Beware of the Other Side(s): Multiple Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder in American Fiction [1. Aufl.] 9783839424889

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Heike Schwarz Beware of the Other Side(s)

American Studies | Volume 8

Heike Schwarz (Dr. phil.) teaches American studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Her research fields include psychiatry and literature, representation of mental illness in literature, (pop)cultural studies, ecopsychology and ecocriticism.

Heike Schwarz

Beware of the Other Side(s) Multiple Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder in American Fiction

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2013 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Concept cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Jo Thoma, Augsburg, 2012, © Heike Schwarz Proofread and Typeset by Heike Schwarz Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-2488-5

Contents

Acknowledgments | 9 Preface | 11 Introduction | 15

P ART I: HISTORY AND T HEORY 1

Personalities or Personality States? The Definition of MPD/DID in Medical Terms | 25

2

The Split of Personality: The Diagnosis MPD/DID versus Schizophrenia | 41

3

Of Demons and Dissociation: The Origins and Early Science of the Other Side | 49

3.1 Demon and Possession | 50 3.2 Magnetism and Mesmerism | 51 3.3 Dipsychism and Polypsychism | 52 3.4 Hypnosis and Hysteria | 56 3.5 Pierre Janet: The Concept of Dissociation | 59 3.6 William James: “Mutations of the Self” | 62 3.7 Morton Prince: The Co-consciousness | 68 4

Shock and Trauma: Renaissance of the Dissociation Concept | 73

4.1 Memory and Identity: The Illusion of the Unitary Self | 73 4.2 Trauma | 81 4.3 Contemporary Theories of Dissociation | 85 5

The Other Side(s): Famous Cases of Double Consciousness and Multiple Personality | 89

5.1 The “umgetauschte Persönlichkeit”: Gmelin’s Case (1791) | 90

5.2 Mary Porter and Estelle (1836) | 91 5.3 The Old State and the New State: The Case of Mary Reynolds (1816) | 92 5.4 The Two Identities of A.B.: The Case of Ansel Bourne (1890) | 95 5.5 A Case of Personality Clusters: Miss Beauchamp (1906) | 98 5.6 The Three Selves of Eve: Thigpen and Cleckley (1957) | 107 5.7 Fact or Fiction? The Sixteen Persons of “Sybil” (1973) | 111 6

Voices of Doubt: The Validity of Multiple Personality | 129

P ART II: T HE CULTURE-EMBEDDED SYNDROME – MULTIPLE PERSONALITY AND DISSOCIATION IN AMERICAN F ICTION 7

Brand Identity and “Culture-embedded Syndrome”: Multiple Personality in American Culture | 141

8

Creating a Public Consciousness: The Role of the Mass Media | 159

9

Fractured Minds: Personal Narratives of Multiple Personality | 171

9.1 Truddi Chase: When Rabbit Howls (1987) | 173 9.2 Joan Frances Casey: The Flock (1991) | 179 9.3 Cameron West: First Person Plural (1999) | 185 9.4 Robert B. Oxnam: A Fractured Mind (2005) | 192 10 “Man ’ s Dual Nature” – Classical Literary Texts of Dissociation: Wakefield, William Wilson, Dr. Jekyll, and the Other Side | 199

10.1 Doppelgänger, Double, and Alter Ego | 201 10.2 Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Wakefield” (1835) | 205 10.3 Edgar Allan Poe: “William Wilson” (1840) | 209 10.4 Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) | 213 11 Beyond Control: Multiple Personality in the American Novel of the 1950s | 229

11.1 Shirley Jackson: The Bird’s Nest (1954) | 231 11.2 Margaret Millar: Beast in View (1955) | 238 11.3 Robert Bloch: Psycho (1959) | 244 11.4 Richard Condon: The Manchurian Candidate (1959) | 251 12 Further Divisions: Subgenres of Multiple Personality and Dissociation Fiction since the 1970s | 259

12.1 The “Devil Inside” – Dissociation as Demonic Possession | 260

12.2 The “Spy Inside”: Dissociation in Spy Thrillers | 271 12.3 The “Killer Inside”: Dissociation as Serial Killer Story | 276 12.4 The “Protector Inside”: Dissociation as Coping Mechanism | 280 13 “What is your name?”: Dissociation and Psychogenic Fugues in American Film from the 1950s to the Present | 287

P ART III: CONTEMPORARY V ARIATIONS IN SELECTED NOVELS 14 “This is what Mary would have said…”: Margaret Atwood Alias Grace (1996) | 301 15 “I know this because Tyler Durden knows this…”: Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) | 317 16 “ – textbook MPD”: Matt Ruff Set this House in Order (2003) | 335 17 “Three! Three personalities in one…”: Ted Dekker ’s Thr3e (2003) | 351 18 “Recall what had been lost…”: Gabrielle Pina Chasing Sophea (2006) | 363 19 “It ’s almost like there are two of me…”: Jess Walter The Zero (2007) | 375 20 “It ’s all staged…”: Siri Hustvedt Sorrows of an American (2008) | 391 21 Voices of Imagination: Valid Cases of Fiction Fugues and Storytelling Selves | 409

 Conclusion | 415 Works Cited | 423 3ULPDU\/LWHUDWXUH | 423 6HFRQGDU\/LWHUDWXUH | 425 Filmography | 449

Acknowledgments Die fehlerhafte und Unglück bringende Auffassung, als sei ein Mensch eine dauernde Einheit, ist Ihnen bekannt. Es ist Ihnen auch bekannt, dass der Mensch aus einer Menge von Seelen, aus sehr vielen Ichs besteht. HERMAN HESSE DER STEPPENWOLF 1927: 203 When we speak today of a divided subject, it is never to acknowledge his simple contradictions, his double postulations, etc.; it is a diffraction which is intended, a dispersion of energy in which there remains neither a central core nor a structure of meaning: I am not contradictory, I am dispersed. ROLAND BARTHES ROLAND BARTHES 1977: 143

This book is a slightly modified version of my dissertation. Furthermore it was updated in terms of current definitions and classifications of the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID), a definition that followed multiple personality disorder (MPD). The dissertation was submitted at Augsburg University in 2010. The new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is often referred to as “the bible of American psychiatry” as it contains all valid and applied diagnoses, was eventually published in May 2013. This book contains also references to this fifth volume of the DSM. Adaptions in literary form or film versions on the topic of multiple personalities inhabiting one body will continue to be produced worldwide. The list provided here at the end of the book will never be complete. Collecting numerous examples, which nonetheless needed to fit in the approach of this study, was a time-consuming yet fascinating challenge. Encounters with German and in particular American scholars were very stimulating and wonderfully supportive. These intellectual transnational dialogues were of invaluable help in consolidating the thesis stated here, namely that the mysterious phenomenon of double or multiple personality, MPD and DID is, regardless which psychiatric term or core definition is used or what the general notion might be, sustainable and ever existing. It was interesting to note that American popular culture contains many more references to multiple personality disorder (MPD) or DID in comparison to German

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popular culture. Sybil is the “magnus opum” of multiple personality fiction, whether it is non-fiction or not, whether it is well-known in the United States, almost unknown or not so widely engraved in the collective consciousness in Germany. This project would not have been realized without the support I received from others. It is dedicated to my beloved parents, Anton Franz Schwarz and Ursula Schwarz, who never doubted my abilities to finish this project and who stood by my side all my life. This book is dedicated to them, in memoriam for my beloved father. I am also very grateful to the expert advice I have received from my advisors at the University of Augsburg, especially from Prof. Hubert Zapf and Prof. Günter Butzer, who supervised my study. Inspirational discussions and talks were highly helpful and offered much appreciated feedback throughout the years. Also I would like to thank Prof. Katja Sarkowsky for her detailed and very supportive comments. Furthermore, I owe some inspiration to the faculty and members of the department for American Studies, the Lehrstuhl für Amerikanistik, and fellow doctoral students at the University of Augsburg. My special thanks go to Melanie Pawlitzki, with whom I was able to discuss my approach in detail. At conferences held in the United States, such as the National Conference of the Popular Culture Association, I was able to introduce my thesis and it was there that I could entirely convince myself that the culture of MPD is still alive, acknowledged and cultivated. It was at that time that the TV series United States of Tara was released and broadly discussed as a revitalization of a 1970s phenomenon in the USA. The study started before this release and I was not surprised to see this series (re)presenting the prototypical multiple personality genre. With participants of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA) Summer Academies in the years 2010 and 2011 and faculty staff at Detroit University I was able to delve into the pop culture of MPD and the never-ending forms of film and TV series adaptions of the theme. The warm welcome at Detroit University and the inspirational talks with Prof. Barrett Watten also need to be mentioned. As the study occupied a considerable time in my life, I am grateful to have had such a supportive environment. My friends and family were patient listeners. Working throughout the years on this demanding subject, I sometimes wished to have been a real multiple personality in the very literal sense being thus able to divide my time properly. As I am solely a single self, this work has finally been accomplished but not so without the patience of the people around me. Yet I am the only one responsible for all this.1

Augsburg, August 2013 Heike Schwarz

1

“That was one thing to be thankful for – he wasn’t responsible for all this” (Robert Bloch Psycho 1959: 127).

Preface One should never underestimate the power of books. PAUL AUSTER THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES 2005: 302

In her short story “Isolated Incidents” (1985), writer Bharati Mukherjee describes several separate occasions which eventually add up to a clear recognizable tendency and self-perception of alienation of immigrants within Canadian society. Similar to such isolated incidents, the decision to face a project like this – namely to challenge the subject of multiple personality and dissociative identity within American fiction and especially focus on a defined so-called mental disorder – was preceded by various situations when I discovered that the topic of multiple personality disorder or MPD was still alive despite the fact that MPD was intentionally renamed into dissociative identity disorder or DID, suggesting a slightly different concept. In my search for a certain actor in the year 2003, I looked for a film called Identity, a movie about a serial killer that reflected the idea of an internally split murderer and whose alter personalities are represented by various actors. Ignorant of the film’s real content and its twist ending revealing the killer’s psychological disturbance, I was surprised to learn that this dubious mental disorder of multiple personality still occurred. It was in the late mid-1990s, in the United States the disorder was already object of controversies, when in Germany a friend of mine, then a student of psychology and child care, was interested in a newly defined yet never really established and mysterious mental disorder called MPS (Multiples Persönlichkeitssyndrom). This was a psychiatric model of a psyche fragmented into several distinct personalities or persons, a concept which was belatedly imported from the United States to Europe. The concept, which sometimes referred to a core self with various alter selves situated around it, or no such core self at all with alter selves taking its place, was never as successful in Germany as it was in the United States. It was this enthusiastic friend, highly fascinated and disturbed by MPS, who first introduced me to this psychological trauma and memory theory. Since then, I have been rather skeptical about the seriousness of the disorder as the sensationalism and extreme explanatory model of the concept remained so irritating: the cause seemed to be severe childhood trauma or even childhood sexual abuse (CSA), and it appeared to be not necessary to remember the trauma, as the psyche was said to have dissociated the memory entirely and restore this traumatic memory in the psyche of alter personalities. How could such an inner fragmentation into several personalities, perceived as whole entities or persons of

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their own possibly work? Such an idea of an uncanny Other inside, or rather Others, is precisely the most fascinating aspect when considering uncontrollable forces or autonomous personalities. Some theories offered the explanation that the core self never existed at all and that the body thus was possessed by complex personalities who shared this one body. Watching the film Identity led to another film, which by then had turned into a cult movie: Fight Club. After consulting Robert Louis Stevenson's novella of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an imaginative relationship between all these fictional works and the diagnosis was obvious. When eventually having discovered the novel Set this House in Order (2003) by Matt Ruff, whose title in the German version literally translates “I and the Others”, it was clear to challenge the topic of a possible proliferation of multiple personality disorder until today and to document the establishment of a genre of its own which works either with or in opposition to psychiatric models (which themselves were often debatable) as this genre and even its subgenres became evident. Several critical books on psychological concepts of multiple personality and dissociation confirmed what was suspected: the disorder is the most controversial psychological disorder in the United States, and it was diagnosed almost exclusively there. The change of the term into dissociative identity disorder was also due to such now well-known controversy. The mechanism of the mind to split off or “dissociate” certain mental processes, which by themselves could be perceived as another personality or even myriads of entire persons inside one body, served as the central theory – a theory that has literally become a culture of its own. Later the inner fragmentation was more important than the proliferation of distinct persons within one body, the idea of the Other within the self was still a striking one, the possibility of alterity a fascination and a cultural habit. The notion of such an inner fragmentation could also point to a more than familiar self-perception within a “post-post-modern” society of overstimulation and mass media overkill. The demand of a contemporary lifestyle to develop a social and mental flexibility and adaptability may meet the criteria of postmodern or contemporary identity fragmentation and inner diversity, whether conceived as a positive force or a negative one. The plurality of mind resists the demand of only one possible existence within a multicultural, multiple-choice pick’n’mix society. Our contemporary Western culture may overwhelm us in its fragmentation and its demands of splitting our lifetime into working selves, family selves and at the same time meet all societal obligations and create a perfection of an ideal ego with an ideal body. Yet despite this comprehensible symptoms, DID still counts as “mental disorder”. The overuse of multiple personality especially within Hollywood film productions may point to a totally different tendency. The fascination with a mysterious internal split into various independently and uncontrollably acting persons in the mind within these hollywoodizations or hyperboles of the phenomenon still persists today. Nothing psychiatric science may attempt – giving the concept another name, trying to tone the disorder's manifestation down to a possible covert mechanism – will stop works of fiction from using the phenomenon in a very subjective and exaggerated form with, for example, the device of an unreliable narration in order to confuse the audience. Finding also voices that comment critically on the phenomenon, which has always been part of our popular culture, seemed difficult at first, yet there are various

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experts who underline the skeptical view when it comes to question the very reality or reliability of such a mental disorder. Multiple personality seemed to be dependent on performativity, an interrelationship with a watching audience despite its very personal aspects. These ideas are confirmed in this study and both popular culture and sophisticated novels are clearly still fascinated by America’s most controversial psychiatric diagnosis which started with the non-fiction book Sybil in the 1970s – a single bogus (!) case that at the same time hit a nerve with the general public and, as Ian Hacking has pointed out in Rewriting the Soul, fell on fertile soil of a citizen’s movement and women's liberation. A traumatized woman needed to be acknowledged. Sybil’s case may however not be entirely a piece of female emancipation but rather a case of patient exploitation and re-traumatization within a psychiatric power system even though the therapist was female and voiced feminist views. The fifth edition of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has confirmed the culture of MPD/DID within American society (and Western or other societies in this globalized world to a certain extent share this, too, although the German culture is not so much influenced by the Sybil phenomenon of multiple personality). Delving into the historical and fictional worlds of multiple personality and the fictional representation of the fragmented psyche is an enormously absorbing task. The texts provide the myth of the alter ego, the strength of imagination and creativity, and the ability to prove that fictional works contain a force that nobody can resist. Facing the challenge of this study not only meant embarking on an exhaustive examination of innumerable texts and films, but also addressing an utterly interesting and highly controversial subject. Contemporary multiples often insist on their selfperception within a narrative of MPD, the stronger and more literal version of DID. It became clear that the persistence of a mysterious syndrome, the strength of dissociated memories within fictional narratives, the ongoing debates about the validity or reality of DID (still perceived as MPD) as well as the culture, cultivation and cult around multiple personality, that all these stances showed the necessity to evolve an interdisciplinary study in contrast to studies looking only at psychiatric ever changing definitions and validations, opinions and theories (which are still highly contested!) or consider an analysis of the literary history of the Other, the alter ego or doppelgänger with an overly romanticizing approach of counterculture. All in all, the reality of the disorder is not questioned, it is there and all too strong, causing consequences for the lives of many. The isolated incidents of finding various works of fiction thus resulted in the aspiration of providing a scientific text that shows the clear tendency of the concept of multiple personality to be as vital as ever, its controversy included. Moreover, this concept is now a fixed part of popular culture with a genre and subgenres of its own in a self-referential mode presenting the trope of multiple personality as a vivid metaphor of not only individual trauma or (patho)subjectivity but of the contemporary subject within a fragmented society.

Introduction That man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 1886: 52 Widespread publicity for the concept makes it uncertain whether any case can now arise without being promoted by suggestion or prior preparation. HAROLD MERSKEY 1995: 3

The most controversial diagnosis of a mental disorder in the United States is that of multiple personality disorder (MPD), now renamed dissociative identity disorder (DID) (cf. Holmes 2008: 271). The widespread popular knowledge of the phenomenon, which understands the occurrence of two or more distinct personality states that take control of the body and appear as if they are independent persons of their own, is mainly connected to the field of fiction. It retells the psychological mechanism of dissociation, a form of amnesia defined as a mental mechanism to dissociate or “forget” traumatic events. Prior to the most influential case of the 20th century, the case of Sybil, less than 200 cases had been reported in the United States. After the publication of the novel-like book of Sybil’s psychiatric case in 1973, hundreds of thousands of cases suddenly occurred. The diagnosis of MPD had soon become the most popular in American psychiatric history. In contrast to the success of the disorder during the 1970s and 1980s, the decline of MPD was connected to several disastrous scandals and cases of overdiagnosis of mental patients during the 1990s. Despite the renaming of the disorder to stress the inner subtle psychological mechanism of dissociation and hence refer solely to dissociative identity disorder (DID) and consequently lessen the extent to which the disorder was displayed, the general notion of the disorder still stuck to the exaggerated and more observable form of MPD.

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However, the mysterious inner fragmentation into separate identities has been exceedingly used in fictional works such as novels or films with a hyperbolical performativity or a typical hollywoodization. Although the American Psychiatric Association (APA) changed the name of MPD to DID in order to stress the inner fragmentation than rather emphasize the proliferation of innumerous distinct entities, the disorder continues to be perceived, both in popular culture and in fictional works, as the existence of two or more persons within one body. During the 1980s, the heyday of MPD, even academic research, such as the philosophical study by Kathleen V. Wilkes called Real People (1988), picked up the idea of the self that is separated into several personalities that can be defined as real persons. Later, however, following the controversy of the 1990s questioning the actual existence of MPD or DID, a rather more skeptical view of multiple personality and dissociation was formulated by analyzing its historical roots of hysteria and hypnosis and by acknowledging the “disorder” as overdiagnosis and fancy diagnosis that caused more harm than good. Apart from individual cases and taking societal forces into account, careful examinations of the phenomenon were presented by a number of distinguished scientists: Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking in Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Science of Memory (1995); American psychologist Nicolas P. Spanos in Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective (1996); psychiatrist August Piper in Hoax and Reality: The Bizarre World of Multiple Personality Disorder (1997); literary critic Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997); and journalist and author Joan Acocella in Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder (1999). Since the turn of the millennium, the validity of multiple personality and dissociation has also been questioned by the movement of False Memory Syndrome (FMSM). Members of the FMSM opposed the idea of multiple personality and dissociation of repressing traumatic memory as demonstrated by Charles J. Brainerd and Valerie F. Reyna in The Science of False Memory (2005). The concept of dissociation consequently was subject of the so-called ‘memory wars’, which evolved around the concept of traumatic events being dissociated and thus “safely locked away” or not (Piper 1997: xii), albeit these dissociated memories were causing considerable psychological and somatic distress. In recent psychological studies and books, the phenomenon of multiple personality and dissociation is still being discussed. Some examples include psychiatrist Brant Wenegrat in Theater of Disorder: Patients, Doctors, and the Construction of Illness (2001), who calls the epidemic of MPD or DID one of the “mass sociogenic illnesses” (Wenegrat 2001: 130); professor of psychology Robert Rieber in The Bifurcation of the Self: The History and Theory of Dissociation and Its Disorders (2006); professors of psychology Scott O. Lilienfeld and William T. O’Donohue in The Great Ideas of Clinical Science (2007), who consider the disorder as a “partially social construction” (Lilienfeld and O’Donohue 2007: 347); and psychiatrist Paul R. McHugh in Try to Remember (2008), in which he declares that MPD and DID are based on “behavioral artifacts built on psychological assumptions” (McHugh 2008: 122). The attempt to reorganize the concept of multiple personality and dissociation within the psychiatric field is presented in a very recent publication on dissociative disorders and their placement within the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical

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Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), which was eventually published in May 2013. In Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders, trauma and dissociation expert Paul F. Dell records quite a number of suggestions for another name for MPD or DID: ‘complex dissociative disorder’, ‘complex posttraumatic dissociative disorder’, ‘chronic complex dissociative disorder’, ‘alter disorder’ and so on (Dell 2009a: 392). The purpose is to stress even more the inner mental mechanism of the “disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception” (APA 2000: 519). Besides these efforts of the psychiatric field to get rid of the remains of multiple personality as MPD, the fictional interpretations of the disorder contributed to the survival of the outdated definition. This study therefore accepts the challenge of analyzing the concept of multiple personality and dissociation with an interdisciplinary look into both psychological dynamics of the definition of MPD and DID and the force of literary texts and film versions, which combine in creating the popular notion of the disorder. Consequently this study develops the theory of MPD and DID as a “culture-embedded syndrome”. Not only psychiatric cases alone contribute to pop psychology. But it seems fairly clear that fictional characters such as Norman Bates in Psycho (1959), Tyler Durden in Fight Club (1996), and Andy Gage in Set this House in Order (2003) also have a considerable impact on how a disorder is generally perceived and further developed. The prototype of the multiple in the 20th century is undoubtedly Sybil (1973) her case now counts as a proven hoax or mere fad in order to establish an exaggerated version of dissociation and multiplicity caused by trauma (although the DID community still perceives her case as bedrock of trauma theory and dissociation). The inner fragmentation of fictional characters and their disintegration was already shown in literary studies such as Jeremy Hawthorn’s analysis in Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character (1983). It presented not only the theory of multiple personality and dissociation but also the equivalent of internally split protagonists within literary texts such as Charlotte Brontë’s Villette or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. This study again developed during a period when MPD was not questioned, and it even offered a fascinating model of how the traumatized mind allegedly works. The manifold plurality of modern or postmodern literary characters was also analyzed in a recent German study by Jens Mergenthaler in Sollbruchstellen der Seele: Die Multiple Persönlichkeit als Metapher im Literaturdiskurs (2008). While this study collects quite a number of diverse texts with mentally divided characters representing the typical plural mind of modernism or postmodernism, and additionally adding the film version of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1996), which differ significantly, the focus does not lie entirely on the dynamics of the psychological diagnosis and its representation within fictional works. Thus, it understands multiple personality merely as a modern form of existence similar to James M. Glass in Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World (1993). Glass, however, also considers MPD not an entirely valid metaphor for postmodern existence but also as a severe posttraumatic disorder causing distress and despair. Such a metaphorical meaning of the mental disorder of MPD or DID is therefore not considered precisely adequate.

