Dashiell Hammett (post 4, update): Why did he have writer’s block for the last decades of his life? Why did he fail in his attempt to write literary novels?

I’m up to page 141 in The Dain Curse. The protagonist, who is a detective, says to another character, who is a writer:

“Don’t be literary with me, building up to climaxes and the like. I’m too crude for that—it’d only give me a bellyache. Just spread it out for me.

“ ‘You’ll always be what you are,’ he [the writer] said.”

I don’t think this dialogue proves my speculation as to why Hammett had writer’s block when he tried to write more literary novels; however, in the context of my speculation in yesterday’s post about “artistic differences” between personalities, I do find it funny.

Dashiell Hammett (post 4): Why did he have writer’s block for the last decades of his life? Why did he fail in his attempt to write literary novels?

After Hammett’s great success in writing detective stories and novels, he sought to prove that he could write novels of a more literary kind. Was his writer’s block related to his attempt to write literary novels; if so, why?

One possibility is that Hammett did not have any storytelling, alternate personalities suited to writing literary novels. However, I have just started to read his novel, The Dain Curse, and aside from the nameless protagonist, hero-detective, Continental Op, there is a character who is a writer. This writer, as far as I can see so far, does not write detective stories, and seems to be an intellectual. So I think that Hammett probably did have alternate personalities suited to making the switch to literary novels.

Another possibility is that his detective and literary personalities had artistic differences, so to speak. And since “Dashiell Hammett” was the author of detective novels, the personality known by that name could not be the author of any other kind. For example, when Agatha Christie wrote novels that were not detective novels, she wrote them under a pseudonym. So Hammett’s block might have been resolved by writing under a pseudonym. But maybe he tried that; I don’t know.

Mark Twain on Writer’s Block: Writers cannot write if their alternate personalities are not “filling up the tank.” This implies you must speak to them.

The following two past posts are not quick fixes, but they might be helpful:

April 29, 2016

Mark Twain’s avowed alternate personality, outside Twain’s awareness, explains how Twain’s books would “write itself” with “unconscious cerebration”  

In yesterday’s post, I quoted from Mark Twain’s notebook, in which he said that he had multiple personality:

“The two persons in a man do not even know each other and are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other—have never even suspected each other’s existence…I am not acquainted with [have no conscious awareness of] my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me…”

You may wonder what his having an alternate personality—a “wholly independent personage who resides in me,” who does whatever he does, totally out of his regular self’s awareness—has to do with his writing?

The answer is, Everything, according to what he says about how his creative process works, for example:

“As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag; but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind…

“…when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again, in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work on other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on” (1, p. 196).

Of course, the “unconscious…cerebration” was unconscious only in the sense that his regular self was not conscious of it. But his “partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me” was evidently busy “contriving [the novel’s] situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations,” to fill up the tank from which Mark Twain drew.

1. [Samuel L. Clemens]. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, et al., Editors. A publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. Berkeley Los Angeles London, University of California Press, 2013.

October 21, 2016

Curing Writer’s Block: Implications of Multiple Identity Literary Theory, which holds that writers have and use a normal version of multiple personality.

What is blocked in writer’s block? That which normally goes on in the writer’s mind: a cooperative participation of the writer’s alternate personalities.

Thus, when writer’s block does occur, writers who are familiar with their alternate personalities will know with whom to discuss the problem.

There are two ways to communicate with alternate personalities: talking and writing. When writers talk with their characters, narrators, muses, and other voices, they are talking with their alternate personalities. When writers keep extensive journals, and sometimes find entries responding to their inquiries, expressing alternate views (which, if handwritten, may be in different handwritings), those mysterious entries are from their alternate personalities.

The cooperative participation of alternate personalities might be blocked by anything that causes, in the view of the alternate personality, a hostile work environment. For example, if a particular alternate personality is facilitated by a moderate blood-alcohol level or a mild depression, they may be blocked by excessive drinking or severe depression. Or an alternate personality might have artistic differences, and want to publish independently, under a pseudonym.

Since the possible kinds of complaints are infinite, it is best to ask your alternate personalities what is bothering them. If you think you have spoken to all your alternate personalities, but still have writer’s block, you may have alternate personalities whom you have not yet met. You may, in the words of Walt Whitman, contain multitudes.

New York Times columnists inadvertently describe President Trump as having behavior suggestive of multiple personality: “6-year-old” and “protean man.”

As I’ve noted in past posts (search “Trump”), a number of Times columnists have unintentionally suggested that President Trump has multiple personality.

There is a difference between calling someone immature and saying he is like a 6-year-old. The latter suggests the presence of a child-aged alternate personality (the most common kind of alternate personality, because multiple personality starts in childhood).

