Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize playwright, says he often does not recognize himself when he looks in the mirror: a textbook sign of multiple personality.

From the Paris Review interview in Issue 39, 1966:

INTERVIEWER: Why wasn’t there a character representing you in the play?

PINTER: I had—I have—nothing to say about myself, directly. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Particularly since I often look at myself in the mirror and say, Who the hell’s that?

INTERVIEWER: And you don’t think being represented as a character on stage would help you find out?

PINTER: No.

The interviewer probably thought that Pinter was being evasive. And he was. But why? Why didn’t Pinter like to talk about himself?

Pinter explains that he has a problem with his own sense of identity, epitomized and illustrated by the fact that he often doesn’t recognize himself when he looks in the mirror.

Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t know that such a thing is possible. He thought Pinter was just being difficult.

But the fact is that looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself is a textbook sign of multiple personality. It happens in two ways. First, the regular “host” personality may look in the mirror and see the image of one of the alternate personalities. Second, an alternate personality (who has his own self-image) may look in the mirror and see the host personality.

To read how the multiple personality of other writers has been reflected in mirrors, search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog.

Daniel Deronda (post 5) by George Eliot (post 8): Talking “behind your own back” — two minor characters, unknowingly, make a multiple personality joke.

“Oh me, Hans!” said Mab, impatiently, “if you must talk of yourself, let it be behind your own back” (1, p. 727).

To talk behind someone’s back is to say something about them without their knowing about it. This is easy to do when three people are involved: B and C gossip about A when A is not present.

But how can a person talk behind his own back? The only way is for that person to have multiple personality: Personality B, who is well aware of (co-conscious with) Personality A, tells another person something about A, but A does not know what B said, because A is not aware of (co-conscious with) B.

Did George Eliot have the experience of saying things behind her own back? That is, did people tell her that she had told them something about herself that she had no memory of having told them?

1. George Eliot. Daniel Deronda. London, Penguin Books, 1876/2003.

Daniel Deronda (post 4) by George Eliot (post 7): Deronda is benevolent, but never understands Gwendolen or the relation of the theme to multiple personality.

Benevolence is necessary, but insufficient.

When Deronda first meets Gwendolen, he redeems her pawned necklace, even though, for all he knows, he could be enabling a compulsive gambler. Luckily, she is not a compulsive gambler, but his later mistakes are dangerous.

Near the end of the novel, after Gwendolen’s husband drowns, Deronda is, as usual, very emotionally supportive, but he fails to assess her suicidality or realize her diagnosis. For he knows two salient facts: 1. She jumped into the water when her husband was drowning, and 2. She doesn’t remember doing so. What issues do these facts raise? Her jumping into the water raises the possibility that she had attempted suicide. Her memory gap for jumping into the water suggests multiple personality (see past post). Suicidality and multiple personality are a dangerous combination.

The novel’s main theme, epitomized by Deronda’s belated discovery that he is a Jew, is that people have hidden identities which must be revealed and acknowledged. But the relation of this theme to multiple personality was not understood by the author, as indicated by the fact that Gwendolen’s hidden identities (multiple personalities) are never revealed and acknowledged.

Gwendolen’s multiple personality is what I call, in novels, “gratuitous multiple personality” (search it in this blog): It is multiple personality that is not an intentional part of character development or the plot, and whose only reason for being in the novel is that it reflects the author’s own psychology.

Daniel Deronda (post 3) by George Eliot (post 6): Gwendolen has multiple personality’s amnesia—a memory gap—for her behavior when husband drowned.

In a previous post, I discussed indications of Gwendolen’s probable multiple personality found at the beginning of the novel. For hundreds of pages thereafter, the novel makes passing comments suggestive of multiple personality.

Suggestive Passing Comments

Nobody says that she has alternate personalities, but she is said to have “impetuous alternations” (1, p. 589).

She is continually spoken of as being possessed by metaphors for alternate personalities—ghosts, phantoms, and demons—at work inside her, behind-the-scenes:

“Fantasies moved within her like ghosts, making no break in her more acknowledged consciousness and finding no obstruction in it: dark rays doing their work invisibly in the broad light” (1, p. 606).

“In Gwendolen’s consciousness Temptation and Dread met and stared like two pale phantoms…” (1, p. 674).

