Novelists have a normal version of multiple personality: Are there a limited number of successful ways for their alternate personalities to be organized?

You might think that there were an infinite number of possible plots for novels, or that there would be an infinite number of ways for novelists’ alternate personalities to successfully collaborate.

But if there are a limited number of basic plots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots) or dramatic situations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations), why wouldn’t there also be a limited number of ways for a novelist’s alternate personalities to successfully work together?

To answer this question, you would have to find out how the alternate personalities were organized in a large number of novelists, and then see if there were a limited number of basic organizations. I don’t know when this will be known and done—or who will do it—but I think it would be possible. 

The results would be of interest to aspiring novelists and writing programs, who might like to have some frame of reference for this aspect of the writing process.

Is there a non-traumatic, story-telling pathway to multiple personality? Or have all novelists (with their normal version of multiple personality) had childhood trauma?

Conventional wisdom is that multiple personality is a way to cope with childhood trauma, if the child happens to have been born with a sufficient ability to use the psychological defense of dissociation (an ability which is relatively common in children, as indicated by such normal phenomena as imaginary companions).

Whether a person’s multiple personality is a mental illness (i.e., it causes distress and dysfunction) or the normal version (an asset, which most novelists have) would depend on the how early and severe the trauma, whether there were supportive adults to help deal with the trauma, and whether there were other helpful things (like writing).

Since there has been trauma throughout history, it makes sense that there has always been a way to cope with it.

However, another thing that people have needed throughout history is story-telling. Before the written word, when stories were spoken, the best story-tellers would have been those who could virtually become each character as each one spoke. And the same is true for the process of writing characters.

So if things exist because they are useful, I can conceive of a nontraumatic, story-telling pathway to multiple personality. Plausibility does not make it true, but my mind is open.

The Mystery of the Literary Double: Why do novelists write about doubles and doubleness instead of multiples and multiplicity, and which one writes about it?

Theoretically, the simplest case of multiple personality is two personalities, but I have never seen a case in which the person had only two personalities.

The first time you meet a person’s alternate personality, you might think that there are only two—the regular self and the alternate personality—but it always turns out that there are more. And most of the personalities are not duplicates in how they look to themselves or each other. The theme of the double makes no sense.

So why does Dostoevsky have The Double, and Stevenson Jekyll and Hyde? Why does Henry James in “The Private Life” have one of a writer’s selves out socializing, while the writer’s other self is back in his room writing? Why does Joyce Carol Oates write about “JCO and I” (after “Borges and I”)? Why does Margaret Atwood write about the writer’s inherent “doubleness” (the one who does the living and the one who does the writing)?

And if there were only two, which of the two would be the one who is telling the reader about this?

W. B. Yeats, 1923 Nobel Prize winner, hoped his “double” and “anti-self” “Leo” was a genuine spirit, but admitted “Leo” might be “a secondary personality”

“It was at Wimbledon, in 1912, that Yeats felt himself contacted by the spirit claiming to be ‘Leo’…’Leo’…said he had been with Yeats since childhood as his ‘opposite’…’Leo’ thereafter frequently reappeared to Yeats, who was so stirred that he began composing a correspondence with this alternate self…This imaginary dialogue was not wasted. It inspired the great antiphonal poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ written in 1915,” which included the following lines:

“I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self…”

“Yeats freely confessed that his useful sparring partner ‘Leo’ might come from his own imagination. As he explained in 1917 to Sir William Barrett, past President of the Society for Psychical Research, ‘I think one should deal with a control on the working hypothesis that it is genuine. This does not mean that I feel any certainty on the point, but even if it is a secondary personality that should be the right treatment’ " (1, pp. 9-10).

1. Brenda Maddox. George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats. London, Picador, 1999.

Shapeshifting, Metamorphosis, Transformation, Jekyll/Hyde: How Multiple Personality is Represented in Mythology, Folklore, and Speculative Fiction.

“The idea of shapeshifting is present in the oldest forms of totemism and shamanism, as well as the oldest extant literature and epic poems, including works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad, where the shapeshifting is usually induced by the act of a deity…It remains a common trope in modern fantasy, children's literature, and works of popular culture…

“Popular shapeshifting creatures in folklore are werewolves and vampires …the Huli jing of East Asia (including the Japanese kitsune), and the gods, goddesses, and demons of numerous mythologies, such as the Norse Loki or the Greek Proteus…Examples of shapeshifting in classical literature include many examples in Ovid's Metamorphoses…” (Wikipedia).

