Great Novelists have Multiple PersonalityKenneth A. Nakdimen, MD, psychiatrist, on the creative process of normal writers. Search "name index," "subject index," "theory."

S a t u r d a y , F e b r u a r y 7 , 2 0 1 5

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (post #2): The narrator says he hears voices and reads minds, which his family and girlfriend think is crazyHis Family

“I heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio…at nearlynine [years old]…inside me, the voices rebounded against the walls of my skull…I had discovered that the voices could be controlled—I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off my newly-discovered inner ear…

[With his family assembled] “I told them. ‘I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think…that Archangels have started to talk to me’…”

But his mother called him crazy, his father hit him “a mighty blow on the side of my head,” and his father declared, “Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me? Let him enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!”

So Saleem decided to keep his voices to himself and pretend it had been “a stupid joke, like you said” (1, pp. 185-188).

“I was wrong about the Archangels, of course…the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels…Telepathy, then…In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening…All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father’s wrath…I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy, the difficulties of concealing knowledge are almost insurmountable…I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing…” (1, pp. 191-194).

His Girlfriend

“I am coming to the fantastic heart of my own story…during the first hour of August 15th, 1947—between midnight and one a.m.—no less than one thousand and one children were born within the [newly] sovereign state of India…endowed with features, talents or faculties which can only be described as miraculous…By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all nearing their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant…of one another’s existence…And then, as a result of a jolt received in a bicycle-accident, I, Saleem Sinai, became aware of them all…

“…So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry…but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem…to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war…and to me, the greatest gift of all—the ability to look into the hears and minds of men…

“Padma [his girlfriend, and the audience for most of his narration] is looking as if her mother had died… ‘O baba!’ she says at last. ‘O baba! You are sick…’

“No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don’t make the mistake of dismissing what I’ve unveiled as mere delirium; or even as the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated before that I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and read aloud to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother’s-head truth…”

“…On my tenth birthday, abandoned by one set of children, I learned that five hundred and eighty-one others were celebrating their birthdays, too…a gang which was spread over the length and breadth of the country, and whose headquarters were behind my eyebrows…That is how it was when I was ten: nothing but trouble outside my head, nothing but miracles inside it” (1, pp. 224-237).

Blog Comment

I am still reading the novel. So, at this point, I can only say two things: First,I am surprised to find that the narrator’s sanity is the novel’s central question. And that it is a seriously posed question, since the text says that the people who know him best—from his own family and culture, his parents and girlfriend—think his claim of hearing voices and reading minds is crazy.Second, if Saleem does not have a psychosis like schizophrenia, but, rather, has the nonpsychotic condition, multiple personality, then the above scenario is a very good illustration of why multiple personality is so hard to diagnose: When the symptoms first arise in childhood, the child soon finds that disclosing the symptoms causes problems, so the child becomes good at keeping the symptoms secret.

1. Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children. New York, Random House, 1981/2006.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 5:33 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: Multiple Personality is Why the Narrator, in Regard to Gandhi’s Death, is Unnecessarily UnreliableIn his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of his “best of the Booker” novel, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie explains the principles of its magic realism: “I have written…elsewhere about my debt to…Dickens for his…ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost

hyperrealistic background, out of which the comic and fantastic elements of his work seem to grow organically…” (1, p. xi).

To repeat: “…almost hyperrealistic background…”

The mentality that wrote the introduction believes that the magical elements of the story should have a very realistic background.

So it is startlingly inconsistent when Saleem Sinai, the first-person narrator, says, “The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But…in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times…Today, in my confusion, I can’t judge…” (1, pp. 189-190).

Thus, the mentality behind the introduction is not the same mentality that is behind the first-person narration. Had the former been in charge of writing this novel, the date of Gandhi’s death would have been, at the very least, corrected in a re-write, because the background should be very realistic, and there is no literary necessity, in plotting or characterization, to get the date of Gandhi’s death wrong.

I have written in past posts that the unreliable narrator is suggestive of multiple personality. My argument is even stronger when the narrator isunnecessarily unreliable, and is in clear violation of the author’s own principles.

1. Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children [1981]. New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 10:24 AM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

F r i d a y , F e b r u a r y 6 , 2 0 1 5

Magical Realism and Telepathy: Persons with Multiple Personality

May Believe in Telepathy due to Anonymous Thought-TransferenceIn yesterday’s post on magical realism in literature, I mentioned that persons with multiple personality, like novelists, may be familiar with telepathic (mind-reading) kinds of experience, because one of their identities may be co-conscious with another of their identities, and so can read the other identity’s mind.

But what if the co-consciousness between two identities is one-way (which often happens)? Suppose identity A can read the mind of identity B, but Bdoesn’t even know that A exists (and A wants to keep it that way). In that case, A could communicate with B anonymously, in either of two ways. First, A could speak to B audibly, in which case B would “hear voices.” Second, A could transfer thoughts or information directly into B’smind, which B may interpret as having magically learned something by telepathy.

Thus, when characters in a magical realism novel experience telepathy, it may reflect the author’s experience with multiple personality.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 10:46 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

T h u r s d a y , F e b r u a r y 5 , 2 0 1 5

Magical Realism and Multiple Personality: A Character’s Telepathy is based on Co-Consciousness of the Author’s Alternate PersonalitiesIn my post of May 20, 2014 (search “magical realism”), I quoted Gabriel Garcia Marquez as rejecting the label of magical realism.