“Gwendolen…was not afraid of any outward dangers—she was afraid of her own wishes, which were taking shapes possible and impossible, like a cloud of demon-faces” (1, p. 681).

But something more definitive of multiple personality happens when her husband drowns.

Memory Gap: A Cardinal Symptom of Multiple Personality

In multiple personality, if personality A is unaware of personality B, and has amnesia for what B does, then if B jumps in the water to save her drowning husband, A will have a memory gap for having done that, and will feel guilty for letting her husband drown. That is what happens in Book VII, Chapter 56 of the novel. Witnesses had seen Gwendolen jump into the water, but when she tells Deronda what happened, all she remembers is that she failed to throw her drowning husband a rope (1, p. 696).

Describing her past conflicting feelings toward her husband, Gwendolen says, “I was like two creatures” (1, p. 691).

1. George Eliot. Daniel Deronda. London, Penguin Books, 1876/2003.

Daniel Deronda (post 2) by George Eliot (post 5): Deronda’s mother has “double consciousness” (multiple personality), which Eliot had ascribed to herself.

“The varied transitions of tone with which this speech was delivered were as perfect as the most accomplished actress could have made them…but in the Princess [Deronda’s mother] the acting had a rare perfection…It would not be true to say that she felt less because of this double consciousness…” (1. p. 629).

Search “double consciousness” in this blog to see the post in which I quote Eliot as saying that she had it, and to read other posts about “double consciousness,” a nineteenth century term for multiple personality. Added July 12, 2020: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/283f/af8d6260742990695f6c0177117fd383e802.pdf

Also, note that the Princess gives the impression of acting, because “the varied transitions of tone”—when a person switches among various alternate personalities—can be dramatically different from each other, and if you don’t know you are seeing multiple personality, it looks like acting.

Deronda asks why his mother had given him away when he was about two years old. He says that he can empathize with the wish she had had to be free to pursue the life of an artist.

“No,” said the Princess…“You are not a woman. You may try—but you can never imagine what it is like to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl…(1, p. 631).

His mother is dying, and Deronda, not wishing to make her talk longer than her energy will allow, asks if she wishes to continue her story the next day.

“ ‘No,’ she said, decisively. ‘I will confess it all, now that I have come up to it. Often when I am at ease it all fades away; my whole self comes quite back; but I know it will sink away again, and the other will come—the poor solitary, forsaken remains of self, that can resist nothing’… It was as if her mind were breaking into several, one jarring the other into impulsive action” (1, p. 636).

That is, it is the weakness and pain of her illness that has enabled her to tell him her story after all these years. When she is feeling well (“at ease’”), her “whole self”—including the personality who thought that her giving him up, and his not knowing his family history, would be better for both of them—would interfere with her telling her story. But when she is weaker, “It was as if her mind were breaking into several,” including some personalities who would impulsively tell her story.

Why did she eventually give up her very successful singing career, marry a Russian noble, and have more children?

“ ‘You wonder why I married…I meant never to marry again. I meant to be free, and to live for my art…For nine years I was a queen. I enjoyed the life I had longed for. But something befell me. It was like a fit of forgetfulness. I began to sing out of tune…That singing out of tune was only like a fit of illness; it went away…but it was too late’ “ (1, p. 639).

One feature of multiple personality is that different personalities may have different skills. One personality may sing extremely well, but another personality can’t carry a tune. Switching from the former to the latter would be like suddenly forgetting how to carry a tune. And switching back to the former personality would restore the ability.

In short, Deronda’s mother, an alter ego for George Eliot, has multiple personality.

And why did Eliot persist in using a male pseudonym long after everyone knew who she was? Why was her artistic personality male?

“No,” said the Princess…“You are not a woman. You may try—but you can never imagine what it is like to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl…(1, p. 631).

1. George Eliot. Daniel Deronda. London, Penguin Books, 1876/2003.

Jane Austen’s Emma: Adam Kirsch and Anna Holmes, in this week’s New York Times Book Review, miss the fact that Emma has multiple personality.

“This week, Adam Kirsch and Anna Holmes discuss what Austen’s work says now, 200 years after ‘Emma’ was published.” Here is what they missed.