Wikipedia’s article on Shapeshifting goes on for sixteen pages:

Table of Contents

Folklore and mythology

1.1 Greco-Roman

1.2 British and Irish

1.2.1 Celtic mythology

1.3 Norse

1.4 Other lore

1.4.1 Armenian

1.4.2 Indian

1.4.3 Philippines

1.4.4 Tatar

1.4.5 Chinese

1.4.6 Japanese

1.4.7 Korean

1.5 Folktales

Themes

2.1 Punitive changes

2.2 Transformation chase

2.3 Powers

2.4 Bildungsroman

2.5 Needed items

2.6 Inner conflict (e.g., Jekyll’s transformation to Hyde)

2.7 Usurpation

2.8 Ill-advised wishes

2.9 Monstrous bride/bridegroom

2.10 Death

Modern

3.1 Fiction

3.2 Popular culture

Psychologically speaking, much of the above shapeshifting, metamorphosis, and transformation in world literature, now and throughout history—not just Jekyll and Hyde—represents the personality switches of multiple personality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapeshifting

Psychologist Mary Watkins’ 1986 book says “imaginal dialogues” with “invisible guests” are normal and creative, but doesn’t know it is multiple personality.

Watkins took the title of her book, “Invisible Guests” (1) from the poem quoted in yesterday’s post, and has other interesting quotations like one from the autobiography of Anthony Trollope:

“…and [the author] can never know [his characters] well unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy. They must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them. He must argue with them, quarrel with them, forgive them, and even submit to them. He must know of them whether they be cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how far true, and how far false. The depth and the breadth, and the narrowness and the shallowness of each should be clear to him. And as, here in our outer world, we know that men and women change,—become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them,—so should these creations of his change, and every change should be noted by him…It is so that I have lived with my characters, and thence has come whatever success I have obtained…” (1, pp. 111-112).

Watkins then adds: “The development of depth of characterization corresponds to the development of the character’s autonomy. As the character becomes more autonomous, we know about its world not just from external observation or supposition but from the character directly. The author or narrator becomes less omniscient and can be surprised by the other. Observation of the character’s actions can be supplemented by the character’s own account of thoughts, feelings and wishes through which the imaginal other gains interiority and depth” (1, p. 112).

However, Watkins thinks that “this multiplicity of characters in an individual’s experience would not resemble a pathological state of ‘multiple personality.’ In the latter there is no imaginal dialogue, only sequential monologue…the illness of multiple personality is problematic precisely because of its singleness of voice at any one moment” (1, pp. 104-105).

However, the fact is: “Interpersonality communication is probably going on in every multiple [person with multiple personality] most of the time. The therapeutic concern is more with the…quality of communication. Most host personalities hear voices [of alternate personalities]…Other alters [alternate personalities] report being able to see and talk with one another while they are not ‘out’…” (2, p. 152).

Watkins makes some good points, but doesn’t realize she is talking about a normal version multiple personality.

1. Mary Watkins, Ph.D. Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. Hillsdale NJ, The Analytic Press/Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986.

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

“Invisible Guests”: Czeslaw Milosz, 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, on his experience of the creative artist’s normal version of multiple personality.

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us

how difficult it is to remain just one person,

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,

and invisible guests come in and out at will.” — from “Ars Poetica?”

from The Paris Review, Winter 1994, No. 133

Czeslaw Milosz, The Art of Poetry No. 70

INTERVIEWER

In your poem “Ars Poetica?” you stated that the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.

MILOSZ

My poetry has been called polyphonic, which is to say that I have always been full of voices speaking; in a way I consider myself an instrument, a medium. My friend Jeanne Hersch, who introduced me to the existentialism of Karl Jaspers, used to say, “I have never seen a person so instrumental,” meaning that I was visited by voices. There is nothing extraterrestrial in this, but something within myself. Am I alone in this? I don’t think so. Dostoyevsky was one of the first writers, along with Friedrich Nietzsche, to identify a crisis of modern civilization: that every one of us is visited by contradictory voices, contradictory physical urges. I have written about the difficulty of remaining the same person when such guests enter and go and take us for their instrument. But we must hope to be inspired by good spirits, not evil ones.

INTERVIEWER

You have called yourself a medium, but a suspicious one. What do you mean by this? Of what are you a medium?