He explained that what people call magical realism is just the way he thinks.

Why would he think that way? Because great novelists have multiple personality.  And one way of describing multiple personality is to say that it is magical thinking by a person who is grounded in reality.

For example, suppose that a character in a “magical realism” novel is telepathic; that is, he can read another character’s mind. Well, that is routine in multiple personality—when one identity reads another identity’s mind—only instead of “telepathy,” it is called “co-consciousness.”

Why, then, don’t all great novelists write magical realism novels? Literary fashion and self-control.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 4:45 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 says Imaginary Playmates are the Normal Multiple Personality of ChildhoodDSM-5, the official psychiatric diagnostic manual, prohibits the clinician from making the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) in children on the basis of “imaginary playmates” (1, p. 292).

The manual doesn’t give a reason, but the implication is that imaginary playmates are common and normal.

The manual does not disqualify imaginary playmates by specifying any observable differences between it and multiple

personality. Indeed, if imaginary playmates and multiple personality did not look quite similar, there would be no reason for the manual to mention it.

Of course, DSM-5 is a manual of mental disorders, not normal psychology. A person could very clearly have multiple personalities, but unless “the symptoms cause clinically significant distress and impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” (1, p. 292), DSM-5 is not interested.

Skeptics about multiple personality think that they are being clever when they they ask, “If multiple personality is real and begins in childhood, why is it found so infrequently in childhood?” The answer is that multiple personality is so common in childhood that it is considered normal.

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 9:22 AM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

T u e s d a y , F e b r u a r y 3 , 2 0 1 5

What would happen if novelists publicly announced that they had multiple personality? Some have, but few take them seriously.As previously discussed in this blog, a few writers have—more or less, directly or indirectly—gone public. But when J. M. Barrie spoke publicly about his alternate personality, it was treated as a joke. When Sue Grafton said that she had alternate personalities, the public mostly ignored it. When Margaret Atwood wrote that all fiction writers have a split personality, and when she, Philip Roth, Dean Koontz, and others published novels that featured multiple personality, few made much of it.

The public probably doesn’t believe that novelists have multiple personality, because they think it would interfere with a person’s ability to function. And since J. M. Barrie, Sue Grafton, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, and Dean Koontz have obviously functioned very well—indeed, at a very high level—how could they have had multiple personality? The answer is that most people with multiple personality are normal. And some are gifted.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 11:07 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

M o n d a y , F e b r u a r y 2 , 2 0 1 5

Galya Diment’s Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness: Multiple Personality in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse“I have borrowed Morton Prince’s term ‘co-consciousness’ to define…Woolf’s and Joyce’s approaches to inner duality where the writers fictionalize what appear to be equally conscious sides of their complex personalities. I strongly believe that it is this co-consciousness that provides the most telling distinction between two different approaches to the theme of inner duality—the ‘divided-they-stand’ approach of the writers discussed in this study, and the ‘divided-they-fall’ approach of the celebrated masters of the double” (1, p. 4).

“Being a psychopathologist, Prince was naturally concerned with the clinical cases of dissociation…Yet by the turn of the century Prince’s contemporaries were postulating that a tendency toward splitting one’s personality is a common trait in many healthy psyches…by 1924 Prince himself came to believe that one did not have to be clinically ill to ‘have as many selves as we have moods, or contrasting traits, or sides to our personalities,’ and that so-called abnormal cases merely took those rather

benign Ichspaltungtendencies to pathological extremes” (1, pp. 49-50).

Virginia Woolf

“…the largely autobiographical nature of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,published in 1927, is well established…Cam Ramsay and Lily Briscoe can be seen as complementary autobiographical characters…Woolf’s use…of two characters to represent one personality accurately reflects not only her sense of inner duality but also her belief in the possibility of multiple states of consciousness. Thus in April of 1925, at the time she was conceptualizing To the Lighthouse, Woolf noted in her diary: ‘My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness…second selves is what I mean’…In her use of a split autobiographical self…Woolf may have been guided by the example of Joyce’s Ulysses…(1, pp. 63-106).

James Joyce

“Frank Budgen quotes Joyce as saying to him once: ‘Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?’ That simple remark captures, it seems to me, what may have been in Joyce’s mind when he decided to split his fictional alter ego into two in Ulysses. Joyce was interested in the ‘mystery of the conscious,’ and…chose to fictionalize in his novel two equally co-conscious parts of his nature…

“The parallel quests of Stephen Dedalus as a son in search of a surrogate father, and Leopold Bloom as a father in search of a surrogate son, are among the most discussed themes in this century’s literary criticism…(1, pp. 111-117).

Co-Consciousness is Multiple Personality

“I think, therefore I am,” because a person is a thinking being; that is, a being with consciousness. Thus, more than one consciousness means more than one being. Co-consciousness means at least two beings who are aware of what each other thinks. If there is only one body, it is called multiple personality.

Novelists Use Normal Multiple Personality to Write Novels

Prof. Galya Diment is saying that Woolf and Joyce had normal multiple personality, and that they each used two of their alternate identities as complementary characters in these novels.