My post of June 24, 2015, reprinted below, addresses the key psychological issue of the novel: How could Emma not have known that she had loved Mr. Knightly all along?

Jane Austen’s Emma: She had loved Mr. Knightley all along, but did not know it, because her love was conscious only to her alternate personality

In an article published by the Jane Austen Society of North America, Professor of English Bruce Stovel makes the case that “Emma Woodhouse is a split character, with two very different sides,” that she has a “split self,” and that she “often does not attend to, or become conscious of, thoughts and feelings that are in her mind…Most important, Emma is, unknown to herself, in love with Mr. Knightley from long before the novel starts.” Indeed, “Emma’s unacknowledged love for Mr. Knightley provides the novel with its comic plot, much as Elizabeth Bennet’s unconscious love for Mr. Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice and as Captain Wentworth’s unacknowledged love for Anne Elliot does in Persuasion” (1).

Emma’s two selves are acknowledged in this dialogue, in which Mr. Knightley says to Emma:

“I shall not scold you. I leave you to your own reflections.”

“Can you trust me with such flatterers?—Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?”

“Not your vain spirit, but your serious spirit.—If one leads you wrong, I am sure the other tells you of it.”

However, Emma, Knightley, and Professor Stovel never explicitly say whether they think that Emma has an ambivalent mixture of vanity and seriousness or a dissociation between a vain personality and a serious personality. In a mixture, there would be no issue of one part’s being unaware of what the other part thinks or feels. In a mixture, she would always have been aware that she loved Knightley, but would have been ambivalent about it. In contrast, in dissociation, one self may really not know what the other self thinks and feels. Multiple personality is also known as dissociative identity, because it entails such dissociation.

This romantic comedy scenario of lovers’ not realizing they are in love is interpreted differently depending on whether the reader has multiple personality. A reader who does not have it will think the scenario is a joke: how can people not know they are in love? A reader who does have multiple personality will consider the scenario to be ordinary psychology: of course things go on inside of which a person is not aware.

Emma’s love for Knightley had not been “unconscious,” except from the perspective of the host personality who was not co-conscious with the personality who loved him. The personality who had always loved him always knew it. That is why, once circumstances changed the balance of power among the personalities, allowing the personality who loved Knightley to come out and predominate, the change to loving him was quick. Emma was not finally learning to love him: behind the scenes, one of her personalities always had.

Writers write such multiple personality characters, because most writers are that way themselves. When writers comment that they will know what they think and feel when they see what they write, they are referring to the way that the thinking and feelings of their own alternate personalities come out from behind the scenes through their writing.

1. Bruce Stovel. “The New Emma in Emma.” Persuasions On-Line: V. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2007).
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/stovel-b.htm

Multiple Personality in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Relatively few visit the blog “Normal Novelists have-use-enjoy Multiple Personality” from USA and England.

Multiple personality and other types of posttraumatic dissociation are found around the world (1). So it is not surprising that this blog has been visited from more than fifty countries. But it may surprise you to learn that relatively few visits come from the USA, and almost none from England.

There is a myth that multiple personality is popular in the USA. Indeed, a professor of American Studies in Germany—land of the doppelgänger!—has published a book about multiple personality in American literature (2). But most Americans think of multiple personality as a literary gimmick. And in creative writing programs, instead of recognizing multiple personality, they speak of “voice” (3).

However, if there is any country where multiple personality is even less popular than it is in the USA, it is England. At least in the USA, multiple personality gets grudging respect professionally (4). Whereas in England, as I pointed out in a past post on dictionaries of literary terms, they have nothing to say about the theme of the double, but a lot to say about ghosts.

1. George F. Rhoades Jr., Vedat Sar (Editors). Trauma and Dissociation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Not Just a North American Phenomenon. New York, Haworth Press, 2005.

2. Heike Schwarz. Beware the Other Side(s): Multiple Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder in American Fiction. American Studies, Volume 8, Transcript, 2013.

3. Thaisa Frank, Dorothy Wall. Finding Your Writer’s Voice. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

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

The blog, Normal Novelists have-use-enjoy Multiple Personality: Do novelists, themselves, know it? Would they ever say so? Do readers believe it?

