Case of apparent blindness proves multiple personality is not cultural or therapeutic artifact or metaphor: Alternate personalities are neurological.

“We present the case of a patient having dissociative identity disorder [multiple personality] who — after 15 years of misdiagnosed cortical blindness — step by step regained sight during psychotherapeutic treatment…

“In addition to its implications for the brain’s ability to control the inflow of visual information, the present case bears on discussions of the ontology of dissociative identity disorders [multiple personality]. In the literature on consciousness and the nature of the self, dissociative identity disorder has been taken as important evidence for the formulation of a scientific theory of the self. However, questions regarding the validity of the phenomenon have complicated the picture. From the onset, nosological description of dissociative identity disorders has been accompanied by an ongoing controversy about whether this disorder might be a cultural and therapeutic artifact. Recent psychobiological evidence has shown that different personality states are correlated with differing cortical activation patterns and has demonstrated neural correlates of switching between personality states. Yet that would still be compatible with a skeptical view that personality states are just metaphors reflecting differences in higher-level cognitive processing, or viewpoints that personality states result from therapeutic suggestions or elaborate forms of role playing. The case of BT contributes to this controversy by demonstrating that differences between personality states are not limited to higher level processing but can differ with respect to the fundamental processing of early sensory information and corresponding perceptual change. It therefore provides compelling evidence for the existence of the dissociated identities in a more biological sense” (1).

1. Hans Strasburger, Bruno Waldvogel. “Sight and blindness in the same person.” PsyCh Journal 4 (2015): 178–185. http://hans-strasburger.userweb.mwn.de/reprints/strasburger_waldvogel_2015_preprint.pdf

Key Topics in Sidebar to Search: “Key Searches” in sidebar improves accessibility to “Novelists use Normal Version of Multiple Personality”

You are welcome to visit this blog with a smartphone, but you may need a larger device to see the sidebar and use search.

The sidebar now has a list of key topics to search, which will connect you to the main ideas from the eight hundred posts since this blog started in 2013.

The Donald Trump Paradox: Very Intelligent, High-Functioning, and Successful, But Thought By Many, Even In His Own Party, To Be Crazy.

It was Donald Trump’s use of pseudonyms—which now has its own page in Wikipedia (1)—that first led me to mention him here. I have often discussed novelists’ use of pseudonyms as a symptom of their multiple personality (search “pseudonyms” and “pseudonym” in this blog).

Another recurrent topic in this blog has been the popular misconception that multiple personality is a psychosis. To borrow a phrase from Hamlet, there is a method to this (seeming) madness. Superficially, it might seem psychotic, but in the vast majority of cases, it is not. For past posts on this subject, search “madness,” “psychotic,” and “crazy” in this blog.

If Donald Trump had multiple personality, and it made him, superficially, appear crazy, then the confusion between multiple personality and madness might be called “the Donald Trump paradox.”

Of course, since I have never interviewed Donald Trump, I have no way of knowing whether he has multiple personality or not.

1. Wikipedia. “Donald Trump pseudonyms.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_pseudonyms

Not Clinical: “What’s Up With Those Voices in Your Head?” by Casey Schwartz in New York Times reviews Charles Fernyhough’s “The Voices Within”

The conventional view is that hearing voices is a symptom of psychoses like schizophrenia. However, as Dr. Fernyhough says, “the idea of hearing voices as…the archetypal symptom of schizophrenia seems problematic. Around three-quarters of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia” hear voices, “but so do a similar proportion of individuals with dissociative identity disorder [multiple personality]” (1, p. 122).

Dr. Fernyhough is a professor of psychology (2), but he is not a clinical psychologist. As he, himself, acknowledges, he has no experience working with patients (1, p. 125), either those with schizophrenic voices or those with multiple personality voices. So he doesn’t know that the voices described by writers (Dr. Fernyhough is also a novelist) are like the voices heard in multiple personality.

1. Charles Fernyhough. The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. New York, Basic Books, 2016.
2. Casey Schwartz. “What’s Up With Those Voices in Your Head?” The New York Times, October 20, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/books/review/voices-within-charles-fernyhough.html

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.

“Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire” by Anna Solomon in New York Times raises the question of why someone would have a history of lying since childhood.