MILOSZ

I suppose, looking back, that everything was dictated to me, and I was just a tool. Of what I don’t know. I would like to believe that I am a tool of God, but that’s presumptuous. So I prefer to call whatever it is my “daimonion.” I have written a new poem that describes this relationship:

Please, my Daimonion, ease off just a bit,

I’m still closing accounts and have much to tell.

Your rhythmical whispers intimidate me.

Today for instance, reading about a certain old woman

I saw again—Let us call her Priscilla,

Though I am astonished that I can give her any name

And people will not care. So that Priscilla,

Her gums in poor shape, an old hag,

Is the one to whom I return, in order to throw charms

And grant her eternal youth. I introduce a river,

Green hills, irises wet with rain

And, of course, a conversation. “You know,” I say,

“I could never guess what was on your mind

And will never learn. I have a question

That won’t be answered.” And you, Daimonion,

Just at this moment interfere, interrupt us, averse to

Surnames and family names and all reality

Too prosaic and ridiculous, no doubt.

So, this voice involves my purification from the past by time and distance. It interferes and stops me from writing about my life too realistically, too prosaically. I am able to move to another dimension.”

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1721/the-art-of-poetry-no-70-czeslaw-milosz

Comment on Scott Stossel’s NYTimes book review of Peter D. Kramer’s “Case for Antidepressants”: Depression is less specific than Multiple Personality.

The basis for the controversy over whether antidepressants work is that depression is a nonspecific diagnosis. Depressed patients are diverse.

Of the patients who fulfill the diagnostic criteria for depression, some do well on antidepressants, but others don’t. And the same is true of the effectiveness of psychotherapy for this heterogeneous population.

In contrast, a patient with alternate personalities and memory gaps has a relatively specific condition.

Most depressed patients do not have multiple personality, but among patients who do have multiple personality (undiagnosed and unsuspected), the presenting problem is often depression.

Sometimes antidepressants help patients with multiple personality, either because the patient has both depression and multiple personality, or because the antidepressant happens to make it more difficult for a problematic personality to take control.

If the patient has both conditions, the antidepressant may be needed even after problems with the multiple personality are resolved. But if the patient has only multiple personality (with the depressed mood as a secondary symptom of the multiple personality), then psychotherapy specifically designed for the multiple personality cures the depression as well.

My main point here is that, compared to depression, multiple personality is a relatively specific diagnosis.

Blind Spot: Psychiatrist after psychiatrist had missed the diagnosis of multiple personality, while the family of the patient had known about it for years.

I had been a psychiatrist for twelve years before I diagnosed multiple personality for the first time. My American psychiatric training had not taught me how to make this diagnosis. It was twelve years before I finally learned to ask my patients relevant questions.

One patient had been in psychiatric treatment for many years, under the care of a number of previous psychiatrists, who had all diagnosed him as having schizophrenia. In addition to the traditional psychiatric evaluation and mental status exam, I asked him my newly acquired, basic screening question for multiple personality—Have you ever had memory gaps?—and his positive answer was the first step in a diagnostic process which led to my meeting his alternate personalities.

However, when I subsequently spoke with his family to explain why I was changing his diagnosis, his family replied that they had known about the multiple personality for many years. I asked them why they had never told me or any of the previous psychiatrists. They said they assumed the doctors knew about it, since it was so obvious. They had also assumed that the diagnosis of schizophrenia included multiple personality (it does not).

You may wonder how the family knew about the multiple personality, while psychiatrist after psychiatrist had not? Why had the family seen the switches from one personality to another, each having a different name, with some personalities having memory gaps for what other personalities had done?

We psychiatrists had always been seeing the patient’s “host” or “patient” personality, and if any of the alternate personalities ever had come out during appointments, they had done so incognito. Why were the alternate personalities so guarded with psychiatrists? They felt that the host personality, not they, was the patient. And they feared that the psychiatrist, to favor his patient, would try to get rid of everyone else, kill them off, either with medication or a psychiatric form of exorcism. At the very least, he would meddle in their lives.

This is not to say that families always know about the multiple personality. In most cases, they do not. They may have only a vague sense that their family member has variable moods, interests, attitudes, and, at times, may be absent-minded. Mark Twain was known for his excellent memory, but his family said that he was sometimes very absent-minded.

This is also not to say that most patients diagnosed as having schizophrenia have multiple personality. Most patients diagnosed as having schizophrenia have schizophrenia. But families should understand that multiple personality is not a symptom of schizophrenia, and if they see signs of multiple personality in their family member, they should not assume that the psychiatrists know about it.