Novelists

Some novelists, like many people with multiple personality, simply don’t know they have it, because their regular “host” personality has amnesia for their alternate personalities, while the latter see themselves as other people, not alternate personalities.

Many other novelists have a vague sense that their regular self and their writing self are like two different people, but that is all they know, and all they care to know.

There are novelists who do know that they have multiple personality, but they usually consider it a private matter and nobody else’s business. When a few of these novelists have published books that guardedly revealed their multiple personality, they found that the public would not believe it and did not want to know.

Readers

I have written many posts in this blog to explain multiple personality and what it actually looks like, but since I, myself, never believed in multiple personality until I, knowingly and repeatedly, had seen it clinically, I doubt that most readers of this blog, who have not had that experience, could believe it.

So who reads this blog? Beyond the numbers, the nations, and the posts they visit, I don’t know. Mostly curiosity seekers, I suppose. I assume that very few take it seriously, so far.

Something may come of this blog, eventually. The idea that 90% of novelists and 30% of the general public have a normal version of multiple personality is, potentially, a big deal.

Meanwhile, and in any case, I enjoy it.

Mary Anne Evans had at least Nine Pseudonyms: George Eliot (post 4), Mary Ann, Marianne, Marian, Pollian, Clematis, Deutera, Minie, and Polly. Why?

George Eliot’s original name was Mary Anne Evans; her middle name ended with an “e” (1, p. 22).

In addition to George Eliot, she had the following nicknames or pseudonyms:

“Mary Ann, Marianne, or Marian Evans, Pollian (a pun on Apollyon, the Angel of Destruction), Clematis (Mental Beauty), Deutera, Minie, Polly…” (2, p. 452).

These nine nicknames or pseudonyms are fewer than Ernest Hemingway’s twenty-two (see past post), but they are more than enough to put to rest the usual rationalizations for why she persisted in using “George Eliot” long after everyone knew who she was. Evidently, she had more than one "I" or sense of identity, which is the essence of multiple personality.

Indeed, her multiple personality (aka dissociative identity) is well known—although not in those terms—to scholars and biographers. For example, in Fredrick R. Karl’s George Eliot: Voice of a Century (3), the biography’s index includes the following two subheadings under Eliot, George (Mary Anne Evans): “divided nature (dualism)” and “secret self of.”

You might think that mere differences in spelling—Mary Anne, Mary Ann, Marianne, Marian—don’t count. But in multiple personality, that is common:

“…Elizabeth Jane Doe might well have alter personalities with the first names of Elizabeth, Lizzy, Lizzie, Liz, Betsie, Beth, Bets, Jane, Janie, Lizzy-Jane, and so on” (4, p. 116).

1. Rosemarie Bodenheimer. “A woman of many names,” pp. 20-37 in George Levine (editor) The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

2. Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Second Edition. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979/2000.

3. Frederick R. Karl. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. New York, WW Norton, 1995.

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

Daniel Deronda (book 1) by George Eliot (post 3): Gwendolen is introduced as a young woman with a split personality, probably caused by childhood trauma.

Epigraph

“Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:

There, ‘mid the throng of hurrying desires

That trample on the dead to seize their spoil,

Lurks vengeance…irresistible…”

The above epigraph precedes the title page of Book 1, “The Spoiled Child,” which is about Gwendolen Harleth. The word in common between the epigraph and title of Book 1 is “spoil.” Thus, it is implied that the way in which Gwendolen, now a young woman, had been “spoiled” as a child, has left something (or someone) within her that (or who) seeks vengeance.

First Paragraph: Duality

“Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil…” (1, p. 7).

Since people of George Eliot’s time believed in physiognomy—that facial features reflect a person’s true character—the first sentence means that Gwendolen had duality of character. As the next sentence elaborates, she had both a good character and an evil character, and they fought with each other for dominance.

Two Selves Contradict Each Other

Persons with only one personality may have ambivalent or mixed opinions, but persons with multiple personality may have contradictory opinions. Here is an example of Gwendolen’s contradictory opinions about marriage:

“I never saw a married woman who had her own way” (1, p. 69).

“Mamma, I see now why girls are glad to be married—to escape being expected to please everybody but themselves” (1, p. 97).

