Einstein said his “bad memory” briefly included his own name, suggesting he’d had to quickly switch back to his regular personality

“During the first World War, when I was thirty-five years old and traveled from Germany to Switzerland, I was stopped at the border and asked for my name. I had to hesitate before I remembered it. I have always had a bad memory” (1, p. 21).

1. Albert Einstein. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011.

“Einstein” by Walter Isaacson: Is Einstein’s reputed “absentmindedness” a rationalization for possible multiple-personality trait memory gaps?

“His distracted demeanor, casual grooming, frayed clothing, and forgetfulness, which were later to make him appear to be the iconic absentminded professor, were already evident in his student days. He was known to leave behind clothes, and sometimes even his suitcase, when he traveled, and his inability to remember his keys became a running joke with his landlady. He once visited the home of family friends and, he recalled, ‘I left forgetting my suitcase. My host said to my parents, ‘That man will never amount to anything because he can’t remember anything’ ” (1, p. 39).

Comment: My first reaction to the above was conventional: Einstein was so preoccupied with profound thoughts that he forgot mundane things. But why wasn’t he able to multitask at least to the extent of taking his suitcase?

Did Einstein switch to an alternate personality to do his profound thinking? I don’t know. But I do know that some fiction writers with multiple personality trait, like Mark Twain, were also known for remarkable absentmindedness.

1. Walter Isaacson. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007.

Benjamin Franklin (post 6): Could forensic graphology tell if his Silence Dogood pseudonym was an alternate personality?

I presume that Franklin’s Silence Dogood manuscripts were handwritten (1). Do the originals still exist? If so, could a forensic graphologist tell whether the handwriting were simply faked by Franklin or were written by his alternate personality? I’m not sure, but it might be possible (2).

1. Wikipedia. “Silence DoGood.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_Dogood

2. Eli Somer, Ron Yishai. "Handwriting Examination: Can it help in establishing authenticity in dissociative identity disorder?" Dissociation, Vol. X, No. 2, June 1997, pp. 114-119. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/1826

http://www.somer.co.il/articles/1997Handwriting.DID.Disoc.pdf

Benjamin Franklin (post 5): “The Man of Many Masks” by Gordon S. Wood, Prize-Winning Historian

“…Franklin is never very revealing of himself. He always seems to be holding something back—he is reticent, detached, not wholly committed…we sense that he was always in control and was showing us only what he wanted us to see…

“…Literary scholars have continually interpreted and reinterpreted the Autobiography but still cannot agree on what Franklin was trying to do in writing it. Among the Founders, Jefferson and Adams also wrote autobiographies, but theirs are nothing like Franklin’s. His resembles a work of fiction in that we cannot be sure that the narrative voice is the same as the author’s…It is hard to interpret the Autobiography, since, as scholars have pointed out, Franklin moves between several personas…

“In all of Franklin’s writings…his assuming different personas and roles make it difficult to know how to read him. He was a man of many voices and masks who continually mocks himself. Sometimes in his newspaper essays he was a woman, like ‘Silence Dogood’ or ‘Alice Addertongue’…At other times he was…‘Obadiah Plainman’ or ‘Richard Saunders,’ also known as ‘Poor Richard,’ the almanac maker…During his London years he wrote some ninety pseudonymous items for the press using forty-two different signatures. For each of the many pieces he wrote in Philadelphia and in London he had a remarkable ability to create the appropriate persona…No wonder we have difficulty figuring out who this remarkable man was…

“Although he wrote against disguise and dissimulation…we nevertheless know that he was the master of camouflage and concealment…he seems to have delighted in hiding his innermost thoughts and motives. “Let all Men know thee,’ Poor Richard said, ‘but no man know thee thoroughly…’ ”(1, pp. 13-15).

Comment: The above looks like the description of a man with undiagnosed multiple personality trait, except that there is no report of memory gaps, probably because such information is rarely volunteered, and nobody had asked him about it. And without a history of memory gaps and the interviewing of alternate personalities, the diagnosis cannot be confirmed.