And to say that Trump is a “protean man” is to say that he changes like a person with multiple personalities.

Here is what they say:

“Fans of the old TV series may remember a classic ‘Twilight Zone’ episode…It featured a small town terrorized by a 6-year-old who for some reason had monstrous superpowers…And now you know what it must be like working in the Trump administration. Actually, it feels a bit like that just living in Trump’s America” (1).

“He is the ultimate protean man” (2).

Of course, none of this proves that Trump has multiple personality (a normal version). But it continues to raise the question, inadvertently.

1. Paul Krugman. “Living in the Trump Zone.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/living-in-the-trump-zone.html?_r=0

2. David Brooks. “The Pond Skater Presidency.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/the-pond-skater-presidency.html

Dashiell Hammett (post 3): Recurring hero-detective, Continental Op, is referred to by his function, not by any name, typical of nameless alternate personalities.

In the two previous posts (search “Hammett”), I discussed multiple personality in The Maltese Falcon, which was most obviously implicated in “the novel’s most important passage” (1, p. 76) about the dissociative fugue of Mr. Flitcraft, which was left out of the movie starring Humphrey Bogart. In regard to naming, multiple personality was suggested by Brigid’s multiple names and changeability. But see those two past posts for more about it.

Names, Signatures, and Identity

“Hammett, who answered to several names himself (Dash, Sam, Dashiell, Hammett), was as cagey about his identity as he was savagely protective of his privacy. He signed himself in an early story as Peter Collinson, which in the underworld slang of the time meant ‘Nobody’s Son.’ Hammett’s first detective is the nameless hero known merely as the Continental Op. He gave later detectives names like Sam, his own first name, and other characters were named for people he admired, such as a former fellow patient nicknamed Whitey. Curiously, he signed several letters with the names of his characters, like Spade, Nicky, and Whitey…” (1, p. xx).

“Before Hammett, the goal had been solving the crime. After Hammett, the detective himself would become a central subject. Hammett’s…premise was that the biggest mystery was the self” (1, p. 44).

Continental Op

“The Continental Op is a fictional character created by Dashiell Hammett. He is a private investigator employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office. His name is never mentioned in any story…He appeared in 36 short stories…” and the novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (2).

To repeat, Dashiell Hammett’s most frequent protagonist is referred to, not by any name (he is nameless), but in terms of his function: He is an operative of the Continental Detective Agency.

Did Hammett have any reason for his character’s namelessness? Apparently, he had no particular reason. This was just the way the character had come to him, and since the character was getting along fine, he was not going to meddle:

“Hammett told his…editor on October 10, 1923, that he hadn’t deliberately kept his hero nameless. But as the Op had got through two stories without needing a name, he would let him continue…

Indeed, the character was not only nameless, but singleminded:

“The Op is a strange hero-detective. He has no home, no interests except his job, no goal except to get the job done…” (1, p. 46).

Namelessness in Multiple Personality

In multiple personality, while many alternate personalities do have their own names, many other alternate personalities are 1) nameless, and 2) referred to by their function, because they are rather singleminded.

Clinical example: A woman, who was not a writer, was puzzled to have occasionally found handwritten poems in a drawer at home, which she had no interest in or memory of writing. I persisted in asking her about these poems, which made her increasingly uncomfortable, until her demeanor suddenly changed.

Now she knew all about the poems, said she wrote them, and said that that was the only thing she cared about or did. She had no name. So I referred to this alternate personality by her function, as the Poet, which made sense to her.

When I then addressed the woman by her regular name, her demeanor suddenly changed back to the way it was usually. She had no memory of what had just happened, and still could not account for finding those poems in her drawer at home.

For further discussion of names and namelessness, prompted by other writers and works, search “nameless,” “nobody,” and “pseudonyms” in this blog.

1. Sally Cline. Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery. A Biography. New York, Arcade Publishing, 2014.

2. Wikipedia. “The Continental Op.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Continental_Op

What does a person with multiple personality look like? (post 2): Quite different from what most psychiatrists, psychologists, and other people expect.