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Accepting every modern or postmodern text that delves into a fictional character with a plural inner world or postmodern existence does not meet the criteria of this study. Rather, it analyzes the impact of American fictional texts of MPD and DID on the popular notion of the disorder. This means that each text needed to explicitly mention the disorder and not merely include a notion of alterity, fragmentation or inner dividedness in the plotline. Another very recent study by philosopher Logi Gunnarsson, Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality (2010), explores the idea of multiple personality still conceived as several entities thus touching on the outdated concept of MPD and the academic musings of the 1980s. It is interesting to note that such ideas of philosophically examining the possible existence of more than one entity within one body are still alive even within academic research. Gunnarsson also analyzes Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club within the literary theory of Astrid Schmid’s Fear of the Other: Approaches to English Studies of the Double (Schmid 1996 cited in Gunnarsson 2010: 181) and understands it as a translation of his theory into a literary text. Contrary to studies on the doppelgänger and alter ego theme, such as Carl F. Keppler’s The Literature of the Second Self (1972), who states that his concept of the second self means that “what each of them lacks is exactly what the other possesses” (Keppler 1972: 9), or as Astrid Schmid’s The Fear of the Other (1996), which both concentrate on several literary texts varying the topic of the internally split character, this study focuses particularly on American literary texts, which, as already stated, explicitly mention the diagnosis of MPD or DID. Thus, corresponding to the theory developed here of the “culture-embedded syndrome” influenced also by fictional representations of the disorder, such texts are understood as contributing to the general notion of multiple personality and disorder in a very powerful way. This general notion again contributed to official psychiatric definitions. Therefore, this study also attempts to synthesize both fields of psychiatry and the dynamics of the disorder with literature and its presentation of the disorder. The reciprocal influences of both fiction and the psychiatric science are apparent. By means of close reading, it is therefore interesting to see how the various psychiatric diagnoses as well as the literary texts treat the concept of multiple personality and dissociation. A main focus of the analysis of the fictional text lies on an understanding of how the here presented American authors varied the inner split of their protagonists. Gérard Genette’s theory of the narrator in terms of “who speaks” may be helpful (cf. Genette 1980: 186). If, as this book proposes, the authors do indeed either stick to the outdated diagnosis of MPD or else re-develop newer concepts of inner fragmentation in terms of DID, the texts might reflect this. As Rom Harré and Grant Gillett stated in the philosophical and psychological study The Discursive Mind (1994), the pronoun system used in fictional texts may indicate such different usages of dissociation in terms of multiplying the “Is” and egos, personalities or persons presented but it may also accentuate the inner fragmentation of the self. While the former definition of MPD may stress different pronoun systems, an inner fragmentation may be presented with the “I” as a still-perceived center or core. Moreover, even if authors still stick to the exaggerated version of MPD, what functions do these secondary selves have? Do they offer “a second life outside offi-

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cialdom” as literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin expressed in Rabelais and His World with which he coined the theory of the ‘carnival’ (cf. Bakhtin 1968: 6)? The secondary, somewhat carnival and comical selves may indeed follow Bakhtin’s statement: “The carnival-grotesque form exercises the same function: to consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted. This carnival spirit offers the change to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of the things.” (Bakhtin 1968: 34)

Despite difficulties with pressing a mental disorder or illness in general into a metaphorical level, as Susan Sontag indeed correctly stressed in her book Illness as Metaphor (1978), that disorders resemble what she claimed to be “the nightside of life” (Sontag 2002 [1978]: 3), American authors used MPD and DID to enhance the inner dividedness of their protagonists and their disconnectedness from themselves and their environment. Thus, besides Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival that opposes dominant forces, assuming that secondary selves or identities oppose such dominant forces, the literary theory of Hubert Zapf, which underlines the notion of “literature as cultural ecology” (Zapf 2002 and 2006) with a triadic model, can also be applied to multiple personality and dissociation in fictional texts and film versions. Accordingly, literature functions as an ecological force within a larger system of culture itself. Literary texts hence can formulate and enhance whatever may be suppressed and excluded in dominant narratives. Moreover, Zapf’s tripartite model may apply even to the very function of multiple personality and dissociation itself – may this function be applied to psychiatric dissociation models of trauma or to the function of counternarratives. By offering an opposition to the primary self in distress in terms of dissociation or secondary selves, the multiple mind attempts to adapt to traumatic experiences. A healing can only be achieved, according to the therapeutic concepts concerning MPD or DID, if the dissociated elements are reintegrated again into the personality. Hubert Zapf developed his tripartite concept of ‘cultural-critical metadiscourse’ with a death-in-life situation where certain features are suppressed by a dominant system, an ‘imaginative counter-discourse’ here resembling an alternative world or self within the conception of secondary selves, and the ‘reintegrative interdiscourse’ to overcome the dichotomies or reintegration of secondary selves into the primary personality – the term of reintegration even exists in certain trauma or MPD/DID therapies (cf. the novel Set this House in Order by Matt Ruff). Yet despite an acknowledged counternarrative, which might be applied to the narrative of the secondary personalities, romanticizing the second selves seems rather one-sided. Literally there is another side to the story of MPD/DID in general. Here it is clear that the concept could be classified as what Ian Hacking called the “interactive categories” in contrast to “indifferent categories” (cf. Hacking 1986). The interactive categories develop, according to Hacking, certain looping effects “in which

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one person’s conceptions shape another’s behavior, which in turn feeds back to shape the first person’s conceptions, and so on” (Lilienfeld and Berg). In this study, the theory of a cultural embedment of the syndrome is developed – the “cultureedmbeded syndrome” indicating the aspects of MPD/DID as official psychiatric diagnoses that were influenced by works of fiction in a very profound way. In order to offer a satisfactory and sufficient overview of the subject of multiple personality and dissociation in the United States and to be able to place each work of literature into the context of how fictional works display multiple characters, it is first necessary to consider the psychological theory and the corresponding history of inner dividedness in terms of demon possession, hysteria, double or multiple personality, MPD, and later DID before proceeding to explain the concept of the “cultureembedded syndrome” as part of the popular culture. Such an examination of each of the definitions and explanatory systems shows how relevant the prevailing cultural system was. After these considerations, an analysis of fictional texts is provided. Here it is of interest in how far these texts, mainly novels, include the controversy around MPD/DID. This study is therefore presented in three parts. The first part introduces the historical and theoretical background of multiple personality and dissociation and its predecessors within hysteria. Chapter 1 clarifies the definition of the various and changing psychiatric terms that include also cultural factors; chapter 2 demarcates MPD and DID from the often misunderstood concept of split personality as schizophrenia; chapter 3 presents the origins and early science of dissociation. In chapter 4, the renaissance of the concept of dissociation within the scientific field is mentioned when memory, trauma, and dissociation were newly interpreted. Within chapter 5, the historical cases of double and multiple personality discussed gradually shift to fictional texts such as Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book Sybil (1973), which served as the template for cases of MPD in the late 20th century and the popular awareness of the phenomenon even in the 21th century. As a complex study on MPD in the United States should not avoid the controversy around the disorder, chapter 6 introduces various critical approaches to the theory of multiple personality and MPD. The second part of this study continues with the concept of the “cultureembedded syndrome” in chapter 7, which indicates that the general notion of multiple personality and dissociation cannot be understood without its representation within popular culture and thus popular fictional works. Here MPD remains the core concept whatever name the disorder may obtain in the future, as it functions also as a strong brand that continues to be recognizable. The therefore relevant role of the mass media is explored in chapter 8. Having thus recapitulated the available popular culture of multiple personality and dissociation, chapter 9 is dedicated to the analysis of prevalent and influential autobiographical texts or autopathographies of MPD and DID. Chapter 10, finally, offers a look into the classic texts of “man’s dual nature” such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and others. With an account of the use of multiple personality and dissociation within fictional texts in the United States, chapter 11 offers an analysis of four important novels published during the 1950s, which experienced the newly discovered phenomenon of the multiple mind and which are influenced by stereotypical models of

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MPD even though the diagnosis was only accepted in 1980 by the official psychiatric association. During the research it became evident that various subgenres exist. The development of these subgenres of multiple personality and dissociation fiction is explored in chapter 12, with the internal split coming in a variety of different names: the devil inside, the spy inside, the killer inside, and the protector inside. Chapter 13 presents the most common forms of visualization of MPD and DID in film versions. Finally, having thus established the fictional history of multiple personality and dissociation, it is of interest to explore contemporary novels and their representation of MPD or DID. The third part of this study therefore offers an analysis of seven novels, partly sophisticated and complex works such as Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) as well as seemingly more simplified mainstream texts such as Ted Dekker’s thriller Thr3e (2003), Matt Ruff’s exploration of MPD in the humorous novel Set this House in Order (2003), or the personal distress of Gabrielle Pina’s Chasing Sophea (2006) dealing with a traumatized African-American woman. Multiple personality and dissociation can also be used as a metaphor within societal structures – as the connection of the disorder to culture already implies. Chuck Palahniuk’s now legendary novel Fight Club (1996) perfectly demonstrates this idea. How dissociation in terms of an identity disorder may be translated into a more contemporary scientific model of the traumatized psyche and the inner disintegration of DID can be seen in the novels The Zero (2006) by Jess Walter, a post nine-eleven narrative of trauma and fragmentation, and the highly multileveled narration of Sorrows of an American (2008) by Siri Hustvedt. The last chapter of this study, “Voices of Imagination”, addresses the question whether a fraud diagnosis can be used as a metaphor in postcolonial narratives. This study also pays attention to the reciprocal and mutually influential intertextuality within multiple personality and dissociation fiction. In contrast to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease or a biological concept of schizoprenia, both diseases may have a typical progression and are also perceived and interpreted in a certain way by most people, a template for MPD/DID was clearly given with fictional works as a kind of imperative or instruction for the patients. In this sense, fiction told them how to behave, how to perform, how to feel. The references to the classic cases of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Psycho and especially Sybil are striking. All these texts referred to psychological concepts of the fragmented human mind and translated them into fictional works. Thus, this study is an interdisciplinary approach attempting to synchronize psychological dynamics of multiple personality and dissociation as dissociative identity disorder with presentations of it within fictional adaptations. MPD/DID – this spelling means that both concepts apply although they are understood as slightly differing – as cultural phenomenon might have been examined in terms of psychiatry or psychology; it might have been examined in terms of a literature of the doppelgänger or the alter ego. This study holds that there exists to date no careful and complex summary of multiple personality and dissociation in fictional works plus the examination of the dynamics of the psychiatric definition, which now includes cultural references, in order to understand it as a cultural phenomenon. Hence, the challenge is to establish an overview of the American fiction of the multi-

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ple mind in order to demonstrate the vitality of a concept that regards the singularity of the human mind as outdated and emphasizes an internal plurality. It is no exaggeration that the metaphor of dissociation in terms of multiple personality still evokes the warning: Beware of the other side(s)!

Part I: History and Theory

1 Personalities or Personality States? The Definition of MPD/DID in Psychiatric Terms The assumption that the personalities are real people […] is without foundation, despite the fact that such beliefs may be experienced by the patient as compelling subjective realities. KLUFT 1993: 22

Is there a succinct and sufficient definition of the term ‘multiple personality disorder’ or MPD? Is there a single and short description of what MPD is all about? Unfortunately yet interestingly, the answer to this question has to be a definite No! There has never been the one and only valid definition or context. Both definition and context of MPD have changed considerably during the centuries. Contradictory explanations and theories coexisted and thus variable names for this mythical diversity of the human mind evolved. In psychiatric terms in the United States, MPD was renamed ‘dissociative identity disorder’, abbreviated to DID, and was consequently understood on a slightly but considerably different basis as the existence of personalities or persons (MPD) within one body then changed into a mere presence of personality states or identities (DID). The dynamics of multiple personality, MPD or DID, is astonishing. It reveals the inconsistency of its very definition or even presents dissociation and confusion in itself. Aside from this variety of definitions, the split, metaphorically speaking, also exists along the juxtaposition of popular culture versus the psychiatric field where the definitions are developed. The term ‘multiple personality’ never led to a short and easy description. The scientific and even to a certain degree the popular understanding and perception of multiple personality itself changed in the course of time and became multiple and thus proved “the difficulties involved in defining multiple personality” (Hawthorn 1983: 6). The “definition’s defects are as palpable as they are numerous”, confirms August Piper in Hoax and Reality. The Bizarre World of Multiple Personality Disorder (1997:7) and “the definitions even contradict each other” (7). Although everyone can agree on the idea that different behavioral patterns of a person can be observed – a seemingly sophisticated Dr. Jekyll versus a devilish Mr. Hyde – and that mood changes are obvious (which is not necessary anymore, cf. Spiegel 2011), what actually explains these different “sides” of a human mind may

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vary from case to case. Mood changes, memory loss, cryptic yet characteristic symptoms and more or less covert or overt second lives may have their origin in various physical deficiencies such as strokes or brain tumors or may be caused by a psychological trauma (as some theory may suggest), yet the phenomenon may still remain the same: more than just one personality, or name it identity and hence lessen its complexity – inhabiting and sharing the same body. Since it lacks a concise explanation in scientific terms, the symptoms that were often summarized as a multiple layered personality were mystified by a popular perception and might therefore be understood within the zeitgeist of each decade or hence culture-bound. However, the core still remained mostly the same. As far as the popular perception of multiple personality in terms of MPD/DID is concerned, it seems to be frozen at a certain point: right after the sensational non-fiction “true story” in the book Sybil was published in the year 1973 and a miniseries appeared on TV three years later. Although part of the general awareness followed the slight yet significant shift of MPD into DID, the multiple personality still survives and consequently becomes part of a recipe of uncanny parts of the human mind: the mystery and danger of dissociation. Quite a number of novels still refer especially to MPD and avoid the change into DID and its continuous journey from an overt to a covert syndrome. A study of the several perceptions of the disorder is thus necessary in order to track down the core of the disorder even if the surroundings may have changed. Furthermore, whether the disorder was placed among hysteria, personality disorders (as the very name may suggest), interface disorders, somatoform disorders or finally dissociative disorders or posttraumatic stress disorders, supplementary study still is essential. But what is the difference between MPD and DID? Using a simple example could offer a then simplified but obvious answer. If a society acknowledges a citizen diagnosed with MPD as hosting 150 personalities or persons within one body, all these 150 personalities or persons, being fully acknowledged citizens, are allowed to vote (maybe 149 of them vote for a conservative party, one votes for a liberal party). This is just an imagined scenario. But a citizen having DID would only own one voice, one vote, as he is one person who is internally fragmented. To exaggerate this bit further, it could be said that for parties it would be advantageous to have some MPD voters since they would ensure a majority of total votes. MPD or DID – two totally different concepts. As already mentioned, the core of the disorder may have never changed – an inner fragmentation is experienced, consequently a number of distinct and distinguishable personalities, personality states, alter egos, alters, ego states within one individual occurs or are expressed – quite a number of terms exist in the universe or multiverse of MPD/DID. Nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary to follow the different definitions because many interpretations misunderstand the term completely and mix the issue with schizophrenia. An example is Annalee Newitz in her remarkable sociological study of capitalism Pretend We’re Dead (2006) when she was refers to Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1999): “The narrator is schizophrenic and has a split personality” (Newitz 48). This subsumption of a mental disorder, or what counts as such, in a cultural context within cultural criticism is valid as it corresponds to the

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framework of a “schizoanalysis” of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), indicating hence the alienation of (male) human beings within so-called civilization. Yet let us still go on splitting hairs. Other authors may not pay attention to the considerable change of the definition and the significant controversies about the disorder as this is not of their main concern. A study on multiple personality or dissociative identity however certainly needs to take a closer look at these issues. So what is actually happening behind the scenes? The very struggle for an adequate name for a mental condition of more than one person, personality, alter, identity or “side” within one single individual and a precise definition beyond naming are evident in the various titles given to the mysterious disturbance of the human mind and the questioning of a unitary human self. This naming of the secondary other sides appeared to be crucial as the question seemed how solitary they act or how much of an entity or other person they were considered. At the end to the 19th century, the established term of double consciousness was followed by a number of others: “Once known as Gmelin’s Syndrome, exchanged personality, multiplex personality1, double existences, dual consciousness, dual personality, double personality, plural personality, dissociated personality, alternating personality, multiple personality, split personality, multiple personality disorder, and, most recently, dissociative identity disorder (Ellenberger 1970, Greaves 1993), this condition seems to be experiencing an identity crisis of its own.” (Brenner 2001: 37)

Multiple personality seems by far the most successful of the terms. It is still the common, publicly recognized name for a strange phenomenon although DID is gathering more and more attention. In the most famous American study on double consciousness or multiple personality The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology (1906), Dr. Morton Prince, a well-established American expert and psychotherapist in the Boston of his time, offered a detailed description of his famous patient named Miss Beauchamp and her “splitting of personality” (Prince 1906: 2): “Cases of this kind are commonly known as ‘double’ or ‘multiple personality’, according to the number of persons represented, but a more correct term is disintegrated personality, for each secondary personality is a part only of a normal whole self. No one secondary personality preserves the whole physical life of the individual. The synthesis of the original consciousness known as the personal ego is broken up, so to speak, and shorn of some of its memories, perceptions, acquisitions, or modes of reaction to the environment.” (Prince 1906: 3; italics in original text)

1

The term multiplex personality was coined by Frederic Myers in 1886, the same year in which Robert Louis Stevenson published his novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. See chapter 10.

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As the most prominent American psychiatrist in the field of multiple personality, Prince had strong ambitions in establishing the concept in the United States during the early 20th century. He clearly differentiated between well generated secondary personalities “carrying on all the functions of a social life, and of adapting itself to the environment” (Prince 1906:4). Some examples are “fully developed forms” with a “large degree of complexity of mental organization which permits complete, free, and spontaneous activity, approximating, at least, that of normal mental life” and examples of “simpler class” concerning subconscious states of automatic writing, “and kindred manifestations, or else as states of hypnosis” (4). Even though Morton Prince already includes the hypothesis that multiple personality refers in fact to a concept of integral fragmentation instead of plurality of several personalities inside one body, he insisted on representing a person or personality on his/her own on each of Miss Beauchamp’s selves (3). Why is this of significant importance? Because here is the core of the disorder, its heart, the stress on entities and persons, which was settled during the 1970s due to Sybil, the peak was reached in the 1980s. The split meant a division into whole entities hence destroying a single self (which became rather single selves). The DID concept actually points to Morton’s disregarded concept, even by himself, where he establishes a disintegrated “whole self” (Prince 1906:4), one self that is internally fragmented. The 20th century offered various definitions of the term multiple personality. As a more common reference book, the American People’s Encyclopedia of the year 1969 presents the following entry on multiple personality disorder: “a condition in which the main stream of thought has divided so that two or more personalities exist within the same individual” (Humphrey et al. 1969: 178; my emphasis). The entry refers to ‘dissociation’, a psychological term originally introduced by the French psychologist Pierre Janet. The mechanism of dissociation is still considered to be the basis for current discussions on the issue, thus the renaming of the disorder. This shall be discussed more closely when analyzing the definition of dissociation and its function within the human mind. Now it is necessary to note that dissociation is understood as the mechanism of the mind, which results in “divisions or splits in consciousness” (Van der Hart and Dorahy 2009: 3) that may eventually lead to the phenomenon of a multiple personality. The entry in the American People’s Encyclopedia continues: “Each personality seems to be well integrated of itself. The primary personality, the original representative of mental function, is usually unaware of secondary personalities that develop. The reverse is usually true of the secondary personalities: they command the entire memory and acknowledge the existence of other personalities. Primary and secondary personalities may alternate frequently or only a few times in a lifetime […] The phenomenon of multiple personality may appear in the absence of organic disease and is therefore a disturbance in function, not structure of the mind. It often is associated with hysteria […] When multiple personalities form, thoughts, desires, and ambitions that are unacceptable to the primary personality for moral or other reasons are repressed from consciousness. This repressed material is gradually integrated into one or more secondary personalities, each with its own preferences, mannerisms, and ideals. If the primary personality then is subjected to a jarring emotional experience, a sec-

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ondary personality may emerge and control behavior for a time.” (Humphrey et al. 1969: 178; my emphasis)

Another popular reference book, the Encyclopedia Americana of the year 1973, places the phenomenon of multiple personality within the famous psychological treatment of Morton Prince. It refers to the mechanism of dissociation, and still mentioned different distinct personalities within one body. “Multiple personality, two or more distinct personalities which either alternate or exist simultaneously in one individual. Morton Prince (1854-1929) became enthusiastic about the possibility of multiple personalities, and his famous case history of a patient named Miss Beauchamp (Dissociation of a Personality, New York, 1905) did much to interest other American psychiatrists and psychologists in the phenomenon. Prince based his interpretations upon theories he had learned from his studies with (Pierre) Marie Félix Janet. Presumably, two or more wellorganized personalities may become dissociated from one another, and each personality may have an independent, temporary, existence. It is said, that one personality may be wholly unaware of the traits and the behavior of another personality which exists within the psychological makeup of the individual.” (Cayne et al. 1973: 558-9; my emphasis)

In the year 1970, Henri F. Ellenberger published his seminal study on the history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry in The Discovery of the Unconscious, “the book that revived Janet’s reputation” and his theory of dissociation (Acocella 1999: 34). A considerable part of the book is dedicated to the phenomenon of multiple personality and its different appearances. Ellenberger’s complex study particularly shows the interaction of distinct personalities or persons within one body and their existing or non-existing mutual relationship and awareness, so that “personalities are called simultaneous when they are able to manifest themselves distinctly at one and the same moment” (Ellenberger 1970: 132; my emphasis). Ellenberger distinguishes between cases “where there are simply two focuses of attention or two streams of consciousness concurrently (as may happen with religious mystics, poets, artists, inventors); or when a person is enacting a role on a stage” (132) and cases of real multiple personalities as “in a true multiple personality, each personality has the feeling of its own individuality at the exclusion of the other or others” (132; my emphasis). All definitions stress the existence of distinct personalities with each consisting of its own individuality, clear social behavior and distinct manners. Each of these complex personalities can thus be characterized and named in detail as complex entities. Accordingly, Ellenberger introduced his “tripartite classification” (Hawthorne 1983: 6) of multiple personality. First of all, he mentions the ‘simultaneous multiple personalities’ followed by ‘successive multiple personalities’, which were “either mutually cognizant of each other, mutually amnesic or one-way amnesic”; the third class of multiple personalities finally displays what he calls ‘personality clusters’ (Ellenberger 1970: 131). Each of these different types of multiple personality has its own typical clinical example, which Ellenberger describes in detail. His survey includes all famous cases which are discussed in the subsequent sections.

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For the understanding and definition of multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder, the psychiatric reference book Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the APA is of major importance. In the United States, it represents the essential source for clinical diagnosis of what is now called “dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder” (APA 2000: 526). The switch from a personality oriented scheme to the definition of a disorder of personality states or identities within one person is obvious and intended. Thus, the fourth revised edition of the DSM states that DID is now understood “as a disorder characterized by identity fragmentation rather than a proliferation of separate personalities” (APA 2000: 519; my emphasis). Such proliferation literally occurred in the year 1980 when the American Psychiatry Association first mentioned multiple personality disorder. Consequently, the number of diagnoses rose astronomically and “mushroomed” (Spanos 1996: 2) during the 1980s, which led to what was called “the multiple personality epidemic” (Hacking 1995: 8). Prior to 1980, the disorder was rarely diagnosed (Spanos 1996: 2) yet it seemed to turn into one of the disorders Elaine Showalter also called hysterical epidemics or ‘hystories’ (Showalter 1997) or a fancy diagnosis. The first edition of the DSM was published in 1952 and includes a reference to “psychoneurotic disorders” and a section called “dissociative reaction” (32). This is understood as a “gross personality disorganization” that may deflect into “various symptomatic expressions, such as depersonalization, dissociated personality, stupor, fugue, amnesia, dream state, somnambulism, etc.” (32). No further explanations exist. The second edition of the DSM (1968) has an entry on “300.14 Hysterical neurosis, dissociative type” (40). The entry shows that “in the dissociative type, alterations may occur in the patient’s state of consciousness or in his identity, to produce such symptoms as amnesia, somnambulism, fugue, and multiple personality.” (APA 1968:40)

The second edition does not contain any further explanations but explicitly mentions the term of multiple personality. The 20th century itself became a somewhat split century featuring the time prior to the epidemic with less than a hundred reported and filed cases of this bizarre condition of switching mental states (Hacking 1995: 8 and Showalter 1997: 159), and periods dealing with mass media productions like the TV movie Sybil in the year 1973 and its printed predecessor as an extremely popular novel (Hacking 1995: 40, Showalter 1997: 160). This has caused first of all a wide spread public awareness and consequently a considerable rise of diagnosed individuals. These intervals have been broadly discussed and analyzed (cf. Hacking 1995; Showalter 1996; Spanos 1996; von Braun 1999; Acocella 1999). The differences between the two definitions of multiple personality disorder and dissociative identity disorder in the several editions of the DSM are here of essential interest. The changes also indicate a different understanding of the disorder from extreme personalities as real persons toward an understanding of inner fragmentation. The edition of the year 1980, the DSM-III, displays the following entry on multiple personality disorder or MPD:

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“A. The existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities, each of which is dominant at a particular time. B. The personality that is dominant at any particular time determines the individual’s behavior. C. Each individual personality is complex and integrated with its own unique behavior pattern and social relationship.” (Hacking 1995: 10; my emphasis)

Still referring to the term multiple personality disorder, in contrast to hysteric dissociation disorder in the second edition of the DSM, the condition is now grouped with dissociative disorders. According to Ian Hacking in Rewriting the Soul (1995), because of the deletion of condition C in the revised DSM in the year 1987 (DSM-IIIR), pointing out that the individual personalities were not necessarily shown as complex and integrated within unique behavioral patterns and even social relationships, “more individuals could be diagnosed with multiple personality” (Hacking 1995: 10), so that consequently “there were patients who satisfied the criteria of 1980. More satisfied the criteria of 1987” (11). Hacking notes that “the name change, from multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder, does matter” (54). The personalities thus existed, were first understood as complex and later accepted even in weaker accentuations. Some proposals for the DSM-V mention DID as chronic disorder: “life-long dissociative presentations” (Spiegel 2011: 826). The definition of the fourth DSM edition, called DSM-IV-TR, which was applied until May 2013 when the fifth edition was published, refers to several dissociative disorders as a category subdivided into several disorders, such as dissociative amnesia or dissociative fugue, and specifies dissociative identity disorder or DID as follows with the changes in brackets as indicated by the DSM-IV Sourcebook (APA 1996), which, accompanying the DSM, concentrates not only on the definitions but on the dynamics of changes and thus includes the several changes of the definition as well: “300.14 Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder) A. The [existence within the person] presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self). B. At least two of these [personalities] identities or personality states recurrently take [full] control of the person’s behavior. C. Inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness. D. The disturbance is not due to a substance-induced disorder (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behavior during alcohol intoxication). In children, the symptoms are not attributable to imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.” (APA 1996: 996; my emphasis)

This definition adds particularly the criterion of amnesia, loss of memory. The change in the diagnosis was due to the discussion on mere personality states or experienced identities rather than complex personalities. Now the personality states do not need full control of the body as in former definitions, for example, “in the case of au-

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ditory hallucinations that may represent the intrusion of one personality state into another”, states the DSM-IV Sourcebook of the year 1996 (APA 1996: 996). Furthermore, the DSM-IV Sourcebook emphasizes on the issue: “Finally, it was proposed by some members of the Task Force [which focuses on the updates of the DSM] that the term ‘multiple personality disorder’ be changed to ‘dissociative identity disorder’ to stress that the nature of the condition is the lack of personal integration rather than the objective existence of various personalities within a single individual” (975; my emphasis). It shall be explained shortly why this difference matters so much in the investigation on MPD and DID in contemporary fiction since this study mainly focuses on such changes and also on a possible inclusion of controversial elements concerning the disorder. The controversy around the phenomenon reached the DSM in its fourth edition: “It has been suggested that the recent relatively high rates of the disorder reported in the United States might indicate that this is a culture-specific syndrome” (APA 194: 485). This “specific culture” (485) hence is acknowledged while additionally the frequency of the diagnosed disorder is mentioned as a “sharp rise in reported cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder in the United States”, 486), thus the DSM-IV now includes this culture of DID in the diagnostic manual: “Some believe that the greater awareness of the diagnosis among mental health professionals has resulted in the identification of cases that were prominently undiagnosed” or that “the syndrome had been overdiagnosed” (486). The DSM-IV here states that this overdiagnosis concerns “individuals who are highly suggestible” (486) using a regularly mentioned cause why suggestible persons adapt to this diagnosis. This shifts the prevalent culture of this “idiom of distress” (Nichter) to individuals who, after all, may act in accordance to their environment or system (such as the psychological or pop cultural models they may come into contact with) or practice of culture in which they exist. Yet the question might be, how concerned individuals with certain (true or imagined) traumatized pasts might belief to be able to express their dismay. In what ways can a certain culture acknowledge a (perhaps culturally pre-coded) inner fragmentation? This cultural influence on individuals perhaps needs to be recognized more strongly in order to accept that there may not be only suggestible persons concerned but a whole (popular) culture. It may also need to be acknowledged that not only the mid-20th century knew such a generally adopted popular culture. It may be of interest in what sense or to what extent the writer Mary Austin included theories of double consciousness or multiple personality in her writings such as her autobiographical notes published in 1932. It becomes clear, for example, that Austin knew various psychological theories (such as Meyer’s “Human Personality”) and William James who had included musings about double consciousness he called “alternating personalities” in his Principle of Psychology (James 1890: 379). In Earth Horizon, her autobiography, Mary Austin writes: “met William James” (282). In this autobiography, where she continually refers to “I-Mary” and “Mary-by-herself”, indicating that she has read some research on “continuing experience of wholeness” (283), and yet she also expresses her inner fragmentation. There might by an oscillation between primordial felt inner dividedness and later well-known popular concepts (of multiple personality) such as Miss Beauchamp by Morton Prince from the year 1906 on. Austin’s narratives, however,

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are pre-Eve (one of the predominant cases in the 1950s) or even pre-Sybil (the prototype of MPD from the 1970s on) but still consistent with definitions of the phenomenon. In a letter, supposedly written in the year 1918, she states her knowledge of the concepts at that time: “As I have had a great deal of trouble with the phenomenon known as double personality…” (cited in Goodman 2008: 159).2 Examining the various contemporary definitions of the disorder, however, the confusion is complete when various terms co-exist similar to Morton Prince’s concept of co-existence, which indicates that several personalities act simultaneously (Prince 1906).3 In his critical approach toward the phenomenon of multiple personality and dissociation Hoax and Reality (1997), psychiatrist August Piper considered a general definition as non-existent. Therefore, he concludes, the diagnosis is not based on solid ground. “In summary, knowing how to test or prove an assertion that an individual has more than one personality, or how to clinically distinguish between personalities, ego states, identities, fragments, personality states, or the like, is impossible in the absence of general agreement about what any of these terms mean” (Piper 1997: 10). Now an obvious change of identities is not necessary: “Readily observable switching behavior from one alternate identity to another is relatively uncommon” (Spiegel 2011: 837), yet the suggestibility or “hypnotizability” is strongest (830).