One personality sees marriage as slavery; the other personality sees marriage as freedom. A person who had only one personality might say that marriage is a mixture of slavery and freedom.

Childhood Trauma

What caused Gwendolyn to have a split personality? Why was it that “those who feared her were also fond of her, the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by…the play of…contrary tendencies” (1, pp. 41-42). How was she “spoiled” (traumatized) into having these contradictory tendencies?

“Gwendolen, immediately thinking of the unlovable step-father whom she had been acquainted with the greater part of her life while her frocks were short, said—‘Why did you marry again, mamma? It would have been nicer if you had not?’ ” (1, p. 24).

“Oh mamma, what can become of my life? there is nothing worth living for! I shall never love anybody. I can’t love people. I hate them. I can’t bear any one to be very near me but you” (1, p. 82).

Multiple Personality’s Memory Gaps

“…a piercing cry from Gwendolen, who stood…with a change of expression that was terrifying in its terror. She looked like a statue into which a soul of Fear had entered: her pallid lips were parted; her eyes…were dilated and fixed…her signs of terror…(1, p. 61).

The reader is not told what goes through Gwendolen’s mind during such episodes. Why not? Gwendolen apparently cannot remember what she thinks during such episodes: she has amnesia for it—memory gaps—a feature of multiple personality. These episodes may be brief periods of time in which a terrified child-aged alternate personality has come out.

In short, Book 1 of this novel introduces Gwendolen as a person with a split personality, which is probably a result of childhood trauma.

1. George Eliot. Daniel Deronda. London, Penguin Books, 1876/2003.

Harold Bloom (post 2): The eminent literary critic finds that normal novelists have multiple personality, but thinks of alternate personalities as daemons.

Bloom’s The Daemon Knows and this blog have the following authors in common: Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and William Shakespeare. If you have read The Daemon Knows (or even if you haven’t), I invite you to search those writers in this blog.

In this post, I will hint at how Bloom and I differ in regard to Melville, James, and Shakespeare.

Bloom prefers Melville’s Moby-Dick. He calls Melville’s final novel, The Confidence-Man, “a botch.” But the latter is the Melville novel I chose to read for this blog. Why? Because Melville—like Dickens with Drood and Twain with Mysterious Stranger—waited until his last novel to more fully reveal his own multiple personality.

Bloom chose Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” to represent that author’s ghost stories. In addition to The Turn of the Screw, I have read two of James’s ghost stories, “The Jolly Corner” and “The Private Life.” They are both multiple personality stories, but I chose to discuss the latter in this blog, because, relatively speaking, “The Jolly Corner” is a botch.

Bloom’s The Daemon Knows mentions Shakespeare and Hamlet quite a number of times, but he does not focus on the character who is key to Shakespeare’s multiple personality: the Ghost. See my discussion of Hamlet in this blog.

Of course, the title of Bloom’s The Daemon Knows refers to Bloom’s own “daemon.” See the quote of Bloom’s reference to his own alternate personality in my previous post.

"The Daemon Knows" by Harold Bloom: He refers to daemons as supernatural, alternate personalities, who produce and/or appreciate creative works.

“What lies beyond the human for nearly all of these writers is the daemon, who is described and defined throughout this book. The common element in these twelve writers…is their receptivity to daemonic influx. Henry James, the master of his art, nevertheless congratulates his own daemon for the greatest of his novels and tales” (1, p. 4).

“Whitman had no poetic method except his self, though I should say ‘selves,’ as there were three of them: ‘myself, Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs,’ and also ‘the real Me’ or ‘Me myself,’ and the nearly unknowable ‘my Soul’ “ (1, p. 54). “The ‘real Me’ or ‘Me myself’ is an androgyne, whereas the persona Walt is male and the soul is female” (1, p. 57).

But Whitman said that he had more than three personalities:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then…I contradict myself;

I am large…I contain multitudes” (1, p. 68).

“Shakespeare entertained a bevy of daemons: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Cleopatra, Macbeth among them. They did not possess him, though Hamlet and Falstaff edged closest. It is a nice question whether daemonic Ahab possessed Melville. The twelve great writers centering this book were all possessed…” (1, p. 122).