“My first case was encountered serendipitously…This raised my index of suspicion, and I found four additional cases…This caused me to wonder if, perhaps, multiple personality disorder was not as rare as it was alleged to be. I undertook a detailed study of these five patients. All five cases had extensive histories in the mental health care delivery system; all had been diagnosed borderline or schizophrenic (some had received both diagnoses from different clinicians); and all but one had been given an affective disorder diagnosis [depression or bipolar], as well. None had responded well to prior therapy. All were either trying to hide their multiple personality disorder or to deny it. None were exhibitionistic or inclined to flaunt or augment their pathology…All admitted they had withheld relevant data at the time of their initial assessments, and all had initially denied amnesia or covered over their amnestic periods. Hence, the patients’ actual presentations were counterexpectational to the then-stereotypic picture of multiple personality disorder…

“Multiple personality disorder patients in treatment often denied their disorder. In the face of powerful evidence and confrontation, they offered convincing alternative rationalizations to explain away signs and symptoms.  They often evaded rather than sought out therapeutic assistance. It became clear that personalities often passed for one another, could emerge and recede so rapidly that the only trace they left was a brief fluctuation in facial expression…Often several months passed during which personalities did not emerge fully. They influenced one another by hallucinated inner voices, or in some way by imposing themselves upon alters [alternate personalities] ostensibly in control of the body.

“I realized that a patient withholding or unaware of data, or who initially presented in the manner I often saw in sessions with individuals known to be classic multiple personality disorder patients, would never fall under suspicion for multiple personality disorder. This, and the alleged rarity of multiple personality disorder, led me to believe that multiple personality disorder is considered unusual because 1) clinicians expect to see and confirm a steady and public history of certain dramatic phenomena…2) the phenomena they expect to see are not displayed in an ongoing and continuous basis by the majority of multiple personality disorder patients, who try to keep their condition concealed…” (1, pp. 204-206).

Comment: Since this blog is about the normal version of multiple personality, and is not about the clinical, mental illness, is the above relevant? Yes, because the normal version is the same as the clinical version, except that the normal version is not causing the person a clinically significant amount of distress or dysfunction, and may even be an asset (e.g., in writing novels and winning Nobel prizes). Many more people have the normal version.

1. Richard P. Kluft, M.D., Ph.D. “The Natural History of Multiple Personality Disorder,” pp. 198-238, in Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality, Edited by Richard P. Kluft, M.D., Ph.D. Washington DC, American Psychiatric Press, 1985.

What does a person with multiple personality look like? If you google that question, you will probably not learn the truth (unless you get a link to this post).

If you google that question, you will be told what a person with multiple personality looks like, their signs and symptoms, after they have been diagnosed, when the alternate personalities have had their cover blown, so to speak, not what the person looked like or how they behaved before that.

Before a person with multiple personality has been diagnosed, they do have all those signs and symptoms, and have had them since childhood, but not for show. You will probably meet only the person’s host personality, not their alternate personalities, who are usually not “out.” Thus, the signs and symptoms, though present, are inconspicuous.

So what does a person with multiple personality look like? They usually look like everyone else.

(For past posts on diagnosis, search “mental status,” “diagnostic criteria,” and “memory gaps.”)

Anne Sexton (post 3): Her psychiatrist tells her “Elizabeth” alternate personality to get lost, and her host personality says “Elizabeth” was a lie.

“Early in Sexton’s therapy [1957], the Elizabeth persona began making appearances while Sexton was in a trance by scrawling messages in childlike handwriting…By September, she was typing letters which she left unsigned, though ‘Elizabeth’ appeared in the return address on the envelopes. Somewhat comically, the writer claimed that she had to type her introductory letter in the dark so Anne wouldn’t read it” (1, p. 55).

Note: Although the biographer thought that the above was comical, readers of this blog know better, since they recall the recent post on Shirley Jackson in which she describes her alternate personalities as leaving notes when her host personality was not looking.

Sexton’s psychiatrist, Dr. Orne, considered “Elizabeth” to be a dangerous symptom for a patient he had diagnosed as having hysteria. He feared that “Sexton was perilously close to developing multiple personality disorder” (1, p. 60), so he ignored “Elizabeth” and she no longer appeared. Moreover, Anne denounced “Elizabeth” as having been a lie (1, p. 63).

Dr. Orne had also expressed concern that Sexton was such a suggestible hysteric that if he had left her hospitalized on a ward with patients who had schizophrenia, she might falsely adopt their psychotic symptoms. But since Sexton had not been exposed to any patients with multiple personality (completely different from schizophrenia), from where did he think she was coming up with the idea of an alternate personality? And his belief that a person can develop multiple personality for the first time in adulthood is wrong; it has a childhood onset.

Moreover, Orne seems to equate having multiple personality with the overtness of an alternate personality. He does not know that that is not how multiple personality ordinarily looks (before it is diagnosed). In the typical case, the alternate personalities are incognito (answering to the regular name and pretending to be the host personality).

You typically discover the alternate personalities in the process of accounting for the person’s memory gaps. And Orne had never understood why Sexton had memory gaps for their therapy sessions (see previous post).