2

3

This reference to Mary Austin’s inner fragmentation into “I-Mary” and “Mary-byherself” is owned to Christina Hirson and her indications she discussed with me on the subject of Austin and her narrative double consciousness. For example, several medical sources tend to refer to the older definition of complex personalities. The United States National Library of Medicine MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), the “world’s largest medical library”, thus describes a multiple personality disorder (F03.300.500) as a “dissociative disorder in which the individual adopts two or more distinct personalities. Each personality is a fully integrated and complex unit with memories, behavior patterns and social friendship. Transition from one personality to another is sudden” (see ‹http://www.nlm.nih.gov/cgi/mesh/2007/MB_cgi?field=uid& term=D009105›. Web. 27 July 2007; my emphasis). The Merck Manual Home Edition (2003), another medical reference book, states that in DID “formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder, two or more identities or personalities alternate”. The fact that identities or altered states of consciousness appear next to personalities might be of interest. The Merck continues: “In dissociative identity disorder, some of person’s personalities are aware of important personal information, whereas other personalities are unaware” (see ‹http://www.merck.com/mmhe/print/sec07//ch106/ch106d.html›. Web. 20 Sept 2009; my emphasis). A revision of the entry in the year 2008, however, offers a different view. The current version of the Merck Manual Online Medical Library (2008) thus characterizes the disorder by “• 2 identities (called alters or self-states) that alternate” (see ‹http://www.merck.com/mmpe/print/sec15/ch197/ch197e.html›. Web. 20 Sept 2009). In addition, the tenth edition of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) of the World Health Organization lists only “F 44.81 Multiple Personality Disorder” (World Health Organization 1992: 160). A revised edition is due for the year 2015.

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In their study Alters in Dissociative Identity Disorder: Metaphor or Genuine Entities?, Harald Merckelbach, Grant J. Devilly and Eric Rassin, all connected with experimental psychology, suggested that alters in persons with DID are probably overinterpreted as separate and complex personalities (Merckelbach, Devilly and Rassin 2002). They concluded: “Neither memory studies, nor psychobiological studies have elicited compelling evidence that supports a literal view on alters in DID. As things stand, the results of these studies in no way refute an interpretation of alters in terms of role enactment and metaphors for emotional states […] Thus it is probably time to de-emphasize the literal interpretation of alters advocated by the DMS-IV.” (Merckelbach, Devilly and Rassin 2002: 497)

Moreover, Merckelbach, Devilly and Rassin accentuate that the alters are suggested as a possible result of “attributional illusions” and they refer to the tendency of some patients to “attribute causality to inside agents” which eventually suggests that there is a possibility of interpreting alters as “metaphors rather than real entities” (493). In an article on “The Long Struggle to Diagnose Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD): MPD”, Paul F. Dell, dissociation expert and director of the Trauma Recovery Center in Norfolk in Virginia, confirms that “the modern dissociative field has struggled with these questions for the past 25 years” (Dell 2009a: 383). In short, there is no singular agreement on how dissociative identity disorder and the variety of personalities or identities should be interpreted. Yet rather than emphasizing real persons inside, there is consistency in stressing the importance of altered states of consciousness due to dissociation. Hence, Dell proposes other names for the disorder such as “dissociative self-state disorder” (392).4 Additionally, in spite of the popular notion of dissociative identity disorder with clear presentation of distinct identity states displayed as different, complex persons inside one body, such a “behavioral evidence” (392) is not valid as it misinterprets the occurrence of the disorder as not exclusively overt but covert. In other words, patients with such a disorder are now not expected to act as if possessed by several persons. On the contrary, they may seem to be able to hide their inner distress, Dell concludes (389). The difficulties to correctly define the disorder are obvious. According to Dell, it is “no wonder [that] DID can be so difficult to diagnose” (389). The story of a diagnosis has not come to an end. For the new definition of DID, a proposal of the APA for the fifth edition of the DSM reads as follows: “300.14 Dissociative Identity Disorder

4

Other proposals mentioned by Dell are ‘disaggregate self-state disorder’, ‘major dissociative disorder’, ‘pervasive dissociative disorder’, ‘chronic complex dissociative disorder’, ‘complex posttraumatic and dissociative disorder’, ‘the taxon of chronic complex dissociative disorder’ to name but a few by several experts. The confusion is clear, yet all of these proposals attempt to point to the inner fragmentation and not the performance of different personalities or persons (Dell 2009: 392).

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A. Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states or an experience of possession. This involves marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning. These signs and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual. B. Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting. C. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. D. The disturbance is not a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice. (Note; In children, the symptoms are not attributable to imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.) E. The symptoms are not attributable to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behavior during alcohol intoxication) or another medical condition (e.g., complex partial seizures). Specify if: With prominent non-epileptic seizures and/or other sensory-motor (functional neurologic) symptoms.”5

It may be interesting to know how an “experience of possession” will be accepted or if such a reference may not include too much of the mysteries of trance states, demon possession, Puritan fear and the like. On the other side(s), literally, it may hint at an acceptance of cultural practices placing the “disorder” in the fields of a culturally accepted syndrome. The DSM-V now understands the disorder as composed of five criteria that does indeed include also a remarkable terminology, that of “possession”, and will later add some more features of possession states when describing further syndromes. In the more descriptive sections of the DSM-V, the diagnostic features include references to behaviors that may include a possession by a “spirit” or “supernatural being” (293). A different way of behaving thus may be the result or “give the appearance” that someone’s identity was replaced by a “ghost” (293). There is also a list of such appearances that can take the culturally accepted forms of “possessing spirits, deities, demons, animals, or mythical figures” (295). The complete definition now reads as follows: A. Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession. The disruption in identity involves marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or senso-

5

This revision is noted under proposed revision on the APA website. See: ‹http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=57›. Web. 18 May 2012.

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B. C. D.

E.

ry-motor functioning. These signs and symptoms may be observed by others or reported by the individual. Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. The disturbance is not a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice. Note: In children, the symptoms are not better explained by imaginary playmates or other fantasy play. The symptoms are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., blackouts or chaotic behavior during alcohol intoxication) or another medical condition (e.g., complex partial seizures). (APA 2013:292)

The question is whether the reference to “some cultures” and the “experience of possession”, a curious phrase within a timeframe of the 21st century that may hint at the importance or revival of religion, contradicts criterion D. This states that it is “not part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice”, but would the latter not refer to mainstream American multiple culture and MPD/DID as “culture-embedded syndrome” (see chapter 7)? In the following sections it is notable that the fifth edition of the DSM now includes paragraphs about “culture related diagnostic issues” that where formerly collected in an appendix about “culture-bound syndromes” in the fourth edition. This inclusion of culture issues in the diagnostic definitions seems an interesting addition as psychology, psychopathology and psychiatry here widens the aspects of a diagnosis in terms of cultural influences that seem to oppose mental health or disorder in general, at least when it comes to signs of possession. It seems that it can either be a cultural practice or a mental disorder and that it does not necessarily indicate a mental disorder when a certain notion of cultural expression is adapted; at the same time the disorder is not a normal generally acknowledged practice within a culture. The APA later refers to cultures of “rural areas of the developing world”, thus including a postcolonial perspective, or “certain religious groups in the United States and Europe” (Catholics or other religious groups that believe in demon possession?), hence expressing the only indication for American culture when mentioning a probably smaller group (295). There is no reference to popular culture or mainstream culture as part of a global understanding of a commonly shared hollywoodization or a kind of popularized form of mental disorders such as MPD/DID which is presented in mainstream film and fiction (hence here criterion D might work). The term of “culture” here applied seems to be the Other, the exotic, the uncommon ground seen from a Western white middle class normativity (although religious groups in the United States and Europe are mentioned). Yet if ‘culture’ refers to the Latin origin ‘cultura’ as cultivation and growing, or is defined as ideas, behavior and customs, it is valid to talk about a multiple culture or dissociation culture on a more general term especially within the United States. Thus, there is no evocation needed to produce a notion of Eastern or rather “exotic” cultures when it comes to include “cultures” where dissociation in terms of experienced possession or DID are accepted cultural behavior patterns. When such other cultures exhibit dissociation as possession or include altered states of consciousness

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as DID within their value system or practice, and if such a practice is not experienced or termed as mental disorder, if it is moreover seen as “broadly accepted cultural or religious practice” (or CoRP)6, why is the American culture (of multiples) excluded here as it has tremendously influenced the general knowledge about the disorder by constantly producing and reflecting popularized cases and their fictional adaptions, or is it excluded with criterion D? This is not entirely clear. Innumerous diagnosed Americans, as they present themselves in chat rooms, online forums and internet groups, understand themselves within a frame of healthy copying or at least refer to the established culture practice of the cultural “idioms of distress” (Nichter) of MPD or DID within the American society. DID still is not totally seen like this plural selfconception or multiple agency in the DSM-V, here it still remains a mental disorder. It is certainly a contemporary approach to acknowledge a multicultural mosaic of various ethnical and religious backgrounds. Alterity of the self, disruptive selfconsciousness, fragmented self-experiences and so on are nonetheless very prominent in American (pop) culture which is interveined by a multiple genre that is still alive. As Allen Frances, a psychiatrist who worked on the fourth edition and who now criticizes the new DSM, notes in his recent book Saving Normal, “we are always just a blockbuster movie and some weekend therapist’s workshop away from a new fad” (132-3). Letting aside the opinion that the disorder is nothing but a fad or a hoax, as August Piper terms it, it is, according to Ian Hacking, a very real phenomenon, experienced on a fixed and constant basis (and Piper does also acknowledge the existence of the disorder which would be clear if critics bothered to read his book while Hacking does include some clear critique). This study totally agrees with what Allen Frances says about MPD: “MPD is probably no more than a methapor that has taken on a life of its own” (131). For Frances, MPD is no more than a fad, an invention, yet in this study the stress on the metaphoric continuity of the term, or its follower DID, is even more important than the stress on a psychiatric hoax that turned into a cultural icon and habit. Transcultural psychiatry or cross-cultural psychiatry pays necessary attention to ethnic complexities in which a syndrome, or mental disorder, is embedded.7 This

6

7

For an interesting exploration of cultural possession see also Richard Saville-Smith’s essay “Releasing the Spirits – The Implications of Cultural Accomodation in DSM-5.” This essay is accessible at ‹http://academia.edu/3126064/Releasing_the_Spirits_ _The_implications_of_cultural_accommodation_in_DSM5.› Web. 26 June 2013. For further references to terms such as “transcultural psychiatry” or “cross cultural psychiatry” see the following studies: John M. Herrera. Cross Cultural Psychiatry. Chichester: Wiley, 1999; Wen-Shing Tseng. Handbook of Cultural Psychiatry. San Diego: Academic Press, 2001; Fernando Suman. Cultural Diversity, Mental Health and Psychiatry. Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2003; Waltraud Ernst and Thomas Müller. Transnational Psychiatries: Social and Cultural Histories of Psychiatry in Comparative Perspective, c. 1800-2000. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010; Colleen A. Ward. Altered States of Consciousness and Mental Health. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989; Martin J. La Roche. Cultural Psychotherapy: Theories, Methods and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage, 2013.

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field of psychiatry emerged because of large numbers of immigrants, migration by various groups and so on, and is to be understood as adding new aspects to a more Western or “white” dominant culture to avoid a restricted view. But when it comes to the term of culture why is there no self-reflection in terms of an embedment in generally available and consumed mainstream narratives? The not entirely secularly reflected new definition poses more questions than answers. But it is up to practitioners of psychiatry to decipher the meaning of such a new understanding of the disorder – and it is nonetheless up to the popular culture what to make of it. The fourth edition of the DSM still included “specific culture, age, and gender features” (485) commenting on the American culture of MPD that preceded the newly named DID. In this section, to be mentioned again, it reads: “It has been suggested that the recent relatively high rates of the disorder reported in the United States might indicate that this is a culture-specific syndrome” (485). The addition of transcultural or cross cultural psychiatric features in the DSM-V seems adequate in terms of mutual influenceability and interchangeable cultural practices but it seems to disguise the mainstream culture that was still acknowledged in the prior edition.8 Literary texts already dealt with such transcultural experiences, yet in a novel by Bharati Mukherjee, who has an Indian background, called Jasemine (1989), and even more in Chinese novelist Hualing Nieh’s novel Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China (1976), released in the same year as the TV film Sybil, the clash of cultures reveal or cause an inner fragmentation, the latter novel especially depicting a narration in a typical multiple genre. To describe, however, the switch from externally visible personae to the inner fragmentation, hence summarizing the discussion, Siri Hustvedt has provided the correct analysis in her non-fictional book The Shaking Woman: A History of my Nerves (Hustvedt 2010): “The DSM’s response was to change multiple personality disorder to dissociative identity disorder, or DID. This deemphasizes the many-people-inside-one-person quality of the illness and stresses that there is something wrong with the patient’s whole identity. Rather than being several discrete persons, the multiple is a being in pieces.” (Hustvedt 2010: 46, italics in original text)

8

The DSM-V, however, does provide a short reference to culture in the third section in the chapter “Cultural Formulation” and thus it refers to the “cultural context of illness experience” (APA 2013: 749). This section also contains references to “cultural conceptualizations of distress”, “cultural features of vulnerability and resilience”, other “cultural features of the relationship between the individual and the clinician”, “overall cultural assessment” and so on (750). It also includes a so-called “Cultural Formulation Interview” (752). Yet there are no details on mainstream culture or common idioms of distress that would help to classify DID also as culture-bound syndrome as the DSM-IV did to a certain extent in the main section of DID.

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In order to understand the translation of a mental diagnosis such as multiple personality disorder into the context of fictional texts and films, it is important to distinguish consequently two concepts of multiple personality. The first concept evolves the idea of distinct personalities within one body with different levels of memory and consciousness, hence a number of persons within one person. Some literary texts refer to this type of multiple personality, even texts published recently and after the change of diagnosis. This concept seems to be more intelligible; it is easier to translate. The second concept develops from the basis of the first and refers to different yet distinct personality or identity states, which means that a variety of states of consciousness can be defined. Here, not distinct personalities or persons are mentioned but different levels of consciousness are obvious within one person. The fragmentation of a mind is emphasized. The nature of multiple personality, however, still resembles the fragmentation of a consciousness in terms of dissociation. That is, no single or unified self is determined and parts of the consciousness are abandoned from the self. The “disintegration of character” therefore, as Jeremy Hawthorn named it in Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character (1988), is central. Yet the notion and knowledge of MPD/DID concentrates on signs and the literal meaning of being multiple. In this sense, the different internal fragmentary states resemble real persons. On a metaphorical level, the symbol of a house corresponding with the human mind or psyche is often referred to in literary texts. Matt Ruff titled his novel Set this House in Order (2003) and compared the different distinct personalities to the many rooms in that house. His novel is an example of the first concept of multiple personality (to which he deliberately refers although it had already crumbled due to the 1990s controversies and the renaming). Another example is the writer Shirley Jackson, who was deeply interested in the phenomenon of a split consciousness in various texts such as Hangsaman (1951). In her third novel The Bird’s Nest (1955), she also used the metaphor of the house at the very beginning of the story: “Although the museum was well known to be a seat of enormous learning, its foundation had begun to sag” (Jackson 1955: 7). The character’s psyche is consequently linked to the “slanted corridors” and “buckled foundations” (7): “Elizabeth Richmond had a corner of an office on the third floor; it was the section of the museum closest, as it were, to the surface, that section where correspondence with the large world outside was carried on freely, where least shelter was offered to cringing scholarly souls. […] It is not proven that Elisabeth’s personal equilibrium was set off balance by the slant of the office floor, nor could it be proven that it was Elisabeth who pushed the building off its foundations, but it is undeniable that they began to slip at about the same time.” (Jackson 1955: 8)

The slipping into a mental nightmare reveals the fragmentation of Elisabeth’s consciousness into three distinct personalities, each symbolizing a different way of living. The disintegration of a unified self is established through the theory of multiple personality also using the first concept described here. Correspondingly, there are several “Is” presented, acting often independently. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club

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(1996) clearly works with the first concept, although he already mentioned dissociation.9 In his novel, two very distinct characters cooperate (or rather compete) within one body. The reader believes in the existence of these two different persons before the final twist reveals the truth. The second concept, which is also closely connected to current theories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is examined in the novel The Zero (2007) by Jess Walter. After the devastating catastrophe of nine-eleven, the protagonist experiences an inner fragmentation also due to a collective trauma. His shattered self is represented by a “muscular vicious disintegration” or macular degeneration (26). It remains unclear what the “I” really is. Does the protagonist, as he perceives it, divide into two different states of consciousness thus exploring the bizarre situation he finds himself in? A dubious other side is still perceived but still remains within the self. Siri Hustvedt presents in her novel Sorrows of an American (2008) another variation of the second concept. An artist explores DID referring to a popular and controversial psychiatric diagnosis and thus attempts to criticize it. At the same time he still focuses on the “I” still being represented. Hustvedt offers a connectedness to current psychiatric stress and trauma models, which shall be discussed in detail in the following sections. Furthermore, as an analysis of several literary texts and film adaptations shall be approached, it is also necessary to distinguish not only the different concepts of multiple personality and dissociative identity but also to distinguish the phenomenon from another mental disorder: that of schizophrenia.

9

He refers to it as “dissociative personality disorder”. See chapter 15 (FC 168).

2 The Split of Personality: The Diagnosis MPD/DID versus Schizophrenia “What are you, schizophrenic?” Julie said. “No, I’m a multiple personality. Schizophrenia is different.” “A multiple personality. You have other personalities sharing your body?” “Other souls.” Remembering what my father had told me, I added: “It’s a complicated truth.” MATT RUFF SET THIS HOUSE IN ORDER 2003: 20-1

The term of multiple personality is repeatedly confused with another mental illness: ‘schizophrenia’. Schizophrenia is often defined as a condition where the mind of a sick person suffers from a split personality. According to Ian Hacking in his seminal book on the phenomenon of multiple personality Rewriting the Soul (1995), the public opinion is that the following equation can be made: “multiple personality = split personality = schizophrenia” (9). In popular culture, the misleading use of these names is very common when someone refers to mental issues or a “mad person”. Yet both disorders consist of a totally different culture. Š‡ ™‘”† •…Š‹œ‘’Š”‡‹ƒ ‹• †‡”‹˜‡† ˆ”‘ –Š‡ ”‡‡ ™‘”† ˆ‘” Dz•’Ž‹– „”ƒ‹dz ɐɖɇɌɂɓȋ–‘•’Ž‹–Ȍƒ†ɔɏɄɓȋ‹†ȌǤŠ‡”‡ƒ•–Š‡—Ž–‹’Ž‡’‡”•‘ƒŽ‹–›‹•”‡ˆ‡””‡† –‘ƒ•’Ž‹–‹–‘—Ž–‹’Ž‡Žƒyers or fragments of a personality with elements or personality states, which may act logically within society, the real meaning of schizophrenia points to the idea when “a person’s thoughts, emotions, and physical reactions are split off from each other, so that the emotional reaction to a thought, or the physical response to an emotion, is completely inappropriate or bizarre” (Hacking 1995: 9). Moreover, “there are delusions, thought disorders, and a terrible range of suffering” (9) which lead to a total loss of control of an inner balance. This deranged mind balance is lost within the blur of reality and insanity within the actual world plus healthy relationships versus a psychotic chaos inside the mind (9). As psychiatrist John Grohol shows, while schizophrenic people have difficulties with regard to a normal social interaction due to the experience of hallucinations and delusions and an opposition of logic and reason, the identities in MPD or DID are distinct personalities or personality states “that are unique and different than the per-

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son’s core personality” (Grohol 2006). These identities take control of a person and “engage in behaviors that the core personality would otherwise not engage in”. However, people with MPD or DID can lead successful and seemingly normal lives (ibid.). “Time functioning” for the schizophrenic is also problematic when it comes to therapy, family and work. A multiple personality can lose memory of certain periods of time when an alter identity takes control, but can function as a normal social person (ibid.). In the year 1908, Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939) introduced the term ‘schizophrenia’ to describe a disorder, which was formerly named ‘dementia praecox’ by Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) referring to the Latin meaning ‘out of one’s mind’ (cf. Bleuler 1908). Kraepelin first mentioned dementia praecox in 1893 and summed it up as a subcategory of mental degenerative processes (“psychische Entartungsprozesse”) (Blom 2003: 54). In the year 1911, Bleuler announced: “I call dementia praecox ‘schizophrenia’ because (as I hope to demonstrate) the ‘splitting’ of the different psychic functions is one of its most important characteristics” (Bleuler 1950: 8 cited in Blom 2003: 116). Nevertheless, the confusion between and even fusion of schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder may have its roots in Bleuler’s own definition. He apparently mentions the concept of multiple personality within his category of schizophrenia: “It is not alone in hysteria that one finds an arrangement of different personalities one succeeding the other; through similar mechanisms schizophrenia produces different personalities existing side by side. As a matter of fact there is no need delving into those rare though most demonstrable hysterical cases, we can produce the very same phenomena, experimentally, through hypnotic suggestion.” (Bleuler 1924: 138; quoted in Hacking 1995: 129 with italics)

Moreover, Bleuler’s concept of schizophrenia as a loss of unity also meant an insufficient “integration of different complexes” (Bleuler 1950: 9), which may become isolated and thus represent a fragmentation of the personality. “Thus the patient appears to be split into as many different persons or personalities as they have complexes” (361). Bleuler’s schizophrenia concept is also connected to occultism and spiritism thus referring to the early onset of the complexity of the human soul in terms of demon possession and strange mental phenomena (cf. Blom 2003). Understanding Bleuler’s term of schizophrenia within this connection, the concept is indeed interpreted as being closely connected to the now current term of dissociative identity disorder (ibid. 169, n220). Bleuler uses the term of ‘état second’, Eugène Azam’s term coined during the 1880s, referring to ‘alternating personalities’ or ‘double consciousness’ (Hacking 1995: 128 – 9).1 However, Bleuler distinguished be-

1

Bleuler’s affinity to the concept of multiple personality seems obvious, as Colin A. Ross stresses in order to demonstrate the proximity of both concepts including becoming “a different person from a certain moment onwards” or speaking “in the third person” when referring to the self or selves (Bleuler 1950 cited in Ross 2009: 560). The similarities, however, do not overlap completely. Multiple personality is not simply schizophrenia. The manifold subtypes of schizophrenia, for example in the clinical guidelines of the

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tween cases of hysteria and hypnotic suggestion from those of his schizophrenia concept, which is after all not understood as the typical case of alternating personality and double consciousness. As Ian Hacking notes, Bleuler stressed the fact that the mechanisms of dissociation both act within cases of double consciousness and schizophrenia: “similar mechanisms”, still. Bleuler did differentiate between cases of hysteria and alternating personalities (cf. Hacking 1995: 128 ff.). While double consciousness meant an alternating state following the other (“succeeding the other”) – Bleuler did not include a co-consciousness concept introduced by Morton Prince, whom he did not know – schizophrenia stressed the “splitting of physic functions” being “side by side” and thus resulting in a disruption of normal mental processes of association (130). As the term schizophrenia was generally accepted and as it included the notion of multiplicity and dissociation, the diagnosis of multiple personality vanished and was replaced by schizophrenia (Hacking 1995: 129). While in the United States, Morton Prince developed and cultivated his concept of multiple personality, ironically including the detail of co-consciousness similar to Bleuler’s ‘side by side’ yet stressing the complexity of different persons or personalities (Prince 1906), schizophrenia became the general diagnosis thus eliminating the idea of multiple personality. The concept of multiple personality in the United States versus schizophrenia on the one hand and psychoanalysis on the other was revived in the year 1980 when MPD was introduced in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). Now, with both disorders separately named, the culture, cultivation and cult of multiple personality disorder needs to be seen as totally distinguished from schizophrenia.