P.S.: I should add that most patients who have multiple personality, but are misdiagnosed as having something else, are not misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia. Multiple personality can be misdiagnosed as many things, such as depression. Actually, in many such cases, the depression may not be a misdiagnosis. The patient may have both depression and multiple personality, and you need to treat both to get the best results.
P.P.S.: I should also add that I don't think everyone has multiple personality. I have diagnosed multiple personality in only about four percent of my patients, which is much more than most psychiatrists, who never make the diagnosis. But I have not diagnosed multiple personality in 96% of my patients.

“Emily Dickinson’s Use of the Persona” by John Emerson Todd: But is it more likely that she constructed personae or had alternate personalities?

Todd points out that in many of Dickinson’s poems, the “I” speaking is not Emily. It is a persona. He says she has four kinds: 1. The “Little Girl” Persona, 2. The “Lover-Wife-Queen” Persona, 3. Personae in Death and Eternity, and 4. Personae involving Psychology and the Divided Personality (1). He gives an example of the latter:

“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind —

As if my Brain had split —

I tried to match it — Seam by Seam —

But could not make them fit” (1, p. 83).

Todd uses the word “persona” to imply that Dickinson “more or less consciously adopted” those four kinds of “non-Emily” (1, p. xv) narrators.

But is that how most poems are written? Is that how Dickinson wrote? Where did her personae come from? Did she purposely, intellectually, construct them? I’m guessing that she didn’t construct her personae any more than most novelists construct their characters and narrators.

And that’s the trouble with concepts like persona, voice, alter ego, double, etc.: they are misleading about the creative process and uninformative psychologically. Emily Dickinson probably had alternate personalities.

1. John Emerson Todd. Emily Dickinson’s Use of the Persona. The Hague, Mouton, 1973.

“Miri, Who Charms,” fourteenth novel by Joanne Greenberg, author of “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”: Is there any residual multiple personality?

Miri, Who Charms is a story of the friendship between Rachel and Miri (Miriam). It has nothing to do with either schizophrenia or multiple personality, the latter of which was my diagnosis for the main character of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, an autobiographical novel (see past posts).

Miri has always dominated the friendship. Why has she? What is the nature of Miri’s charm? What is Rachel’s psychology? And is there anything to suggest that the multiple personality found in the 1964 novel is still present in 2009, in Rachel, the first-person narrator?

The following paragraph comes early in the novel, but it is a flash-forward to the end of the novel, when the friendship is on the rocks and they are angry with each other.

Rachel’s Multiple-Mindedness,

Miri’s Single-Mindedness

“We’re still angry. My arm is throbbing [from their fight with each other] and she hasn’t spoken a civil word since we left Boulder. My own anger is mixed with sadness, exhaustion, anxiety, and hope, a whole bouquet of emotions, many of them contradictory. It comes to me that part of Miri’s charm is the purity of her feeling. Ambivalence makes us strain, work too hard or give up too easily. Uncertainty clouds our eyes, makes our gestures graceless, our smiles waver. We strike people as being inauthentic, phony. Miri is sure. Her lines are clear and straight as the part in her hair. This charm of hers isn’t only her beauty” (1, p. 53) (boldface added).

Self-Contradiction

Rachel appears to think that the words “contradictory,” “ambivalence,” and “uncertainty” are synonyms, but they are not. Contradictory thoughts or feelings cannot be present simultaneously in the same personality; whereas, ambivalence and uncertainty imply a mixture of things that are different, but can coexist in the same personality. Thus, if it were true that Rachel had simultaneous thoughts and feelings that were truly contradictory, she would have multiple personality.

“We strike people as being inauthentic, phony” is true of people with multiple personality when they have more than one personality expressing itself at the same time, since people misinterpret the self-contradiction as a sign of lying.

Plural Pronouns

When the above statement is made, Rachel and Miri had just had a violent physical fight with each other, and were now in a police car, on their way to rescue Miri’s daughter, who was lost in a cave. One interpretation would be that Rachel was using plural pronouns to make a philosophical statement about people in general, but under the circumstances, I doubt that she was feeling philosophical. Another interpretation would be that under the stress of circumstances, she revealed her sense of being multiple.

Conclusion

The author may still have multiple personality, but if so, it is what most novelists have: a normal version.

