Bob Dylan’s “Philosophy of Modern Song”: New book by this winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature. Which of his personalities wrote it?
Book review by Dwight Garner in The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/books/bob-dylan-philosophy-of-modern-song.html
Search "Bob Dylan” for past posts on his probable multiple personality trait.
Michel Sauret, independent author, claims he has multiple personality and quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald
https://www.msauret.com/multiple-personality-disorder-autho/
Comment: I just came upon the above, and find that he's actually published, but I’ve not read him. Search “F. Scott Fitzgerald” to see my past citation of that famous quote.
Eudora Welty (post 3): What she calls a writer’s “imagination,” other novelists have called “impersonation,” a talent of multiple personality
“I have been told, both in approval and accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself…the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high” (1, p. xvii).
Comment: What Welty calls a writer’s “imagination,” other novelists have more accurately called a writer’s “impersonation.” And what she calls “the jump” is her switch to an alternate personality.
Please search “impersonation” for past posts that quote other novelists on this issue.
1. Eudora Welty. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. New York, Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1980/2019.
Since “Annie Dillard” (post 6) was not born with the name “Annie,” is “Annie” merely a pen name or the name of her writing alternate personality?
Annie Dillard was born “Meta Ann Doak” (1).
How Alternate Personalities are Named
“Most personalities will have a name; in many cases, the names are some derivative of the legal name. So an MPD patent named Elizabeth Jane Doe might well have alternate personalities with the first names of Elizabeth, Lizzy, Lizzie, Liz, Betsy, Beth, Bets, Jane, Janie, Lizzie-Jane, and so on” (1, p. 116).
1. Wikipedia. “Annie Dillard.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dillard
2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
Concluding Comment: Obviously, for those who liked this book, I have nothing to say.
“The Maytrees” by Annie Dillard (post 5): “She wanted only to hear herself think”
“She wanted only to hear herself think…stay home to think. How else might she hear any original note, any stray subject-and-verb in the head, however faint, should one come?” (1, p. 131)
Comment: People often joke that it is so noisy, they can’t hear themself think. But do most people seriously mean by “thinking” that they listen to hear subject-and-verb voices in their head?
No, most people don’t hear voices in their head, unless they have alternate personalities who sometime speak to them.
Many fiction writers do hear voices in their head: narrators, characters, editors, and muses.
1. Annie Dillard. The Maytrees. New York, Harper Perennial, 2008.
“The Maytrees” by Annie Dillard (post 4): A Sense of Inner Wayward Multiplicity
“He learned he did not think. He witnessed ghost parts and motes on parade disappear…Could anyone…master his own mind…Did his brain contain a pack of selves?…Surely, he thought, it must be easier to drill a troop of baboons (1, p. 97).
Comment: Much of this novel contains rambling psychological meditations.
1. Annie Dillard. The Maytrees. New York, Harper Perennial, 2008.
“The Maytrees” by Annie Dillard (post 3): Who was responsible for misspelling an unusual word?
Following the accidental injury of their young son, Petie, the married Maytrees have just split, which reminds me of a similar marital breakup in Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist (1985).
“His leaving condemned Petie to being spoiled. And stuck with [his wife, Lou’s] pauciloquoys [sic] (1, p. 70).
“Pauciloquoys” is a misspelling of “pauciloquy,” which means brevity of speech. Who is to blame for using and misspelling this unusual word?
I could blame the publisher’s editor and proofreader, but they probably thought that any author who was erudite enough to use such a word would certainly know how to spell it.
My guess is that the misspelled word was dictated to the author by an alternate personality she trusted, which is a creative, but not a foolproof, system.
1. Annie Dillard. The Maytrees. New York, Harper Perennial, 2008.
Annie Dillard (post 2) in her novel “The Maytrees”: What is meant by a “split-faced smile”? Does it imply the author’s multiple personality trait?
“Two years later [after their marriage] they were dancing in the kitchen to ‘Lady Be Good.’ Maytree [the husband] turned down the radio and ran his notion by Lou [the wife]. It is an unnameable boon love hauls down, that people rightly prize as the best of life, and for which it fusses over weddings…Her eyes’ crystal, her split-faced smile, agreed. He rolled the volume knob. Oh sweet and lovely (1, p. 45).