World Health Organization ICD-10, indicate that such a simple equation is not valid: ‘paranoid schizophrenia’, ‘polymorphic psychotic disorder’, ‘hebephrenic schizophrenia’, ‘catatonic schizophrenia’ and so on (WHO 1992: 84 – 109). Whereas the subtypes of schizophrenia are listed in the section “F20 – F29 Schizophrenia, schizotypal and delusional disorders” (26), multiple personality disorder is described in the sections on “neurotic, stress-related and somatoform disorders” (30) with dissociative (conversion) disorders: “F44.8.81 Multiple personality disorder” (31). The ICD-10 explicitly states that “this disorder is rare, and controversy exists about the extent to which it is iatrogenic or culture-specific” (ibid. 160; my emphasis). Furthermore, the onset of the dynamic psychology included the notion of the human mind as not singular but complex. Further theories next to Bleuler’s schizophrenia concept show the diversity of such a complex psyche, for example, Carl Gustav Jung’s psychoanalytic theory and his archetypes where he describes the ability of the psyche to dissociate (Dissoziabilität der Psyche) (Jung 1984: 20). Early case histories introduced by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud also mentioned secondary states of consciousness, for example, the famous case of Anna O., who felt divided into two egos (“zwei Ichs”, Breuer and Freud 2007a [1895]: 45). Besides the description of her two separate states of consciousness or “condition seconde” (“zwei ganz getrennte Bewußtseinszustände”, ibid. 44), the case included the terms of hypnosis, autohypnosis and alternating and dissociated personalities hence recounting the typical terms (61).

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In his medical account Diagnosis and the Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (1989), Frank Putnam, one of the most influential American experts of MPD and DID, assumed that many multiple patients were misdiagnosed as schizophrenic (Putnam 1989: 34). While schizophrenic patients may respond to medical treatment, patients with amnesias and related dissociative symptoms are treated with a longer period of intimate therapy (34). Besides the improvement of the quality of life by different drugs, discussion shows that schizophrenia may be caused by neurochemical mechanisms or a genetic predisposition (Hacking 1995: 9). Whereas dissociative disorders are said to be caused by psychological trauma, schizophrenia is connected to physical imbalances and multiple personality is “not a true disease entity in the biomedical sense”, according to Colin A. Ross, who is another major American psychiatrist in the field of dissociation (Ross, cited by Hacking 1995: 11).2 To distinguish both disorders, contemporary valid clinical aspects need to be summed up briefly. Schizophrenia and multiple personality share the symptom of hearing “voices”. The existence of these voices is distinguished between the confusion the schizophrenic patient experiences of voices inside and voices of people from the outside. Inner and outside voices cannot be differentiated. The voices which a multiple may hear can exist so that “the degree to which co-conscious multiples feel they are simultaneously ‘inside’ each of their backstage personalities varies” (Carter 2008: 41). The multiple patient is thus aware of the voices produced by other personality states, which are consequently able to communicate. These loud thoughts are determined as signals of “secondary-process” quality, whereas the voices of schizophrenic patients mingle with the outside world in a “primary-process” quality (Putnam 1989: 62). More importantly, schizophrenia “fails to preserve the intact outer form and function of a complete personality” (Howell 2005: 269n4). The multiple personality, however, is composed of identities or personality states with each consisting of fully integrated and complex units with memories, behavior patterns and social friendship. Instead of totally falling apart, the multiple personality is composed of a variety of several complex and functional persons, personalities or identities (the latter according to the applied definition).

2

Considering the new definition of dissociative identity disorder, formerly multiple personality disorder, with regard to a more internal fragmentation instead of distinct complex personalities or persons, the DID definition may overlap more closely with the symptoms of a schizophrenic or psychotic delusion. Such implications are made by a study on psychosis, trauma and dissociation, which points at the correlations of schizophrenia and dissociative symptoms. In this study, the approach toward schizophrenia as a biological disorder is changed into a more trauma-oriented view. According to that approach, schizophrenia, psychosis and dissociation can be connected to traumatic experiences (Moskowitz et al. 2008). Recent considerations in the fields of dissociation research indicate a subtype of schizophrenia with dissociative symptoms, which could be named ‘schizophrenia, dissociative type’, yet essential features of this schizophrenia are considered to be trauma-related and display considerable dissociative symptoms (Ross 2009: 559).

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The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the fourth edition DSM-IV-TR summarizes schizophrenia with other psychotic disorders (APA 2000: 297) and understands schizophrenia with characteristic symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and negative symptoms such as affective flattening, alogia (poverty of speech), or avolition (lack of motivation). These symptoms result in “social/occupational dysfunction” (312). Similar to the standards of the clinical descriptions of the World Health Organization in the ICD-10, schizophrenia consists of many subtypes such as the paranoid type, disorganized type, and catatonic type. Multiple personality, now classified as dissociative identity disorder is summarized under dissociative disorders understood as a “disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception” (APA 2000: 519). So according to Hacking, a multiple person may have several identities or personality states of which some function without symptoms of derangement or insanity: One of these states may be schizophrenic (Hacking 1995: 131). A schizophrenic patient gets lost within the boundaries of reality and insanity (131). Therefore, a distinction between the two disorders can be made in terms of horizontal and vertical splits: the multiple personality thus being vertically split into different states, and the schizophrenic wandering between reality and insanity on a horizontal line (131). Although dissociation, Bleuler’s “similar mechanisms”, occurs in schizophrenia as well there is thus a certain “side-by-side fragmentation” in schizophrenic patients, whereas people with multiple personality display clear and observable alternations (131). The rise and decline of the idea of multiple personality is also closely connected to psychoanalysis on the one side and schizophrenia on the other. Between them, the theory of hysteria found its place. “There is no doubt”, noted psychiatrist Frank Putnam, “that the rise of the psychoanalytic therapeutic model, and the competition between the model and earlier theories formulated by Janet and others, provided a major impetus for many of the objections to hypnosis and MPD” (Putnam 1989: 33). In the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, cases of MPD, which had outnumbered the diagnosed cases of schizophrenia by far, became fewer and fewer due to the introduction of Bleuler’s definition of schizophrenia. The Index Medicus, documenting diagnoses, reported more cases of MPD from the years 1914 to 1926; however, after 1927, there were by far more cases of schizophrenia (Rosenbaum 1980; see Putnam 1989: 33). In fictional works, the split personality in terms of multiple personality is also often misinterpreted as schizophrenia thus referring in general to a split of personality. Yet an interpretation of a fictional text displaying a schizophrenic character is completely different from an interpretation of a multiple character understood to be suffering from MPD or DID.3 Moreover, not merely the interpretation, which may re-

3

Suggestive examples can be found in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), which is sometimes referred to as a text with a schizophrenic character and sometimes otherwise seen as a text with a multiple or dissociative character. In fact, Palahniuk mentions dissociative identity (or personality) disorder and various multiple fictional characters in the

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flect the one way or the other, the understanding and thus shaping of a mental disorder, needs to be distinguished from another disorder. The culture of multiple personality is not that of schizophrenia especially not in the United States. It may be confused with schizoprenia and understood as split personality. Yet the reference to such a split of personality in terms of being multiple still refers to distinguishable persons or personalities or personality states within one body. Differentiating the culture of multiple personality thus stresses also the function of dissociation as a regulation of the psyche in terms of creativity and as a coping mechanism of a traumatized mind and not presenting a mere madness or craziness as understood with the concept of schizophrenia. Accordingly, in MPD/DID, dissociation is mainly understood as “intrapsychic defense mechanism” (Ross 2009: 558). Dissociation in schizophrenia is understood as “the opposition of association” or of a functioning interaction (558). A recent example of a confused understanding of the fundamental meaning of schizophrenia as multiple personality is the debut novel of Marisha Pessl Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006). The teenage narrator reflects her feelings toward her father who actually becomes tangled up in a secret organization and his hidden existence of a political rebel. He indeed lives two different lives firstly that of a professor of political science, single father, sophisticated man and secondly his dubious and legendary status as a political activist and terrorist. He is no multiple character whatsoever and no schizophrenic either. His precocious daughter Blue van Meer, raised on specialist literature and innumerous novels, bases her reflection on literary citations from scientific and fictional works. The author Pessl thereby uses real or invented references. In case of multiple personality, Blue van Meer, upon reflecting her possible guilty of murder, refers to The Three Faces of Eve, a fictional novel based on a real multiple personality case during the 1950s in the United States: “Maybe I suffered from schizophrenia and had been under the influence of the malevolent Blue, the Blue who took no prisoners, the Blue who ripped people’s hearts out and ate them for breakfast (see The Three Faces of Eve).” (Pessl 2006: 547)

Blue’s other secret side may be the murder side, a mysterious part of her personality with a dark life of its own. However, this secret side of Blue, if it existed at all (it does not; Blue did not commit the murder) would more likely be a dissociated side, a very Mr. Hyde side: relentless, blood driven and without mercy. The sudden thought of having such a Mr. Hyde side recalls fears of an uncontrollable nature within, but is clearly no symptom of schizophrenia. The fictional character here, and of course the implied author Pessl, mingles theories of schizophrenia and multiple personality. A sharper distinction is given in his short story “Filling the Spaces Between Us” (2005), when author Michael Guista shimmers through the narrator’s voice, a psychiatrist, who explains the very nature of his patients. The author Michael Guista, who holds a master’s degree in creative writing as well as in psychology, lets the narrator explain the differences between schizophrenia and multiple personality:

text, thus explicitly not linking it to schizophrenia. This is explained in detail in the corresponding chapter on Fight Club.

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“And I should have noticed what would be so obvious to an outsider: that these people lacked what most of us see as the essence of soul, some kind of connectedness to the world, to the universe, to other people, and to ourselves. They lacked affect. They were split from themselves, just as the literature said they were. (People often make the mistake of thinking that schizophrenia – which means split personality – means that a person has multiple personalities, when really it is characterized by a split from one’s own personality.) If there were souls in these men and women, they were far away from them, lost in some void that couldn’t be reached, except, paradoxically, when they went crazy.” (Guista 2005: 6; my emphasis)

While in these terms the multiple personality may suffer from having too many souls, the schizophrenic patient suffers from a lack of connectedness to the world and to his very own soul. The latter may consequently have no soul at all, no affect. Besides this confusion of two disease categories, some novels may actually describe a twilight zone of both definitions thus reflecting the redefinition of DID that lays more stress on the internal disintegration rather than on various clearly defined multiple personalities. There is a possible way of interpreting The Horned Man (2005) by James Lasdun in terms of such a twilight zone. The protagonist feels that he is being stalked by a strange doppelgänger, who might actually be himself. Both diseases mingle. No disease is explicitly mentioned.4 Although both diseases meet within the protagonist and find a combination of both, each disease is still clearly distinguishable in terms of its clinical features. The schizophrenic part of Lasdun’s character may feel overpowered by reality, fantasy and psychosis. On the multiple personality level, on the other hand, the narrator as a non-reliable narrator may display also a hidden, secondary side with an appeal of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Strictly speaking, however, no trauma is explicitly mentioned. The narrator may slide into madness and cover his violent other side thus offering a variation rather on a doppelgänger motive or a killer not unlike Jim Thompson’s thriller The Killer Inside Me (1952).5 The short text reference at the beginning of this chapter is an extract from Matt Ruff’s novel Set this House in Order (2003). The reader is immediately introduced to the phenomenon of multiple personality. Not only to set the protagonist’s soul in or-

4

5

During the very difficult and complex development of this study, it was actually planned to examine Ladson’s novel. This text offers rich material for a productive interpretation. I found it necessary, however, to only refer to texts, that literally evolved around MPD and DID. Although this novel is very complex, it is not really suitable for the investigation here, but it would certainly serve as an excellent model regarding the combination of schizophrenic and MPD/DID symptoms. Initially the delusion the protagonist experiences refers to a schizophrenic disturbance, while his point of view is counter-reflected by his unreliability. Jim Thompson’s protagonist mentions his “sickness”. In addition, the unnamed narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, although perceived sometimes as schizophrenic, sees himself in terms of a split personality based on multiple personality and dissociation. He consequently uses typical multiple intertextuality referring to Sybil and Psycho. See chapter 15.

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der but also in order to understand the pattern of actually two protagonists with each suffering from MPD, as is explicitly mentioned in the novel, the author explains the phenomenon and distinguishes it from schizophrenia. He represents MPD as a consequent splitting into different complex and logically thinking entities or personalities within one body after the experience of trauma. Severe trauma, especially sexually oriented and during childhood, so called child sexual abuse (CSA), functions as one signature element of the contemporary explanation for MPD or DID. In this way, each fictional text used in this study explicitly refers to multiple personality disorder or MPD, dissociative identity disorder or DID and not schizophrenia. The explanation each text offers in order to reveal the real condition the protagonist suffers from seemingly is set within the culture of MPD/DID. Both concepts, as already shown, may concern a different notion of the human psyche. Furthermore, historical explanations of the split into various personalities or identities concern another dynamics behind the concept of dissociation. These various concepts, beginning with demonic possession, are presented in the next chapter.

3 Of Demons and Dissociation: The Origins and Early Science of the Other Side The dæmon that controuled me at first is still in the fruition of power. CHARLES B. BROWN EDGAR HUNTLY 1799: 35

The focus of this chapter is on the shift of what is here called “the other side(s)”, which refers to hidden aspects within a person’s mind that were consequently even understood as secondary personalities, from religiously orientated origins of demon possession that were abandoned in favor of manifold theories to early scientific observations and models. As Henri Ellenberger captured this shift in his seminal book The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), the obsession of the scientific field with forces beyond the surface remained dominant even though the explanations varied.1 The observation of alternating states of consciousness and behavioral patterns were firstly explained by the religious concept of demon possession: devilish forces inhabited a human body and soul, speaking in dubious tongues, provoking somatic change. In the aftermath of more scholarly oriented notions of the Enlightenment, a more scientific and physically oriented view was established. Although theories of possession persisted (ironically also in the current DSM-V), the alien forces inhabiting a human body were secularized. Instead of the demon, another (dead) human soul would qualify as invader. In the 18th century, the experience of suggestion would then evolve around theories of animal magnetism, mesmerism and hypnotism, pinpointing the idea of a fragmented self. Theories on separated elements of the human mind have led to the concept of dissociation, mainly formulated by Pierre Janet from the late 19th century, whose ideas served as the basis of contemporary theories including trauma studies. After the decline of hysteria, American scientists nevertheless followed the idea of multiple personality. American philosopher and physician William James reflected on various cases of double consciousness and neurologist Morton Prince concentrated on his concept of co-consciousness when investigating the spectacular case of Miss Beauchamp (cf. Ellenberger 1970).

1

The following synopsis given here is painstakingly presented in Ellenberger’s influential study.

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3.1

D EMONS

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The history or observation of altered states of consciousness or temporal “transformations of identity” (Ross 1997: 13) originates in the phenomena of demon possession. Also understood as hypnotic trance states (cf. Oesterreicher 1974), the demon possessions “share many of the properties of DID” and may not even be differentiated from DID at all (Ross 1997: 14). Consequently, the persistence of a new personality is demonstrated here by a consistent acting out of a demon personality. This personality admits its demonic nature, refers to itself in first person and uses the third person for the possessed, maintains specific knowledge unknown to the possessed and displays a complete change of character and morals (Wilson 1976: 224 quoted in Ross 1997: 14). While in Europe physicians like Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) were already trying to establish more scientific views on various symptoms, exorcists like Father Johann Joseph Gassner (1727-1779), who was very popular during his lifetime, still concentrated on ceremonial healings. Gassner distinguished three categories of disease: circumsessio, which was “an imitation of a natural disease and caused by the devil”; obsessio, which was “the effect of sorcery”; and possessio, which was classified as “the overt diabolical possession” (Ellenberger 1970: 55). Those diseases were treated with exorcism and Gassner would perform them publicly with considerable audience appeal (55). But as Henri Ellenberger writes, demon possession, however, offers “a broader concept than disease, since there are also numerous instances of artificial and ceremonial possession” (13). Although he also classifies it “as a form of illness” (13), he states that it is rooted in various cultures of the world and hence is a cultural practice. As seen in the current DSM-V version, this possession or trance association with dissociative identity disorder is again reestablished. The phenomenon of possession lasted for many centuries, but according to Henri Ellenberger it can obviously be regarded as a variety of multiple personality. Ellenberger classified two different forms of possessions: the “lucid” and the “somnambulistic possession” (14). The lucid possession points at a state “in which the subject feels within himself the two souls striving against each other”, and the somnambulistic possession again is a state “in which the subject loses consciousness of his own self while a mysterious intruder seems to take possession of his body and acts and speaks with an individuality of which the subject knows nothing when he returns to awareness” (127). Both the lucid and the somnambulistic forms of possession can be found in the two main forms of multiple personality, Ellenberger calls “simultaneous” and “successive multiple personality” (127). Moreover, he writes, “just as possession could be manifest or latent, multiple personality can be manifest…or it may only appear under the influence of hypnotic maneuvers or automatic writing” (127). The parallels are clearly made here. Yet after the decline of possession as a valid diagnosis or explanation of a certain behavior, cases of multiple personality were also reported “in mesmerist writings and later also in medical reports” (127), so the phenomenon itself never seems to disappear. Interestingly Ellenberger indicates that a mysterious 14th century case of the German mystic Rulman Merswin, a leader of a Catholic sect, and his identity “Friend

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of God of the Oberland” may hint at a case of multiple personality in a time that did not know such a definition (127) yet Merswin’s case and that identity of the “Friend of God” remains a legend within German mysticism.2 Ellenberger therefore never denies the disorder. In his medical book Dissociative Identity Disorder (1997), Colin Ross, one of the major American experts on the topic, mentiones the phase of “early transitional demon possession” (18). This marked a shift from demonic states or demons, allegedly in control of persons, to a more psychological theory when people were controlled by neighbors or the deceased, thus resulting in a more “social context of possession” (18). Ross also acknowledges four distinct but overlapping stages which demonstrate the transition from demon possession to the contemporary form of dissociation and DID (16-23). These are the “classical demon possession” characterized by Christian versus blasphemous statements, the above-mentioned “early transitional demon possession” state with the possessed person now classified as a patient (around 1830) and first attempts of medical approaches via hypnosis, and “late transitional demon possession” hence concentrating not only on the possession state as a “dissociated psychic entity” (19) but also a more complex theory of dissociation.3 Ross recognized that “the transition from classical possession to DID was accompanied both by medicine taking over responsibility for these cases and by the church relinquishing responsibility” (19). Finally, the “‘postdemonic demon possession’ indicated a cultural climate with agnostic or atheistic psychotherapy and a decline of spiritual approaches” (19). The question now seems to be whether the now classified “chronic complex” disorder of DID (Spiegel 2011: 829) and the “experience of possession” (as proposed in 2011; see Spiegel 2011: 840) reestablish a religious view or indicate that cultural patterns or practices, understood on a global and multicultural scale, become part of the disorder (which is still listed as DID in the DSM-V).

3.2

M AGNETISM

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M ESMERISM

The mysteries of a dark, uncontrollable and unconscious side of the human psyche have always inspired both religious explanations and scientific theories. As Ellenberger explains, after concepts of demonic possession and public exorcisms like those of Father Gassner, a more dynamic psychotherapeutic view emerged (57). In

2

3

For the influence of the German mystic Rulman Merswin and the dubious identity of “The Friend of God of Oberland” see also the influential Austrian philosopher and esotericist Rudolf Steiner in Mystics After Modernism: Discovering the Seeds of New Science after Renaissance. Great Barrington: Anthroposophic Press [1901]. The phase of such a late transitional demon possession, as Ross mentioned it, is underlined by the case of Achille, who was treated by Pierre Janet in 1890 (Ross 1997: 19). Oesterreicher quoted this case in detail (Oesterreicher 1974): the patient showed states of depression with a devilish control. As such the “devil” announced: “Cursed the Trinity, cursed the Virgin!” and “Priests are worthless!” (Ross 1997: 19).

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1775, Franz Anton Mesmer announced his theories on the human mind which were later recognized as a “turning point” from exorcism (57). As Ellenberger thoroughly delineates in his historical account of famous healers, the German doctor Mesmer, influenced by the movement of Enlightenment rather than religion, treated his patients with a common therapy of magnets, which were used frequently at that time first by English doctors (58 ff.). After swallowing a liquid containing iron, the doctor would touch the body of the patient with magnets and could then provoke certain “artificial tides” (58). Magnet streams were then considered to be responsible for healing patients who had suffered from various symptoms. Mesmer noted on July 28, 1774, that “essentially different agents” such as magnet streams could intensify natural fluids and magnetic streams within bodies. Such observed force was then named ‘animal magnetism’ (59). This alludes to a force that invisibly creates a bond between “man, the earth, and the heavenly bodies” (63). Mesmer demonstrated the strength of animal magnetism during a journey in 1775, when he was able to perform “several sensational cures” (60). Mesmer’s conceptualization of disease and treatment was summarized with his famous aphorism: “There is only one illness and one healing” (Messmer cited in Ellenberger 1970: 63). He therefore underlined his conviction of the disease as a “crisis”, which could also be provoked artificially. The provocation of symptoms would eventually result also in its healing. Recovery would therefore follow (63). Although Mesmer gained considerable success among innumerable patients, medical schools and the scientific world refused acceptance (Rieber 2006: 48). He was even called a quack. Influential sponsors, however, made it possible to found the Sociéte de l’Harmonie in order to spread Mesmer’s theories of body fluids and socalled animal magnetism (Ellenberger 1970: 65). This step was partially successful, but the egocentric Mesmer finally faced his near ruin because of failed treatments and disputes with his colleagues (69). Messmer’s theories have undergone several phases of crises and success. As Ellenberger notes, almost forgotten at the end of the 18th century, they experienced a revival during the 1820s and 1850s (83). From the years 1860 to 1880, the concept of the Nancy School directly referred to magnetism and hypnotism; in 1885, the famous patient Lous Vivet, who is considered to be the first multiple personality, was also treated with ‘metallotherapy’ (83).

3.3

D IPSYCHISM

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P OLYPSYCHISM

In Ellenberger’s enormous study, various concepts emerge from the experiences gained from studies of magnetism and hypnotism, and two explanatory models of the human mind subsequently evolved: the concept of the duality of the human mind, which in The Discovery of the Unconscious is referred to as ‘dipsychism’, and a more complex view defining the human mind as a cluster of subpersonalities named ‘polypsychism’ (145). According to the dipsychism view, certain altered states of consciousness, often interpreted as manifestations of another distinct personality, could be observed in hypnotized persons by hypnotizers or so called magnetizers and such a secondary

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personality, as Ellenberger notes, could lead a “continuous life of its own” (145). As a consequence, it is the main occupation of the entire 19th century to name and decipher the alleged duality of human nature by means of the concept of a “double-ego” such as Dessoir’s then well-known account of double consciousness in The Double Ego (1890) (145). According to this view the duality of mind is composed of two egos, which consist of “‘upper consciousness’ and ‘under consciousness’; we get an inkling of the latter during dreams and clearer impressions during spontaneous somnambulism”, thus Ellenberger says in his summary of Dessoir’s account (145). In addition, the strength of the under consciousness as the second ego is not to be underestimated as it seeks predominance and represents in itself the very core of dual personality (145-6). Such theory of the divided self that involved concerns about the “disintegrations of the ego” was announced by Henry Maudsley in the year 1883, just three years prior to Robert Louis Stevenson’s huge success of his shilling shocker Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Maudsley’s concept emphasizes the dual character of the human mind with a hidden other side. The ego or self “holds together” all functions of the body, but “manifold varieties of mental derangement” could result in a feeling of “two alternating and opposite phases” (Maudsley 165). The director of the laboratory of physiological psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris, Alfred Binet underlines in his studies among other publications in Alterations of Personality (1896) famous cases such as Félida, reported by Dr. Azam in 1858 and other examples of dual personality of ‘initerant automatism’ (Binet 1896: 2). “The most famous case, perhaps, on record is that of Félida X., reported by Dr. Azam of Bordeaux”, wrote William James in his Principles of Psychology published in 1890 (380). Félida’s case was published in May 1876 in the scientific magazine Revue Scientifique and later in Azam’s scientific book Hypnotisme, Double Conscience et Altérations de la Personnalité in 1887 (380). In Alterations of Personality, Binet describes Félida suffering from various physical symptoms such as “blood spitting” (7). However, she also exhibits a “second state”, which “she called her crisis” (7). After a sleep of only three minutes she awakes in another intellectual state or “second condition” (11) where “everything appears different” (9) and surprisingly seemed superior, even physically, compared to her “normal state” (11). Eventually Félida displays two distinct existences, but also very rarely revealed even a third state (10), although this third one is not of no relevance in the studies. The dualistic concept of dipsychism seemed to have a considerable influence on further models of the mind, as Ellenberger can show (cf. 145 ff.). Therefore dipsychism “in its closed variety was the model from which Janet drew his concept of the subconscious and Freud his first concept of the unconscious as being the sum total of repressed memories4 and tendencies. Jung’s theory of the unconscious was soon of the open variety, in that the individual unconscious is open to the collective unconscious of the archetypes.” (Ellenberger 1970: 147)

4

I shall later refer to the theory and controversy of so-called repressed memories.