In multiple personality, undiagnosed alternate personalities typically become overt only in some sort of crisis. “Elizabeth” became overt, because she felt that Dr. Orne did not understand his patient (1, p. 55). But when Dr. Orne intentionally ignored her, she reverted to her usual life behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Anne, the host personality, was only too glad to call “Elizabeth” a lie, in compliance with Dr. Orne’s opinion about it.

As quoted in the previous post, from an interview years later, Sexton knew that she was “many people.”

1. Diane Wood Middlebrook. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Anne Sexton (post 2): “It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people…I become someone else…even in moments when I’m not writing the poem”

“It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it. Many times I assume these guises; I attack it the way a novelist might. Sometimes I become someone else, and when I do, I believe, even in moments when I’m not writing the poem, that I am that person. When I wrote about the farmer’s wife, I lived in my mind in Illinois; when I had the illegitimate child, I nursed it—in my mind—and gave it back and traded life. When I gave my lover back to his wife, in my mind, I grieved and saw how ethereal and unnecessary I had been. When I was Christ, I felt like Christ. My arms hurt, I desperately wanted to pull them in off the Cross. When I was taken down off the Cross and buried alive, I sought solutions; I hoped they were Christian solutions.”

from Anne Sexton interview with Barbara Kevles in 1968, published in The Paris Review, 1971. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4073/anne-sexton-the-art-of-poetry-no-15-anne-sexton

Anne Sexton’s Memory Gaps: Phi Beta Kappa, Pulitzer Prize poet repeatedly had amnesia for what she had said during psychotherapy sessions.

Anne Sexton saw Dr. Martin Orne, a psychiatrist, two to three times a week from 1956 to 1964:

“From the start, it was clear to Orne that Sexton was unable to remember much from one session to the next. From his point of view, Sexton’s ‘memory trouble’ proved the biggest obstacle to her progress. To address this problem, he eventually suggested (at the end of 1960) that they tape her sessions so that she might listen to what they discussed and reflect upon it in between sessions. Orne believed that transcribing the sessions would help Sexton ‘understand what she was doing’ (Middlebrook, 1991). Faithfully transcribing each tape, Sexton arrived at a session prepared to discuss what had transpired in the previous hour. She commented that she often only ‘heard’ his part of the dialogue when she wrote it down” (1, Introduction, p. xvi).

“Some of the tapes feature the long silences of Sexton’s trances, the dissociated states she entered when angry or upset, presumably in an attempt to manage her feelings. We can hear Orne's soothing voice as he attempted to coax her back to consciousness, and the flare of his anger when she refused to do so, even though the appointment had come to an end and another patient was waiting outside” (1, p xx).

“Her father, whose personality changed completely when he was drunk, once beat Anne with a riding crop because she had stolen her sister’s birthday money…Later, Sexton was to speculate about whether she had been sexually abused by…her father, a question which returned in her therapy sessions dozens of times and which is the subject of many of her poems (as well as her Broadway play, Mercy Street)” (1, p. xiv).

Comments

The only psychological condition with recurrent amnesia (search “memory gaps”) or spontaneous trances or complete personality changes (the latter attributed to Sexton’s father) is dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality).

Furthermore, after Sexton listened to the recordings of her psychotherapy sessions, “She commented that she often only ‘heard’ [the psychiatrist’s] part of the dialogue.” That is, she could not “hear” the voices of her alternate personalities, with whom she was not co-conscious. Indeed, it was her lack of co-consciousness with these alternate personalities that had accounted for her host personality’s memory gaps for the parts of sessions in which the alternate personalities had been in control.

As any clinician who is familiar with multiple personality knows, alternate personalities (who have not had their cover blown by diagnosis) typically try to remain incognito (they answer to the persons’s regular name and pass for the host personality). So the clinician has to recognize clues, such as memory gaps, and find out what accounts for these gaps; i.e., meet the alternate personalities who had been in control for these periods of time. 

Sexton’s memory gaps should have prompted an evaluation for multiple personality. But, to be fair to Dr. Orne, those were Freudian days, and since Freud’s theories were antithetical to understanding multiple personality (as I have previously discussed), most clinicians would have missed the diagnosis.

As to Sexton’s father, if it is true that when he drank he had a complete change in personality, then he may have had multiple personality, too. Multiple personality is sometimes multigenerational. Alcohol itself does not completely change the personality, but if a person has multiple personality, alcohol may prompt a switch to an alternate personality who drinks.

1. Dawn M. Skorczewski. An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton. New York, Routledge, 2012.

“Two Girls, Fat and Thin” by Mary Gaitskill: Two women who were sexually abused in childhood now have multiple personality, but it is unacknowledged. 

Dorothy (fat) and Justine (thin) are two young women who had been sexually abused in childhood (1, pp. 26-27). This psychological novel depicts its aftereffects.