“Where is Melville the man in Moby-Dick? Split at least three ways (Ishmael, Ahab, narrator), he is somewhat parallel to Whitman, who in 1855 also is tripartite…” (1, p. 125).

“Daemonic agency is the hidden tradition of American…narrative (Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner)…In narrative, the protagonists are possessed by daemons, conquistadores somehow ordering a chaos of unruly other selves” (1, p. 135).

“The obscure being I could call Bloom’s daemon has known how it is done, and I have not. His true name (has he one?) I cannot discover, but I am grateful to him for teaching the classes, writing the books, enduring the mishaps and illnesses, and nurturing the fictions of continuity that sustain my eighty-fifth year” (1, p. 156).

Hart Crane…Like John Keats, he had a truer sense of other selves than most of us can attain” (1, p. 158).

“Emerson, a scholar in the broadest sense, formulated what he chose to call ‘the double consciousness’ “ (1, p. 165). Search “double consciousness” in this blog.

“I conclude by expressing a lifelong sense of personal gratitude to Hart Crane, who addicted me to High Poetry. He taught me that my own daemon desired that I read deeply, appreciate, study, and clarify my response to his work. In doing so, my long education began and is ongoing” (1, p. 496).

1. Harold Bloom. The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and Pseudonyms: In her comic short story “Brother Jacob,” why does David Faux change his name to Edward Freely?

The plot—which makes no sense, so I consider it a cover story—is about a young man, David Faux, who steals his mother’s savings, goes to America to seek his fortune, but then returns to England and establishes himself under an assumed name, Edward Freely. His true identity is revealed when he is found by his developmentally disabled brother, Jacob, which is funny, but implausible.

—Why is his real name “Faux” (which means fake)?

—When he returns, why does he adopt a false identity without first checking if he is under any legal jeopardy due to the theft, or if his family will accept him back anyway (which turns out to have been the case)?

—Why has Eliot used a fugue scenario, in which a person travels and changes identity (except that Faux/Freely has no amnesia)? (Search “fugue” or “dissociative fugue” in this blog. It is a symptom of multiple personality.)

This story, about a person who adopts a pseudonym, raises the question of Mary Ann Evan’s pseudonym, George Eliot, which she had no good reason to keep using after everyone knew who she was.

That the protagonist’s real name is given as “Faux” (fake) suggests that, in some psychological way, Mary Ann Evans did not consider “Mary Ann Evans” to be her real name.

Since she had “double consciousness”— multiple personality (see post earlier today)—it may be that “Mary Ann Evans” was not her writing personality. When it came to writing, “Mary Ann Evans” was not her real name.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) had multiple personality: She, herself, said she had “double consciousness,” a nineteenth century term for multiple personality.

“Eliot used the term ‘double consciousness’ of herself on at least two occasions. In her journal account of her visit to Italy in 1860 she wrote that ‘One great deduction to me from the delight of seeing world-famous objects is the frequent double consciousness which tells me that I am not enjoying the actual vision enough…’ Herbert Spencer noted that she once told him she was ‘troubled by double consciousness—a current of self-criticism being an habitual accompaniment of anything she was saying or doing…’ “ (1, pp. 94-95).

“double consciousness: a semi-technical term in this period. Physiologists of mind, including Sir Henry Holland (1788-1873), who was to become Eliot and Lewes’s friend and occasional consultant physician, hypothesized that the hemispheric structure of the brain had observable consequences for perception. Health of mind depended upon the ‘proper correspondence, or unity of action’ of the two halves of the brain and nervous system…Sufferers from mental derangement and, in some cases, hysteria were particularly likely to experience ‘a sort of double-dealing’ of mind with itself: ‘there appear, as it were, two minds; one tending to correct…the other…’ These states, ‘where the mind passes by alternation from one state to another, each having the perception of external impressions and appropriate trains of thought, but not linked together by the ordinary gradations, or by mutual memory’ were called ‘double consciousness’…Other mid-century writers, including John Addington Symonds, interpreted double consciousness as an associative disorder rather than looking to the structure of the brain for an explanation…” (1, p. 94).

Search “double consciousness” in this blog for a more extensive discussion of the concept.

1. George Eliot. The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Helen Small. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Multiple Personality and The Ten Commandments: God could have said that no other gods exist, but instead He said they do exist, and He is jealous.