Anna Solomon says she has been a liar since childhood, but now limits her lying to her work as a novelist:

“When I was a kid…I told flat-out lies, and I told them with some frequency…But I knew I was lying. And I seemed to be getting better at it…So now I have a problem. And now you know: I’ve still got the instincts of a liar. The difference, I like to think, is that I’m in control of those instincts now. I’ve become a novelist, which is to say I make up people and worlds and describe them in such detail that my bunk and fudges become believable” (1).

But is she telling the truth about her history of lying? In what sense did she always know when she was lying? For if she had always known it, and she had childishly lied simply to gain some minor advantage, but she is now grown up, why is she still concerned that her lying could get out of control and that it needs to be channeled into her writing?

Maybe she had known she had lied, not because she could always remember what had happened or what she had said, but because she was highly intelligent and could usually infer the truth from circumstantial evidence. This might be the case if, like many other novelists, she had a normal version of multiple personality. To quote a textbook on multiple personality:

“Adult multiples will often recount that they acquired a reputation as liars in childhood…Multiples are perceived by other people as lying when they deny doing things that they were seen to do. In most instances, this is because the personality that is denying the behavior is amnesic for the actions of another personality who actually performed the action” (2, pp. 78-79).

Another scenario is that the lie is a fantasy that is sincerely believed in as being true by one of the alternate personalities. But the regular personality always knows that the fantasy is not true. However, since the regular personality is not aware of the existence of the alternate personality, and does not remember what the alternate personality has done or said, the regular personality believes that she, herself, must be a liar.

A third scenario is that an alternate personality tells lies as a prank to cause the regular personality embarrassment. [added 7:27 pm]

Search “lying” in this blog for previous posts about other novelists.

1. Anna Solomon. “Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire.” New York Times, October 19, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/books/review/writer-writer-pants-on-fire.html

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

Bipolar & Multiple Personality: In “All That” by David Foster Wallace, a boy hears autonomous voices with distinct personalities, and sometimes feels ecstatic.

If this posthumous short story (1) were autobiographical, it might indicate a dual diagnosis with a childhood onset: 1. bipolar disorder, with a manic phase described as “ecstatic,” and 2. multiple personality, with at least two alternate personalities, described as rational, autonomous voices. These two conditions would later have been complicated by drug and alcohol abuse, all ending in suicide.

from “All That”

“I ‘heard voices’ all the time as a small child. I was either five or six, I believe…the ‘voices’ I heard as a child never worried me or caused me to fear that something was wrong with me…

“My surfeit of religious interest also had to do with the frequency and tenor of the ‘voices’ I regularly heard as a child (meaning up until roughly age thirteen, as I recall it). The major reason that I was never frightened about the voices…involved the fact that the childhood ‘voices’ (there were two of them, each distinct in timbre and personality) never spoke of anything that wasn’t good, happy, and reassuring…these voices were—or appeared to me as—entirely real and autonomous phenomena…with manners of speech and accent that nothing in my childhood experience had exposed me to or prepared me in any way to ‘make up’ or combine from outside sources…Indeed, one of the voices’ favorite topics consisted in their assuring me that it was of no importance whether I believed they were ‘real’ or simply parts of myself, since—as one of the voices in particular liked to stress—there was nothing in the whole world as ‘real’ as I was. I should concede that in some ways I regarded—or ‘counted on’—the voices as another set of parents…and yet also as fellow-children: meaning that I had no doubt that they and I lived in the very same world and that they ‘understood’ me in a way that biological adults were incapable of…

“Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic…the experience of the real but unobservable and unexplainable ‘voices’ and the ecstatic feelings they often aroused doubtless contributed to my reverence for magic and my faith that magic not only permeated the everyday world but did so in a way that was thoroughly benign and altruistic and wished me well…” (1).

Bipolar disorder, substance abuse, and multiple personality can be a lethal (suicidal) combination, especially if the multiple personality is never diagnosed and addressed. Of course, I don’t know that this short story was autobiographical. It was published as fiction.

1. David Foster Wallace. “All That.” The New Yorker, December 14, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/all-that-2

Many a true word is spoken in jest: T. C. Boyle says writers “suffer from multiple personality disorder. We sit in a room five hours a day talking to ourselves.”

The New Yorker “magazine’s fiction editor…asked George Saunders, T.C. Boyle and Joyce Carol Oates to discuss why so much of modern fiction is negative, even nihilistic…

“Let’s not forget,” Boyle said, “that the three of us suffer from multiple personality disorder. We sit in a room five hours a day talking to ourselves. This is the result” (1).