Gordon Stewart Wood is an American historian. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History. His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787  won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal (2).

1. Gordon S. Wood. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York, The Penguin Press, 2004.

2. Wikipedia. “Gordon S. Wood.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_S._Wood

Benjamin Franklin (post 4): Literary scholar notes Franklin’s “self-splittings” and “self-division,” but cannot conceptualize multiple personality trait

In an essay included in the appendix of my edition of Franklin’s autobiography, a literary scholar, Michael Warner, discusses an issue about Franklin that has evidently been raised in the literary criticism literature:

“In rational thought, who is thinking?…

“Method in the arrangement of thoughts is something that Franklin teaches himself. There are two parallel self-splittings in that notion: the first divides the arranging and methodical agent from the subject who has thoughts; the second divides the teacher of method from the thinker who learns it. These splittings allow Franklin to have an internally private relation to himself: neither way of describing his action or his thinking can comprise his ‘self.’ He can carry out actions of which he is both subject and object…it requires a thorough and normative self-division…(1, p 365).

After the above passage, Warner goes on to mention Franklin’s use of pseudonyms Richard Saunders and Mrs. Silence DoGood, but does not raise the possibility of Franklin’s having a nonclinical version of multiple personality, what I call “multiple personality trait.”

1. Michael Warner. His scholarly essay in the appendix of Joyce E. Chapin (Editor). Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Norton Critical Editions. New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2012.

Benjamin Franklin (post 3): Poor Richard’s Almanack by Richard Saunders, who was either Franklin’s pseudonymous alternate personality or merely a joke, depending on whether Saunder's denial of Franklin's authorship was subjectively sincere

“In 1733, Franklin began to publish the noted Poor Richard’s Almanack under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, on which much of his popular reputation is based…Although it was no secret that he was the author, his Richard Saunders character repeatedly denied it. ‘Poor Richard's Proverbs,’ adages from this almanac, such as "A penny saved is twopence dear" (often misquoted as "A penny saved is a penny earned") and "Fish and visitors stink in three days,” remain common quotations in the modern world. Wisdom in folk society meant the ability to provide an apt adage for any occasion, and his readers became well prepared. He sold about ten thousand copies per year—it became an institution” (1).

1. Wikipedia. “Benjamin Franklin.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

Comment: Oscar Wilde also had an alternate personality responsible for his popular quotations:

2014 past post

Oscar Wilde (post #3): The Picture of Dorian Gray and who Wrote all those Quotations

“Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages perhaps.” Letter from Oscar Wilde, 12 February 1894

The main characters of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray are three young English gentlemen: Basil, the Artist, who has painted the picture and is infatuated with Dorian; Lord Henry, the Quotable; and Dorian, the pretty-boy who is corrupted by the hedonistic ideas given to him by Lord Henry.

Basil (the character with whom the writer of the above letter identifies) knows Dorian before Lord Henry does, and is reluctant to reveal his name. Lord Henry asks why. Basil explains, “When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It seems like surrendering a part of them. You know I love secrecy.” This is the prototypical attitude of the person with multiple personality. The last thing they will reveal is the actual name of another personality, and their general attitude is one of secrecy.

“Dorian Gray” appears to be the name of a group of personalities. “For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this book [that Lord Henry had given to him]…He procured…no less than five…copies…bound in different colors, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control.” This reminds me of the different colored notebooks used by different personalities in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (see Lessing posts).

One or more of the Dorian Gray personalities is interested in various esoteric aesthetic interests, while one or more other of the Dorian Gray personalities leaves home for “mysterious and prolonged absences” … "under an assumed name, and in disguise” or he “would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature.”  “Curious stories became current about him…It was said that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors…and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade.” He would also ruin women from both the upper and lower classes. Thus, “Dorian Gray” was multiple Jekylls and multiple Hydes.

“Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray’s opinion. He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives…”

To conclude, let’s take a fresh look at the letter quoted at the beginning of this post. The personality of Oscar Wilde who wrote that letter says he is Basil, the Artist, not Lord Henry, whom the world thinks he is. Who is Lord Henry? He happens to be the character who provides most of the novel’s numerous quotable remarks. So the letter writer is saying that he is not the personality responsible for the public’s image of Oscar Wilde as someone who is famous for memorable quotes. The quotes are from Oscar Wilde’s other “Lord Henry” personalities.

Wilde, Oscar. The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.

Benjamin Franklin’s Pseudonyms: I plan to follow-up my past post from 2015 (reprinted below)

Past Post from 2015

Pseudonyms of Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe, and Benjamin Franklin: Was it only playful satire? Do their pseudonyms imply multiple personality?

“In his satires, Jonathan Swift used seventeen pseudonyms including Isaac Bickerstaff and M. B. Drapier, following a satirical convention of having silly-sounding, playful, and memorable pseudonyms…Voltaire, whose real name was Francois Marie Arouet, used 173 pseudonyms (174 if one includes ‘Voltaire’)…Daniel Defoe, who holds the record of using 198 pseudonyms, had one called Miranda Meanwell. In his female pseudonym, Silence Dogood, Franklin actually quotes Defoe…Silence Dogood appeared in…1722. Franklin continues to employ both male and female pseudonyms throughout the 1720s with Busy Body, Patience, Martha Careful, and Caelia Shortface. In the 1730s he used the nom de plumes of Alice Addertongue, Anthony Afterwit, Celia Single, and, most prolifically, Richard Saunders [author of Poor Richard’s Almanack]” (1).

1. Calaway, Jared C., "Benjamin Franklin's Female and Male Pseudonyms: Sex, Gender, Culture, and Name Suppression from Boston to Philadelphia and Beyond" (2003). http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=history_honproj

Comment [2015]: I have no information on whether Swift, Voltaire, Defoe, or Franklin had multiple personality, which is the implication of pseudonyms that is previously discussed in this blog. But I thought their having pseudonyms was interesting to note.

Pen Names: How to distinguish marketing ploys from alternate personalities by the author’s subjective experience

Is a pen name merely a name that is used for privacy, or that is expected to sell better? If so, the author may give it up if and when everyone knows who they are. But the basic question is how the author thinks and feels when they write as one person or the other. And some authors have been quite candid about it: They say that when they write as the person with this name, they think and feel this way and like these things. But when they write using the other name, they’re like a different person. They say they’ve always had different sides, like Jekyll and Hyde, but in their own way.

Pseudonyms and Pen Names: In multiple personality, the names of alternate personalities are, of course, pseudonyms.

Search “pseudonym” for past discussions of various writers.

1. Carmela Ciuraru. Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. Harper, 2011.

2. Adrian Room. Dictionary of Pseudonyms, Fifth Edition. McFarland & Co., 2010.

3. T. J. Carty. A Dictionary of Literary Pseudonyms in the English Language. UNKNO, 2000.

4. Michael Peschke. International Encyclopedia of Pseudonyms: Real Names. K. G. Saur, 2007.

5. Wikipedia. “Pseudonym.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonym

6. Wikipedia. “Pen Name.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_name

Many Pseudonyms? Probably Alternate Personalities

—Søren Kierkegaard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

—Fernando Pessoa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa

—Charles Hamilton (Frank Richards et al) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamilton_(writer)

—Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal

Indeed, any time writers use one or more pseudonyms, even if they claim it is only for marketing purposes, be skeptical.

Joan of Arc (post 4): Multiple personality and heroism may have originated as a psychological defense against actual or threatened sexual abuse

Her greatest accomplishment was getting England out of France; that is, getting certain men out of, and away from, where they shouldn’t have been. Her wearing men’s clothing and armor, and surrounding herself with soldiers, protected herself, personally. Her voices indicated that she had multiple personality, as previously discussed regarding her and many others.