1. Joanne Greenberg. Miri, Who Charms. Millburn NJ, Montemayor Press, 2009.

Wisdom, Human Nature, Personal Identity, Multiple Personality, and the Universal Truth, Part A: People are Basically the Same, Part B: People are Basically Different.

Prejudice misapplies Part B.

Overgeneralization misapplies Part A.

Wisdom is the appropriate application of both parts A and B.

In regard to personal identity, most people apply Part A: they think that everyone has the same kind of sense of personal identity that they do.

If they have a single sense of identity, they can’t believe that anyone could really have multiple personality. If they have multiple personality (and if they know it), they feel that everyone else probably does, too, but that many people are either not self-aware or simply don’t want to admit it.

A related example is hearing non-psychotic, rational voices—or having non-self or other-self thoughts—in one’s head. People with multiple personality, who experience this occasionally or even routinely (it is the voices and thoughts of their alternate personalities), think that everyone probably has the same thing, but that many people are either not self-aware or simply don’t want to admit it.

After all, they think, if everyone did not have this kind of experience, why would there be such common expressions as hearing “the voice of reason” or the “voice of conscience”? Don’t all normal people hear the voices of reason and conscience?

But the fact is that people without multiple personality, many of whom are quite reasonable and moral, do not have this kind of subjective experience.

Interpretation of a Margaret Atwood (post 8) quote: “Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”

When I google “Margaret Atwood,” I can’t help but notice that Google provides highlights about the author in the right margin, including the above quote from Atwood’s novel, Cat’s Eye.

I have not read Cat’s Eye, so I just looked it up in Wikipedia, which notes:

“The book is sometimes seen as containing autobiographical elements. For example, like [one of the characters], Atwood is the daughter of an entomologist.”

“Elaine [the protagonist] is bullied [in childhood] by the three girls, her supposed ‘best friends.’ The bullying escalates that winter when the girls throw Elaine's hat into a ravine and abandon her half-frozen outside in the snow.”

Since, in Lady Oracle, a similar episode with three girls takes place in the protagonist’s childhood, it may be that Atwood, herself, had some such childhood experience, which was traumatic.

The quotation “that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise” implies that the adult still has a sense of being a child. I don’t know the context of this statement in Cat’s Eye, but the quote has meaning in the context of multiple personality.

In multiple personality, there are certain commonly encountered types of alternate personality. The single most common type is the child-aged alternate personality, which makes sense, since multiple personality begins as a way to cope with childhood trauma. So the quote “that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise” may imply her awareness of the presence of a child-aged alternate personality.

“Lady Oracle” by Margaret Atwood (post 7): Protagonist depicted as having multiple personality by her use of automatic writing and by her own statement.

I have previously quoted from Atwood’s nonfiction book on writing, in which she said, in effect, that fiction writers have multiple personality. In this novel, her protagonist is a fiction writer, who, not surprisingly, is depicted as having multiple personality: she uses automatic writing to write one of her novels and she states that she has multiple personalities.

Automatic Writing

As previously discussed, the title, “Lady Oracle,” is also the title of a novel written by the protagonist using the process of “automatic writing”:

“At this point I told the truth. I shouldn’t have done it, but once I’d started I couldn’t stop. ‘Well, I was trying some experiments with Automatic Writing,’ I said. ‘You know, you sit in front of a mirror, with a paper and pencil and a lighted candle, and then…Well, these words would sort of be given to me. I mean, I’d find them written down, without having done it myself, if you know what I mean.’ ”

Historically, automatic writing was an experimental method used by psychologists to demonstrate that even some normal people had “double consciousness” (1), an old synonym for multiple personality. More recently, automatic writing has been used clinically as one way to communicate with a patient’s alternate personalities (2, p. 94).

Protagonist’s Statement

As previously quoted:

“This was the beginning of my double life. But hadn’t my life always been double? There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin…It was never-never land she wanted, that reckless twin. But not twin even, for I was more than double, I was triple, multiple…”

Since Atwood has stated that fiction writers, in real life, have multiple personality, the above statement by her fictional writer cannot be interpreted in any other way.

Multiple Personality Unnamed

Yet, in Atwood’s novel about a writer, as in her essay on writing, although she describes the writer as having multiple personality, she does so without using the term. Why?