Coincidental to my recent posts on Frank Conway, Boyle received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but before Conway was director.

Boyle’s joke (if he meant it as a joke) is not a joke, because writers often experience their characters and narrators—whose voices they may hear—as having minds of their own. This means that the writer has more than one “I,” which is the essence of what multiple personality is. A clinical diagnosis requires overt, observable, personality switches, plus a history of memory gaps (not attributable to another medical condition), but a person’s subjectively having more than one “I” is what is behind it.

Is the novelist’s multiple personality just an artifact of an imaginative writing process? Do writers have multiple personality in their real life or just while they are writing? The recent posts about Frank Conway show that he had personality switches and memory gaps (the other cardinal symptom of multiple personality) in his real life. And if you read about other writers in past posts, you will see that Conway is one more example of a writer with multiple personality, not an exception.

T. C. Boyle may have been joking, but many a true word is spoken in jest.

1. Nathaniel Stein. “The Dark Side of Contemporary Fiction.” The New Yorker,  October 1, 2011. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/new-yorker-festival/the-dark-side-of-contemporary-fiction

Frank Conroy (post 5): Tom Grimes, writer and friend of Director, Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1987-2005), says “Frank inhabited several personalities”

“Several incarnations of Frank existed. The pool playing, hard-drinking, cigarette smoking was quintessential Frank. Jazz musician Frank protected and supported this Frank, as well as the literary Frank, for many years. Literary Frank was solitary. Teaching Frank focused solely on the text. He was devoted to teaching, and if, at times, he came across as heartless in class, that was a function of him wanting everyone in the class to learn something from the story being discussed. But his impersonal exterior dissolved if he worked closely with someone -- at least, it did in my case. With Jayne Anne Phillips, too, who was Frank’s first truly serious, and incredibly diligent, student. Whenever I spoke to Frank one on one about my novel, he was talking to me, not to the words on the page. So, Frank inhabited several personalities, although most were known, even to him, as Frank Conroy. He wrote a brief essay about this, called ‘Me and Conroy,’ which begins, ‘He needs me more than I need him, but you’d never know it from the way he treats me. Contempt is perhaps too strong a word. It’s something icier, more distant, more perfectly disinterested. He uses me as if I could easily be replaced, which is certainly not true. Who else would put up with him the way I have?’ Ultimately, you have the Frank who is a conflation of his public and private personae. Elsewhere in the essay he writes, ‘For my entire adult life he has simply popped up whenever it pleased him, used me, put me through a million changes and split without warning, leaving me exhausted and enervated. He takes me, and my love, totally for granted, and if I had any brains I’d tell him to fuck off. But of course it’s far too late for that. He is my fate, for better or worse’ ” (1).

1. JC Hallman. “An Interview with Tom Grimes” (2010). http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_08_016444.php

Naming in Sarah Domet’s “The Guineveres”: Novel said to have nothing to do with multiple personality has four main characters named like alternate personalities.

Sarah Domet’s new first novel was just brought to my attention by its review in The New York Times. I was struck by the naming of its four main characters, each of whom is referred to by a variation of the same legal name:

“Four girls, each named Guinevere, are abandoned by their parents at a convent to be raised by nuns. Vere, Gwen, Ginny, and Win come to the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration convent by different paths. Each has her own complicated, heartbreaking story that she safeguards. And while they may share the same name, they couldn’t be more different. Gwen is all Hollywood glamour and swagger; Ginny is a budding artiste with a sentiment to match; Win’s tough bravado isn’t even skin deep; and Vere is the only one who seems to be a believer, grasping at the saint stories the nuns tell and trying to hold on to her faith that her mother will one day return for her. However, the girls are more than the sum of their parts and together they form their own family, the all-powerful and confident The Guineveres.” —from the author’s web site

Judging by the Times’ and other reviews, the novel has nothing to do with multiple personality. And according to what I see online of Sarah Domet’s 90 Days to Your Novel: A Day-by-Day Plan for Outlining & Writing Your Book (Writer's Digest Books, 2010), multiple personality is not part of the writing process that she uses or recommends. Nevertheless, the naming of her four Guineveres is similar to a common kind of naming in multiple personality:

In multiple personality, “Most personalities will have a name…in many cases, the names are some derivative of the legal name. So…Elizabeth Jane Doe might well have alter personalities…Lizzy, Lizzie, Liz, Betsie, Beth, Bets, Jane, Janie, Lizzy-Jane, and so on” (1, p. 116).