Comment: In the above context, they are both happy. But I’m not familiar with the phrase “split-faced smile,” and googling it did not clarify.
Out of the above happy context, a “split-faced smile” might mean that the person’s upper and lower face contradicted each other, such as when a person, ordered to smile, brings the corners of their mouth upward, but does not get wrinkles at the corners of their eyes.
Since the word “split” might imply a split personality, the above may be an example of how an author’s multiple personality trait inadvertently intruded into what would otherwise have been an unambivalent scene?
1. Annie Dillard. The Maytrees. New York, Harper Perennial, 2008.
Eudora Welty (post 2) in “The Optimist’s Daughter,” cites, gratuitously, the forerunner of all modern literature on “the double” and multiple personality
Laurel’s father dies, and after his funeral, she finds that his personal library includes “Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (1, p. 118). The villain of Welty’s novel is her stepmother, “who always saw herself—in the right. Justified” (1, p. 131).
1. Eudora Welty. The Optimist’s Daughter. New York, Vintage International, 1969/1972/1990.
2. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Optimist's_Daughter
Gratuitous Multiple Personality
The above illustrates what I call “gratuitous multiple personality,” which is when a work of fiction makes reference to multiple personality that has no apparent reason, in either plot or character development, for being included, suggesting that its presence may reflect the author’s psychology.
Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Memoirs_and_Confessions_of_a_Justified_Sinner
"One Writer’s Beginnings” by Eudora Welty (post 1): Welty “hears” a “voice,” “certainly not my own,” has “always trusted this voice,” “the voice of the story or the poem itself”
“Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers—to read as listeners—and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don’t know. By now I don’t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.
“My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice” (1. pp. 15-16).
Comment: Welty is neither crazy nor joking when she says that her guiding voice was not her own, but “the voice of the book or poem itself.”
Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison similarly said that her book, Jazz, literally wrote itself. Search “Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz?”
Of course, I interpret the dissociated consciousness of both Welty and Morrison as dissociative identity or multiple personality, the creative trait, not the mental disorder.
1. Eudora Welty. One Writer’s Beginnings. New York, Scribner, 1983/2020.
“The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard: “a work in progress will turn on you”
"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better…
“This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated…As the work grows, it gets harder to control…You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it…” (1, p. 52).
“…One January day, working alone in that freezing borrowed cabin I used for a study on Puget Sound…I wrote one of the final passages of a short, difficult book…Mostly I shut my eyes. I have never been in so trancelike a state, and in fact I dislike, as romantic, the suggestion that any writer works in a peculiar state…” (1, p. 76).
Comment: She personifies a book being written as being able to turn on her. And how could a book get a will of its own? From alternate personalities involved in the process. And what might bring out alternate personalities? A “trancelike state,” which is psychological, not “romantic.”
1. Annie Dillard. The Writing Life. New York, Harper Perennial, 1989.
“Sybil” by Flora Rheta Schreiber: Was Sybil’s multiple personality iatrogenic, faked, or more elaborate?
In the last phase of Sybil’s curative psychotherapy by Dr. Wilbur, the alternate personalities whose self-image was younger than Sybil’s actual age were “age-progressed” up to Sybil’s actual age to facilitate their merger into one Sybil. This reminded me that Dr. Herbert Spiegel had once age-regressed Sybil in a demonstration of hypnotic phenomena.
Did Dr. Herbert Spiegel believe that Sybil’s multiple personality was not entirely genuine, because, in retrospect, he wondered if his age-regression of her had been partially responsible for it? Of course, if Sybil’s history of memory gaps had preceded Dr. Herbert Spiegel’s age-regression of her, then he did not cause her multiple personality.
Concluding comments: There are two reasons that faking multiple personality is rare, and a reason that the list of Sybil's personalities was probably incomplete. First, patients don’t like this diagnosis, because they feel it portrays them as a crazy freak. Second, it is very hard to remember all the characteristic nuances of each personality, and not be caught in making a mistake. In a movie, if the actor makes a mistake, they simply reshoot the scene. Third, as an added speculation, I would guess that Sybil, with an IQ of 170, had more than sixteen alternate personalities, but some were nameless and reticent.
1. Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sybil. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 1973/2009.
“Sybil” shows DSM-5 was written to make the diagnosis of multiple personality less likely
In Sybil (1), the nonfiction bestseller about a woman with multiple personality, the first thing the reader sees is NOT Sybil’s alternate personalities, but her problem with memory gaps. And in real life, that is the most common order in which the symptoms come to the clinician's attention: 1. Memory gaps, 2. Multiple personalities.
In contrast, in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, DSM-5, the Diagnostic Criteria for multiple personality are listed in the reverse order: A. Multiple Personalities, B. Memory Gaps (2, p. 292). Whereas, to repeat, in real life, as in “Sybil,” the clinician usually becomes aware of the alternate personalities only later, when looking to see why the person has a long history of memory gaps.
Of course, once the alternate personalities realize that their cover has been blown, and that hiding has become futile, they do start to look like multiple personalities. So, to further obscure the diagnosis, DSM-5 changed the name from “multiple personality disorder” to “dissociative identity disorder” (2).
Comment: The authors of DSM-5 rationalized what they did, but probably knew better.
1. Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sybil. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 1973/2009.
2. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5], Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.
“Dissociation” by Herbert Spiegel M.D., a strangely unavailable book, is a loose end in the story of “Sybil”
In “Sybil Exposed” by Debbie Nathan, Dr. Herbert Spiegel was one person who had seen Sybil and supposedly testified that he had evidence the case was fake. So for many years, I have occasionally tried to get the doctor’s book “Dissociation” to see what it had to say. At one point, it was offered for sale as a used book for $600.00, but I didn’t buy it. Since then it has been “out of print” and “unavailable.”
I consider it to be a strangely untold story as to how Dr. Herbert Spiegel could be against the legitimacy of multiple personality, while his son, Dr. David Spiegel, was the head of the group that wrote the section on multiple personality, and renamed it “dissociative identity disorder,” in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, the DSM.
“Dissociation” by Herbert Spiegel MD might have had nothing interesting to say about multiple personality and “Sybil,” but it is a loose end.
Debbie Nathan (1), author of “Sybil Exposed” is affiliated with National Center for Reason and Justice (2), defender of people accused of child abuse by people with multiple personality
Does this debunker’s affiliation mean "Sybil Exposed" had an ulterior motive?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Nathan
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Reason_and_Justice
“Sybil” by Flora Rheta Schreiber: Did Dr. Herbert Spiegel’s hypnotic age regressions on Sybil suggest alternate personalities of various ages to her?
I have just begun to read this nearly 500-page book. The Acknowledgments section includes “Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who did age regressions on Sybil and described her as ‘a brilliant hysteric’ ” (1, p. xix).
Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a psychiatrist who specialized in hypnosis, may have used Sybil as a hypnosis demonstration subject. And when he did “age regressions on Sybil,” he may have suggested that she experience herself at various ages, which may have inadvertently suggested alternate personalities of various ages.
Thus, if “a brilliant hysteric” could easily experience alternate personalities, the distinction between Dr. Spiegel’s diagnosis and Dr. Wilber’s diagnosis (multiple personality) may be less significant than they at first appear. And Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who denied Sybil had multiple personality, may have contributed to it.
1. Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sybil. NewYork, Grand Central Publishing, 1973/2009.
“Sybil”: What had a textbook on multiple personality said about it, and what has happened to the diagnosis?
I may go ahead and reread Sybil for its historical interest, but looking back in this blog, I see that I have already addressed its debunkers’ lack of credibility. And I have just done what they should have done, see what an authoritative textbook on multiple personality had said about it:
Sybil (1974) “is both detailed and accurate enough to serve as mandatory clinical reading for students of MPD” (1, p. 35).
Moreover, nearly fifty years later, the American Psychiatric Association’s official diagnostic manual, DSM-5, stands behind the diagnosis (renamed “dissociative identity disorder”) without reservation. The debunkers have been debunked.
1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
Is a psychiatrist who strongly disbelieves in multiple personality qualified to have an opinion?
Since multiple personality patients may be very suggestible, a psychiatrist who strongly disbelieves in it is unqualified to have an opinion. An agnostic psychiatrist who has read about it is the most qualified.