She calls it The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness. I call it Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

1. Galya Diment. The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf, and Joyce. University Press of Florida, 1994.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 10:09 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

Mikhail Bakhtin is the closest that standard literary theory comes to addressing multiple consciousness and multiple personalityIn a couple of previous posts, I cited Mikhail Bakhtin on Dostoevsky. You can tell that Bakhtin discusses issues relevant to multiple personality by just looking at the index of his book, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where you find: “Double (split personality)” and his literary concept about how Dostoevsky was able to write about that, “multi-voicedness” or “polyphony.”

Bakhtin is proposing the theory—without knowing that he is proposing the theory—that split personality is found in literature, because novelists have multiple personality (which is Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the theory of this blog). Bakhtin talks about split personality (an informal term for multiple personality) without actually relating it to multiple personality, per se.

So, I am hereby amending my last post on twenty textbooks of literary theory. They may not discuss the theme of the

double directly, but the issue is raised indirectly if they mention Mikhail Bakhtin, which they often do.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 11:47 AM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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Twenty Textbooks on Literary Theory Fail to Discuss The Theme of the Double as the Literary Metaphor for Multiple PersonalityIn an online survey of twenty textbooks on literary theory, I searched their texts for any mention of “theme of the double.”

Only one book out of twenty even mentioned the theme of the double. And that book did not connect the theme with multiple personality.

In its section on psychoanalytic literary theory, it discussed Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny,” which certainly does mention the theme of the double. But, in Freudian theory and Freud’s essay, the obvious connection between thetheme of the double and multiple personality is completely overlooked. As I have repeatedly pointed out in this blog, Freud’s model of the mind, which posits a single consciousness, cannot account for the existence of even one case of multiple personality, which involves multiple consciousness. And Freud, himself, acknowledged the existence of such cases.

Thus, nineteen out of twenty textbooks on literary theory made no mention whatsoever of the theme of the double. The twentieth textbook did mention it, but not its connection to multiple personality.

Evidently, none of the standard literary theories understands the theme of the double, Dostoevsky’s The Double, and other works with these issues.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 6:59 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

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S a t u r d a y , J a n u a r y 3 1 , 2 0 1 5

Definition of “Memory Gap”: When a person cannot understand why they do not remember a period of time, certain behavior, or an eventPeople have a lot of experience with normal forgetting. After all, time passes. Many things are routine, trivial, or uninteresting. Also, a person sees what others forget. So most people know very well what is normal forgetting.

(Of course, I'm not talking here about a general problem with memory, such as is seen in Alzheimer's. People with the kind of memory gaps discussed in this post have generally good memory, often exceptionally good memory, which makes these memory gaps so puzzling.)

When I ask someone if they have memory gaps, I rarely have to explain what I mean. A person who has had memory gaps will usually give me an example. For example, one woman told me that her boyfriend had recently asked her if she was enjoying the coat he had given her. She told him yes, so as not to hurt his feelings or appear stupid, but she really didn’t know what he was talking about. However, when she got home, she found the new coat in her closet. But she still did not remember getting it. (And we determined that she had not been intoxicated, and that the coat had not been put in the closet without her knowing it as a surprise or practical joke. Also, let me add, Feb. 1st, she said that she had been having memory gaps since childhood, so this was no big deal.)

Talking about the coat made her uncomfortable. I could see that she wanted to change the subject. But I kept discussing it. And after about five minutes, her demeanor suddenly changed, and I was talking to another identity, who explained how she had gone

shopping with the boyfriend and made him aware of how much she loved that coat, and how she was happy when he gave it to her. I then stopped discussing the coat, and her demeanor suddenly changed back to her regular self, who had no memory—a memory gap—for what had just happened.

Neither the regular identity nor the alternate identity accepted the idea that she had multiple personality. The regular identity did not call me a liar when I told her about my conversation with other identity, but she did not remember it, and thought the idea of multiple personality was far-fetched. When, at a later time, I talked again with the alternate identity, she remembered both my conversation with her and my conversation with the regular “host” identity. But the alternate identity rejected the idea of multiple personality, because she felt that she was a person in her own right.

Do novelists occasionally have memory gaps during times when they write, or in the rest of their life?Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 9:52 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

F r i d a y , J a n u a r y 3 0 , 2 0 1 5

Failure to diagnose dissociative identity disorder is inevitable with the interview taught in American psychiatry residency training programsPsychiatric diagnosis depends on an interview called the Mental Status Examination (MSE). Psychiatrists are not able to diagnose a disorder if the MSE fails to elicit its symptoms, its Diagnostic Criteria.

The Diagnostic Criteria for dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder), found in DSM-5 (the diagnostic manual), may be abbreviated as follows:

Criterion A: alternate identitiesCriterion B: memory gaps

Interviewing the “Host” IdentitySince the psychiatrist will be interviewing the patient’s “regular” or “host” identity—who is unaware of any other identities—neither the psychiatrist nor the patient (the host identity) will suspect dissociative identity disorder.

Alternate Identities Hide and Remain IncognitoAlternate identities will usually hide during psychiatric interviews. But even if an alternate identity does come out during the interview, it will not give its name or identify itself. It will answer to the patient’s regular name in order to fool the psychiatrist.