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What Ellenberger also stresses is, that dipsychism, however, is not the ultimate form of the divided mind. With Freud’s triad of self as ego-superego-id, which replaced the conscious-unconscious theory, and Jung’s opinion of the human psyche as being essentially multiple, another level was reached (146). The idea of multiple selves in the concept of polypsychism hence was born. According to Jung, the psyche is even based on a dissociative structure with different levels of consciousness: “Jungian theory stresses the dissociative nature of personality. No complex entirely controls the personality, nor should it, although the ego complex is usually dominant during waking life. When a person entirely identifies with the ego complex, however, generally a neurosis develops as other complexes are repressed and denied. Identification with another complex (not-ego, not-I) is a dissociative state that may be severe (such as in multiple-personality disorder or psychotic state) or transient and temporary (such as in a mood).” (Hall 1991: 141)

Already Plato, foreshadowing Freud, introduced the notion of a triad of the self. According to Plato, the self is referred to as pointed “to reason, shame and ‘the beast’ within us” (Erdelhuy 1994: 4). Duality is hence not nearly enough. Another concept had to be formulated. The concept of polypsychism refers to the human mind which is consequently fragmented into several levels of consciousness or “clusters of subpersonalities”, as Ellenberger points out (145). The term polypsychism, Ellenberger claims, was named by the magnetizer Durand (de Gros) in Polyzoïsme ou Pluralité Animale chez l’Homme (1868), who defined the human organism, as Ellenberger notes, as consisting of “anatomical segments, each of which had a psychic ego if its own, and all of them subjected to a general ego, the Ego-in-Chief, which was our usual consciousness” (146). The human psyche and its segments of egos are therefore composed of a legion of subegos with an individual consciousness, of which each could perceive and keep memories and even elaborate “complex psychic operations” (146). Our unconscious life is, then, the “sum total of these subegos” (146). According to Ellenberger, Durand (de Gros) postulated that even under anesthesia, for example, during surgery, some of these subegos remained conscious and experienced pain, although the conscious ego or Ego-in-Chief was totally ignorant. “Under hypnosis”, as summarized by Ellenberger, “the main ego was pushed aside and the hypnotizer gained direct access to a number of the subegos” (146). Here Ellenberger collects a considerable number of theories stressing the success of the polypsychism view (146 ff.). In his Etudes sur la Vie Inconsciente de l’Esprit (1880), Edmond Colsenet examined this concept of polypsychism and compared it to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s “hierarchy of monads” (cited in Ellenberger 1970: 146). In 1803, an account of the phenomenon of dissociated personalities within one mind was already documented by Johann Christian Reil. He described these manifestations in normal dreams: “the roles are distributed: of these the dreamer takes only one that he connects with his own personality” (Reil cited in Ellenberger 1970: 147). Such distinct personalities were often organized in a certain hierarchy, “linked together by a complex system of interpersonal relationships (147). Consequently, G.N.M. Tyrell noted in 1947 in Personality of Man: “The personality is a multiplicity in unity of a

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kind which is almost impossible to express in words” (Tyrell 1947 cited in Ellenberger 1970: 147). Historically, the first case of multiple personality to shape the prototype of the modern multiple, and whose medical documentation connects to the polypsychism theory, is that of the patient French Louis Vivet, a male hysteric, although the average hysteric would be female (cf. Showalter 1985). In the year 1883, the treatment of Vivet started as a case of “grande hystérie chez l’homme avec dédoublement de la personnalité” (Hacking 1995: 171). Dr. Azam’s concept of ‘dédoublement’ was still used by Vivet’s physician Dr. Voisin, who considered Vivet as a “perfect, prototypical hysteric” (171). By 1885, Vivet had undergone several treatments and eventually developed, or displayed, eight distinct personalities, which were described by the doctors Bourru and Burot. Within one year, the phrase of “multiple personality” appeared in medical reports in England (172). As Ian Hacking shows in Rewriting the Soul, Vivet’s eight personalities were cultivated under the influence of the so-called ‘metallotherapy’; several parts of the body were touched by different sorts of metals (172 ff.). This triggered typical hysterical symptoms such as anesthesia, contractures, paralyses and so on. The symptoms often appeared on one side of the body and could be transferred with magnets and other pieces of metal. Famous scientists such as Jean-Martin Charcot and Alfred Binet had already used metallotherapy. Early critics, who mentioned the effects of the metals as mere “suggestion” (Bernheim), were said to be ignorant of the magnetic effects and its power of electricity: “Binet was to write an enthusiastic tract about objective experiments confirming double conscience, stating firmly that the topic had now passed from the realm of pioneering exploration to science” (Hacking 1995: 172; italics in original text). The connection of theories of ‘la grande hystérie’, ‘magnetism’ and ‘double or multiple personality’ was thus established, as also Hacking’s impressive book Rewriting the Soul confirms. In Vivet’s case, however, not only one doctor was able to apply his theories, many doctors followed this new fashion. After inducing various mental and physical conditions by the application of different metals, it was astonishing how Vivet developed also several distinct personalities – or at least Vivet’s various doctors used this as an explanation, Vivet’s personal account does not exist. This occurrence eventually offered his doctors the opportunity to create a “conceptual space for the idea of multiplicity” especially within a male hysterical (Hacking 1995: 179). The relationship therefore was no folie à deux, but a folie à combine, Hacking notes and thus stresses the iatrogenic factor (173). Hacking stated clearly that the medical reports on Vivet by Bourru and Burot are mere “rubbish” (174). There were no doubts about Vivet’s turbulent life of a poor underdog and his sickness, but his career as star patient was remarkable. Dr. Voisin had “attempted to transfer [Vivet’s] symptoms by the use of magnets. The magnet had no effect at first, but later when Vivet realized the importance of the magnet to Voisin, the very sight of a magnet would make him switch states” (176). Vivet was then clearly trained to display several symptoms. Voisin could consequently conclude that “all of the usual arsenal of suggestions and provoked hallucinations was thus brought into play” (Voisin cited in Hacking 1995: 176). The case of Louis Vivet also offered a connection between memory and specified personalities with each constituted personality being in charge of its very own

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memory: “If there are only two personalities, the other personality is simply the other”, Hacking concluded (182). Vivet, however, “provided a beautiful way to identify personalities. Each personality had its three-part signature: a memory segment” (182). The essential features of dissociative disorders still included a “disturbance or alteration in the normally integrative functions of identity, memory, or consciousness” according to the DSM-III (APA 1987: 269). Amnesia, now another criterion required for the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (APA 1996: 974), may occur when a traumatized person “commonly makes deliberate efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations about the traumatic event,” states the current edition of the DSM (APA 2003: 464). Memory, on the other hand, constitutes the single self and therefore divides the un-unified mind. Vivet’s case thus presented all the symptoms necessary for the contemporary concept of multiple personality (cf. Hacking 1995: 171182).

3.4

H YPNOSIS

AND

H YSTERIA

Š‡ ™‘”† ǮŠ›’‘•‹•ǯ ‹• †‡”‹˜‡† ˆ”‘ –Š‡ ”‡‡ ™‘”† DzŠ›’‘•dz ȋɀɎɋɍɑȌ ™Š‹…Š ‡ƒ••Ž‡‡’Ǥ The Dissociation of a Personality (1906), Morton Prince commented on the relation of hypnosis and the subconscious as he described it as persistent dissociation from consciousness. Hypnosis, subconscious and particularly the hypnotic consciousness may merge into an alternating personality: “But even a subconsciousness of this kind is not identical in extent with the hypnotic consciousness. The subconsciousness, so long as it is subconscious, has a much narrower field; it does not (excepting in crisis) have control, for instance, of the arms and legs, or the speech faculties, and it is not possessed of the intellectual capacities which the subject in hypnosis possesses. When the subject is hypnotized and put into a particular state, the subconsciousness may become fused with this particular hypnotic consciousness, and, if so, its contents are then remembered and the whole may then form an alternating personality.” (Prince 1906: 45; my emphasis)

Alternating personalities, first born under hypnosis, may be the host of another personality. This theory was developed by Prince when examining the condition of his famous patient “Miss Beauchamp” and the secondary personality called Sally.5 Chapter IV of his study is therefore entitled “How Sally Got her Eyes Open and the Subconscious Became an Alternating Personality” (Prince 1906: 91). Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism had also evoked another concept. In order to cure the “crisis” of his patients, who were often treated during kind of mass audience called “the baquet”, Mesmer provoked certain states of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness (Rieber 2006: 47). These states were similar to trance states

5

I shall later describe this case in the chapter on historical cases of multiple personality, chapter 5.5.

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and could transfer people into a condition, in which they would act on command although their “faculties had stopped functioning in the normal manner” (Buranelli 1975 cited in Rieber 2006: 47). The term ‘hypnotism’ was specified by James Braid (1795-1860), a Scottish psychologist. He wanted hypnotism to replace the term ‘mesmerism’ (cf. Hacking 1995: 144 ff.). His emphasis was on psychological rather than physical causes. To obtain a satisfactory level of hypnosis, the patient had to clear his mind and focus only upon a concept of relaxation and sleep. This state of relaxation and sleep was called ‘active somnambulism’ by Ambroise-Auguste Liébault who states that “the characteristics of active somnambulism are what the hypnotist makes them by mobilizing the nervous energy accumulated as a usable power in the mind through suggested ideas” (Buranelli 1975 cited in Rieber 2006: 49; my emphasis).6 In his skeptical study, The Passion of Ansel Bourne: Multiple Personality in American Culture (1986), Michael Kenny clearly states that he regards hypnosis “as an interesting cultural delusion” (186). Therapy with hypnosis is therefore always influenced by “currently fashionable theories” (168). It is obvious that doctors interpreted various conditions as clear evidence of an existing secondary personality. Such fashionable theories evolved around the hospital Salpêtière in Paris. In order to treat patients, doctors made use of hypnosis. Consequently, the most important phase of hypnosis as a valid therapy for especially hysterical patients is connected with Jean-Martin Charcot (1835-1893), the famous physician, who developed the term of ‘la grande hystérie’. In her feminist study, The Female Malady (1985), Elaine Showalter describes the male system of psychiatrists classifying and presenting female hysterical cases: Charcot understood hysteria first of all as a pathological condition with neurological and physical causes; he later abandoned this view (cf. Showalter). The term ‘hysteria’ was originally derived from the understanding of the disturban…‡ ƒ• …ƒ—•‡† „› ƒ ™ƒ†‡”‹‰ ™‘„ ˆ”‘ –Š‡ ”‡‡ ™‘”† ɠɐɒɚɏȽ ‘” DzŠ—stera” meaning uterus. First of all, hysteria was defined as a female disturbance only, although later, with patients like Louis Vivet, male hysterics were also classified (Showalter 1985: 1993). Charcot’s concept established a very dramatic and performative form of presenting hysteria very similar to the performative MPD. He described four phases of hysteria itself after two preliminary phases such as “seeing animals” or “ovarian paint” as in the ‘hysterical aura’ (Levy 2003: 205). Eventually, the globus hystericus, “a sensation of obstruction in the throat” preceded the ‘major hys-

6

In their famous case of Anna O., Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud described the hypnotic state of Anna being first self-inflicted (Autohypnose, Breuer und Freud 2007: 50) and also externally induced. Breuer stated that he hypnotized Anna in order to leave her eyes closed until he would reactivate the eyes to open again in the mornings (ibid. 58). This is a striking similarity to Morton Prince and his patient Miss Beauchamp, as her strong secondary personality Sally insists on opening her eyes and thus comes to life (Prince 1906). See the chapter on historical cases, especially Prince in chapter 5.5, and chapter 11.1 of Shirley Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest (1954), which is a fictional retelling of Prince’s case. Closed or open eyes also play a role in Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (1996), see also the corresponding chapter in the third part of this study, chapter 14.

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teria’ with the ‘epileptoid period’, the ‘period of convulsion and major movements or clownish period’ (clownism), the ‘period of passionate attitudes’ and the ‘terminal or delirious period’ (205).7 For Freud, who witnessed such attacks, the hysterics merely displayed a “perversion of seducers” as they “connect up nursery games and sexual scenes” (Freud cited in White 1989: 159). After Charcot’s death, some patients would still produce various hysterical symptoms when given a small tip, and although nobody cared any longer, they still knew how to act and perform (Acocella 1999: 35). It was this theatrical concept of hysteria, “suggestively induced” (Leys 2000: 8), which offered a basis for multiple personality being compared to a parasite hinting at its existence within several concepts of mental disorder. As already mentioned, after the term of hysteria had begun to appear old fashioned and outdated, schizophrenia emerged on the one side and psychoanalysis developed on the other (see chapter 2). Neither one of these new concepts was able to incorporate the understanding of multiple personality or dissociation. When hysteria disappeared, so did the theory of multiple personality (cf. Hacking 1995). Nevertheless, multiple personality survived and it remained a very exotic and rare disorder (Acocella 1999: 35). Surprisingly, contemporary theories of dissociation consider MPD and especially DID as some form of ‘somatoform disorder’. Dutch psychologist Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis consequently mentions this in his medical study Somatoform Dissociation (2004). He stated that the classification of the seemingly outmoded term of hysteria could again serve as an appropriate classification: “In conclusion, relabeling conversion somatoform dissociation, and categorizing the DSM-IV conversion disorders as dissociative disorders is indicated. The same applies to somatization disorder if it would be predominantly characterized by somatoform dissociation. Such findings would promote a reinstitution of the 19th century category of hysteria (under the general label dissociative disorders).” (Nijenhuis 2004: 200; my emphasis)

Hippolyte Bernheim (1840-1919), however, opposed Charcot’s view of hysteria as the manifestation of a pathological condition. In his opinion, hypnosis represented the “effect of ‘suggestion’” and “the aptitude to transform an idea into an act” and was therefore also observable in every person (Ellenberger 1970: 87). The demonstrations of hypnosis at the Salpêtrière were also understood as iatrogenic and thus mere artifacts (87). Would a remanifestation of the term hysteria, as Nijenhuis promotes it, mean a return to the 19th century, a return to dubious practices? Iatrogeneses, a condition that results from a treatment by a physician or psychiatrist, would not be classified or recognized any more. After all, all patients mentioned reacted how they were supposed to (re)act.

7

For photographs of the various phases of hysteria see Didi-Huberman 1982. The hysterics, most prominently the patient called Augustine, posed for photos.

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D ISSOCIATION

The first and most important theorist on dissociation is undoubtedly Pierre Janet (1859-1947). His writings on the split of human consciousness offer a basis for all psychological, psychiatrist and neurological science of the phenomenon and mechanism of dissociation (cf. Van der Hart and Friedmann 1989; Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1989; Howell 2005; Dell and O’Neil 2009). His seminal publications on ‘psychological automatism’ (l’automatisme psychologique), ‘fixed ideas’ (idées fixes) and finally ‘dissociation’ (désagreggation) also influenced quite a number of his contemporaries such as William James and Morton Prince (cf. Howell 2005: 50). Influenced by Charcot, Janet developed his own concepts and was able to publish his observations in detail with an estimated amount of more than 17,000 pages (cf. Prevost 1973 cited in Van der Hart and Friedman 1989).8 Although Janet was quite well known during his lifetime, it is surprising that he never gained as much attention as at the present time, several scholars note (cf. Howell 2005, Fieder 2006; Dell and O’Neil 2009). During the second half of the 20th century, his work was reintroduced to the interested public by Henri Ellenberger’s comprehensive study on dynamic psychology The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), a source mainly used by therapists who helped to foster the diagnosis of MPD in the USA (Howell 2005: 50). Flora Rheta Schreiber’s version of the most important case of MPD in US-american history, Sybil (1973), portrays psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur using this book as well. Under the general label of hysteria, Janet could introduce his views of dissociative processes which accordingly are linked to and caused by traumatic experiences. Especially this newly revealed link is Janet’s major contribution to the science of traumatic memories, although a number of descriptions of hysterical and dissociative reactions had been copiously described during the 19th century (Howell 2005: 51). Hence, Janet’s attempts to explain the mechanisms of dissociation are solid accounts on the interaction of the human personality and consciousness (cf. Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1989; Nijenhuis and Van der Hart 1999; Howell 2005). According to Janet, traumatic memories are indeed “encoded in the body” (Howell 2005: 51) thus creating severe physical symptoms which are now also labeled ‘positive somatoform dissociative symptoms’ (cf. Nijenhuis 1999; Nijenhuis and Van der Hart, 1999, Howell 2005). Moreover, these are acknowledged to be connected with the current theory on ‘posttraumatic stress disorder’ or PTSD. Furthermore, Janet had a considerable impact on various scientific fields. Firstly, he was able to establish the term of the ‘subconscious’ thereby preparing the grounds for psychoanalysis (Howell 2005: 51). Secondly, his concept of the ‘fixed ideas’ was elementary for C.G. Jung’s concept of the ‘complexes’ (51), and his influence on Bleuler’s theory of schizophrenia is based on his concept of ‘neurasthenia’ (Howell 2005, Moskowitz 2006). Finally, contemporary theories such as the ‘neodissociation theory’ of E. R. Hilgard in Divided Consciousness: Multiple Controls in Human Thought and Action (1977) were able to re-establish Janet’s conceptualization of dissociative processes.

8

See Howell 2005:50.

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Janet’s approach to his concept of dissociation was a phenomenological one. He interpreted the physical and psychological symptoms of his patients in terms of hysteria, that is “in terms of functional losses, such as anesthesia and amnesia, and in terms of acute, transient, distressing, and often intrusive symptoms, such as flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, or sudden bodily experiences” (Howell 2005: 53). Accordingly, he also established the connectedness of mind and body as he observed somatic symptoms after psychological traumata, and although his patients were not victims of any organic disease, they could produce corresponding symptoms without conscious awareness (53). Furthermore, Janet had the impression that a subconscious part of the human psyche could lead to a performance of these bodily symptoms and that such a subconscious part could be examined as a second consciousness (53). As Rieber notes, this second consciousness was therefore the result of a dissociated part of the human traumatized mind and could act just like a second personality. In the year 1889, Janet had published on psychological automatism which contained an automatic action beneath awareness. Janet had focused on the mind of hypnotized people who were not totally unconscious but rather had a divided consciousness (20). In his major work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (1907), which drew upon all his studies, Janet referred to ‘double personalities’. In the chapter of the same name, Janet even mentiones Morton Prince, the American specialist on double consciousness and his book on The Dissociation of a Personality (1906).9 Here Janet lectured on “disturbances of memory” (Janet 1965: 72). Accordingly, the disease of double personality is constituted of “perfect alternation” between different personality states. A person can also suffer from amnesia between the states, which means that during the first state, the second state is not remembered and vice versa (73). This phenomenon is called ‘reciprocal somnambulism’ (74). Nevertheless, Janet stresses the rareness of such symptoms: “Double existences of such a simple form are very rare. It very seldom occurs that the subject in his abnormal existence has entirely forgotten his normal existence, and that in the latter he has likewise entirely forgotten the other person. This absolute division of life into two alternating periods which do not know each other at all is quite exceptional.” (Janet 1907: 74; my emphasis)

It is worth noting, however, that Janet refers to different cases of double personality. He cites the case of the “Lady of MacNish”, who shared symptoms of absolute reciprocal somnambulism, and the famous American case of Mary Reynolds, who exhibited a second existence when her normally quiet character developed a lively and cheerful façade (Janet 1906: 76). Hence, the mystery of multiple personality was always based on legendary cases, and each of them are regularly referred to. The most

9

Janet wrote in his chapter “Double Personalities”: “…it is in America that the greatest number of remarkable cases have appeared, and it is American doctors, among them MacNish, Wood, Weir Mitchell, Dana, and quite recently one of the greatest physicians of this town [Philadelphia; my insertion], Dr. Morton Prince, who have devoted to it the most remarkable studies” (Janet 1907: 67; my emphasis).

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important cases especially concerning the development of multiple personality in the United States shall be discussed shortly. The transitions of Mary Reynolds are elements of one of those American cases and are also part of another form of double existence. Janet called it the ‘dominating somnambulism’ (77). Here one state dominates the other. According to Janet such cases were much more common and the memory “during this state, was much more extended than in the other” (77). The third form consisted of more complicated cases which offer “a very great number of forms of existence” (83). Consequently, the different states could amount to nine or more. These cases can “offer very various relations with one another” and were a mixture of both forms of somnambulism (83). Janet’s opinion on double or multiple personality, however, stressed one point: he was convinced that the secondary states could be “produced artificially” (Janet 1965: 86) similar to Bleuler, who noted that those cases could be induced by hypnosis (Bleuler 1950: 138). As they were cases of hysteria, double existences could be evoked and their appearance could also be helpful as doctors were able to reach the human psyche by means of an artificial secondary state and thus heal the whole person (Janet 1965: 87). In opposition to Freud’s concept of trauma as the central focus and necessary recollection, Janet even tried to hypnotize his patients in order to make them forget their trauma (Hacking 1995: 263). Joan Acocella compares Freud and Janet in her critical approach toward the MPD mystery and connected Janet to the contemporary theories on dissociation and multiple personality: “But Janet’s explanation of double consciousness is not just the germ of Freud’s theory; it is modern MPD theory, with only a few additions from Sybil.10 Ellenberger’s book was published in 1970; Sybil three years later.” When the two met – in the context of other circumstances such as sexual abuse during childhood and women’s movement – the modern MPD movement was born (Acocella 1999: 34).11 Freud’s theory of repression was based on the idea that a “willful exclusion of information from consciousness” exists (Howell 2005: 195). In his essay “On Repression” (1915), Freud pointed out that repression is the concept of “turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious” (195). Freud’s concept is understood as a theory of unconscious processes, which are active and motivated (196). Janet’s concept of dissociation, however, is now understood as an automatic reflex upon a traumatic event and therefore psychologically passive (198). Both theories, repression and dissociation, share common ground (199).12

10 11 12

Sybil is the most famous and most influential case of multiple personality in the United States during the 20th century. Cornelia Wilbur, the therapist of America’s most famous multiple personality case Sybil, was a psychoanalyst. The case of Sybil is described in the chapter on famous cases. In fact, Freud and Breuer related their early understanding of hysteria to Janet and Binet. In their Studies on Hysteria (Studien über Hysterie), they explained hysteria in terms of dissociation as a splitting of consciousness known in cases of ‘double conscience’ (they used the term in their originally German text) and thus they concluded that what they coined neuroses are composed of such abnormal states of consciousness (Breuer and Freud “Über den psychischen Mechanismus”, 2007: 35).

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Janet’s explanation of secondary states, whether artificial or not, is evoked as a kind of “oscillation of mental activity, which falls and rises suddenly”, the first “higher, with a particular exercise of all the senses and functions”, the other one “lower, with a great reduction of all the cerebral functions” (Janet 1906: 92; italics in original text). It is a separation of these two states that can be connected to each other “through gradation and remembrances” (92). If they are isolated, the two states are consequently separated. Hence, a dissociation occurs “not only of an idea, not only of a feeling, but of one mental state of activity” (92). Pierre Janet, in Psychological Automatism (1889), also espoused a dipsychist view: In certain individuals – pathological cases – a dissociation (désagreggation) of personality (ego) occurs so that part of the personality splits off thus becoming an autonomous subconscious subpersonality (cf. Erdelyi 1994).

3.6

W ILLIAM J AMES : “M UTATIONS

OF THE

S ELF ”

One of the classical scientific texts about altered state of consciousness was written by the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910). James was well acquainted with the theories concerning double-consciousness or multiple personality and called it ‘alternating personality’ (cf. James 1890). James’s connection with the French ideas on the subject was described by Ian Hacking: “He knew the French literature intimately. He also personally interviewed the famous American case of fugue, namely, Ansel Bourne. Finally, he was always close to the Boston investigators of psychic phenomena, who had a lot to do with the upsurge and persistence of interest in multiple personality in New England” (Hacking 1995: 223). William James – the “preeminent figure in late 19th and early 20th century” (Spanos 1996: 206) – devoted the famous Chapter X in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to “The Consciousness of Self”.13 In chapter VIII “The Relations of Minds to Other Things”, he had already referred to the splitting of consciousness in a person – “It must be admitted, therefore, that in certain persons, at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into parts which coexist but mutually ignore each other, and share the objects of knowledge between them. More remarkable still, they are complementary” (James 1890: 204; italics in original text). In Dissociative Identity Disorder (1997), Ross considered James’s concept of the self as “a plurality of selves in the normal individual” including the material, social, spiritual selves and the pure ego, yet various psychological derangements, however, could result in severe dissociation or even DID (Ross 1997: 23). James’s concept of the self was reached through the empirical view: “The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me. [...] A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic power” (PP 279). However, the “constituents of the Self” can be “divided into two classes”, according to James, “those which make up respectively – (a) The material

13

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918 [1890]; hereafter abbreviated PP.

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Self; (b) The social Self; (c) The spiritual Self; and (d) The pure Ego” (PP 280). Furthermore, the empirical life of self is again divided into self-seeking and selfestimation, both of which are again divided into material, social and spiritual. There is no single, one-dimensional self since “after the bodily and social selves come the spiritual” (PP 307). The consciousness of the self, however, is built on a stream of thought, “each part of which as ‘I’ can 1) remember those which went before, and know the things they knew; and 2) emphasize and care paramountly for certain ones among them as ‘me’, and appropriate to these the rest” (PP 378). If this system of a healthy self, based on identity and constant memory, is disturbed, another phenomenon may occur. William James’s approach to what he called the ‘alternating personality’ is shown at the end of chapter X. Here he defines the “mutations of the self” and again divides them into two classes: alterations of memory; and alterations in the present bodily and spiritual selves, whereas the latter may feature two or even more types of insane delusions, alternating selves and mediumship or possession (PP 354). James based his view of alternating selves on disturbance of memories, thus following Ribot,14 who “took alternating personality to be above all a disturbance of memory (Hacking 1995: 223): “The phenomenon of alternating personality in its simplest phases seems based in lapses of memory [...] In the pathological cases known as double or alternate personality the lapse of memory is abrupt, and is usually preceded by a period of unconsciousness or syncope lasting a variable length of time.” (PP 358)

What James has in common with Janet is his belief in the possibility of alternating the personality through hypnosis and the effects thereupon, which show how the hypnotized person will “throw himself into the new character with a vivacity proportionate to the amount of histrionic imagination which he possesses” (PP 358).15 Regarding the pathological case, James wrote, “the transformation is spontaneous” (PP 358). And if, according to James, we consider that the “anæsthetic and 'amnesic' hysteric is one person” (PP 363), it could be also observed, that “when you restore her inhibited sensibilities and memories by plunging her into the hypnotic trance – in other words, when you rescue them from their 'dissociated' and split-off condition, and make them rejoin the other sensibilities and memories – she is a different person” (PP 363).16 Hypnotized persons, such as Janet’s patients Louis Vivet or Lucie,

14

15 16

William James mentions Ribot’s Diseases of Memory and Forbes Winslow’s On Obscure Diseases of the Brain, and Disorder of the Mind in a footnote for further readings (James 1918: 384). William James adds in a footnote: “Although the number of subjects who can do this with any fertility and exuberance is relatively quite small” (PP 358). Ian Hacking pointed out that the term “person“ is that of someone as a different person “after a couples of drinks”. In this sense, we cannot find a final philosophical definition of what a person might be, but nonetheless the idea of another state of consciousness, another state of personality: “Indeed William James is a model of all philosophers who

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and their obvious different states of consciousness, seemed to be conditions of a “proteiform individual”, not unlike Locke’s assumption of “changes of memory bring changes of personality” (PP 368). According to Janet’s law, noted James, “anæsthesia and gaps in memory go together” (PP 368). To underline this phenomenon, James could refer to some well-known cases. One of these cases was again that of Félida X., “reported by Dr. Azam of Bordeaux” in the year 1876. As already mentioned, she was a woman who for the first time passed into a secondary state of consciousness at the age of fourteen, and in which she was able to recollect memories of the original state, but later she had no memories of the second state in her newly gained original state.17 Another case listed here by James is the one reported by Dr. Rieger. The male patient lived quietly in his so-called first normal state, which then was irregularly interrupted by periods of lawlessness and robbery (PP 359). James dedicated a few pages to “the remarkable case” of Mary Reynolds, a “dull and melancholy woman, inhabiting the Pennsylvania wilderness in 1811” and her vivid secondary state (PP 359). But did amnesia completely explain these “changes of disposition” (PP 368)? Did the amnesiac patient only function as a mere motor, to use a term of Charcot, solely as a visual character maybe (PP 364), or was James not content with Janet’s cases of amnesiac states and dissociated and split-off conditions? “The same brain may subserve many conscious selves”, he concludes, “either alternate or coexisting; but by what modifications in its action, or whether ultra-celebral conditions may intervene, are questions which cannot now be answered” (PP 379), at least not through Janet’s approach, he claims: “M. Janet’s law, true of his own cases, does not seem to hold good in all” (PP 369).18 So Janet’s cases, on which even contemporary cases may be established, may not offer a satisfactory explanation: “But mere anæsthesia does not sufficiently explain the changes of disposition, which are probably due to modifications in the preciousness of motor and associative paths, co-ordinate with those of the sensorial paths rather than consecutive upon them” (PP 368). The result could be an alteration of personality, but the causes might still be obscure: “Of course it is mere guesswork to speculate on what may be the cause of the amnesias which lie at the bottom of changes in the Self” (PP 369), notes James. The last case William James now could refer to is the case of Ansel Bourne. His episode of dissociative fugue, when he gave himself the name of A.J. Brown, caused much speculation, be it due to epileptic elements or other peculiarities (PP 369).