Multiple personality may originate as a psychological defense against childhood sexual abuse, but she probably did not have severe childhood sexual abuse, or had only felt threatened, because severe abuse, especially without either real-life protectors or protective alternate personalities, might have made her mentally ill.

And as far as I know, she was a hero, and not mentally ill.

Joan of Arc (post 3): On Not Reading Mark Twain’s Novel about a Woman who Heard Voices

I had planned to read Joan of Arc by Mark Twain (1), especially since Twain’s appended essay says that Joan of Arc “is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced” (1, p. 452). He says that her “personality is one to be reverently studied, loved, and marveled at, but not to be wholly understood and accounted for by even the most searching analysis” (including his) (1, p. 441). So I hesitated to read a novel by an author who admitted that he didn’t understand the protagonist.

Instead, I will apply what I know as a psychiatrist about people like Joan of Arc, who hear voices.

If I think that the person and their voices sound like rational people, I inquire about the voices and try to engage them in conversation. If I am wrong, and the person and voices are actually psychotic, the person may react like I’m the crazy one for trying to relate to the voices. However, if I’m right, and these are voices of nonpsychotic alternate personalities in nonpsychotic multiple personality, then the person will often, initially, reject my inquiry, but for a different reason: that it’s an invasion of privacy. Persons with undiagnosed multiple personality usually consider their voices a very private matter. And that is how Joan of Arc reacted when people inquired about her voices.

1. Mark Twain. (Personal Recollections of) Joan of Arc [1896]. San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1989/2007.

“Saint Joan” by Bernard Shaw [Nobel Prize winner]: Shaw’s Preface shows he didn’t realize that Joan of Arc had multiple personality

“Joan’s voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation. They have been held to prove that she was mad, that she was a liar and impostor, that she was a sorceress (she was burned for this), and finally that she was a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the variety of the conclusions reached shew how little our matter-of-fact historians know about other people’s minds, or even about their own. There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure…Joan must be judged a sane woman in spite of her voices because they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her from her mother wit…”(1, Preface, pp. 11-12).

“Joan was what Francis Galton and other modern investigators of human faculty call a visualizer…and…the street is full of normally sane people who have hallucinations of all sorts which they believe to be part of the normal permanent equipment of all human beings” (1, Preface, p. 18).

Comment: If Joan had only one personality, she would have remembered imagining and visualizing her voices, and so would not have thought these were persons independent of her, with minds of their own.

Shaw’s Saint Joan—who wore men's clothing to lead soldiers in battle, etc.—was probably one of Joan of Arc's alternate personalities.

1. Bernard Shaw. Saint Joan [1924]. London, Penguin Classics, 2003.

“Joan of Arc, A History” by historian Helen Castor: Joan heard one voice always, another intermittently, and a third whom the other two consulted

“…a peasant girl hears heavenly voices bringing a message of salvation for France, which lies broken at the hands of the invading English. Against all the odds, she reaches the dauphin Charles, the disinherited heir to the French throne, and convinces him that God has made it her mission to drive the English from his kingdom. Dressed in armour as though she were a man, with her hair cut short, she leads an army to rescue the town of Orléans from an English siege…But soon she is captured by allies of the English, to whom she is handed over for trial as a heretic…She is burned to death in the market square in Rouen, but her legend proves much harder to kill. Nearly five hundred years later, the Catholic Church recognizes her not only as a heroine, but as a saint…

“There seems little purpose…in attempting to diagnose in her a physical or psychological disorder that might, to us, explain her voices…Joan and the people around her knew that it was entirely possible for otherworldly beings to communicate with men and women of sound mind; Joan was not the first or last person in France in the first half of the fifteenth century to have visions or hear voices…Similarly…in medieval minds, war was always interpreted as an expression of divine will…” (1, pp. 1-5).

“She first heard it [her voice from God] at the height of a summer day in her father’s garden when she was thirteen years old…she was speaking sometimes of a voice, and sometimes of ‘voices’. But when Beaupère asked who had told her to wear men’s clothes, she refused to say…” (1, pp. 170-171).