Why? Because they didn’t make this appointment. They are not the patient. And they see the psychiatrist as being an ally of the host identity in the doctor-patient relationship. Moreover, they fear that if the psychiatrist knew about them, he would try to get rid of them, out of loyalty to the host identity, his patient.

Memory Gaps as FootprintsTherefore, since the psychiatrist will not see—or at least not knowingly see—alternate identities, the key to making this diagnosis is to screen for it by getting a history of memory gaps. The host identity is usually aware of having had memory gaps, and will give that history if asked, but only if asked, because the gaps are nothing new, and the host has always tried to ignore them.

If there is a history of memory gaps—and if they have no medical or neurological cause—then the gaps may be periods of time during which alternate identities have been “out.” So getting a history of memory gaps is like finding the footprints of alters, but not the alters themselves.

The MSE and Memory Gaps

Does the traditional MSE interview ask patients if they have a history of memory gaps? Unfortunately, it does not. It evaluates short-term memory and long-term memory. It does not ask about memory gaps.

If alcoholism is at issue, the traditional MSE may inquire about alcoholic blackouts. But it fails to inquire about nonalcoholic “dry” blackouts.

The Formal Diagnosis The diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder is not made unless and until the clinician knowingly meets, and has conversations with, the alternate identities (Criterion A), and then finds that the host identity has amnesia (memory gaps) (Criterion B) for those conversations.

However, as explained above, the diagnostic process usually starts with Criterion B (memory gaps), and eventually leads to Criterion A (alternate identities).

“But I never see that.”When told that a colleague has made the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, most American psychiatrists wonder why, if it’s real, they never see it. The reason is that the traditional MSE fails to ask patients if they have a history of memory gaps.

Except for the rare cases in which alternate identities are overt in the initial interview, it is only after getting a history of memory gaps, and then finding out what caused the memory gaps, that a psychiatrist will make this diagnosis.

Most American psychiatrists think that they never see such cases, because they do not routinely ask their patients if they have a history of memory gaps.

Books That Illustrate the Problem

Note: These books were chosen, because they are excellent in other regards.

1. Mark Zimmerman, M.D. Interview Guide for Evaluating DSM-5 Psychiatric Disorders and the Mental Status Examination. East Greenwich, RI, Psych Products Press, 2013.

Patients are never asked if they have a history of memory gaps, and the book never even mentions dissociative identity disorder.

2. Paula T. Trzepacz, M.D., Robert W. Baker, M.D. The Psychiatric Mental Status Examination. New York, Oxford University Press, 1993.

Patients are never asked if they have a history of memory gaps, and the book never even mentions multiple personality disorder(the name of the disorder at the time this book was published).

3. David J. Robinson, M.D. Brain Calipers 2nd Ed.: Descriptive Psychopathology and the Psychiatric Mental Status Examination. Rapid Psychler Press, 2001.

Patients are never asked if they have a history of memory gaps, and the book never even mentions dissociative identity disorder.

4. Abraham M. Nussbaum, M.D. The Pocket Guide to the DSM-5 Diagnostic Exam. Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric Publishing (A Division of American Psychiatric Association), 2013.

At first, this guide looks enlightened. Its general psychiatric interview includes the following screening question under the heading of Dissociation: “Everyone has trouble remembering things sometimes, but do you ever lose time, forget important details about yourself, or find evidence that you took part in events you cannot recall?” And in its brief chapter on Dissociative Disorders, this guide includes dissociative identity disorder.

However, in contradiction to the above, its outline of the Mental Status Examination includes “recent and remote” memory, but omits memory gaps. And in its chapter, “A Brief Version of DSM-5”—covering, the author implies, the really important disorders—it

omits dissociative identity disorder (even though the author, having read DSM-5, should have known that dissociative identity disorder has a greater prevalence than schizophrenia).

Therefore, the mixed-message of this guide is that the conscientious psychiatrist should screen for multiple personality by asking a question about memory gaps, but if the psychiatrist doesn't have time to do everything, and must focus only on what, in the author’s opinion, is really important, then screening for dissociative identity disorder can be omitted.

In short, even when American psychiatrists are taught how to screen for dissociative identity disorder, they are told not to bother.

In conclusion, to make the MSE capable of screening for dissociative identity disorder, its evaluation of memory must include memory gaps. This would require the addition of one word to the outline of the MSE taught to psychiatrists:

Traditional MSEMemory: short-term, long-term

Revised MSEMemory: short-term, long-term, gapsPosted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 10:50 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

W e d n e s d a y , J a n u a r y 2 8 , 2 0 1 5

Salman Rushdie’s Interviews: On Autonomous Characters, Theme of the Double, Multiple Personality, and Divided Self in Midnight's Children and Satanic Verses“Padma is one of my favorite characters in [Midnight’s Children], because she was completely unplanned. In the first version, she

appeared as a very minor character in the last fifteen or so pages; then, when the narrator began to ‘tell’ the book, she arrived and sat there, she simply demanded to be told the story and kept interrupting it, telling Saleem to get on with it. She became very important because she literally demanded to be important” (1, p. 14).