17 18

would address the mind. He records alternating personality as a phenomenon that leads on to ‘questions which cannot now be answered’” (Hacking 1995: 223). See chapter 5 on famous cases. Janet himself eventually concluded that the theory of dissociation may not persist as a valid description of the phenomena of multiple personality. A fact which is intentionally spared when contemporary theories of dissociation mention Janet! As Ian Hacking noted: “It is ironic that Pierre Janet has been adopted as the godfather of the field of multiple personality and, more generally, of dissociation. He himself came to the conclusion that multiple personality was a folie circulaire” (Hacking 1998: 76; italics in original text).

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The last section of the chapter “The Consciousness of Self” was dedicated to the study on ‘mediumships’ or ‘possession’. These secondary states occur “relatively abrupt” and last only for a limited period of time (PP 371) and, if they were well developed, leave no memory “for aught that happened during it remains after the primary consciousness comes back” (PP 371). Secondary states differ from normal or primary states as if “animated by a foreign person” (PP 371) or even a demon that takes total control.19 This demon could appear as “at the worst for an Indian or other grotesquely speaking but harmless personage” or resemble a dead person, so that this “mediumistic possession in all its grades seems to form a perfectly natural special type of alternate personality”, which may be even not uncommon (PP 372).20 Lower phases of possession included automatic handwriting, inspirational speaking, playing musical instruments, etc. These performances meant no total exclusion of the normal self, “though their initiative seems to come from elsewhere” (PP 372). The highest phases of possession, however, completed the trance (PP 372). James notes: “One curious thing about trance-utterances is their generic similarity in different individuals. The ‘control’ here in America is either a grotesque, slangy, and flippant personage (‘'Indian’ controls, calling the ladies ‘squaws’, the men ‘braves’, the house a ‘wigwam’, etc., etc., are excessively common). Otherwise, if he ventures on higher intellectual flights, he abounds in a curiously vague optimistic philosophy-and-water, in which phrases about spirit, harmony, beauty, law, progression, development, etc., keep recurring.” (PP 372)

James concludes his observation with the belief that “it seems exactly as if one author composed more than half of the trance-messages, no matter by whom they are uttered” (PP 372). It is not certain, “whether all sub-conscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum of the Zeitgeist, and get their inspiration from it”. However, it was astounding that these particular types of secondary selves seem to follow the same pattern (PP 372). According to James, medium trance and hypnotic suggestion shared the same symptoms and the subject seems to adapt to a certain role, “simply because opinion expects it of him under the conditions which are present” (PP 372), depending on the acting capacities of the medium. No matter how curious these cases may seem, James vaguely assumed eventually that the “brain condition” during those states of alternating personalities “must be capable of successively changing all its modes of action, and abandoning the use for the time being of whole sets of well-organized association-paths. In no other way can we explain the loss of memory in passing from one alternating condition to another” (PP 377). According to James, “organized systems of paths can be thrown out of gear”, so that processes in one system gave rise to one consciousness, and those of another system to another simultaneously existing consciousness” (PP 377). Howev-

19 20

William James wrote: “In old times the foreign ‘control’ was usually a demon, and is so now in communities which favor that belief” (James 1890: 371). In his novel Flight (2007), Sherman Alexie lets a human soul or consciousness possess several bodies thus presenting such a mediumistic possession.

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er, James could not explain here the mechanism of “what sort of dissociation [sic!] the phrase ‘thrown out of gear’ may stand for, we cannot even conjecture” (PP 377). James did not stress the “doubling of the self”, but of objects which are now “divided between the two ‘selves’, so that “each of the selves is due to a system of cerebral paths acting by itself” (PP 377). If these dissociated systems come together again, James argued, “we should get a new affection of consciousness in the form of a third ‘Self’” (PP 377).21 James referred to the idea of the brain parted between left and right hemispheres producing automatic handwriting such as those subject to agraphic diseases. Hughlings Jackson’s principles defined the left hemisphere as “being the more evolved organ”, inhibiting the activity of the right one “at ordinary times” (PP 378). Nonetheless, just like F.W.H. Myers James believed the theory of two selves as if they were two hemispheres as unconvincing, “the selves may be more than two”, each hemisphere working and “interpenetrating each other in very minute ways” (PP 378). Consequently it was not possible to give a single valid reason why successive thoughts and possessions occur, and why certain brain-states function as they do since James considered this view as too mathematical. The reason or answer concerning, for example, the very meaning of a thought could only lie “in the total sense or meaning of the world” (PP 379). Hence, James ended his chapter with these words: “This is as much to say that the special natural science of psychology must stop with the mere functional formula. [...] With the question once stated in these terms, the spiritual and transcendentalist solutions must be considered as prima facie on a part with our own psychological one, and discussed impartially. But that carries us beyond the psychological or naturalistic point of view.” (PP 379)

Another view besides the psychological and naturalistic perspective is offered in “Lecture VIII” of The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1904).22 It is where William James wrote about “The Divided Self, and the Process of its Unification” were he mentioned the healthy minds, “who need to be born only once” and the “sick souls, who must be twice-born in order to be happy” (VR 166). The result is, James stated “two different conceptions of the universe of our experience” (VR 166). The religion of the “once-born” took place in a world as a “sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have” and consisted eventually in a clear sum of pluses and minuses with happiness and religious peace “on the plus side of the account” (VR 166).

21

22

This concept of a Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis beautifully matches what Chuck Palahniuk called the “three character model” or the model displayed in Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson”. See especially chapter 15. Other triadic models include Hubert Zapf’s literature model and Vladimir Nabokov’s (and my) reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). See chapter 10. William James. Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans, 1904; hereafter abbreviated VR.

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However, the world for the “twice-born” was a “doubled-storied mystery”, where “there lurks a falsity in its very being” and finally “no final balance” can be reached (VR 166). Although James admitted that most people may be a mixture of both as “intermediate varieties”, as for the extreme forms of both, the twice-born “seems to be a certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution” (VR 167). It was the “homo duplex” of Alphonse Daudet, which drew James’ attention here in the text. Daudet’s personal experience when he was fourteen years old seemed to be the appropriate example for James: “‘Homo duplex, homo duplex!’ [...] While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at a theatre.’[...] This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!” (VR 167-8)

The last words of this quotation might actually remind one of the ape-like Mr. Hyde, who is mocking the humble Dr. Jekyll and who will indeed be literally intoxicated in the end. William James was now interested in “recent works in the psychology of character” and referred to the works of F. Paulhan (Les Charactères, 1894)23 and the general focus on “inconsistency” and loss of harmony concerning “inner constitution [...] well balanced from the outset” (VR 168). For the once-born, the guidance of their intellect was not troubled, “passions are not excessive”, and lives were “little haunted by regrets” (VR 168). However, the twice-born suffered from “whimsical inconsistency” (VR 168) and a “stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject’s life (VR 169): “There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand (VR 169).” This “heterogeneous personality” was therefore not able to keep “the spiritual house in order” a phenomenon, which “connects itself with the life of the subconscious self” (VR 170).24 Just like Whitehead confirmed the unifications of the healthy self in Process and Reality (1929), James stated that the normal self is constituted to a degree of “diversified temptations”, so that the “normal evolution of character chiefly consists in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self” despite the “comparative chaos in us” in order to form a “stable system of functions in right subordination” (VR 170).

23

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In a footnote, James referred to F. Paulhan and his book Les Caractères (1894), “who contrasts les Equilibrés, les Unifiés, with les Inquiets, les Contariants, les Incohérents, les Emiettés, as so many diverse psychic types” (William James 1904: 168). See later Matt Ruff’s novel Set this House in Order (2003) as well as the house metaphor used in Shirley Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest (1954) and in Richard Bloch’s Psycho (1959). On houses in American fiction see also Chandler 1995.

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If religious belief counteracted with one’s inner struggles, a “religious melancholy and ‘conviction of sin’ may occur”, which was “so large a part of Protestant Christianity” and so “the man’s interior is a battle-ground”, wrote James, with “two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal” (VR 171). Such a “discordant personality” could be seen in various examples and James started with Saint Augustine. In his book Confessiones dating back to 400, Saint Augustine described the adoption of ‘manicheism’, a dualistic religious system, and the both sides of him as a distraction “by the struggle between the two souls in his breast”. Therefore, “Augustine’s psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a divided self which has never been surpassed” (VR 172): “The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough to overcome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So these two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contended with each other and disturbed my soul. I understood by my own experience what I had read, 'flesh lusteth against spirit, and spirit against flesh'. It was myself indeed in both the wills, yet more myself in that which I approved in myself than in that which I disapproved in myself.” (Augustine Confessiones, book VIII cited in VR 172)

To underline the excellence of Saint Augustine’s life here, James further argued: “There could be no more perfect description of the divided will, when the higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists), that enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously into life and quell the lower tendencies forever” (VR 173). The divided will here formed a contrast to the “inner unity and peace” (VR 175) which was finally gained only through the relief of true belief and religion: “Happiness! Happiness! Religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift” (VR 175). Whether arguing in favor of religious revelation or psychological terms, James stresses the dividedness or plurality of the self. Referring to various examples from Augustine to contemporary cases of alternating personality, James is one of the most important thinkers of the psyche seen as a multitude of selves united or not.

3.7

M ORTON P RINCE : T HE C O - CONSCIOUSNESS

The American psychologist and physician Morton Prince (1854-1929) was one of the major scientists in the United States interested in the phenomenon of multiple personality. As an influential researcher in the psychological field concerning double consciousness, he gained considerable attention on the subject when he published his seminal work on the case of “Miss Beauchamp” in his book The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology (1906). Prince taught neurology at the Harvard Medical School from 1895 to 1898 and at Tufts College Medical School, Medford, Massachusetts from 1902 to 1912. He also founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906. Likewise, he was a founding member of

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the American Psychopathological Association in 1910 and eventually helped to establish the Harvard Psychological Clinic in 1927. After gaining his medical degree at Harvard College in 1879, Morton Prince traveled to France and got acquainted with the ideas of Jean-Martin Charcot. The concept of dissociation, established by Pierre Janet, was essential to Prince and his theory of ‘co-consciousness’. As Rieber notes, this focused on parallel states of consciousness and the co-existing awareness of a well-organized system of the human mind (Rieber 2006). His studies connected psychological and physiological aspects of multiple personality, “especially when it entails the use of hypnosis” (26). Following Janet’s concept, Prince tried to establish a theory on a “physiologico-anatomical basis” for such a psychological phenomenon as dissociation (26). His first publication in the United States, where he elaborated strongly on the success of dissociation theory, appeared in 1898 in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. For Prince, a model for explaining the phenomenology of multiple personality or dissociation for Prince was not to be a simple one. Prince focused on various aspects such as neurological processes, amnesic effects and problems of cerebral inhibitions. Therefore, similar to William James, Prince contended “that no single explanatory principle could account for all of the facts of the disorder” (26). For Prince, physiological explanations of dissociation that were disseminated by, among others, Alfred Binet in Alterations of Personality in 1896 were central and important for his theories. Conceptions on the normal “duality of personality”, which can be found in the mind-body views of John Hughlings Jackson, and mental processes of “higher complex processes of thought and voluntary movements” as well as “lower automatic subconscious processes” were another influence (Rieber 2006: 26). Accordingly, during hysterical amnesia or artificial hypnosis the middle centers of the brain could function well enough, whereas the higher centers were actually enabled. Prince hence focused more on a direct mind-body connectedness (27). Thus, in various essays Prince discussed the “Revelations of Hypnotism” in double personality (1885-1909) as well as the development of multiple personality (1898-1911). These were finally published together in 1975 in Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality: Selected Essays (Hale 1975). In his final drafts on normal and abnormal personality for The Unconscious (1929), Prince also referred to the “Psychogenesis of Multiple Personality”: “In a general way alteration of personality is effected through the primary organization by experience and later coming into dominating activity of particular unitary systems of ideas with their affects, on the one hand, and the displacement by dissociation or inhibition of other conflicting systems on the other.” (Prince “The Psychogenesis” 545)

Cases of multiple personality included symptoms such as “aboulia”, which referred to an “inhibition of will” as well as “negative hallucination, crystal visions, coexistent conscious states, automatic writing” (Prince 1900: 139). Prince examined the different personalities and hypnotic states of his patients and tried to establish a clear interrelationship between such personalities and states. His conclusion in the case of the “Misses Beauchamp” evolved around her “different personalities” and their relationship “they bear to each other and the true self” (139). What Prince found to be the

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true self did not always correspond to the real Miss Beauchamp she thought herself to be (Leys 1992 “The Real Miss Beauchamp” 2000). In the case of Miss Beauchamp, however, Prince admitted that certain associations were “owned in common” by all personalities “including the motor and sensory spheres” (Prince 1900: 154). He eventually concluded that “(a) The subliminal self may become a true independent personality contemporaneously acting and existing with the primary consciousness […] (b) Other so-called personalities and apparent personalities may be nothing more than the primary self, mutilated by disintegration. (c) The absence of knowledge and hence amnesia on the part of the primary self of the subliminal is dependent on the normal psycho-physiological arrangements. (d) The amnesia of one mutilated self for another mutilated self is due to disintegration and to a severance and rearrangement of psycho-physiological associations. (e) Theoretically any number of personalities is possible […] (f) Personalities may develop accidentally […] (g) The subliminal consciousness is not necessarily equivalent of the hypnotic self. (h) Personalities may represent any different psychical compounds. One may be that peculiar group of psychical elements which is called the subliminal self, and another may be a disintegrated compound of the ordinary supernatant self. (i) Different personalities may have successive existences in time, or when one is the subliminal self they may be co-existent. (j) Personalities, including the subliminal self, may be hypnotized, and thus the personalities may become still further disintegrated.” (Prince 1900: 157)

In another account of the Miss Beauchamp case, published in The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology (1906), Morton Prince also referred to the split of consciousness as a process that may represent just different parts of one personality: “Cases of this kind are commonly known as ‘double’ or multiple personality, according to the number of persons represented, but a more correct term is disintegrated personality, for each secondary personality is a part only of a normal whole self” (Prince 1906: 3; italics in original text). This would certainly mirror the theory of dissociative identity disorder or DID, which focuses more on inner or “identity fragmentation” (APA 2000: 519). The personalities would therefore symbolize certain characteristic parts within one personality. Such an approach, however, is not consequently sought after as Prince abandons this when he later uncovers the different personalities in Miss Beauchamp (Hawthorn 1983: 18). His narrative “is that the different personalities are autonomous subjects” (Leys “The Real Miss Beauchamp” 45). In his more general yet detailed account on the human psyche The Unconscious (1929), Morton Prince again alluded to the “Psychogenesis of Multiple Personality”. A dissociation could be observed and diagnosed, “when the dissociation is so comprehensive as to deprive the individual of memory of his previous phase of personality, or of certain acquired knowledge or other particular experiences

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that the personality is easily recognized as a dissociated one.” (Prince 1929: 546; my emphasis)

The normal condition was obtained again when “the inhibiting or repressing force that induces dissociation ceases to be effective” (Prince 1929: 546). Interestingly, Prince used a psychoanalytical expression that is called ‘repression’. The “subliminal self” mentioned earlier also points in that direction. In the year 1929, the success of psychoanalysis was evident and on solid footing. Prince, on the other hand, had followed the opposite direction as he contributed to the concept of multiple personality. It grew almost exclusively in the United States, with the idea of co-consciousness following Pierre Janet and not Sigmund Freud, who developed his own theoretical notion. But Prince found his own interpretation in opposition to other theories. As Van der Hart and Dorahy observe: “They considered the ‘hysteric’ personality t to be the original or first state, and the ‘normal’ personality to bet he dissociated secondary state. Prince, however, claimed that the hysteric state was the secondary, dissociative, or disintegrated state...The first or normal personality, according to Prince, displayed no symptoms.” (Van der Hart and Dorahy 2009: 11).25

Normal and altered states, however, formed the concept of Prince’s multiple personality. Two processes played a major role in the explanation of dissociation: dissociation and also synthesis. Morton Prince described it as a ‘secondary growth’: “It should be noted that the formation of a secondary personality is primarily the result of two processes, dissociation and synthesis though it is subject to secondary growth through various processes. As a result of the first process, dissociation, systems of thought, ideas, memories, emotions and dispositions previously habitual in the individual may cease to take part in the affected person’s mental processes. The influence of these systems with their cognitive tendencies is therefore no longer in play.” (Prince 1929: 546-7; italics in original text)

Morton Prince also noted that dissociation could reveal one or more “‘sides’ of one’s character” (Prince 1929: 547) and that an individual may exhibit only one side at certain occasions.26 Conflicts and inhibitions might be involved and the result could be a severe dissociation in the field of consciousness (549). The alteration of personality was the main symptom. Morton Prince concluded that during “so-called neurasthenic

25

26

A fictional account on the history of psychoanalysis in the United States is represented in the thriller The Interpretation of Murder (2006) by Jed Rubenfeld. Freud’s travel to New York is the central focus of a murder story. The opposing theories, the European psychoanalysis and the American concepts, collide. Morton Prince noted on these sides that “the ethical systems built up and conserved by early pedagogical, social, and environmental training may cease to take part in the mental processes and regulate conduct; or, again, the ideas which pertain to the lighter side of life and its social enjoyments may be lost and only the more serious attributes of mind retained” (Prince 1929: 547).

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states” the power of self-control was disturbed and therefore too weak. Hence, a certain “automaticity” might occur and lead to a complete dissociation (586) which could even lead to a more healthier “phase of personality” which again gained a certain significant “freedom” from neurasthenic and hysterical symptoms (592). As a result, the true self may be found, Prince may have concluded, leaving us with the question where such a true self might in the end be situated.

4 Shock and Trauma: Renaissance of the Dissociation Concept The analysis would proceed more rapidly, she believed, if Sybil knew about the other selves. Then the doctor could confront her with what the other personalities had said and bring her closer to the memories from which she seemed barred. SCHREIBER SYBIL 1973: 113-4

This chapter explores the assumption that the unitary self is an illusion. The idea of the self not being represented sufficiently on a singular or unitary level is also explored. Consciousness and memory oppose dissociation and amnesia. Dissociation is nowadays closely linked to the conceptualization and psychology of memory and trauma (cf. Dell and O’Neil 2009). Contemporary concepts of dissociation and the theory of trauma related dissociative disorders as well as the controversy concerning the trauma-memory argument are introduced in this chapter.

4.1

M EMORY AND I DENTITY : T HE I LLUSION OF THE U NITARY S ELF

The theory of ‘dissociation’ and its mechanism raises question of memory and identity and so on. As was admitted, the concept or definition is not comprehensively precise (Spiegel 2011: 825). However, some “‘essential features’ (DSM-IV) or the ‘common theme’ (ICD-10) (825) are described: “Dissociation is a disruption of and/or discontinuity in the normal, subjective integration of one or more aspects of psychological functioning, including – but not limited to – memory, identity, consciousness, perception, and motor control. In essence, aspects of psychobiological functioning that should be associated, coordinated, and/or linked are not.” (Spiegel 2011: 826)

In the United States, it is seemingly agreed upon that “pathological dissociation is experienced as an involuntary disruption of the normal integration of conscious awareness and control over one’s mental processes (Spiegel 2011: 826). Some scien-

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tists claim that amnesia, as a result of dissociative processes, consequently leads to a fragmented existence: “Contrary to the traditional view that human consciousness is a single, unbroken, and unitary continuity, Janet’s clinical observations provided convincing evidence that there may coexist within one and the same individuals two or more separate, dissociated streams of consciousness, each existing in isolation from the others and each with a wide spectrum of mental contents such as memories, sensations, volitions, and affects. The magnitude and intricacy of those dissociated complexes vary greatly.” (Nemiah 1998: 7; my emphasis)

These separated and dissociated streams of consciousness were also observed by William James, who wrote on the abnormal internal fragmentation in The Principles of Psychology (1890): “The buried feelings and thoughts proved now to exist in hysterical anesthetics, in recipients of post-hypnotic suggestion, etc., themselves are parts of secondary personal selves. These selves are for the most part very stupid and contracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from communication with the regular and normal self of the individual; but still they form conscious unities, have continuous memories, speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, or adopt names that are suggested; and, in short, are entirely worthy of that title of secondary personalities which is now commonly given them. According to M. Janet, these secondary personalities are always abnormal, and result from the splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into parts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the other appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman has.” (James 1890: 222; italics in original text)

According to James, second selves or a secondary consciousness were considered to be pathological. Dissociation, however, is now also understood as a natural mechanism of the mind to avoid traumatic experiences. According to psychoanalyst and traumatologist Elisabeth F. Howell, dissociation pervades psychic life, and the capacity for it is built into our DNA. Consequently, the mechanism of dissociation serves as an explanatory model of our psyche. Although the theory of dissociation has existed more than one hundred years “side by side with the doctrine of repression”, its renaissance as a prominent psychological theory is astonishingly new (Howell 2005: x). With the decline of hysteria and multiple personality theory after the 1980s and 1990s, another concept, namely that of dissociation emerged. Multiple personality disorder or MPD was renamed dissociative identity disorder or DID in order to stress the psychological mechanism. The concept of dissociation also “designates a theoretical commitment to the notion that integrated systems such as the self are made up of subsystems that may become – or may even normally be – relatively disconnected in terms of information exchange or mutual control” (Erdelyi 1994: 3). The category of dissociative disorders in the DSM suggests that the concept of dissociation is generally accepted (Kihlstrom 1992, 1994, 2005). The term of dissociative amnesia or fugue state has even infected fictional works. Psychotherapist and trauma expert Robert C. Scaer noted this in his book on trauma and narrative The Body Bears the Burden (2007):

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“The most profound type of dissociative amnesia is called a fugue state. In its most dramatic form, this type of dissociation is probably what the Hollywood movie industry is trying to represent in fictional stories about persons experiencing prolonged periods of amnesia. These persons are depicted as suffering profound emotional trauma, or sometimes a blow to the head. Thereafter, the victims go so far as their own name or past life history. Although obviously stretching reality in the interests of drama, these stories have a kernel of truth.” (Scaer 2007: 79)

The “Hollywood movie industry” has indeed made profound use of the idea of a lost memory due to a mysteriously concealed secret, which needs to be dramatically discovered. It is the final twist, the revelation of the secret that contributes essentially to the suspense of a story. The story line therefore needs to represent a certain idea and concept of mind, which is confronted with severe mental (or sometimes physical) damage. The idea and concept of mind needs to be embedded in a theoretical and yet discernible scheme, that of dissociation, the loss of continuous memory, inner fragmentation, and maybe also multiple personality. Several examples of movies shall later be explored to stress the idea of what is here called a culture-embedded syndrome stressing also the culture, cultivation and cult of such concepts and its common understandings. The central theme of these movies and other fictional works therefore is the concept of trauma management. Through the concept of a hidden memory, the “coping strategies” of the human mind are introduced. These concepts are, literally, multilayered. In fact, there are “memory wars” fought on the ground of an adequate theory of a hidden, dissociated trauma memory (MacNally 2005: 821). Trauma therapist Robert Scaer states that “while many traumatized patients experience recurring and intrusive memories of the trauma, a significant number have partial or complete amnesia for the experience” (Scaer 2007:69). Yet it is important to note that the “wars” on dissociated memory are about whether such a trauma memory is forgotten or dissociated at all. Total amnesia, states the other side, does not exist, as made clear by psychiatrist Paul McHugh (for example in McHugh 2008). Whereas now one side considers trauma an insult to memory itself (cf. Caruth 1995; Howell 2005; Scaer 2007), the other side stresses that trauma is indeed remembered all too well, and that therefore what is called “recovered memory” as a necessity to uncover/un-do trauma is a mere fad (cf. Crews 1995; Hacking 1995; Acocella 1999; Piper 1999; McHugh 2008). To dissociate or not to dissociate seems to be the question. Consequently, the concept of dissociation “has become the name of the game” (Hacking 1995: 54). A popular notion is presented by more generally accessible encyclopedias such as The New Oxford American Dictionary (2001). It refers to “multiple personality” as “a rare dissociative disorder in which two or more personalities with distinct memories and behavior patterns apparently exist in one individual: multiple personality disorder” (Jewell and Abate 2001: 1122; italics in original text). Noteworthy here again is that distinct personalities are explicitly named. As mentioned previously, the DSM-IV listed the presence of identity or personality states as not to be understood as literal persons or personalities. Furthermore, in the New Oxford American Dictionary, dissociation is understood as the “separation of normally related mental processes, resulting in one group functioning independently from the rest, leading in extreme cas-

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es to disorders such as multiple personality” (Jewell and Abate 2001: 494-5; my emphasis). According to the German Brockhaus Psychologie (2001), the mental process of dissociation splits off parts of the memory, feelings and associations normally integrated within the mind and personality, so that these parts are not accessible anymore after severe traumatic experiences (Bliesener and Storke-Perschke 2001: 110). A multiple personality might occur if the condition of dissociation endures, creating thus altered states of consciousness in which people may act differently from their normal patterns beyond their control (110). One of the first fictional descriptions of such a character seems to have been the one of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde created by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886. But in the corresponding chapter here, however, it will be explained that the dissociation of Jekyll/Hyde – even of memory - was not complete.1 In popular culture in particular comic superheroes lead a double life and resemble the perfect role model of a dissociated character. The Brockhaus Psychologie specifically mentions the double existence of characters such as comic hero Superman, who leads a silent life as reporter Clark Kent but possesses superhuman powers when he transforms into a secondary personality: “The double life of inconspicuous journalist Clark Kent and the heroic figure of Superman with superhuman power can be seen as a fiction of a dissociative process [Das Doppelleben des unscheinbaren Reporters Clark Kent in der heldenhaften Figur des Superman mit seinen übermenschlichen Kräften kann als fiktive Gestaltung eines dissoziativen Prozesses betrachtet werden]” (Bliesener and Storke-Perschke 2001: 110; my translation). One of the first dissociative characters in a comic novel was the character Hulk, who develops different personalities, each characterized by appearance and affection. The transformation of Hulk, however, is mostly due to the fact that the graphic novels, which were published by Marvel Comics, are written by several authors starting in the year 1962 with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as was suggested (cf. Gresh and Weinberg 2002). Since his first appearance as a dual character in The Incredible Hulk #1, during the 1980s, Hulk converts into a dissociative character suffering from MPD after a severe trauma. Writer Peter David contrasts the genius Bruce Banner with the green giant figure of Hulk, who represents the “dark, primordial side” of Banner’s psyche, claim Gresh and Weinberg in The Science of Superheroes (2002). In the early 20th century, Morton Prince explained his view on the mechanism of the human mind, when “particular emotional states, like fear or anxiety, or general mental distress, have the tendency to disintegrate the mental organization in such a way that the normal associations become severed or loosened” (Prince 1906: 22). A mental shock such as an accident or “an alarming piece of news” produces a “dissociation of mind” (22). This “state of hysteria” is characterized by “persisting loss of

1

The (incomplete) dissociation was also not caused by trauma but by a drug. Life within Victorian bounderies, however, may function as an explanation of a trauma caused by social restriction. But Dr. Jekyll also had a vigorously violent covert side to him that sought release in the Mr. Hyde personality. With regard to the validity of Dr. Jekyll’s account, the question is whether the fictional character is reliable or not. See also chapter 10.