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me…for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”

From a philosophical-psychological perspective, God is the original, prototypical Being. Is that Being one or multiple? God says multiple in The Ten Commandments.

C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections: A psychiatrist who had multiple personality and who built a psychological theory partially based on it.

Carl Gustave Jung (1875 -1961) is of interest here for three reasons:

First, Jungian therapists have a tradition of treating creative artists.

Second, Jung described himself as having a normal version of multiple personality, and some of his psychological theory is based on his own psychology.

Third, I like to give examples of successful people, and not just novelists, who have had multiple personality.

In his autobiography, Jung explicitly describes himself as having more than one personality since childhood:

“Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons. One of them was the schoolboy who could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself, the other was important, a high authority, a man not to be trifled with…This ‘other’ was an old man who lived in the eighteenth century…I began pondering these isolated impressions, and they coalesced into a coherent picture: of myself living in two ages simultaneously, and being two different persons” (1, pp. 33-35).

Since he continues to function well, he infers that he does not have a medical illness, multiple personality disorder, but rather a normal psychological phenomenon. He is right, except when he assumes that everyone has normal multiple personality (most people don’t):

“The play and counterplay between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, which has run through my whole life, has nothing to do with a ‘split’ or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense. On the contrary, it is played out in every individual. In my life No. 2 has been of prime importance, and I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come from within. He is a typical figure, but he is perceived only by the very few” (1, p. 45).

It is true that many people with multiple personality don’t realize it, but it is going too far to say that everyone has it (most people don’t).

“…I once asked myself, ‘What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?’ Whereupon a voice within me said, ‘It is art.’ I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I was writing has any connection with art. Then I thought, ‘Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression…I said very emphatically to this voice that my fantasies had nothing to do with art, and I felt a great inner resistance…Then came the…same assertion: 'That is art.’ This time I caught her and said, ‘No, it is not art!'…and prepared myself for an argument…She came through with a long statement…Later…I called her the ‘anima’…I felt a little awed by her. It was like the feeling of an invisible presence in the room…” (1, pp. 185-186).

1. C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Revised Edition. New York, Vintage Books/Random House, 1961/1973.

When hearing voices—auditory hallucinations—masquerades as metaphor: The case of Sigmund Freud and his “voice of the intellect…signifies not a little.”

As previously discussed in many posts, novelists often speak of “voice” as though it were just a metaphor, but they are really talking about hearing voices. In yesterday’s post, I discussed the voice heard by that man of reason, Socrates, since childhood (multiple personality starts in childhood). Today, I note this famous quote:

"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little."

— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927)

People who do not have multiple personality do not hear a rational voice in their head, which is the voice of an alternate personality speaking from behind the scenes.

Are there any other reasons to suspect that Freud had multiple personality? There are many. See my essay on Freud in this blog.

The reason I mention Socrates and Freud in this blog is that I want to make it clear that novelists are not the only ones who have a normal version of multiple personality.

Socrates, Classical Philosopher, Man of Reason, had nonpsychotic auditory hallucinations—he heard voices—like people with multiple personality

When a nonpsychotic person hears voices that address themselves rationally to various situations, and have been doing so since childhood, they are probably the voices of alternate personalities, speaking from behind the scenes.

(Of course, discovering that a person had such voices would make for only a probable diagnosis. To confirm the diagnosis, you would have to enter into a dialogue with the voice; this would prompt the alternate personality to become overt, to come out, and temporarily take over; which would happen quite naturally, without hypnosis or drugs.)

Socrates (470 – 399 BC): His Hidden Side

With his Socratic Method of asking questions, and his chief claim of wisdom—that he appreciates what he does not know—he is a prototypical, above board, Man of Reason. But he also has a hidden side, a covertness:

“Perhaps the most interesting facet of this [covertness] is Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daimōnic sign", an averting inner voice Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake…Socrates' characterization of the phenomenon as daimōnic may suggest that its origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts. Today, such a voice would be classified…as a…hallucination” (1).