“What I meant was that Saleem's whole persona is a childlike one, because children believe themselves to be the centre of the universe, and they stop as they grow up; but he never stops, he believes—at the point where he begins the novel—that he is the prime mover of these great events. It seemed to me that it was quite possible to read the entire book as his distortion of history, written to prove that he was at the middle of it. But the moment at which reality starts to face him it destroys him; he can’t cope with it, and he retreats into a kind of catatonic state or he becomes acquiescent and complacent” (1, p. 41).

“I do find it difficult to start writing until I can hear the people speak” (1, p. 98).

“Many of the characters in [The Satanic Verses] are for a long time not really unitary selves, they’re just collections of selves…And I think that’s also true about people, that we are not unitary selves, we are a kind of bag of selves, which we draw out from; we become this or that self in different circumstances” (1, p. 103).

“I think, like most writers, that I am most completely myself when I write, and not the rest of the time. I have a social self, and my full self can’t be released except in writing” (1, p. 46).

“Then I suppose what I finally understood, which actually let me start writing, was that [The Satanic Verses] is about, unsurprisingly I suppose for me, about divided selves…And I discovered, only now, really, only in the last few weeks when I’ve been obliged to start talking about the book, that I keep doing this, it seems. That it seems to me I’ve done it, if you look at every novel…Doubles, yes…obviously Saleem in Midnight’s Children…And here I am doing it again. I feel ashamed of this…Maybe becoming conscious of it is a way of stopping” (1, p. 90-91).

1. Michael Reder (Editor). Conversations with Salman Rushdie. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2000.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 8:03 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

F r i d a y , J a n u a r y 2 3 , 2 0 1 5

Elena Ferrante (post #2): The First-Person Narrator of Her First Novel Has Multiple PersonalityAt the beginning of the novel, Delia’s mother, Amalia, has recently committed suicide by drowning. The end of the novel is as follows:

“I dug in my purse and took out my identification card…With a pen…I drew around my own features my mother’s hair…I was Amalia” (1, p. 139).

Delia’s switch to an Amalia alternate personality is not an acute grief reaction. The whole novel is about how this has been going on since Delia was a child.

“But I still had the impression of not being alone. I was being spied upon, not by that Amalia of months before who now was dead but by me coming out on the landing to see myself sitting there” (1, p. 24).

Delia is prone to dissociative trance states (not unusual in people with multiple personality): “I fell into a torpor crowded with images…in my waking sleep…I had dreamed it that way countless times with my eyes open, as I did now yet again…” (1, pp. 30-31).

“By then I knew that in that image of fantasy there was a secret that could not be revealed, not because one part of me didn’t know how to get to it but because, if I did, the other part would have refused to name it and would have driven me out” 1, p. 35).

“When I came to myself, I felt drained, depressed by the sensation of being humiliated in front of the part of myself that watched over every possible yielding to the other” (1, p. 37).

“I decided to put on makeup. It was an unusual reaction. I didn’t wear makeup often or willingly…But just then I seemed to need it…’You’re a ghost,’ I said to the woman in the mirror. She had the face of a person in her forties… ‘I don’t like you,’ I whispered as I put on some blusher. And in order not to be contradicted, I tried not to look at her” (1, p. 42).

As I have previously discussed in this blog in reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others, people with multiple personality sometimes have a problem with mirrors, because they may see another identity in the mirror, and they may not like it.

In childhood, one of Delia’s alternate identities had evidently told her father stories about her mother Amalia’s infidelity. It is not clear what had actually happened. It may have been that, in childhood, Delia’s Amalia identity had been molested. “‘You told your father everything.’ Everything. Me. I didn’t like that suggestion and didn’t want to know what ‘you’ he was talking about’” (1, p. 50).

A typical statement by a person with multiple personality, each of whose identities has its own, separate, memory bank: “I remembered but I couldn’t tell myself” (1, p. 118). That is, one of her identities had memory of something that it wouldn’t share another of her identities.

Delia says of her childhood, “I was pretending not to be me. I didn’t want to be ‘I,' unless it was the I of Amalia. I did what I imagined Amalia did in secret…I was I and I was her…I felt I was her, with her thoughts…” (1, pp. 130-131).

In childhood, she had told her father that someone “had done and said to Amalia, with her consent, in the basement of the pastry shop, all the things that in reality Antonio’s grandfather had said and perhaps done to me” (1, p. 133).

In short, the novel describes a woman who has had multiple personality since childhood.

Note: I have not read Elda Buonanno’s La Frantumaglia: Elena Ferrante's "Fragmented Self,” which is based on Elena Ferrante’s own nonfiction book, and on how this theme appears in Ferrante’s novels. I don’t know if multiple personality, per se, is discussed.

1. Elena Ferrante. Troubling Love [1992]. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa Editions, 2006.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 11:11 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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Nobel Prize novelist Thomas Mann’sConfessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, a novel about multiple identities, possibly multiple personalityThomas Mann (1875-1955) had worked intermittently on this story for nearly fifty years, and it was still unfinished at the time of his death. Why so long and inconclusive? Was it just an idea he had picked up from the story of a real-life confidence man, or from other things he had read? Was it a metaphor for hidden struggles with sexual orientation? Or is this another example of a novelist’s saving his personal issue with multiple personality for his last novel, like Dickens’s Drood, Twain’s Mysterious Stranger,Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, and Melville’s Confidence Man?

