Novelists Hear Voices, A Textbook Symptom of Multiple Personality, plus an example from the Introduction to a Novel’s 20th Anniversary Edition by Wally Lamb

—Psychiatric Textbook on Communication With 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” (1, p. 94).

—A Well-known Kind of Experience of Many Novelists

“Delores Price first came to me as a voice. I was in the shower after an early morning run, hustling to get ready for my teaching day at the high school where I’d worked for the past nine years. “Well, the dork just left me,” the voice said. “Good riddance.” She was unnamed, not yet visible. But in those eight words, she sounded wounded, irreverent, and funny. I liked her immediately” (2, p. XVI).

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

2. Wally Lamb. She’s Come Undone. New York, ATRIA/Washington Square Press, 1992.

Comment: It is fairly common for novelists to hear the voices of, and relate to, their characters, as though they were persons with minds of their own, the essence of alternate personalities. Neither patients nor novelists will insist that these are real people, because neither novel-writing nor multiple personality is a psychosis.