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sensation, paralysis, amnesia, and other so-called stigmata, which are now recognized to be manifestations of the dissociation of sensory, motor, and other images from the main stream of consciousness” (22). Unlike Freud and his theory of the trigger of psychological trauma (“auslösender Moment”), Morton Prince had attached the behavioral patterns of his patient “Miss Beauchamp” to a certain moment of trauma, the window scene. On the phenomenon on dissociation, Prince wrote in 1889 for the Society for Psychical Research that all dissociative phenomena such as hysteria, hypnosis, mediumship and multiple personality are “probably after all a question of cerebral localization” (Kenny 1986: 134). In The Dissociation of a Personality (1906), Morton Prince mentions “the phenomena of disintegrated personality” as “a matter of brain associations” (299). These brain associations could be rearranged and altered “for good or ill” and thus, dissociation as contrary to association appears (299). Prince explained the following: “Particular emotional states, like fear or anxiety, or general mental distress have the tendency to disintegrate the mental organization in such a way that the normal associations become severed or loosened. Thus it happens that a mental shock like that of an accident, or an alarming piece of news, produces a dissociation of the mind. […] A doubling of consciousness is thus brought about.” (Prince 1906: 22)

This observation of physical symptoms, which are linked to the psychological sensations of a dissociated mind, followed an understanding of multiple personality upon the terms of hysteria. Multiple personality as a dissociative disorder is defined in the generally accessible Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology (1989), but still stresses the distinct personalities within one person: A dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits in turn different personalities; when exhibiting one personality, he may have no knowledge of the others and no memory for his experiences under a different personality (Sutherland 1989: 270). Dissociative disorders are “disorders in which parts of behavior or consciousness seem to become separated from the rest, for example, fugues, psychogenic amnesia, and multiple personality” (122). Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud opposes the idea of split or dissociated consciousness although he knew cases of multiple personality or rather used the typical scientific terms of multiple personality as hysteria in his earlier publications such as the co-authored Studies on Hysteria (1895), most importantly with the case of Anna O. described by Breuer (Breuer and Freud 2007a [1895]: 42-66). Yet later, Freud explains: “We have no right to expand the meaning of the word (“conscious”) to the extent that it can be used to describe a consciousness of which the owner is ignorant. If philosophers find it difficult to believe in the existence of an unconscious thought then the existence of an unconscious consciousness seems to me even more doubtful.” [Wir haben kein Recht, den Sinn dieses Wortes („bewusst“) so weit auszudehnen, dass damit auch ein Bewusstsein bezeichnet werden kann, von dem sein Besitzer nichts weiß. Wenn Philosophen eine Schwierigkeit darin finden, an die Existenz eines unbewussten Gedankens zu glauben, so scheint mir die Existenz eines unbewussten Bewusstseins noch angreifbarer.] (Freud 1912/1975: 32; my translation)

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It should also be emphasized that Freud differentiated the concept of dissociation from his own definition of the unconscious and the mechanism of ‘repression’. Regarding the difference between those two theories he states that the psychoanalysis understands the unconscious or repression as an active force within the human psyche (“aktives Sträuben”) and not – referring to dissociation – the disability of synthesis (“Unfähigkeit zur Synthese”) (Freud 1971: 209).2 In his late book on the self within culture, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud finally rejects the mechanism of total forgetting, total dissociation: “Perhaps we should content ourselves with stating that the past may persist in the mind, that it need not necessarily be destroyed [Vielleicht sollten wir uns zu behaupten begnügen, daß das Vergangene im Seelenleben erhalten bleiben kann, nicht notwendigerweise zerstört werden muss] (Freud 2007: 38; my translation, italics in original text). However, some of the contemporary theories on dissociative amnesia claim that the manifestation of dissociation of memory is also existent in the now popular diagnosis of ‘posttraumatic stress disorder’ or PTSD, and therefore traumatic amnesia “is perhaps the most common example” (Scaer 2007: 78). Accordingly, although many patients are still able to memorize the traumatic event, “a significant number have partial or complete amnesia for the experience” (78). This form of amnesia is common in adult survivors of child abuse, who may have little or no memory of their abuse, or else remember it in grossly distorted terms and although recovered memories of child abuse may be distorted or inaccurate, they frequently clearly represent dissociative amnesia of actual events (78). Such inaccurate memories represent the core of the discussion. Does such amnesia – dissociative and posttraumatic – really exist? ‘Dissociationism’ in the history of dynamic psychology arises from the breakdown of an illusion – or, at least, what many consider to be an illusion – the illusion of the unity of self (Erdelyi 1994: 4). On the phenomenon of double consciousness, Hacking notes that it is “an extreme form of hysterical amnesia” (Hacking 1995: 184). The word ‘consciousness’, he suggests, is a powerful word because of its passiveness. It does not contain a “suggestion of action or interaction, no hint of a

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In “Die psychogene Sehstörung in psychoanalytischer Auffassung“ (1910), Freud states: “Die Psychoanalyse akzeptiert ebenfalls die Annahmen der Dissoziation und des Unbewußten, setzt sie aber in eine andere Beziehung zueinander. Sie ist eine dynamische Auffassung, die das seelische Leben auf ein Spiel von einander fördernden und hemmenden Kräften zurückführt. Wenn in einem Falle eine Gruppe von Vorstellungen im Unbewußten verbleibt, so schließt sie nicht auf eine konstitutionelle Unfähigkeit zur Synthese, die sich gerade in dieser Dissoziation kundgibt, sondern behauptet, dass ein aktives Sträuben anderer Vorstellungsgruppen die Isolierung und Unbewußtheit der einen Gruppe verursacht hat. Den Prozeß, der ein solches Schicksal für die eine Gruppe herbeiführt, heißt sie Verdrängung und erkennt in ihm etwas Analoges, wie es auf logischem Gebiete die Urteilsverwerfung ist. Sie weist nach, dass solche Verdrängungen eine außerordentlich wichtige Rolle in unserem Seelenleben spielen, daß [sic!] sie dem Individuum auch häufig misslingen können und daß das Misslingen der Verdrängung die Vorbedingung der Symptombildung ist” (Freud 1971: 209; my emphasis).

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rounded personality” (150). The English expression ‘double consciousness’ was adapted into the French language and turned from the word ‘somnambulism’ into ‘double conscience’. Other “labels” (Hacking) were also successful such as ‘alternating personality’ or ‘doubling of personality’. “Breuer and Freud”, as confirmed by Hacking, “famously asserted ‘that the splitting of consciousness which is so striking in the classical cases under the form of double conscience is present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria. Moreover, a tendency to such a dissociation, and with it the emerge of abnormal states of consciousness (which we shall bring together under the term ‘hypnoid’) is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis’” (151). The unity of the self is an illusion, and yet the self – pathological and healthy – is actually distinguished by its plurality (cf. Howell 2005). This expression, however, may give rise to some inconsistencies, and it may be helpful to here speak of a unity of memory and a plurality of self-perception or a self with an inner plurality and multi-dimensionality. In Rewriting the Soul (1995), Ian Hacking mentions in the chapter “Mind and Body” the theory of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmology (1929), who thinks that every thing that we know as an entity is actually a plurality, a society as Whitehead calls it. According to Whitehead (in Hacking’s rendition), “an electron is a society of electron occasions” (Hacking 1995: 224). Whitehead suggests that every organism is a society finally refers to the case of people: “But in the case of the higher animals there is central direction, which suggests that in their case each animal body harbours a living person, or living persons. Our own self-consciousness is direct awareness of ourselves as such persons” (Hacking 1995: 224). On the other hand, Whitehead continues, “there are limits to such unified control, which indicate dissociation of personality, multiple personalities in successive alternations, and even multiple personalities in joint possession” (Whitehead 1929: 164). It is, in fact, a question of religion which may apply here now, as “this last case belongs to the pathology of religion, and in primitive times has been interpreted as demoniac possession” (164). “From Whitehead’s perspective”, writes Hacking, “multiple personalities are come by all too easily” (Hacking 1995: 224). Whitehead had the opinion that “the integration of the physical and mental side into a unity of experience is a selfformation which is a process of concrescence, and which by the principle of objective immortality characterizes the creativity which transcends it” (Whitehead 1929: 164). Most importantly, as Hacking emphasizes it in Whitehead’s text: “So what needs to be explained is not dissociation of personality but unifying control, by reason of which we not only have unified behaviour, which can be observed by others, but also consciousness of a unified experience” (Hacking 1995: 224). The unified experience as the main requirement for a unified self is already set up in the theory of personal identity formulated by John Locke in his Essay on Human Understanding (1693). Locke mentiones his opinion on memory and even memory recovery: “The mind very often sets itself on work in search of some hidden idea, and turns, as it were, the eye of the soul upon it; though sometimes too they start up in our minds of their own accord, and offer themselves to the understanding; and very often are roused and tumbled out of their dark cells into open daylight, by some turbulent and tempestuous passion; our affections

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bringing ideas to our memory, which had otherwise lain quiet and unregarded.” (Locke 1849 [1693]: 88-9)

The Cartesian Self had relied on a unitary concept of body and mind. Whiteheads therefore comments: “The Cartesian philosophy is based upon the seeming fact – the plain fact – of one body and one mind, which are two substances in casual association” (Whitehead 1929: 165). The concept of double consciousness undermined such views. Whereas William James wrote on the double consciousness on psychological terms and the phenomenon of seemingly multiple personality, his African American student W.E. Burghardt Du Bois developed his sociologically influenced idea of such a double consciousness. In his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois comments on the feeling of a divided (sociological) self: “After Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” (Du Bois [1903] 1999: 10-11)

Du Bois reflects on the “two-ness” of the self, the “two souls” – “an American, a Negro” – and these two souls experienced throughout the American history a “longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self” (Du Bois [1903] 1999: 11). Psychologist and philosopher William James is connected to another great thinker, the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Being a pen friend of William James, Bergson’s concept of “multiplicité” reflected on the experiences of the self as a bundle of impressions. Accordingly, Bergson’s term “la durée” (duration) needs to be understood as incorporating unity and multiplicity and cannot be analyzed with fixed or mathematical concepts. The only way for Bergson to express unity and multiplicity is what he called “intuition”. Although presenting a multiple reflection, the healthy mind can unify these impressions and therefore mix them into a unified picture and can experience the “élan vital”. However, the mind does not work solemnly on singular terms but on multiple ones. Bergson had also influenced Alfred North Whitehead, whose reflections in Process and Reality (1929) was mentioned previously.3

3

Those short references can certainly not cover all of Henri Bergson’s intriguing theories. To read more on Henri Bergson, see also his Essay sur les données immmédiates de la conscience (1889) and also his seminal work La Durée et Simultanéité (1922). For further reading on Bergson’s influence on American culture see Paul Douglass. 1986. Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press; Tom Quirk. 1990. Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens. North Carolina: University Press. A contrasting examination of William James and Henri Bergson can be found in the historical text by Horace Mayer Kallen. 2001 [1914]. William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life. Bristol: Thoemmes Press.

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American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson distinguished the reflective and the active self: “The worst feature of this double consciousness is that two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other”, he wrote in the Transcendentalist published in the year 1842, and these two lives, according to Emerson, were then not really associated (Emerson 1866: 290). Dissociation then is not association. Even the discussion on memory and dissociation displays a clear dividedness. The non-existence of the unity of the self here is literally symbolized by a discussion on the validity of repressed memory concerning the pathology of the mind. Merckelbach, Devilly and Rassin note in a study on secondary personalities or alters in multiple personality (2002): “Memory studies on DID suffer from the absence of articulated theories about memory functioning in DID. Psychobiological studies, on the other hand primarily suffer from the absence of proper control conditions […]. More precisely, further attempts to clarify the status of alters by means of sophisticated memory paradigms of biological techniques are uniformative unless they include a control group of individuals with similar levels of fantasy proneness and distress on measures of personality and symptom endorsement.” (Merckelbach, Devilly and Rassin 2002: 492)

The psychodynamic approach to memory, however, is essential in therapeutical work when it comes to treating the symptoms of multiple personality (Hacking 1995: 200). Hacking considers secondary states even as an attempt of escapism. These personality states, which seem to share no memory of the primary or original personality states, fulfill some kind of counterparts on a societal level. On the psychological level, dissociative symptoms were inseparably connected to another headword: trauma (183 ff.). Essential for the phenomenon of MPD/DID is that memory storage is of central concern: What personality/person/identity has or shares what memory? Does person A know what person B dissociated and so on? This is, at least, the popular notion.

4.2

T RAUMA

Nowadays, the term ‘dissociation’ is persistently linked to another headword: trauma. Contemporary psychological research is interested in pathological reactions to trauma and severe stress which may finally result in dissociative symptoms and posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD (Caruth 1995: 3). Three domains are concerned when PTSD is diagnosed: “emotional, cognitive, and visual reexperiencing of the trauma; avoidance of trauma-relative stimuli; and general arousal” (Foa and HearstIckeda 1996: 207). It is this affective and cognitive avoidance experienced after trauma which evokes the interest of trauma research as it is generally “referred to as dissociation” (Foa and Hearst-Ickeda 1996; Spiegel, Hunt, & Dondershine 1988

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etc.).4 Early editions of the DSM defined trauma vaguely as “a stressful occurrence that is outside the range of usual human experience” (APA 1981: 236), whereas the later edition even includes extreme events such as “threatened death or serious injuries, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others” (APA 1994: 427-8). Variations of multiple personality or dissociations were interpreted as “trauma-driven” (Ross), thus enabling trauma theory to prevail psychoanalytic or biomedical models of the human psyche. Consequently, the theory of dissociative identity disorder could be based on a “paradigm shift” in psychiatry which eventually led to the interaction of traumatology and dissociation (Acocella 1999: 53). The origins of psychoanalysis are also based on the theory of dissociation as taught by Pierre Janet and since then it was linked to trauma. Breuer and Freud, who initially followed that idea, later developed their own opposing ideas of repression. In recent psychological theories, however, psychoanalysis and traumatology absorbed each other. The term dissociation is now not even conceivable without trauma and traumatology. Official conferences on dissociation in the United States are held by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) and focus the research on trauma and dissociation as well as psychotherapy in complex PTDS and dissociative disorders (Howell 2005; Sar 2007). The psychotherapist Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis, for example, focuses on “phenomenal selves in structural dissociation” (Sar 2007), and psychiatrist Harold Siegel introduced dissociative disorders and discusses adaptive responses to trauma “when traumatic stress goes beyond PTDS” (ibid.). Contemporary academic work mainly focuses on the interaction of trauma and dissociation when it comes to studies of dissociative disorders (cf. Fontenelle et al. 2007, Giesbrecht 2007, Hopper 2007, Lamprecht 2007). Generally, severe traumatic experiences are considered “psychological blows, wounds to the spirit” and have at the present time turned into a metaphor “for almost anything unpleasant” (Hacking 1995: 183). However, the word trauma itself has gone through a considerable shift from “body to mind” (183). Its origin lay in the railroad accidents that could not present manifest physical injuries. The term ‘railway spine’ referred to mysterious “spinal concussions” (Erichsen 1866), an expression which was one of the first accounts on psychological or neurological symptoms. Wartime experiences were called ‘shell shock’, a term introduced by Myers in Great Britain or “traumatic neurosis” in Germany where psychological effects had been studied already during the late 19th century and named ‘great commotions’ (Hacking 1995: 188). The trauma as a cause of severe dissociation, however, provoked different psychotherapeutical approaches (Hacking 1995: 195). Whereas Freud was convinced that the reexperiencing of the traumatic event was the precondition for psychic healing, Pierre Janet followed the opposite direction: via suggestion and hypnosis (195). Janet was even convinced that a patient could be taught to forget the individual trauma so that a psychological reaction like dissociation would not make any sense at all, and in this way, the patient could be healed (195).

4

See Foa and Hearst-Ikeda 1996: 207.

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The history of multiple personality and dissociative identity disorder is characterized by its close relation to the term trauma or the “psychologization of trauma” (Hacking 1995: 197). Increased psychological awareness of trauma directed the focus on traumatic experiences such as childhood sexual abuse (CSA). The negligence of severe trauma is what Howell calls a ‘cultural unconscious’ in contrast to Jung’s concept of the ‘collective unconscious’ (Howell 2005: x). This corresponds to a societal dissociation of abuse and harm thus creating isolated individuals, and as Hacking notes, Freud did pay much attention to abused children and wanted to uncover “the Truth” (195). The concept of multiple personality disorder or MPD “regarded the symptoms of dissociation and splitting as the displaced result of trauma that remained fundamentally absent from the psyche, walled off from conscious access by a subject that splintered into various ‘alter’ personalities” (Waugh 2006: 505; italics in original text). Furthermore, the concept of the hidden traumatic event as the cause of multiple personality and dissociation still shapes the popular belief: “Fostered by self-help literatures and sensational media, the idea that individuals could harbour hidden traumatic memories of abuse became a pervasive narrative of selfhood from the late 1980s. Around a core of serious activism about familial abuse, this structure of the forgotten secret and its magical (re-)discovery by hypnotic regression produced a remarkable efflorescence in popular culture.” (Waugh 2006: 505)

The theory of the hidden traumatic event, which needs to be recovered, did not end with Freud’s idea of the unconscious. In the collection of essays published in The Memory Wars (1995), the controversy around memory and trauma became evident being examined as a consequence and even a legacy of Freud’s dictum of repressed memory (Blum 1995). Frederick Crews’s challenging essays “The Unknown Freud” and “The Revenge of the Repressed” provoked the scientific and certainly the psychoanalytic community. In these essays, Crew considered Freud’s psychoanalysis to be a pseudoscience as it offers no solid data and even bases itself on bullying, making its scientific offspring of recovered memory also a pseudoscience (Crews 1995). Yet interdisciplinary research mingled literary studies with psychoanalytical and trauma studies. An example is Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) or her seminal study Unclaimed Experiences: Trauma, Narrative, History (1996). She uses a psychoanalytical approach to explain what Freud had called the ‘belatedness’ (Nachträglichkeit) of trauma, which refers to a “structure of its experience or reception” (Caruth 1995: 4; italics in original text). Another example is Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (1992), where she coined the term of ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder’ or CPTSD (Herman 1992). Freud’s concept therefore considers trauma as not totally dissociated but also relevant in the course of life. The concept of ‘traumatic hysteria’ was mentioned in Freud’s early work (with Breuer) in the studies on hysteria (Breuer and Freud 2007a: 27- 41). Tying psychoanalysis and the concept of dissociation together are constitutive elements in the theory of a dissociation-association continuum, which stretches from total separateness to reintegrative processes (Spiegel 1963). Reviewing several psychoanalytical as well as dissociative models of trauma in Foreign Bodies (2006), Laura Di Prete connects trauma

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and the body becoming foreign to the self. Corresponding to this, yet on neuropsychopathological grounds, David Spiegel emphasizes the fragmentation of the traumatized person and at the same time urges therapists to recognize this and not treat the inner fragmentation as separate personalities (Spiegel 2006).5 There are, basically, two sides and each side literally has to beware of the other. While one side still refers to trauma as conceptualized in the DSM-IV of the year 1994, namely an overwhelming event to the individual (Howell 2005: viii), and focuses on repression, recovery of unconscious memories (cf. Erdelyi 1993, 1996, 2006; Gleaves, Smith, Butler, and Spiegel 2003), the other side remains highly critical. The main point of the skeptics here is the repressed and therefore forgotten or dissociated memory of the traumatic event. Consequently, they conclude that repressed memory is a myth or urban legend and the link between memory or amnesia and trauma still needs to be reestablished (McNally 2005). Most victims do remember very well their experiences and Holocaust survivors never forgot the Holocaust. This is claimed by John F. Kihlstrom, professor of psychology at Berkeley (Kihlstrom 2004). He concludes in Trauma and Memory Revisited (2006): “The trauma-memory argument and recovered-memory therapy have been with us for more than 100 years, and have embedded themselves deeply into both our professional practices and our wider culture. But there was never any good evidence for either, and there still is none.” (Kihlstrom 2006: 289)6

Kihlstrom points out the fact that literature offers no valid explanation of trauma as impairing memory. “In view of the paucity of evidence that trauma causes amnesia”, he states therefore, “discussion of implicit memories of trauma seems pointless. Laboratory analogs of traumatic amnesia are models in search of a phenomenon; theories of traumatic amnesia are explanations in search of facts” (Kihlstrom 2006: 289). The fictional works that will be analyzed in detail basically all refer to amnesia and trauma as the cause of severe dissociation, especially childhood trauma, although some of them explicitly do not. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1996), for example, can be seen as not based on such a trauma (CSA or other abuse during childhood), although it may be argued that societal conditions may cause the dissociation as they are experienced as a severe and disturbing trauma (cf. Gold 2004). The incident and initial moment of dissociation in Fight Club is not a severe traumatic expe-

5

6

For a depiction of psychoanalysis as being itself traumatized by trauma concepts see Ralf Hillenbrand. 2004. Das Trauma in der Psychoanalyse: Eine psychologische und politische Kritik an der psychoanalytischen Traumatheorie. Gießen: Psychosozial Verlag. On the necessity of trauma as the cause for multiple personality and dissociation and possible implanted traumatic memories see C.J. Brainerd and V.F. Reyna. The Science of False Memory. Oxford: University Press, 2005. One of the most prominent figures of criticizing the concept of repressed memory is Elisabeth Loftus. See E. Loftus and K. Ketcham. The Myth of Repressed Memories: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

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rience but a calm moment of being oneself naturally.7 Therefore, the dissociation may not represent a copying strategy via avoidance, but rather a personal opportunity and change, a creative way of reinventing the self. Novels like Chasing Sophea (2007) or Identical (2008) connect the dissociation of the protagonist closely and solely to personal childhood trauma thus wholly corresponding to the narratives of trauma psychology. The split of consciousness or the development of distinct personality states are therefore not mirrored on the background of societal discrepancies such as the Victorian values described in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Stevenson, but on personal experiences. These are only completely understandable to the protagonists themselves. The novel Sorrows of an American (2008) by Siri Hustvedt also takes interrelations of dissociation and experiences of posttraumatic stress and PTSD into account thereby connecting dissociation to contemporary psychological grounds. The mention of DID in Sorrows of an American, however, will be treated in quite different terms.8 The dissociation of the protagonist in The Zero (2007) on the other hand is closely connected to PTSD due to the chaos experienced at Ground Zero after 9/11. The author reflects on the mental reactions which mirror the absurdities of a confused life in a world of disaster and confusion with experiences of a shattered life and a shattered identity.