The first-person narrator, Felix Krull, works as a waiter at a Paris hotel, where he sleeps in the employees' dormitory. At the same time, he maintains an apartment elsewhere in Paris where he keeps an upper-class set of clothes, which he wears when he dines out with the rich. This “amounted, as one can see, to a kind of dual existence, whose charm lay in the ambiguity as to which figure was

the real I and which was the masquerade…Thus I masqueraded in both capacities, and the undisguised reality behind the two appearances, the real I, could not be identified because it actually did not exist” (1, p. 230).

He had never been satisfied to be who he was, “glorying as I did in the independent and self-sufficient exercise of my imagination,” “holding lively imaginary conversations,” and even bringing “the muscles controlling the pupils…under voluntary control. I would stand in front of my mirror, concentrating all my powers in a command to my pupils to contract or expand…My persistent efforts, let me tell you, were, in fact, crowned with success…I actually succeeded in contracting them to the merest points and then expanding them to great, round, mirror-like pools. The joy I felt at this success was almost terrifying and was accompanied by a shudder at the mystery of man” (1, pp. 10-12).

NOTE: The reason I quote this about controlling his pupils is that some people with multiple personality appear to have alternate personalities who differ from each other in visual acuity, and this might be caused by alters' differing from each other in pupillary contraction.

“My basic attitude toward the world and society can only be called inconsistent…There was, for example, an idea that occasionally preoccupied me…It was the idea of interchangeability” (1, p. 224).

The rest of the novel is about his exchange of identities with someone.

In conclusion, I can’t say with certainty that Felix Krull is about multiple personality or that this would mean that Thomas Mann had multiple personality. But I think that the above is sufficient to raise the possibility.

1. Thomas Mann. Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Translated from the German by Denver Lindley. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 12:48 AM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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Myth of the Cultural Construction of Multiple Personality: The truth is that “Sybil” (1973) was propaganda against multiple personality, and was ignored by most American psychiatrists.Critics of multiple personality often cite the case of “Sybil”—search “Sybil Exposed” in this blog—as the prime example of how a popular book and movie (about a case of multiple personality) was responsible for a large increase in diagnosed cases.

But Sybil portrayed multiple personality as extremely rare. Otherwise, what would have been the big deal?

The other reason that Sybil was actually propaganda against multiple personality is that most real patients are frightened by books and movies like that.

When people who don’t know they have multiple personality see a movie likeSybil, they see someone afflicted with something that they would never want to have. To them, it looks crazier and more frightening than even a psychosis like schizophrenia.

Real psychiatric patients think: In schizophrenia, you may have hallucinations and delusions, but at least you know who you are and what you are doing. Whereas, in multiple personality, you literally don’t know who you are (are you this personality or that personality?) and you literally don’t know what you are doing (due to amnesia for what other personalities have done). Being like Sybil would be the worst and craziest psychiatric condition that they could imagine.

In the real world, for every patient who didn't have multiple personality but wanted to be like Sybil, there were a thousand

patients who did have multiple personality, but who saw Sybil and fled from the diagnosis.

Why, then, were more cases diagnosed in the twenty years following Sybil(1973)? It was not because of Sybil, [whose impact on American culture was trivial]. There were [four] other trends of much greater influence. First, in the 1970s, there was an exponential increase in verified cases of child abuse. Second, there was the “second wave” of feminism. Third, a number of astute clinicians chanced upon the diagnosis and pursued the issue. [added January 17th:] Fourth, Freudian psychology—whose single-consciousness model of the mind had made multiple personality seem logically impossible—was losing its influence. Those were the years that American psychiatry abandoned psychoanalysis in favor of psychopharmacology (treatment with medication).

I, myself, did not diagnose multiple personality until 1987, more than a decade after Sybil. Multiple personality had been barely mentioned in my psychiatric training in the 1970s, when the big thing in American psychiatry had been lithium and bipolar disorder. Sybil (1973) had not caused me or any psychiatrist that I knew to diagnose multiple personality. Indeed, I and most American psychiatrists in the 1970s and 1980s thought of multiple personality as something that they were never likely to see (if we ever thought of it at all, which we rarely did).

As an American psychiatrist who was in American psychiatric training at the time Sybil was published, I can tell you that it had virtually no impact on American psychiatrists. Following the publication of Sybil, and to this day, I would guess that less than one percent of American psychiatrists have ever made the diagnosis. It is in the American psychiatric diagnostic manual because of scientific studies, not because it has ever been widely diagnosed in American psychiatry.

I have previously touched on why so few American psychiatrists make the diagnosis. It has to do with how American psychiatrists are trained, a subject I will come back to.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 9:03 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

Credibility: What is the minimum requirement for a nonfiction book, article, or speaker to have credibility regarding multiple personality?Are opinions about multiple personality credible if the person is1. a psychiatrist?2. a psychologist?3. a psychoanalyst?4. a psychotherapist?5. a scholar?6. well-respected?Not necessarily! Often not!

The minimum requirement for credibility is that, for months or years, the person has talked with people who have multiple personality, including conversations with their alternate personalities.

Any author or speaker without that experience is not credible in regard to multiple personality.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 12:38 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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Ian Hacking’s Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory—Gives Opinions About Observable

Matters That the Author Has Not ObservedA professor of literature recently suggested that if I wanted to understand her view of multiple personality, I should read the book by Professor of Philosophy, Ian Hacking. So I have.