Since the association between childhood sexual abuse and multiple personality is well known, the following questions should be in the mind of any reader: Will the characters have signs of multiple personality? If so, will these signs be labelled as such by a narrator or character? Or will these signs be unacknowledged? (Most multiple personality in novels is unacknowledged.)

Dorothy

“The boundaries of my inner world—[when a person’s alternate personalities are not ‘out,’ they are nevertheless conscious, and are living in the person’s ‘inner world’]—did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded, like the force field of clouds and limitless night sky that surrounded the island of Never-Never Land” (1, p. 111). [See posts on J. M. Barrie.]

“Those dinner tribunals occurred with such frequency that I developed the ability to divide myself while they occurred; the external person who sat and cried while her father reviled her and the internal person who helped herself to more salad as he ranted, and noticed that the scalloped potatoes were particularly succulent tonight” (1, p. 117).

[Following her father’s sexual abuse the night before, she has had a multiple personality type of memory gap, a dissociative fugue, in which she finds herself somewhere else, without memory of how she got there:] “I became conscious again as I sat in study hall the next day before a pile of books” (1, p. 124).

“She said, ‘Oh, wait, you haven’t told me—what is your name? I mean your real name, not the one your parents gave you.’ And I said, ‘Dorothy. Dorothy Never’ ” (1, p. 183). [“Dorothy Never,” as in Never-Never Land, is not the character’s real name, but is evidently the name of an alternate personality.]

[Told her duties as a secretary] “I wanted to cry, I can’t do it! I can’t! But fast after this feeling came another, a deep dark surge of ‘Oh yes you can’ that seemed to come from my lower body…It was a proud, stubborn, angry feeling that made me picture a harsh thin-lipped mouth setting itself in determination. My will, usually wandering my body in various pieces…After the first few hours had passed, my frayed perception forked into two—one navigating the landscape of words, phrases, and ideas, the other absorbing the sounds, inflections, and tonal habits of the voices” (1, p. 201).

“It was as if I had divided into two people: one hungrily embracing the dangerous world of emotional contact and power play, enjoying the game of move, counter move, the unpredictable changes of feelings, the other a terrified child unable to bear the carnivorous spirit of this world, weeping with fear at the sight of adults savagely copulating on their beds, on desks, in elevators” (1, p. 268).

“A voice of reason coughed nervously and interjected that perhaps I had misinterpreted the message of her eyes. But I had not!…I felt like there was an animal trapped in my lower body, pacing furiously, wanting to come out and tear the nearest living creature to pieces” (1, p. 287).

“The chattering voices [of various alternate personalities] in my head stopped, confused…The voices lunged forward, all talking at once, knocking each other down and climbing over each other to explain” (1, p. 295).

Justine

“A tough little person [child-aged alternate personality] within her rose and asserted itself” (1, p. 101).

“She remembers a strange thing she said one night at the dinner table, without knowing why she said it. Her mother asked her how school had been that day, and, recalling a study hall conversation, she answered, ‘Sally Hinkel is going to fuck Jim Thorn tonight.’ Her father’s eyes opened in alarm, her mother’s mouth opened in mid-bite…” (1, p. 139). [An alternate personality had spoken up, inappropriately.]

“One part of her stepped forward like a first grader in a starched dress with her hands clasped behind her back…and yet another part of her tried to puzzle out why she was talking to this prick…” (1, p. 193).

“The child Justine [one of her child-aged personalities] pouted flirtatiously as he eyed her” (1, p. 243).

“Even the rampaging child [another child-aged personality] paused, wondering” (1, p. 248).

[Child-aged alternate personalities are the most common kind, since multiple personality starts in childhood, and such personalities are often frozen in time.]

“Justine pressed her face into the floor [as an adult, she is, at her own request, engaging in a sadomasochistic scene], rubbing her cheek against the porous smelly wood, trying to scrape through her drunkenness. Blackness roared around her; she could barely feel the welts rising on her back. Her knees hurt, she thought. He beat her as she squirmed on the floor, caught in the steel trap that had closed on her when she was five years old. The upper strata of her thoughts and feelings had ruptured, and the creature long trapped beneath [an alternate personality] was out and gnawing her with its teeth” (1, p. 270). [This passage connects her adult interest in sadomasochism with her child abuse at age five and its resulting alternate personalities.]

Concluding Comments

Both of the novel’s two main characters had a history of child abuse, and now have manifestations of alternate personalities. However, since there is no narrator or character who labels it as multiple personality, per se, its presence in the novel seems to be unintentional, and may reflect the author’s own psychology.

Most reviewers of this novel completely missed these issues, but they should not have: When a psychological novel’s set-up is two main characters, both with histories of child abuse, reviewers should stop to consider the implications (multiple personality).