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

Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times Review of Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia: Quote from book implies Ferrante (post 6) has multiple personality.

Michiko Kakutani (New York Times, October 10, 2016) reviews Elena Ferrante’s latest book, Frantumaglia (meaning “a jumble of fragments”) — a collection described by its publisher as “consisting of over 20 years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews” (1).

Quote from book: “When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it” (1).

Kakutani thinks the above is “pretentious” (1). I think it describes the switch from the alternate personality (“Elena Ferrante”) to the regular personality (Anita Raja?).

1. Michiko Kakutani. “Review: Elena Ferrante Wants Privacy. Her New Book Implies Otherwise.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/books/review-elena-ferrante-frantumaglia.html

Donald Trump’s Body Language in Second Debate: Why did he stand behind his chair? Was that an alternate personality, there to back him up?

At the beginning of the debate, Trump stood behind his chair, with his hands on the top of the back of the chair. It was a very unusual thing to do.

My first thought was that he was using the chair as a shield to protect himself against the expected onslaught of criticism for his recent boasting-sexual-predator video.

But cowering behind a chair is not typical body language for Donald Trump, whose behavior is usually aggressive, as was seen later in the debate, when it appeared to some that he was “stalking” Hillary Clinton around the stage.

So why was Trump standing behind his chair?

It was as if the chair was where his regular self was sitting, while an alternate personality was standing behind him, ready to back him up.

“Living with Voices” by Marius Romme et al: Hearing Voices Movement says voices derive from childhood trauma, but fails to diagnose multiple personality.

“The stories in this book demonstrate that recovery means ‘taking life back into your own hands’…‘living your own life, not the life of your voices’…often they had also received long-term traditional psychiatric care that had not helped. Most of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia…Most do not use medications anymore…hearing a voice is not a sign of pathology but a signal of existing problems…Our own studies show that there is a causal relationship between trauma and hearing voices…” (1, pp. 7-8).

This book provides fifty clinical vignettes to prove the value and effectiveness of Living with Voices therapy.

However, apparently unknown to the authors, some of the vignettes describe persons with undiagnosed, and incompletely treated, multiple personality. Here are two examples:

Jolanda

“…I hear three voices and they all have names: Hannah, Eva and Nina…Nina is about 7 years of age. She is still a child. I think Eva is 18 or 20 years old, and Hannah stays about the same age as me…

“Nina cries a lot but is immediately present when other people, or I myself, want to have bodily contact. At that moment Nina sets the rules. She does not get angry but she takes control over me and behaves like a 7-year-old child. I might even say things that come from Nina…Nina originates from a long time ago and she is connected to the sexual abuse…

“Eva is a voice that always has comments…Eva cannot talk decently. She uses vulgar language. Eva also thinks that I have to harm myself. She thinks I shouldn’t exist. Eva came when I was 18 and my family withdrew the formal complaint to the police about the person who had sexually abused me…

“Hannah is the voice that got older with time. She was always there. I was a bit of a loner and Hannah was my mate…

“The voices have had influences in many ways on a lot of things: they took over things I had trouble with, like Nina taking over my intimacy, Eva my defensibility, and Hannah putting my thoughts in order…

“I think I have created the voices myself as I needed them badly in order not to become stressed out. Don’t ask me how I did it. I think it was my survival strategy…

“I have been quite often in psychiatric care and no one talked about my voices. My psychiatrist, Iwona, is the only one. That was eight years ago. She is worth her weight in gold…Iwona also taught me to…invite my voices for a meeting. Then I needed her help to learn how to chair the meeting…” (1, pp. 225-228).

She and her psychiatrist apparently don’t know that this a common technique in the treatment of multiple personality, called “internal group therapy” (2, pp. 261-262).

Lisette

“…I suffered much, especially when I had lost pieces of time. For example, I could walk on the beach; I didn’t know how I had arrived there, but suddenly I was sitting on the beach…Then, I didn’t know how, I came back and all at once I was in the room where I was supposed to be, for example, in the classroom…

“I had never talked about my hearing voices because my voice didn’t allow me to. He had scared me so much that I really hadn’t dared…When I began to talk about him for the first time two years ago he started my self-harm. He does it, the self-harm. I am not aware of it; it is kept out of my consciousness…I have often lived outside my consciousness…

“The voice is male and called Stefan…The voice, the flashbacks and my incestuous past were all mixed up. One moment I was 15 years old and the next I was 9…

“I still experience time gaps regularly [and Lisette] still hears the voice…” (1, pp. 234-237).