In this case, you can tell a book by its cover, since the back flap reveals what motivated the author: Hacking is against “scientizing of the soul.” He is interested in multiple personality only to the extent that it is involved in science’s intrusion into the philosophical, moral, and spiritual soul.

“…[Is] there...such a thing as multiple personality [?]. The straightforward answer is plainly yes…the simple conclusion is that there is such a disorder…Is multiple personality a real disorder as opposed to a kind of behavior worked up by doctor and patient? If we have to answer yes-or-no, the answer is yes, it is real—that is, multiple personality is not usually ‘iatrogenic’” (1, pp. 10-12).

Yet, since he also gives the views of skeptics, he says, “You may be beginning to think I’m of two minds, just a little bit split myself, when it comes to multiple personality…What do I think? Is it real or not? I am not going to answer that question” (1, p. 16).

His real concern is how multiple personality and the sciences of memory (neurology, psychology, etc.) are tampering with the soul:

“Talk of the soul sounds old-fashioned, but I take it seriously. The soul that was scientized was something transcendental, perhaps immortal. Philosophers of my stripe speak of the soul not to suggest something eternal, but to invoke character, reflective choice, self-understanding, values…freedom and responsibility. Love, passion, envy, tedium, regret, and quiet contentment are the stuff of the soul…I do not think of the soul as unitary, as an essence, as one single thing, or even as a thing at all. It does not denote an unchanging core of personal identity. One person, one soul, may have many facets and speak with many tongues…” (1, p. 6).

“The soul was the last bastion of thought free of scientific scrutiny” (1, p. 208).

“…in the latter part of the nineteenth century…Memory…became a scientific key to the soul, so that by investigating memory (to find out the facts) one would conquer the spiritual domain of the soul and replace it by a surrogate, knowledge about memory…Subsequently, what would previously have been debates on the moral and spiritual plane took place at the level of factual knowledge…” (1, p. 198).

Regarding multiple personality, Hacking would include himself among “the less arrogant and more reflective doubters…They accept that the patient has produced this version of herself: a narrative that includes dramatic events, a causal story of the formation of alters [alternate personalities], and an account of the relationships between the alters. That is a self-consciousness; that is a soul. [Reasonable] doubters accept it as a reality…Nevertheless, they fear that multiple personality therapy leads to a false consciousness. Not in the blatant sense that the apparent memories of early abuse are necessarily wrong or distorted—they may be true enough. No, there is the sense that the end product is a thoroughly crafted person…That is a deeply moral judgment” (1, pp. 266-267).

Hacking says that, in most cases, the patient, not the therapist, has produced the multiple personality narrative. The condition really occurs. But he suspects that cultural beliefs and therapeutic practices have a major impact on the patient’s narrative.

The reason he thinks so is that he has never diagnosed, treated, or even interviewed people who have multiple personality. As he says, “The whole field of multiple personality is ripe for participant observation…But that is a task for others. I have scrupulously limited myself to matters of public record” (1, p. 7).

Even though Professor Hacking is honest, and acknowledges that he has never been a participant observer of multiple personality, I don’t think that that fact registers with most readers. For who could believe that a nonfiction book about an observable matter would be written by someone who had never observed it?

1. Ian Hacking. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton University Press, 1995.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 11:57 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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Either What I Say Can’t Be True—about Novelists, Creative Writing, Psychiatry, and Multiple Personality—Or It Has Been Known Since Plato and EuripidesThe foremost experts in multiple personality—those psychiatrists and psychologists who have specialized in the study and treatment of multiple personality, and have published books about it—do not recognize what I call “normal multiple personality” in novelists or anyone else. And if what I say is true, how could they have missed it?

Many of the novelists and novels discussed in this blog have been studied by groups and networks of eminent scholars. Indeed, much of this blog consists of quotations from their essays and books. So how can I come along and say that multiple personality is involved, if they don’t agree and are not convinced?

But suppose my ideas were to catch on and become popular. I would get credit for only a few minutes. Then everyone would remember all the psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and fiction writers who have been saying the same things—or at least things consistent with what I've been saying—since antiquity (search “Plato and Euripides,” for my post of June 28, 2014).Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 6:22 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

Skepticism by Some Psychiatrists about the Prevalence of Multiple Personality is Based on Their Not Asking Relevant Questions in InterviewsYou, dear reader, may have an agnostic opinion about multiple personality, because you have seen books by psychiatrists and others on both sides. And you have never been told the cause of the skepticism. The cause is that the relevant kind of interview question discussed below is not taught in most psychiatric training programs. And some psychiatrists, including some eminent ones, have never learned it and never used it to screen their patients for multiple personality.

The minimum essential question that a psychiatrist or psychologist must ask in order to know whether or not the people they interview have multiple personality is: Have you ever had memory gaps?

Other versions of the same question: When you not intoxicated, do you ever lose time? Do things ever happen that nobody else could have done, but you don’t remember doing it? Do people ever refer to things that they assume you remember—things that you or they allegedly said or did—but you don’t remember it. Have you ever found anything among your belongings that you couldn’t account for? Have you ever found yourself somewhere, but didn’t know how you got there? Are there things or events that you know about, and should remember, but you really don’t?