1. Mary Gaitskill. Two Girls, Fat and Thin. New York, Poseidon Press, 1991.

“People Have Limited Knowledge. What’s the Remedy? Nobody Knows”: New York Times review of “The Knowledge Illusion” forgets “The Unconscious”

“In The Knowledge Illusion, the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach hammer another nail into the coffin of the rational individual. From the 17th century to the 20th century, Western thought depicted individual human beings as independent rational agents…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/books/review/knowledge-illusion-steven-sloman-philip-fernbach.html

But Western thought has long given up on the idea that people are always rational, that they always know why they think what they think or do what they do. I discussed the centuries-old Western idea of “the unconscious” in a recent post:

March 31, 2017

“The Unconscious”: First, Freud did not discover it (it was already well known); Second, it’s a misnomer, since it refers to conscious, alternate personalities.

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind

“The term ‘unconscious’ was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Influences on thinking that originate from outside of an individual's consciousness were reflected in the ancient ideas of divine inspiration, and the predominant role of the gods in affecting motives and actions. Unconscious aspects of mentality were referred to between 2500 and 600 BC in the Hindu texts known as the Vedas. Paracelsus is credited as the first to make mention of an unconscious aspect of cognition in 1567. William Shakespeare explored the role of the unconscious in many of his plays, without naming it as such. In addition, Western philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche used the word unconscious. In 1880, Edmond Colsenet supports at the Sorbonne, a philosophy thesis on the unconscious. Elie Rabier and Alfred Fouillee perform syntheses of the unconscious ‘at a time when Freud was not interested in the concept.’ In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, William James, in his monumental treatise on psychology (The Principles of Psychology), examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and ‘subconscious.' Historian of psychology Mark Altschule observes that, 'It is difficult—or perhaps impossible—to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.' ”

The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberger (Basic Books, 1970)

“During the entire nineteenth century, hypnosis remained the basic approach to the unconscious mind. However…it was supplemented by [the study of]…mediums…automatic writing…multiple personality…Chevreul’s pendulum…[etc.]” Freud came later.

“The Unconscious”: Misconception and Misnomer

The idea of “the unconscious” assumes, incorrectly, that a person may have only one consciousness. Posthypnotic amnesia demonstrates two states of consciousness: 1. what the person knows and remembers when in hypnosis, and 2. what the person knows and remembers when not in hypnosis. What the person knows and remembers only in hypnosis is “unconscious” only from the point of view of the person when not in hypnosis. Hypnosis that involves posthypnotic amnesia might be viewed as artificially-induced multiple personality.

In multiple personality, per se, what an alternate personality knows and thinks may be “unconscious” from the point of view of the host personality, but it is quite conscious to the alternate personality (who is conscious simultaneously with, but outside the awareness of, the host personality).

Of course, there are certain types of truly unconscious processes. For example, there are physiological processes of which a person is not conscious. Also, there are some cognitive functions, such as recognizing faces, of which a person is conscious of the result, but not of how it was done (assuming there is no face-recognizing personality, per se).

Most things that a writer’s host or editorial personalities attribute to their “unconscious” are things that one or another of their alternate personalities consciously thought up. Give credit where credit is due.

Editors of The New York Times Book Review, 1896-2017: Why have so few of them written novels or poems? Has Times been prejudiced against fiction writers?

After my previous post—which contrasted the cognitive styles of Pamela Paul, Book Review Editor, and Nicole Lamy, the Match Book columnist—I wondered if past Editors had been like Pamela Paul, nonfiction writers.

As the following list indicates, of the nineteen Editors since The New York Times Book Review became a separate section in 1896, I could find only two, John Leonard and Harvey Shapiro, who had published novels or poems:

  1. Francis Whiting Halsey (1896-1902)

 2. Edward Augustus Dithmar (1902-1907)

 3. John Grant Dater (1907-1910)

 4. Joseph Benson Gilder (1910-1911)

 5. George Buchanan Fife (1911-1912)

 6. Louis H.[?] Wetmore (1912-1913)

 7. Clifford Smyth (1913-1922)

 8. Brooks Atkinson (1922-1925)

 9. J. (James) Donald Adams (1925-1943)

10. Robert Van Gelder (1944-1946)

11. John K. Hutchens (1946-1948)

12. (Ernest) Francis Brown (1949-1971)

13. John Leonard (1971-1975) (novels)

14. Harvey Shapiro (1975-1983) (poems)

15. Mitchel R. Levitas (1983-1989)

16. Rebecca Pepper Sinkler (1989-1995)

17. Charles McGrath (1995-2004)

18. Sam Tanenhaus (2004-2013)

19. Pamela Paul (2013-present)

So I wonder if those who have chosen Editors for The New York Times Book Review have been prejudiced against fiction writers. And if so, I wonder on what that prejudice is based: on the way fiction writers, in contrast to nonfiction writers, think?