Lisette clearly describes the memory gaps of multiple personality.

Comment

Jolanda and Lisette have benefitted from “Living with Voices” therapy, which recognizes: first, that hearing voices does not automatically mean that the person has a psychosis, schizophrenia; second, that hearing voices may originate as a way to cope with childhood trauma; and third, that voices must be given recognition and treated with respect.

However, this therapy apparently does not recognize when voices are the voices of alternate personalities.

Jolanda and Lisette might have made an even better recovery if their multiple personality had been diagnosed and more completely treated.

1. Prof Marius Romme, Dr Sandra Escher, Jacqui Dillon, Dr Dirk Corstens, Prof Mervyn Morris. Living with Voices: 50 stories of recovery. UK, PCCS Books, 2009.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
3. Wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement

“Player Piano” by Kurt Vonnegut (post 2): Multiple personality theme suggested by name of protagonist and city; dual society and identification.

The plot of Vonnegut’s first novel is about a technologically advanced dystopia. The idea was suggested to Vonnegut by his job at General Electric and the novel Brave New World.

But his plot did not require all of the following:

First of all, it did not require that Vonnegut name his protagonist “Paul Proteus” and the city “Ilium.”

The name of the Greek god Proteus gives us the adjective “protean,” which means exceedingly variable; readily assuming different shapes or forms. A person who switches from one personality to another may be said to have a protean personality.

Two identical initials—like Poe’s “William Wilson”—suggest the theme of the double and a dual personality.

The name “Paul”: In The New Testament, Paul (a Christian) is also known as Saul (a Jew), a dual identity.

The novel’s city is named “Ilium,” Latin name of the ancient city of Troy, known for the Trojan Horse, which, like a person with multiple personality, had multiple people hidden inside.

The people of Ilium are strictly divided into two segregated classes, the elite manager/engineers and the low-class rest of society.

Paul Proteus is one of the head manager/engineers, but he sometimes gets into a jalopy and visits the other side of town. And when the lower class plans a rebellion, Paul has feelings of identification with both sides. This might be interpreted as his having two personalities.

Does Proteus have any unexplained memory gaps, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality (search “memory gaps” in this blog)? No. The only time he has a memory gap is when he is drugged; for example, when he is given truth serum to assess his loyalty. But since others in the novel assess his truthfulness with a polygraph (which does not cause a memory gap), it is not clear why tactics that involved a memory gap had to be employed. Are memory gaps in this novel only because the author experienced them? In my previous post, I quoted Vonnegut as saying he had a memory gap for the bombing of Dresden.

1. Kurt Vonnegut. Player Piano [1952]. New York, Dial Press/Random House, 2006.

“The Girl on the Train”: Paula Hawkins, her Novel, the Movie, Reviewers, all mistakenly think memories from alcohol blackouts can be recovered.

“Early anecdotal evidence suggested that blackouts might actually reflect state–dependent information storage—that is, people might be able to remember events that occurred while they were intoxicated if they returned to that state...Regardless of how compelling such stories can be, clear evidence of state–dependent learning under the influence of alcohol is lacking."

     —Aaron M. White, Ph.D. “What Happened? Alcohol, Memory Blackouts, and the Brain.” National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 2004. http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-2/186-196.htm

In other words, memory lost in an alcohol blackout can't ever be remembered, even if you get drunk again. Any memory you do recover must have been lost for some other reason.

My past post of Monday, April 20, 2015

Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train: Did Rachel have Alcoholic Blackouts or Multiple Personality Memory Gaps for the periods of time that she was drunk?

Alcoholic Blackouts

Alcoholic Blackouts are categorized as either complete or partial. If Rachel had blackouts, she had the complete kind, because the next day she would remember nothing at all of the period of time she had been drunk.

In complete blackouts, the alcohol’s toxic effect on the brain prevents any memories from being recorded, so there are no memories to remember, either the next day or at any later date.

The person may infer or guess what happened during the blackout period, from memories of the time before and after the blackout period, and from circumstantial evidence, such as physical injuries or what other people have said, but they have no direct memory of the blackout period.

Multiple Personality Memory Gaps

When the person was drunk, the regular, non-drinking personalities were not in control of behavior and consciousness, and so had no memories for that period of time. And when the regular personalities resumed control (afterwards and the next day), all they had was a memory gap for the period of time in question.