Plutarch (AD 46 – AD 120)

“…Socrates embraced a manner of teaching and speaking that had more of the true philosophic stamp…as for humbug…he sent it flying to the sophists…

“Very well, said Theocritus, but what, my dear sir, do we call Socrates’ sign [Daimonion]? An imposture?…[which] Heaven seems to have attached to Socrates from his earliest years as his guide in life…

“Simmias…had often heard Socrates express the view that men who laid claim to visual communication with Heaven were imposters, while to such as affirmed that they heard a voice he paid close attention. It thus occurred to us…that Socrates’ sign was perhaps no vision, but rather the perception of a voice or else the mental apprehension of language that reached him in some strange way…” (2, pp. 403-451).

Plato (427–347 BC)

Socrates: “…You have heard me speak, at sundry times and in different places, of an oracle or sign which comes to me; it is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do. This is what deters me from being a politician…” (3, pp. 289-290).

Xenophon (430 – 354 BC)

“…Socrates’ inner voice…Socrates calls it to daimonion, ‘the divine’, and claims it communicates with him…by warning him if he is about to do something that is not to his advantage…We should be wary of assimilating it too closely to our concept of ‘conscience’, if by that we mean a moral force, because Socrates’ little voice appears to have no moral function…” (4, pp. 34-35).

Comment

Socrates had a “little voice” just like Lee Child’s protagonist, Jack Reacher (see recent post).

In short, my past posts regarding voices, novelists, and multiple personality are not about something that applies only to novels and novelists. It’s been a phenomenon of human nature since antiquity.

1.Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

2. Plutarch. “On the Sign of Socrates,” in Plutarch’s Moralia, Vol. VII, Trans. Phillip H. De Lacy and Benedict Einarson. Loeb Classical Library 405. Harvard University Press, 1959/2000.

3. Plato. “Apology,” in Essential Dialogues of Plato. Trans. Benjamin Jowett, Pedro de Blas. New York, Barnes & Noble Classics, 1871/2005.

4. Xenophon. Conversations of Socrates. Translated and Introduced by Robin Waterfield. London, Penguin Books, 1990.

Lee Child postscript: Jack Reacher hears the rational, autonomous voices of his alternate personalities, an example of unintended “gratuitous multiple personality”

Most readers pay no attention to Reacher’s voices, and rightly so, because they are unnecessary to both plot and character development in these Lee Child novels.

There is no indication the author even knows that rational, autonomous voices imply the existence of alternate personalities.

I have had to invent a term for this situation—gratuitous multiple personality—because so many of the novels discussed in this blog have had it, and have had it for no apparent reason other than that it probably reflects the author’s own subjective experience.

For previous discussions, search gratuitous multiple personality in this blog, for a discussion of the issue in only a small fraction of the novels in which I found it to occur.

Lee Child’s Make Me: Jack Reacher still hears voices—the “small voice” plus “radio chatter” voices “tuning up for a fight” and “working out the implications”

In my last post, on the first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor, I discussed the fact that Reacher hears voices; specifically, a “small voice.” Now, in the twentieth Reacher novel, Make Me, I find that he still hears the “small voice”:

“A small voice, full of defeat” (1, p. 384).

“A small voice, full of defeat” (1, p. 385).

These two lines are wedged in on two successive pages without any comment or explanation.

Lee Child doesn’t explain or justify including those two lines, because he evidently still thinks, probably based on his own personal experience, that most people hear voices. But while people with multiple personality do occasionally hear the voices of their alternate personalities, speaking from behind the scenes, most other people don’t hear voices.

In Make Me, Reacher also hears “radio chatter”:

“The back part of my brain knows it was the same guy” [says Reacher].

“How?”

“The radio chatter is off the scale.”

“You hear radio chatter?”

“I listen out for it hard. We were wild animals for seven million years. We learned a lot of lessons. We should be careful not to lose them.”

“What is the radio chatter saying?”

“Part of it is tuning up for a fight. It knows nothing good is coming.”

“What about the other part?”

“It’s having a back-and-forth, working out the implications…” (1, p. 185).

Reacher interprets the “radio chatter” as instinctual perception learned by the evolving brain during millions of years. But his interpretation does not fit his metaphor, “radio chatter,” which implies voices in his head, who happen to be preparing and planning to cope with Reacher’s specific situation, just the way that good alternate personalities would be doing.

1. Lee Child. Make Me. New York, Delacorte Press, 2015.