“Her squire Jean d’ Aulon recalled that, when he had asked about her revelations, she told him she had three counsellors — one who was with her always, another who came and went, and a third whom the other two consulted. But when he begged to be allowed to see them, she said he was not worthy or virtuous enough. He did not ask again” (1, p. 238).

Comment: I will see what other sources say.

Added July 20: The voices cited in the title look like a typical constellation of alternate personalities.

1. Helen Castor. Joan of Arc, A History. New York, Harper Perennial, 2016. 

LYING: Who Does It and What Causes It?

Is Joshua Hunt both the essayist on pathological lying (1) and a successful journalist (2)?

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/opinion/class-poverty-lying.html

2. http://www.viajoshhunt.com/about

I don't know, but for another view on lying, search “lying” in this blog.

Two Types of Inner Voices: “Intrapersonal” vs. “Communication with Alternate Personalities”

“Intrapersonal communication is the process by which an individual communicates within themselves by…acting as both sender and receiver of messages…to consciously engage in self-talk and inner speech…Intrapersonal communication is a person's inner voice…

…Intrapersonal communication also facilitates the process by which an individual engages in unspoken internal dialogue between different and sometimes conflicting attitudes, thoughts, and feelings…An inner discourse takes place much as would a discussion with a second person…” (1).

Forms of Communication with the Alternate Personalities

“…Another form of contact is through inner vocalizations. The patient may ‘hear’ the alternate personality speak as an inner voice within, often as one of the ‘voices’ that the patient has been hearing for years” (2, p. 94).

Comment: An inner voice may be the voice of an alternate personality if it seems to have a mind of its own.

1. Wikipedia. “Intrapersonal Communication.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapersonal_communication

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

“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (post 7): Reader’s regretful conclusion

Even though the remainder of the novel included a character, Elly Brand, who had a named alternate personality, and there wasn’t much more for me to read, I stopped reading before the end, feeling that the novel’s perspective was just too dated.

1. Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain [1924]. Translation from the German by John E. Woods. New York, Vintage International, 1996. 

 “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (post 6): Character is repeatedly referred to as “a personality”

Mr. Peeperkorn, who is not introduced until page 538, is gone by page 616, and is not expected to have any relevance in the remaining ninety pages of the novel, has nothing about him to suggest multiple personality, except that he is repeatedly and frequently referred to as “a personality,” which is how one would refer to an alternate personality.

In the novel, “a personality” is used in the sense of a personage, and is meant to convey that this character is of a distinctly higher social status than the protagonist. So why wasn’t “personage” used? Is this just a matter of translation? Or did the author slip and reveal a subjective sense that this and other characters were his alternate personalities?

1. Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain [1924]. Translation from the German by John E. Woods. New York, Vintage International, 1996.

Added July 15: Coincidentally, unrelated to the above, in the next chapter, the narrator uses the phrase "a high-placed personage" (1, p. 620), so "a personality" had probably not been an issue of translation.

“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (post 5): Author opens last section of novel by highlighting dissociative (multiple personality) issues

“Can one narrate time? (1, p. 531).

“We have often declared that we do not wish to make him [the protagonist, Hans Castorp] any better or worse than he was, and so we do not want to hide the fact that he frequently took countermeasures to try to atone for the reprehensible pleasure he found in mystic disturbances that he quite consciously and intentionally elicited himself” (1. p. 535).

Comment: Multiple personality (also known as “dissociative identity disorder”) encompasses issues of time and lost time (memory gaps), mystic disturbances (dissociative trance states), and plurality (“we”).

Did the author take “reprehensible pleasure” in these things?

1. Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain [1924]. Translation from the German by John E. Woods. New York, Vintage International, 1996.

Stunt Fiction: Book Review Promotes Hundred-Year Literary Tradition

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/books/review-carnality-lina-wolff.html

My theory is that what I call “stunt fiction"—in which a writer who knows better violates the norms of good writing—represents an author’s unmoderated multiple personality trait.