However, the drinking personalities did have complete memories for that period of time. And since the memories had been recorded (in the memory banks of the drinking personalities), it would be possible for the regular, non-drinking personalities to eventually get those memories, if the drinking personalities were ever willing to share them, and if the regular personalities were ever willing to listen.

Rachel (the main character)

Rachel says, “for four years I’d had problems with alcohol… ‘I don’t remember things…I black out and I can’t remember where I’ve been or what I’ve done,’ “ (1, p. 189).

Rachel describes “the person I am when I drink. Drunk Rachel sees no consequences, she is either excessively expansive and optimistic or wrapped up in hate. She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment” (1, p. 105). This is what Regular Rachel has inferred from what others have told her about how she behaves when she is drunk. It is unclear whether there are two different drinking personalities, or one that is more rounded. In either case, Drunk Rachel is not just some physiological state of disinhibition. She has personality. But she is still only an alternate personality with limited perspective (not a total person, which would mean all her alternate personalities put together and taken as a whole).

Eventually, (Non-Drinking) Rachel does remember what she had previously not remembered: “She got into the car with him. That night. I saw her. I didn’t remember it…But I remember. I remember now” (1, p. 282).

If it had been an alcoholic blackout, there would have been no memory to remember.

In short, posing as a novel of alcoholic blackouts, this is actually a novel of multiple personality memory gaps.

1. Paula Hawkins. The Girl on the Train. New York, Riverhead Books of Penguin Group, 2015.

Elena Ferrante (post 5) vs. Anita Raja: Why is anonymity more important to this writer than it is to other writers who have published under pseudonyms?

“Supporters Of Ferrante Are Irritated by Exposé” is the headline of an article in today’s New York Times. But that misses the real story (assuming that Ferrante’s insistence on anonymity is not just a publicity stunt).

The real question is why anonymity is more important to Anita Raja/Elena Ferrante than it is for J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith, Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, and the many other novelists who have published under a pseudonym.

The key is that pseudonyms are the names of alternate personalities.

In the case of J.K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, both personalities are novelists; the same is true for Nora Roberts and J.D. Robb. And the pseudonymous personalities have evidently agreed that the regular personalities will be their spokespersons.

But if the Anita Raja personality is primarily a translator who does not see herself as a novelist—and, in particular, does not see herself as the author of the Elena Ferrante novels—she might not want to take credit for them. Moreover, the Elena Ferrante personality may have insisted that she, herself, get the credit for what she writes.

Anita Raja has refused to do in-person interviews because she is not the author of the novels, and has not been authorized to be Elena Ferrante’s spokesperson. Elena Ferrante, herself, has refused to do in-person interviews, because Elena Ferrante looks, to other people, like Anita Raja. Although the Elena Ferrante personality may think that she looks quite different from Anita Raja, she knows that other people are always mistaking her for Anita Raja.

If you have a better explanation for why anonymity is more important to this writer than it is to other writers who have published under pseudonyms, please submit your comment.

Adam Kirsch’s nonspecific comments on revelation of identity of Elena Ferrante (post 4): He does not address her specific, stated reasons for anonymity.

Nowhere in Adam Kirsch’s Op-Ed essay in today’s New York Times does he address Elena Ferrante’s specific, stated reasons for wanting anonymity, which, as I noted in my last post, are puzzling. He raises all kinds of interesting issues, but they are not Ferrante’s issues as she has stated them.

Elena Ferrante (post 3): Reports that her identity has been discovered fail to address her puzzling reasons for anonymity and the possible explanation.

In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, conducted via email, Elena Ferrante gave this puzzling explanation for her anonymity: “What counts most for me is to preserve a creative space that seems full of possibilities, including technical ones,” she wrote. “The structural absence of the author affects the writing in a way that I’d like to continue to explore.”

In my post of December 10, 2014, I quoted another of her puzzling explanations:

EW: Why are you living out the bold decision to write under a pseudonym?

ELENA FERRANTE: Anyone who writes knows that the most complicated thing is the rendering of events and characters in such a way that they are not realistic but real. In order for this to happen it is necessary to believe in the story one is working on. I gave my name to the narrator to make my job easier. Elena is, in fact, the name that I feel is most mine. Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.

—Email interview by Karen Valby, Sept. 5, 2014, in Entertainment Weekly

If the novelist has multiple personality, and one of her alternate personalities is named Elena Ferrante, what she says could make sense.