A person who does not have multiple personality will not understand such questions. A person who has had such experiences deserves further evaluation. A formal diagnosis of multiple personality is not made unless and until the psychiatrist actually speaks to an alternate personality, which is beyond the scope of this post.

Suffice it to say that 99% of the time the interviewer will not need hypnosis or drugs; there will be no context—legal or otherwise—in which malingering would make sense; and the interviewee will prefer to have almost any other diagnosis.

Either a psychiatrist screens all his patients for multiple personality by asking one simple type of question—“Have you ever had memory gaps?—or a psychiatrist’s skepticism about multiple personality is based on don’t ask, don’t tell.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 12:02 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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Is Multiple Personality a fad and a debatable interpretation, or has it been documented for over 400 years, and is it clearly observable?Cases of the clinical disorder, multiple personality disorder, have been documented for over 400 years (see post earlier today).

And that is just the clinical disorder. One would expect the normal version of multiple personality—the subject of this blog— to be much more common than the clinical disorder (just as one would expect more people to have normal anxiety than to have an anxiety disorder).

And since imaginary companions are known to be relatively common in childhood, it is reasonable to expect that something so similar, multiple personality, would be just as natural to human psychology, and also relatively common.

But isn’t that kind of thing just for children, in childhood? Don’t adults outgrow that? Many don’t. It is just that they are more discreet about mentioning it, and may think about it in other terms. Who would be so indiscreet as to say so? Novelist Stephen King, for

one. I have quoted Stephen King in this blog as saying that novelists don’t outgrow it.

But the main point I would emphasize is that the diagnosis of multiple personality involves the observation of certain unmistakable behavior (the diagnostic criteria in the diagnostic manual). That is why the vociferous critics of multiple personality have not been able to get it kicked out of the diagnostic manual. Too many people have seen it.

Multiple personality is neither a fad nor an interpretation. Just the opposite. It has been documented for over 400 years and it is observable.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 6:32 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

Multiple Personality Stands the Test of Time: A More Complete History of Multiple Personality (aka Dissociative Identity) Goes Back to 1584http://www.dissociative-identity-disorder.net/wiki/History_of_DIDPosted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 10:34 AM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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Which is Longest Standing, Most Established, Psychiatric Diagnosis? Multiple Personality since 1791; Obsessive-Compulsive since 1860s; Schizophrenia since

1890s; or Panic Disorder since 1980?As indicated above, multiple personality has been a distinct psychiatric diagnosis for 70 years longer than OCD, 100 years longer than schizophrenia, and 189 years longer than panic disorder.

http://www.fortea.us/english/psiquiatria/history.htmhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2667880http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181977/http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19698673Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 7:33 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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Some literary fiction—by Marcel Proust, Henry James, etc.—is hard to read, because of the author’s multiple personality and failure to heed Toni Morrison.Many people are “bored” with literature like that of Proust and James:

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/16/magazine/literature-bores-me.html

But these critics don’t have a good theory as to why such authors write that way and why other people think those authors are extraordinarily good.

My recent posts on Proust may explain what is going on. His writing involves the perspectives of multiple selves, who often

come and go without each identity’s being identified. That’s difficult to follow.

Another difficulty is that the author’s alternate personalities are so autonomous that they ramble on in pursuit of their own interests. As quoted in a past post, Toni Morrison, who had been an editor, said that she could tell when a character had gotten away from a writer. She cautioned writers to control their characters and let them know whose novel it is. But since some of her own novels are as hard to read as James or Proust, it may be that she has not always taken her own advice.

Why do some readers love that kind of writing? It can be rewarding to find that something, which seems crazy at first, makes more and more sense the more you look into it.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 12:11 AM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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Great Commercial, Genre, Plot-Driven Fiction vs. Great Literary, Thematic, Character-Driven Fiction: It is considered literary if it looks harder to do.If I could write a great commercial novel or a great literary novel, I would be doing that now instead of writing this blog. But I can’t do either. I’m writing this blog to find out how it’s done. And finding out, for me, is fun.

What I’ve found so far is that most novelists have multiple personality. Do literary novelists have more complex multiple personality systems than genre novelists? Did Henry James have a more complex system than J. R. R. Tolkien? I don’t think so.

Do literary novelists treat more important issues, and have greater insight, than commercial novelists? That seems unlikely, since most literary novels are not initially conceived as a way to deal with important issues, and most literary novelists are not philosophers.

Novels are considered literary if they look harder to do. Marcel Proust is considered more literary than Agatha Christie, because it looks easier to write what Christie wrote. But, for Proust, writing what Christie wrote would have been impossibly difficult.

Neither great commercial novelists nor great literary novelists mechanically construct their characters. Nor do they control their characters like puppets. Their characters come to them, not from them (subjectively speaking). Their characters, and various narrative voices, are co-authors (subjectively speaking). If their characters and narrators—alternate personalities—prefer genre formats or literary formats, that’s not the novelist’s (regular self’s) choice alone.

I admire great novelists, both commercial and literary, because very few people with multiple personality (and hardly anyone without multiple personality) can write great novels of any kind.Posted by Kenneth A. Nakdimen at 10:07 PM No comments: Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Links to this post

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