New York Times Book Review Editor Pamela Paul and Literary Advice Columnist Nicole Lamy: Contrasting Cognitive Styles, Nonfiction vs. Fiction?

Nicole Lamy has a literary advice column in The New York Times Book Review. She matches people with books they would like.

Pamela Paul recently urged people to read books they hate (1).

It struck me that Lamy and Paul have different attitudes. I hypothesized that Lamy has a multifaceted cognitive style typical of fiction writers, and Paul has an analytical cognitive style typical of nonfiction writers. So I looked to see what else they have written.

I found that Paul has written a number of books, all nonfiction; while Lamy has a personal essay in The American Scholar (2000) about memory and identity issues, which, as discussed in this blog, are more typical of fiction writers.

from “Life in Motion” by Nicole Lamy

“Three years ago I took pictures of all the houses I’ve lived in…twelve houses before I turned thirteen. For me the moves had always resisted coherent explanation…I wanted to gather the photos as charms against fallible memory…

“…by…age thirteen I seemed to have passed directly to thirty-five…”

“Now when I leave my apartment for vacation…I experience numbing panic — will I ever see home again?…Each time I return home from vacation, rooms don’t appear the same as I left them…

“When the photo project was complete…I had gathered the proof of my life…” (2).

1. Pamela Paul. “Why You Should Read Books You Hate.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-hate-reading.html

2. Nicole Lamy. “Life in Motion.” http://www2.hawaii.edu/~facoba/readings/lamy.htm

“Mary McCarthy: Ice Queen” by Sam Sacks in Wall Street Journal: His essay on the eminent novelist and critic does not mention her split personality.

As an epigraph for the print version of his essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks quotes Mary McCarthy: “Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.” This quote is a metaphor for McCarthy’s multiple personality, which his essay does not mention (1).

Carol Brightman’s biography of Mary McCarthy does mention her multiple personality:

“A fatal ambiguousness has crept into her twelve-year-old mind. Now she begins to see everything in doubles…And that is when she seems to split into two people…For Mary McCarthy, this doubling of consciousness, this splitting of one mind into two warring halves, is the very breath of life” (2, pp. 40-41).

“With [Harold] Johnsrud a new cycle had begun, one that would repeat itself when McCarthy settled down with Edmund Wilson, a much older man. In the first stage of these relationships, the persona of the brash young intellectual began to unravel under the pressure of a darker self, one that McCarthy characterizes in The Company She Keeps as ‘the fugitive, criminal self [who] lay hiding in a thicket’ of half-remembered terrors from childhood” (2, p. 84).

“Like Byron, Mary McCarthy is also aware of the division in her nature. At the end of The Company She Keeps, the heroine…begs the ‘Ghostly Father’ of the tale to allow her to repossess herself, all of herself, the ‘sick,’ impulsive, attention-craving, love-starved side, along with the conscience-stricken side that reasserts itself, coldly reasoning, the morning after. ‘Preserve me in disunity,’ she implores” (2, p. 170).

“With the publication of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, McCarthy was relieved of some of the burden of personality, one might say; of that peculiar fragmentation of personality that was her lot” (2, p. 413).

“…a Jekyll and Hyde drama far from unusual among writers…” (2, p. 266).

1. Sam Sacks. https://www.wsj.com/articles/mary-mccarthy-ice-queen-1492189399

2. Carol Brightman. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York, Clarkson Potter, 1992.

NY Times Book Review asks “Which Force is More Harmful to the Arts: Elitism or Populism?”: Adam Kirsch answers, “Writers write as their minds compel.”

“The truth is, however, that few writers ever make a conscious choice between elitism and populism, difficulty and accessibility. Writers write as their minds and fates compel them to: Virginia Woolf could not have written a populist epic like ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ any more than John Steinbeck could have written a modernist study like ‘To the Lighthouse’ ” (1).

Now the Book Review should ask Adam Kirsch and other contributors to explain how writers’ minds compel them to write as they do.

1. Adam Kirsch. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/books/review/which-force-is-more-harmful-to-the-arts-elitism-or-populism.html

“In Praise of Agatha Christie’s Accidental Sleuths” in New York Times does not wonder how she became a great fiction writer: a multiple personality mystery. 

Radhika Jones’s essay (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/books/agatha-christie-literary-obsessions.html) means to praise Christie, not analyze her, and so does not address the mystery of Christie herself: How did her mind work? What enabled her to become a great fiction writer?