Supportive of the possibility that she has a normal version of multiple personality, my post of January 23, 2015 showed that the first-person narrator of her very first novel, Troubling Love (1992), has unacknowledged multiple personality.

Multiple Identity Theory—the idea that 90% of novelists and 30% of the public have a normal version of multiple personality—is doubted for four reasons.

This blog, which is about Multiple Identity Literary Theory—or, more generally, Multiple Identity Theory—has been visited by thousands of people from more than fifty countries, but few of them take it seriously. I can think of four reasons:

First, it is hard to believe that multiple personality even exists if you, yourself, have never, at least knowingly, seen it. I, myself, a psychiatrist, was very skeptical before making the diagnosis and seeing it with my own eyes.

Second, most people don’t know what undiagnosed multiple personality normally looks like, with its alternate personalities hidden inside the person and/or coming out in private and/or coming out in public, but incognito.

Third, most of the evidence discussed in this blog is literary, but I don’t have a literary degree, and my views are not published in either regular book form or literary journals.

Fourth, Multiple Identity Theory would mean a change in everyone’s view of human nature, a change that just seems too big to not have been known about previously (at least in these terms).

If you would like to comment on the above reasons or add more, please do.

Anthony Doerr (post 3), Time Travel, and using a Time Machine in the treatment of multiple personality to help child-aged personalities grow up.

Anthony Doerr has just reviewed a book on the history of time travel, because it has been one of his lifelong interests (1).

Why would a novelist be interested in time and time travel?

Time in Multiple Personality

Novelists, I argue in this blog, are likely to have a normal version of multiple personality. And time is a key issue of multiple personality in two ways: First, people with multiple personality often think of their memory gaps as “losing time.” Second, the most common type of alternate personality is the child-aged alternate personality, who never grows up, and is frozen in time (often the time of a childhood trauma).

The alternate personalities of an adult with multiple personality see themselves as being of various ages: child-age personalities, teenage personalities, young-adult personalities, actual-age personalities, older personalities. Some personalities may see themselves as living in past centuries, the future, or spiritual realms. The child-aged personalities often see themselves as living in the year when the person had been that age: If the person is 30 in 2016, a ten-year-old personality may think it is 1996.

Time Machine

In the treatment of multiple personality, “Age progression techniques are useful in the ‘growing up’ of infant and child alter personalities…Via…suggestion, the infant or child alter can be helped to grow older…Various metaphors or images can be used to help the alter progress in time. Kluft describes using ‘time machine’ fantasies in the age progression of alter personalities. Other metaphors or images, such as riding along a river through time, flipping calendar pages, or speeding days and nights, are equally useful…” (2, p. 233).

Of course, novelists, having a normal version of multiple personality, don’t need treatment. But they may enjoy writing novels that take them back and forth through time.

1. Anthony Doerr. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/books/review/james-gleick-time-travel.html?_r=0

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

Adam Kirsch says nobody “would know better what the text means than its creator,” but Stephen King and Margaret Atwood say writers are not single-minded.

Kirsch says this in a New York Times Book Review essay: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/books/review/can-you-read-a-book-the-wrong-way.html

However, who a text’s creator is, how it was written, and what the author knows about it, is not a simple matter, as explained in two past posts, which quote Stephen King and Margaret Atwood:

Monday, June 29, 2015

Stephen King quoted on Writing: His voices, visions, trances; his becoming or observing autonomous characters; his cowriter muse and discovered stories

“…to be a writer…you have to imagine worlds that aren’t there…You’re hearing voices…As children…we’re told to distinguish between reality and those things. Adults will say, ‘You have an invisible friend, that’s nice, you’ll outgrow that.’ Writers don’t outgrow it” (1, p. 4).

“When I write as Richard Bachman [a pseudonym under which King wrote several novels], it opens up that part of my mind. It’s like a hypnotic suggestion that frees me to be somebody who is a little bit different…and it was fun to be somebody else for a while, in this case, Richard Bachman” (1, pp. 138-139).

“After writing more than a dozen novels, one thing hadn’t changed: Steve rarely provided detailed physical descriptions for the characters he created. ‘For me, the characters’ physical being is just not there. If I’m inside a character, I don’t see myself because I’m inside that person,’ he explained” (1, p. 147).

“[King] was by himself…he was thinking about getting high later…Then, out of the blue, came a voice that told him to reconsider. You don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to was the exact phrase he heard. ‘It’s like it wasn’t my voice,’ he said later” (1, pp. 159-160).