In post 4, I speculated that she thinks of “multiple personality” as a term that would apply only to a person who was mentally ill. And since she does not wish to imply that either novelists in general or the writer in this novel is crazy, she does not feel the term applies. Perhaps she would use the term if she read this blog and came to accept that multiple personality has a normal version.

Salient Fact and Main Point

The salient fact of Lady Oracle is that the protagonist is a fiction writer. Any analysis of this novel that could apply even if the protagonist were not a fiction writer, and which does not interpret the novel in the context of Atwood’s views on the fiction writer, misses the main point, which is that the protagonist has multiple personality.

1. Alfred Binet. On Double Consciousness: Experimental Psychological Studies. Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Company, 1905.

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

“Lady Oracle” by Margaret Atwood (post 6): Protagonist Joan says, “I was more than double, I was triple, multiple” and had written “Lady Oracle” in a trance.

Joan is being interviewed about her recently published book, Lady Oracle (a different kind of novel, within the novel, but with the same title):

“At this point I told the truth. I shouldn’t have done it, but once I’d started I couldn’t stop. ‘Well, I was trying some experiments with Automatic Writing,’ I said. ‘You know, you sit in front of a mirror, with a paper and pencil and a lighted candle, and then…Well, these words would sort of be given to me. I mean, I’d find them written down, without having done it myself, if you know what I mean’ ” (1, p. 237).

On page 246, Joan says:

“This was the beginning of my double life. But hadn’t my life always been double? There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin…It was never-never land she wanted, that reckless twin. But not twin even, for I was more than double, I was triple, multiple, and now I could see that there was more than one life to come, there were many.”

I reserve comment until I finish the novel.

1. Margaret Atwood. Lady Oracle. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1976.

Margaret Atwood (post 5) denies “Lady Oracle” is autobiographical, since protagonist is a writer who lost 100 lbs, but Atwood was never obese.

In interviews, Atwood likes to tell the story of how readers have assumed that she had been obese as a child, and had lost a lot of weight, since Joan, the protagonist of Lady Oracle, at fifteen, was 5’8” and 240 lbs., but lost one hundred pounds when her aunt died and left her money on the condition that she lose the weight.

Joan, the first-person narrator, who is a novelist as an adult, tells the reader, at very great length, about her conflict with her mother, and her relationship with her peers, as related to her childhood obesity. But is Joan a reliable narrator? Should the reader believe that she had been obese throughout childhood, and had then lost one hundred pounds?

I’ll give my opinion about Joan’s truthfulness when I finish reading Lady Oracle. But the question I’m raising in this post is what to think when novelists deny that their novels are autobiographical, as they often do.

Suppose Atwood, though never actually obese, had had an imaginary companion or alternate personality who was obese. Would she then be telling the truth when she says that the novel is not autobiographical?

Of course, I have no way of knowing if Atwood has ever had an imaginary companion or alternate personality who was obese, except that I believe most major characters, of most novelists, are best understood, not as constructs, but as alternate personalities.

This would mean that Lady Oracle, though not autobiographical of Atwood’s host personality, might be autobiographical of her alternate personality. Maybe Atwood had a fat alternate personality who wanted to come out, and who did come out, in this novel.

Why does Margaret Atwood (post 4), who argues that all fiction writers have multiple personality, never use the term, but only the euphemism of doubles?

“…in Negotiating with the Dead [A Writer on Writing], Atwood returns to her persistent concern with the writer as double, as split personality…” (1, p. 38), says Lorraine York, who teaches Canadian literature (Atwood is Canadian).

The term that Professor York uses, “split personality,” is the informal term for multiple personality, and she is quite right in reading Atwood as arguing that fiction writers have multiple personality. Atwood clearly states that the writer consists of “two entities,” one who exists for activities other than writing, and the other “personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over” to do the writing.

Why, then, doesn't Atwood use either “split personality” or “multiple personality”? The closest she comes is to say that writing “splits the self in two.” She prefers the euphemism of “doubles”: “In this chapter, it is therefore the doubleness of the writer qua writer I will discuss.”

My guess is that she thinks of multiple personality as always being a mental illness, and that it would be absurd to say that she and all other fiction writers were mentally ill. I agree, which leads me to infer that multiple personality has a normal version.

1. Coral Ann Howells (Editor). The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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 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.

Nora Roberts’ (post 5) Eve Dallas in Historical Context: Incest victim, solving a murder about incest, when incest and multiple personality were associated.