Part of the solution to that mystery is found in Unfinished Portrait, one of the novels Christie wrote under the pseudonym, Mary Westmacott, and in Christie’s An Autobiography, both cited in two past posts:

October 13, 2014

Agatha Christie’s Unfinished Portrait Describes Lifelong, Normal, Multiple Personality as Leading to Both her Literary Career and "Gone Girl" Fugue

Agatha Christie’s discussion of her mysterious, sensational, real-life disappearance in 1926—see my post of October 5, 2014—was not in her autobiography, but in Unfinished Portrait, one of the novels she published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

The novel tells the story of Celia.

Age 3: “Nobody knew that as Celia walked sedately along the road she was in reality mounted upon a white palfrey…She was on different occasions a duchess, a princess, a goose girl, and a beggar maid…Most of her world was inside her head” (1, p. 33-34).

That is, she switched into the subjectively-real identities of a duchess, etc., and experienced herself as having these alternate personalities for various periods of time. This is usually lumped together with “imaginary companions” or “imaginary playmates” or “imaginary friends,” but, to be more precise, this was imaginary impersonation (in which the child switches into alternate personalities).

Age 5½: “Celia displayed an insatiable curiosity about words…By the time she was five and a half Celia could read all the story books…Fairy stories were her passion. Stories of real-life children did not interest her” (1, p. 40).

Age 10-19: “Celia still spent much of her time alone. Although she had [real friends to tea]—they were not nearly so real to her as ‘the girls’ [which] were creations of Celia’s imagination. She knew all about them—what they looked like, what they wore, what they felt and thought” (1, p. 101-102) They included Ethelred Smith, Annie Brown, Isabella Sullivan, Ella Graves, and Sue de Vete. At age 19, when Celia herself was engaged to be married, “she married off ‘the girls’” (1, p. 172).

Age 24: “Celia invented a new person. Her name was Hazel,” and also a young man, Owen (1, p. 221). “Whenever Celia had a little leisure, or when she was wheeling [her daughter] to the Park, [their] story went on in her mind. It occurred to her one day that she might write it down. She might, in fact, make a book of it…It wasn’t quite so easy when it came to writing it down. Her mind had always gone on about six paragraphs farther than the one she was writing down—and then by the time she got to that, the exact wording had gone out of her head” (1, pp. 221-222).

Then, when she had had some initial success in getting published, and there appeared to be no problem in her family life, her husband shocked her by announcing that he had found someone new and he wanted a divorce.

Celia’s Fugue: “She walked for a long time—it was raining and wet…She couldn’t remember what she was walking for…What was her own name? How frightening—she couldn’t remember…” (1, p. 261).

The writing career and fugue are mentioned only very briefly. But the novel is interesting for its portrait of the psychological development, since early childhood, of a person who could have a real writing career, and, in a crisis, a real fugue.

Why did “Mary Westmacott” write about this, and not Agatha Christie? Maybe Agatha Christie never did remember what happened, but her Mary Westmacott personality did.

1. Mary Westmacott [pseudonym of Agatha Christie]. Unfinished Portrait [1934]. New York, Jove Books, 1987.

October 15, 2014

Agatha Christie’s Autobiography: “The Girls,” not just imaginary companions, lived on, but never grew old, since child-aged alternate personalities, like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, don’t

Yesterday’s post discussed “the girls” as they were portrayed in a novel written by Agatha Christie under a pseudonym. This post is about “the girls” as discussed by Agatha Christie in her autobiography, which she wrote between ages sixty and seventy-five.

It is the same seven girls, including Isabella, whom Agatha did not like, because she was too “worldly” (1, p. 90). But here, instead of discussing the personal conflict in terms of music, it is discussed in terms of croquet.

“I used to arrange tournaments and special matches. My great hope was that Isabel would not win. I did everything short of cheating to see that she did not win—that is, I held her mallet for her carelessly, played quickly, hardly aimed at all—yet somehow the more carelessly I played, the more fortunate Isabel seemed to be. She got through impossible hoops, hit balls from right across the lawn, and nearly always finished as winner or runner-up. It was most annoying” (1, p. 91).

“‘The girls,’ I may say, stayed with me for many years…Even when I was grown up I spared them a thought now and then, and allocated them the various dresses in my wardrobe…Even now, sometimes, as I put away a dress in a cupboard, I say to myself: ‘Yes, that would do well for Elsie, green was always her colour.’ It makes me laugh when I do it, but there ‘the girls’ are still, though, unlike me, they have not grown old” (1, pp. 91-92).

As I have previously discussed in regard to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, child-aged alternate personalities may never grow old.

1. Agatha Christie. An Autobiography. New York, Dodd Mead & Company, 1977.