“There is a muse—traditionally, the muses were women, but mine’s a guy…He may not be much to look at, that muse guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty…” (2, pp. 144-145).

“You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted…I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible…I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and transcribe them, of course)…When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that…I believe it. And I do…Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world…My job [is to] watch what happens and then write it down…I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way…” (2, pp. 163-165).

“And if you do your job, your characters will come to life and start doing stuff on their own. I know that sounds a little creepy if you haven’t actually experienced it, but it’s terrific fun when it happens. And it will solve a lot of your problems, believe me” (2, p. 195).

“Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake. And that usually happens. If I sit down to write in the morning, in the beginning of that writing session and the ending of that session, I’m aware that I’m writing. I’m aware of my surroundings…But in the middle, the world is gone and I’m able to see better…I can remember finding that state for the first time and being delighted. It’s a little bit like finding a secret door in a room [or like Alice falling down a rabbit hole?] but not knowing exactly how you got in…And after doing that for a while it was a little bit like having a posthypnotic suggestion” (3, pp. 141-142).

All the above is characteristic of multiple personality (in this case, normal multiple personality). People with multiple personality may hear the voices of their autonomous, alternate personalities, or may see them, or may switch to become them. It all has similarities to hypnosis; indeed, one old theory of multiple personality is that it is a kind of self-hypnosis.

1. Lisa Rogak. Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King. New York, Thomas Dunne St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008.

2. Stephen King. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York, Scribner, 2000/2010.

3. Naomi Epel. Writers Dreaming. New York, Carol Southern Books, 1993.

Friday, July 1, 2016

Margaret Atwood (post 3) on writing: superstitions, ghosts, amnesia, interviews, hearing voices of characters, and that the writer qua writer has a split personality.

“There are a lot of things that I would rather not know about writing, because I think that if you get too curious about it and start dissecting the way you work and why you do it, you’d probably stop. Maybe not. Anyway that’s one of my superstitions” (1, p. 10).

“There are various kinds of ghosts…Or you can have the Henry James kind, in which the ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment of one’s own self which has split off, and that to me is the most interesting kind and that is obviously the tradition I’m working in” (1, p. 18).

“…when I do go back and read things I’ve written a long time ago I’m often surprised…I can’t remember having written them” (1, p. 169).

“Interviews are an art form in themselves…The fact is that most writers can’t remember the answers to some of the questions…so they make up the answers…Also, writers quite frequently conceal things. They either don’t want them known, or they think of them as trade secrets…Let’s just state at the beginning that interviews…They’re fictions” (1, 191).

Interviewer: Professor Elspeth Cameron has written in an essay on your work that your characters are “transformations of imagined persona around an inner self.”

Atwood: What does that mean?

Interviewer: In Lady Oracle, Joan Foster creates various personas and somewhere in the midst of them all is “Joan Foster.” Many of your stories, both long and short, are built around shifting identities, the various personas the characters create. You often organize your books around a split point of view. First and third persons, contradictions within the characters, fractured identities. Is that how you see characters?

Atwood: Well, maybe…A lot of this is trying to keep oneself amused…” (1, p. 213).

“Well, for a creative person, some of the work is doing nothing…You need silence within yourself in order to listen…Unless you can listen, you won’t year anything” (2, p. 182).

Interviewer: What are [characters] like?

Atwood: …they talk all the time… (2, p. 222).

Interviewer: Do you see the scenes in your books as you are writing them, or do you hear them?

Atwood: I see them. I hear them, but I’m not hallucinating” (2, p. 248).

“I don’t ‘get an idea’ for a novel…I usually find that I have collected a number of compelling images or that a voice starts operating, somebody starts talking, and I want to know more about him, find out about him…” (1, p. 164).

“I grew up in a world of doubles…a superhero was nobody unless he had an alter ego…Yeats and his theory of personae had nothing on us…As for the artists who are also writers, they are doubles twice times over, for the mere act of writing splits the self in two. In this chapter, it is therefore the doubleness of the writer qua writer I will discuss…What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’?…By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward…and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes over and uses it to commit the actual writing…All writers are double…you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read…(3, pp. 31-37).

1. Earl G. Ingersoll (Editor). Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 1990.

2. Earl G. Ingersoll (Editor). Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 2006.

3. Margaret Atwood. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York, Anchor/Random House, 2002.