Naked in Death, the first of more than forty novels featuring police lieutenant Eve Dallas, was published in 1995. The novel highlights the fact that Eve Dallas had been a victim of incest in childhood. And she solves a murder that had been committed to cover up multigenerational incest: a woman had been blackmailing her grandfather, threatening to expose his crime of incest, so he kills her.

In the 1990s, incest, traditionally a hidden crime, and multiple personality, intrinsically a hidden disorder, had come out of the closet. In fact, discovering incest as the hidden cause of psychological problems had become so popular that some misguided therapists were over-diagnosing it. And since incest had become associated in the popular mind with multiple personality, the backlash against false accusations of incest had become a backlash against multiple personality as well.

In any case, the point is, when Naked in Death, a novel about an incest victim who solves a murder about incest, was published in 1995, incest and multiple personality were associated, not only as a clinical fact, but in the popular mind. And so anyone who reads the story of Eve Dallas without thinking of multiple personality is taking it out of historical context.

The fact that the novel emphasizes and highlights incest, but does not even mention multiple personality as a possibility, is curious, considering the historical context noted above. Perhaps, for the author, multiple personality was too sensitive a subject.

“Naked in Death” and “Seduction in Death” by J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts) (post 4): Eve Dallas’s Dissociative Fugue and Probable Multiple Personality.

Police lieutenant Eve Dallas, who, in the first of this series of over forty novels (1) is thirty years old, had been found abandoned at age eight in the city of Dallas, with no memory of her own name or of anything else about her first eight years. She was given the name Eve Dallas, placed in foster care, and eventually, at about age twenty, joined the New York City police department.

Remarkably, whenever this background is discussed (and it is repeatedly) even Dr. Mira, the highly regarded police psychiatrist (1, p. 133), does not call it what it was: a dissociative fugue, which is when, after psychologically traumatic experience, people wander or travel away from where they are known, and have amnesia for who they are and what their life had been. [Search “dissociative fugue” for prior posts.]

Dissociative fugue is one of a group of psychological conditions called dissociative disorders, which includes dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality). So if someone has had a dissociative fugue, there is a good chance that they have multiple personality, especially if they’ve had extensive psychological trauma in childhood, which was the case for Eve Dallas (1, p. 133).

In short, the protagonist of this series of novels has been given a backstory suggestive of multiple personality, but the author (as represented by the narrator and characters) does not know it, and so there is no effort to provide the reader with relevant information, such as whether Eve Dallas has identity changes and memory gaps (the narrator would have to say so or another character would have to ask her). 

Nevertheless, inadvertently, there are some indications suggestive of multiple personality. For example, at one point Eve says, “My father raped me.” And the narrator adds: “She heard herself say it. The shock of it, hearing her own voice say the words, mirrored in her eyes.” Now, there are two ways to interpret this; 1. that she had often thought of it, but was surprised at her impulsivity to say it out loud to other people, or 2. that she had had dreams and flashes of memory about this, but had not known there was a part of herself (an alternate personality) who had a clear memory of it. It is a clinically known fact that people with multiple personality sometimes have a subjective sense that they say or do things that does not feel like them saying or doing it (alternate personalities can sometimes pull strings from behind the scenes). This is why multiple personality used to be confused with being possessed.

The other main character, Roarke, thinks Eve Dallas has two distinct personalities, as, for example, when he says, “Lieutenant Dallas wouldn’t be afraid of me, even if Eve might” (1, p. 153).

Like many people with multiple personality, Eve Dallas sometimes hears the voices of alternate personalities in her head. One is a personality based on her deceased father, so she must have had this alternate personality from before she was eight years old. As she is in the process of arresting a criminal: “So what? a voice whispered in her ear. Her father’s voice. Another’s coming. Another always is” (2, p. 304).

In multiple personality, it is not uncommon to have some opposite-sex alternate personalities. The alternate personality related to her father was probably not the only one. For example, Eve Dallas and Roarke were having a playful physical fight, and at one point she says, “Just be careful who you call a female, ace” (2, p. 179). Indeed, J. D. Robb’s decision to have police subordinates address their superiors, like Lieutenant Dallas, as “Sir” makes me wonder whether J. D. Robb thinks of Eve Dallas’s police personality as male (as opposed to her off-duty and romantic personalities, which are clearly female). But I don’t think most readers would like that interpretation.

1. J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts). Naked in Death. New York, Berkley Books, 1995.

2. J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts). Seduction in Death. New York, Berkley Books, 2001.