent in 1992, and 70.45 percent in 1996) and Barack Obama (67.84 percent in 2008 and 61.71 percent in 2012).

“So that’s five elections since Reagan and in which the winner got a larger percentage of the Electoral College votes than Trump.

“Overall, Trump ranks in the bottom third in terms of the size of his Electoral College win. We rated his repeated claim that he won in a ‘massive landslide’ False” (1).

Three Speculations

Since Trump is not psychotic (and at least one personality knows the facts), was the lie told by an alternate, emotional-reality personality, who honestly believed what he said?

Or is Trump just so cynical that he believes most ordinary people see fact-checking as an elitist conspiracy?

Or did a cynical personality let an emotional-reality personality have its say?

1. Politifact. Fact-checking Donald Trump's Feb. 16 press conference. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/feb/16/fact-checking-donald-trumps-press-conference/

Allen Frances in NY Times on Trump: “grandiosity, self-absorption, lack of empathy, ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity, and pursuit of dictatorial powers…

…but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder” (1).

How does Dr. Frances know that President Trump does not suffer from the distress required to diagnose mental disorder? Has he interviewed Trump? And is the Trump administration going so well that Dr. Frances can be sure Trump has no impairment? In any case, a debate over whether Trump is “mentally ill” is a game of semantics.

Instead, consider these more interesting questions: What can account for Trump’s puzzling inconsistencies? Why is Trump so unpredictable?

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/an-eminent-psychiatrist-demurs-on-trumps-mental-state.html