4.3

C ONTEMPORARY T HEORIES

OF

D ISSOCIATION

The concept of dissociation is prominent throughout contemporary models of the mind. Although dissociative identity disorder signifies the most severe form of dissociation, it may symbolize the pathogenic form of the natural dissociative structure of the human psyche (Howell 2005: ix). Dissociation here “refers to a rigid separation of parts of experience, including somatic experience, consciousness, affects, perceptions, identity, and memory” (ix.). At least a rudimentary sense of the “I” (Van der Hart et al. 2004) may be related to the separated states of self. Following somehow this idea, it is striking how the contemporary approach to the idea of dissociation is distinguished by a notable diversity with at least such a rudimentary sense of “I” or core. All recent theories of dissociative processes of the mind, however, refer to the dissociation model of Pierre Janet as the ‘somatoform dissociation’ theory, pointing directly back to his concept of the inseparability of body and mind (Howell 2005: 146). The most prominent contemporary scientist on this field is Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis and his study Somatoform Dissociation (2004) where he mentions dissocia-

7 8

This refers to the beach scene when the figure Taylor Durden first appears. I shall later explain my argumentation in the corresponding chapter on Fight Club. See the chapter on Sorrows of an American which treats DID on a more external and descriptive level. Hustvedt also avoids the controversy around DID by turning it into an eccentricity and obsession of an artist symbolized by his photographic gallery installation.

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tive symptoms experienced via physical and somatoform symptoms. Different states can also produce different physical symptoms. The ‘neodissociation theory’ of Ernest Hilgard is based on the model of attention, thought, and behavior as autonomous and isolated elements. His theory of the “hidden observer” in his work Divided Consciousness (1977) is still applied. It defines a basic consciousness that guards the different states of consciousness and thus enables the body to function properly, for example, the ability to hear etc. (Howell 2005: 138). Morton Prince derived a similar concept in his patient Miss Beauchamp (Prince 1900: 154). A cohesive theory of ‘structural dissociation’ is presented by Van der Hart, Nijenhuis and Steele (Nijenhuis and Van der Hart 1999, Van der Hart et al. 2000, Steele, Van der Hart, and Nijenhuis 2001, Van der Hart et al. 2004)9 which amalgamates classical and contemporary theories of both trauma and dissociation. “Integrative deficits” constitute a “lack of integration” and thus lead to a dividedness of personality (Van der Hart et al. 2004: 600). Relevant terms here are different parts of the personality: the ‘emotional person’ (EP) and the ‘apparently normal person’ (ANP) (see also Nijenhuis 2007), which structurally divide the personality. Psychiatrist Frank Putnam’s idea of ‘discrete behavioral systems’ (DBS) offers a basis for this structural theory since healthy personalities need to integrate throughout their lifetime. If a trauma is experienced, the EP is rooted in the trauma, often repeating or reenacting it, whereas the ANP seemingly functions well in daily life. The discrepancy arises from the interference of these two parts (Howell 2005: 131). Anthony Ryle published scientific works on ‘cognitive analytic therapy’ (CAT) which accentuate the “embeddedness of the individual in the social matrix and the importance of the internalization of reciprocal role relationships in the development of the personality” (Howell 2005: 122). According to Ryle, the “context of our relationship with others” (Ryle 2002: 40) shapes our psyche, procedural memories are established by a ‘reciprocal role procedure’ (RRP), and mutual interactions with others especially during childhood. Ryle bases his theory also on a concept of a “dialogic self” which was developed by literary critic Bakthin (The Dialogic Imagination 1981). Different conditions of feeling as well as behaving form “states of being” (Ryle 1997), representing an identification with certain roles, whereas the latter are always reflected on mutual actions and relations (Howell 2005: 124).10 The ‘multiple self states model’ (MSSM) finally understands the self as disturbed within its relations to the self states that include both role and reciprocating role. Accordingly, the dissociated identity cannot develop coherently or integrate configurations of RRP (Howell 2005: 125). Along a model of a continuum, an increasing lack of integrity constitutes a dissociated state of mind. A partly dissociated self or self state is still able to obtain a fundamental “capacity for self-observation” with diminished memory, claim Gokynkina and Ryle (Gokynkina and Ryle 1999). Such a lim-

9 10

See Howell 2005: 129. Trauma literature mentions the identification with the aggressor, explained as “switches in behaviour.” Ryle’s model of reciprocal role relationships also refers to this (Howell 2005: 259).

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ited perception may lead to amnesia and a restricted range of reciprocal role patterns. On a continuum, different degrees from healthy identity perceptions more difficult behavioral patterns such as in borderline personality disorder (BPD) may occur and eventually lead to a dissociative identity disorder. This variety of contemporary scientific approaches toward the concept of dissociation proves the relevance of the field. Concepts of a dissociated mind are not only connected to seemingly outdated theories of the 19th century but they are extremely alive and still inform a considerable amount of challenges (cf. Dell and O’Neil 2009).

5 The Other Side(s): Famous Cases of Double Consciousness and Multiple Personality The caseworker told me the symptoms, and I did my best to manifest them and then let her cure me […] For three months after I first met the caseworker, I was dissociative identity disorder because I wouldn’t tell the caseworker about my childhood. PALAHNIUK SURVIVOR 1999: 207-8

Despite controversies that surround the multiple personality debate, it is necessary to track a clear shape of typical cases so that the identification in fictional works is possible and comprehensible. The following chapter offers a variaty of famous cases of so-called double consciousness or multiple personality; each case is individually embedded in societal structures and the corresponding zeitgeist. The career of multiple personality is based upon a number of famous cases which are usually mentioned in theoretical works about this subject (cf. Putnam 1989, Hacking 1995, Kluft 1993). Besides frequent headlines on celebrities nowadays, who claim to suffer from MPD or DID, and regular appearances of multiple characters in TV movies like Sybil (1976 and 2008) or television series, for example, United States of Tara (2009), and even blockbuster films such as Mr. Brooks (2007), a couple of classic cases shaped the popular knowledge and awareness of the phenomenon. “It is instructive”, writes Putnam, “to read through the literature of single case reports spanning the history of multiple personality. After one has read any 10 randomly selected case reports, a ‘once you read one case report, you’ve read them all!’effect sets in” (Putnam 1989: 37). Apparently, the clinical symptoms may be the same, but the cause may be different. All the cases described here were assigned to the phenomenon of multiple personality and formed the understanding and definition of the disorder. It is the observation of the clinical symptoms that finally determine the definition of multiple personality. This is a difficult and often controversial venture. While some authors of the case reports knew little about “the reports of earlier clinicians, most seem not to have been particularly well informed”, admits Putnam (37). Some may have been too well informed as in the case of Doctor Cornelia Wil-

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bur and Sybil, the most famous and most controversial case during the 20th century. (cf. Degen 2000, Rieber 2006). All cases, however, are based on what the authors could witness with their patients. Putnam therefore sums up the typical statements on the individual cases. Firstly, the patient undergoes a sudden dramatic transformation and presents a side that contradicts previous behavior. For example, the other aspect of the self is childish in contrast to a depressed adult personality with changes concerning “speech, mannerism, affect, food and other preferences...and pain sensitivity or somatic symptoms” (Putnam 1989: 37). Secondly, the rapid transformation “appeared related to environmental stimuli” such as “syncopal episodes or brief periods of sleep”, which Putnam calls “swoon switches” (37). Thirdly, there can be amnesiac barriers that separate the personalities. These barriers can be polarized with one personality being amnesiac to the other but not vice versa (37). An account of several of the most important – yet definitely not all – cases of dual and multiple personality in this chapter gradually progresses from mere medical accounts to works of fiction. How reliable they are is another question. The book The Three Faces of Eve (1957), for example, was written by Eve’s therapists and was put into the novelist form. It was later translated into a movie. The story of Sybil, which was published in the 1970s, was first known as psychiatric case that turned into a novel which displayed a seemingly real case. It was not written by the therapist, Cornelia Wilbur, but by her friend Flora Rheta Schreiber. All cases were not merely experienced in isolation but were presented to the public. Thus, they all, like Morton Prince’s Miss Beauchamp, “deliberately aimed at a general audience” (Leys “The Real Miss Beauchamp” 43).

5.1

T HE “ UMGETAUSCHTE P ERSÖNLICHKEIT ”: G MELIN ’ S C ASE (1791)

One of the canonical incidents mentioned as an early case of modern multiple personality dates back to the year 1791. Henri Ellenberger cites a case treated by Eberhardt Gmelin, who published it as an incidence of “umgetauschte Persönlichkeit” or “exchanged personality” (Ellenberger 1970: 127). During the French Revolution in 1789, a German woman was moved by the sight of aristocratic French refugees. A rapid transformation of her behavior could then be observed: “Impressed by [the sight of aristocratic refugees], a twenty-year-old German young woman suddenly “exchanged” her own personality for the manner and ways of a French-born lady, imitating her and speaking French perfectly and German as would a French woman. These “French” states repeated themselves. In her French personality, the subject had complete memory of all that she had said and done during her previous French states. As a German, she knew nothing of her French personality.” (Ellenberger 1970: 127)

As Ellenberger notes, medical reports replaced reports of possession (127). The suggestibility of the woman here is shown with the “motion of the hand” (127) with

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which Gmelin lets the woman change her personalities. Even other cases prior to Gmelin’s case were reported, some of them still connected with possession (cf. Gauld 1992, Crabtree 1993). Cases both of men and women were documented. Ellenberger’s recount shows the clear distinction of personalities/persons (for example in the languages spoken).

5.2

M ARY P ORTER

AND

E STELLE (1836)

In 1836, a London physician noticed that an eleven-year-old girl, Mary Porter, suffered from the same condition. He concluded that “the cases of double consciousness, hitherto published, have mostly occurred in young females in whom the uterine functions were disturbed or, if in the male sex, where the nervous system has been weakened by excesses, terror, or other cerebral excitement” (Hacking 1997: 151), another male observance of female “uterine failure”. As Hacking notes, this vanished after puberty (151). One of the “hitherto published” cases of double consciousness had been the case of “la dame de Macnish” which was in fact the case of Mary Reynolds, an American, whose two states of consciousness received much attention both in France and the United States. Hacking contrasts this Mary Porter case with the case of “Estelle” introduced in France in the same year. Estelle’s condition made the headlines as a “theater of florid magnetism” (Shorter 1992: 160 cited in Hacking 1995: 156). Estelle’s second therapist was C.H.A. Despine, the “great magnetizer and the medical inspector at the fashionable spa in Aix-le-Savoie” (156) who describes “daydreams, fantastic visions and hallucinations” and “a magnetic state” (Despine cited in Ellenberger 1970: 129 ff.). Prior to this case, Despine had already reported on a woman with six different states of which one was observed to be a magnetic state, “which gave the patient an interior feeling of a second existence” (Shorter 1992: 160 cited in Hacking 1997: 156). Despine’s comments on the case, published in 1838 and 1840, gained much attention and its impact continues to the present day. Pierre Janet emphasized the importance of the case, which inspired his own research on this topic (Ellenberger 1970: 131). Richard Kluft, one of the most prominent modern psychiatrists in the field of American multiple personality theory, admitted that Despine had influenced him considerably (Hacking 1997: 156). “I hold in high esteem a man whom I consider my teacher, Antoine Despine, M.D., a French general practitioner of high repute, and a student of magnetism (hypnotism), [who] appears to be the first to have effected a nonexorcistic cure of MPD, in his treatment of Estelle” (Kluft 1993b: 88). Kluft had read about Despine in Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (Hacking 1995: 45). Estelle’s two states of consciousness , represented by her “ordinary state and her crisis (“état de crise”), and the resulting treatment by Despine using magnetism and hypnosis were later interpreted as presenting an early case of multiple personality with an adequate treatment. Catherine Fine, an activist on multiple personality, read Despine’s account on that case in this light (Fine 1988).

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Estelle’s case, on the other hand, was at that time and place one of many typical cases which were embedded in an environment of “bizarre symptoms”. This is asserted by Edward Shorter in his study on psychosomatic illnesses (Shorter 1988: 160). Ian Hacking’s presumption on Estelle is rather clear: the girl might have been nothing else but “a spoiled brat from Switzerland who loved publicity, manipulated the self-indulgent community of a French spa, and took advantage of the fashionable charlatan who was medical inspector there”. What Estelle had in common with other multiples was a certain tendency to “show off” (Hacking 1997: 157).

5.3

T HE O LD S TATE AND THE N EW S TATE : THE C ASE OF M ARY R EYNOLDS (1816)

The case that may have influence Mary Porter and Estelle was that of an American woman. In 1816, Reverend William S. Plumer published an article in Harper’s Magazine about a young woman named Mary Reynolds. Her condition was described as “a very extraordinary case of double consciousness in a woman” and considered as “the best-known English-speaking multiple of the nineteenth century (Hacking 1995: 150; italics in original text). The period in which this case was published was marked by revolutionary and political, scientific and industrial shifts with “the greatest diaspora the world has known – the settling of North America – and of an extraordinarily potent ideology matched to an unsettled New World” (Kenny 1986: 25). At that time, the zeitgeist understood the perception of selfhood as torn apart between new concepts of personal and societal freedom as well as a mixture of libertarian ethics and the “heritage of evangelical Christianity”, the latter composed of “anxious soul-searching, its dualism, and its messianic fervor” (25). In The Passion of Ansel Bourne (1986), Michael Kenny notes that this case was the “first detailed report of the medical phenomenon that came to be called ‘multiple personality’” (26). However, this “prototypical case” was not embedded in a pure culture unaffected by reports of this kind as the case itself reveals an “ambiguity that has affected this issue from the beginning” (26). When the case was briefly mentioned in an account during the year 1816 entitled “A Double Consciousness, or a Duality of Person in the same Individual”, it was not the duality of person which hit a public nerve but the mysterious term of double consciousness. The case finally became “the diagnostic category, in English, for most of the nineteenth century” (Hacking 1997: 150).1

1

See also: Mitchill, S. L. “Double Consciousness or a Duality of Person in the same Individual: From a Communication of Dr. MITCHELL to the Reverend Dr. NOTT, President of Union College. Dated January 16. 1816”. The Medical Repository of Original Essays and Intelligence Relative to Physic, Surgery, Chemistry and Natural History etc. 18 [or New Series 3] From the issue of February 1816 (Hacking 1995: 316).

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The case was originally described by John Reynolds, whose private account in Autobiography of John Reynolds (1870)2 provided detailed descriptions: “When I was employed, early in December, 1815, with several other gentlemen, in doing the duty of a visitor to the United States Military Academy at West Point, a very extraordinary case of double consciousness, in a woman, was related to me by one of the professors, Major Ellicot […] Miss R___ possessed naturally a very good constitution, and arrived to adult age without having it impaired by disease.” (Reynolds cited in Kenny 1986: 27)

But Mary Reynolds’s original state, here described as “a very good constitution” with a capacious memory contrasted with a second state of consciousness: “Unexpectedly, and without any kind of forewarning, she fell into a profound sleep, which continued several hours beyond the ordinary term. On waking, she was discovered to have lost every trait of acquired knowledge. Her memory was a tabula rasa; all vestiges, both of words and things, were obliterated and gone. It was found necessary for her to learn every thing again. She even acquired, by new efforts, the arts of spelling, reading, writing, and calculating, and gradually became acquainted with the persons and objects around.” (Kenny 1986: 27)

Mary Reynolds’s second state is the mind of a tabula rasa, as Reynold’s report notes (cited in Kenny 1986: 127). Kenny here refers to John Locke who had the idea that the mind is symbolized as a blank state upon which life and experiences gradually leave their marks. So far two states of consciousness have been defined here: the original state and the second state to which Mary Reynolds unexpectedly awoke after a “profound sleep” (Kenny 1986: 27). Soon another “fit of somnolency” invaded her just to change her again back into her original state: “On rousing from [another fit of somnolency], she found herself restored to the state she was before the first paroxysm; but was wholly ignorant of every event and occurrence that had befallen her afterwards. The former condition of her existence she now calls the old state, and the latter the new state; as she is as unconscious of her double character as two distinct persons are of their respective separate natures.” (Kenny 1986: 27; italics in original text).

Although Mary Reynolds was allegedly unaware of the other state when in her old or new state, thus acting noticeably as two distinct characters, she obviously could later name the two states and make a distinction. Indeed, in another report by Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, which included “a follow-up by Reverend William S. Plumer” (Ellenberger 1970: 129), the question of total separation of the two states also arises as Mary Reynolds was able to recollect some of her memories of her dead sister and of reading the Bible. The report says that “the case of Mary Reynolds is usually quoted as an instance of complete separation between the two personalities. Howev-

2

John Earle Reynolds (1870). Autobiography of John Reynold [privately printed on the occasion of his 88th birthday]. See Kenny 1993: 27.

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er, it is clear from Rev. Plumer’s account that the separation was not always complete” (Plumer here cited in Ellenberger 1970: 129). The question of total separation of the two sides is definitely fascinating. This shall be dealt with in detail when analyzing the most famous fictional character invented by Robert Louis Stevenson in Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Concerning the case of Mary Reynolds, Kenny also looks deeper into the matter: “At this point an interesting question arises, seen also in other cases of multiple personality, of the degree to which the various personalities in question are indeed separate” (52). The connection between the two states existed here as “the second Mary knew when the first was coming back” and “the second Mary intruded into the first’s domain” (52). John Reynolds’ report, however, describes her old state as consisting of her “original knowledge” and “her fine powers of penmanship”, whereas the new state meant she had to acquire everything anew writing then “a poor and awkward hand”. In addition, “if a new gentlemen or lady be introduced to her in the old state, and vice versa”, Mary Reynolds could only satisfactorily name them when introduced to them in both states (27). Thus, Mary Reynolds experienced several transitions from one state to the other: “During four years and upwards, she has undergone periodical transition from one of these states to the other. The alternations are always consequent upon a long a sound sleep. Both the lady and her family are now capable of conduction the affair without embarrassment. By simply knowing whether she is in the old or the new state, they regulate the intercourse, and govern themselves accordingly.” (Kenny 1986: 27)

Eventually, Mary Reynolds alternates between two different states of consciousness. The unexpected had become the common occurrence. Kenny concludes on the two sides of Mary: “Mary’s cultural background is a singularly important element in her case: her literary heritage provided her with images of the hidden “natural” self and an attitude toward Nature in general that were incorporated within the symbolic content of her second state, a symbolism that allowed her to fuse life and art and to escape through doing so the rigid constraints of her girlhood.” (Kenny 1986: 43)

Kenny distinguishes between Mary’s cultural side and the natural side. The first state is the culturally influenced one, the second a wilderness driven state of mind (Kenny 1986: 43). Mary herself finds pleasure in writing down her experiences, especially when in her second state, and makes sure in her first state that after the forthcoming transformation a piece of paper and a pencil are at hand: “I should want paper when I changed to my second state” (Mary Reynold cited in Kenny 52). She also expresses the freedom she feels when in her second state: “I was rather romantic in my disposition, and took great delight in rambling about the woods, and at such times I was fond of being alone” (43). These words somehow reminds one of the somnambulistic character in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799). The psychological novel was published in 1799 and explores man’s uncontrollable nature – symbolized

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by the somnambulistic side of Edgar Huntly during which he is also “rambling about the woods” but without knowing it when he is awake. The ingredients of 18th century Romanticism, as Kenny notes, formed Mary’s imagination: “poetry of Nature and Nature’s God; the Gothic Romance [...] its mysteries [...] the imagery of transmigration of souls [...] an embryonic fascination with the mystery and infinite possibilities of the self” (Kenny 1986: 44). The case of Mary Reynolds attracted considerable public attention. It had been published in Robert Macnish’s book Philosophy of Sleep in 1854 (Kenny 1986: 56). When it was printed in France entitled as a case of “la dame de Macnish”, nobody at first realized that it was actually the case of Mary Reynolds. It was understood that “both” cases were evidence of the existence of multiple personality (Ellenberger 1970: 129). Michael Kenny’s detailed description of Mary Reynolds mentiones the “western pale of settlement” in the United States and the religious imaginary that surrounded the culture of that time, especially religious mass meetings with “falling exercises” in which “great numbers of the devout – and less than devout – fell to the ground comatose” (Kenny 1986: 39).3 Considering herself a sinner, Mary Reynolds’ faith is based upon a strict Protestant culture on the one hand and severe transformational experiences on the other. Her own writings proves the distress she experiences: “While I was blind I often thought of those words of Sollomon” (Kenny 1986: 33). Kenny further argues that her condition was probably an “acute contradiction between her desires and her circumstances and between these desires and a Christian ethic of female self-sacrifice; this formidable combination was at first translated into the traditional hysterical idiom of female distress” (Kenny 1986: 36). Furthermore, Kenny asks whether the dualistic impressions of the New World versus conservative religious values, the separation of her parents and their reunion may have influenced Mary. Kenny asks, however, if she was therefore “in some way encouraged to develop a rebellious new self” (57; italics in original text). Her case is certainly embedded in the setting of a romantically perceived wilderness “transformed into the home of natural men and women opposed to the unnatural restrictions of culture” (60).

5.4

T HE TWO I DENTITIES OF A.B.: T HE C ASE OF ANSEL B OURNE (1890)

The second classic case of multiple personality in the United States in terms of a ‘dissociative fugue’ is that of Ansel Bourne. His condition eventually entered “into the literature on multiple personality” (Kenny 1986: 63). Bourne’s mysterious life inspired novelist Robert Ludlum to write his thriller The Bourne Identity (1984). After several sequels to the novel and movie adaptations, there is now a real “Bourne

3

Anthony Kubiak refers to such religious experiences in his essay “Splitting the Difference. Performance and Its Doubles in American Culture” (1998).

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Industry”.4 In Siri Hustvedt’s novel The Sorrows of an American (2008), one character displays similar symptoms of a dissociative fugue. William James personally spoke to Ansel Bourne and analyzed the case in The Principles of Psychology shortly before the book was published in 1890. Mentioned under the category of James’s term of ‘alternating personality’, Bourne’s case represents typical “lapses of memory” (379). As a consequence of such lapses of memory, “any man becomes, as we say, inconsistent with himself if he forgets his engagements, pledges, knowledges, and habits; and it is merely a question of degree at what point we shall say his personality has changed” (379).5 Bourne’s case reflects what is now called ‘dissociative fugue’. The fourth edition DSM lists the dissociative fugue as characterized “by sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one’s customary place of work, accompanied by an inability to recall one’s past and confusion about personal identity or the assumption of a new identity” (APA 1994: 477). William James classified Bourne’s condition in detail as a case of “alternate personality of the ‘ambulatory’ sort” (James 1890: 390). The time is set before the Civil War and the publication of The Origin of Species. Like with Mary Reynolds the values of carpenter Ansel Bourne were shaped on evangelical Protestantism in the course of his life (Kenny 1986: 63). However, before his mysterious symptoms first appeared, Ansel Bourne was a dedicated atheist who “became converted from Atheism to Christianity just before his thirtieth year” (James 1890: 391). On October 28 in the year 1857, Ansel Bourne left his house but suddenly felt dizzy and sat down. Thinking of somewhere else to rest, he imagined the “Christian Chapel” although he had always thought this the last place to go: “I would rather be struck deaf and dumb forever, than to go there” (Bourne cited in Kenny 1986: 64). Bourne’s condition, however, turned out to be serious; in fact he felt that his “major senses were gone” (Kenny 1996: 64). This loss could be observed and was interpreted as “severe cerebral disturbance” by his doctor (67). On November 15, Bourne was brought to the chapel and wrote down words of belief: “I have been led to think that God has something for me to do” (Bourne cited in Kenny 1986: 64). In an instant, all physical disturbances disappeared. The incident changed Ansel Bourne’s spiritual feelings; he became an itinerant preacher for the next twenty years. In 1887, when living in a town called Greene, another change occurred. However, now nobody “attributed it to divine agency” (67). William James notes on the case:

4

5

The novels about Bourne are part of what here is called the “conspiracy subgenre” or “the spy indide” of multiple personality fiction. The first and basic novel of this subgenre is, in my opinion, the novel by Richard Condon The Manchurian Candidate published in 1959. The Manchurian Candidate was transferred into a successful blockbuster movie in 1962 starring Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Landsbury and Frank Sinatra. The plot of the novel revolves around a brainwashing experiment in order to create a perfect assassin. Is shall later return to this topic in my chapter on films and subgenres of multiple personality. Other adaptations of the subgenre followed, for example, Mosaic in 1999, written by John Maxim or Legends in 2006 by Robert Littell. James 1890; hereafter abbreviated PP.

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“On January 17, 1887, he drew 551 dollars from a bank in Providence with which to pay for a certain lot of land in Greene, paid certain bills, and got into a Pawtucket horse-car. This is the last incident which he remembers. He did not return home that day, and nothing was heard of him for two months. He was published in the papers as missing, and foul play being suspected, the police sought in vain his whereabouts.” (PP 391)

After he left Greene and Providence, Ansel Bourne lead another life, the life of a man called A.J. Brown. One morning in March, Ansel Bourne woke up in the middle of another man’s life: “On the morning of March 14th, however, at Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A.J. Brown, who had rented a small shop six weeks previously stocked it with stationery, confectionery, fruit and small articles, and carried on this quiet trade without seeming to any one unnatural or eccentric, woke up in a fright and called the people of the house to tell him where he was.” (PP 391)

The environment of A.J. Brown meant nothing to Ansel Bourne, who could not remember anything: “He said his name was Ansel Bourne, that he was entirely ignorant of Norristown, that he knew nothing of shop-keeping, and that the last thing he remembered – it seemed only yesterday – was drawing the money from the bank, etc., in Providence.” (PP 391)

The man who woke up as Ansel Bourne could not recall the last two months. “He would not believe that two months had elapsed” (PP 391). After contacting Bourne’s family in Greene, it was confirmed that he told the truth by insisting that his name was Bourne. James continues on the case: “[They] took him home. He was very weak, having lost apparently over twenty pounds of flesh during his escapade, and had such a horror of the idea of the candy-store that he refused to set foot in it again.” (PP 391)

After resuming the life of his “normal personality” (PP 391), it was clear that Ansel Bourne had no memory of the time he had lived under the name of A.J. Brown. The Bourne identity literally had no knowledge of shop keeping or trade. Mr. Brown was characterized by those who had met him in Norristown as “taciturn, orderly in his habits, and in no way queer” (PP 392). The sympathetic Mr. Brown socialized in many ways: “He went to Philadelphia several times; replenished his stock; cooked for himself in the back shop, where he also slept; went regularly to church; and once at a prayer-meeting made what was considered by the hearers a good address, in the course of which be related an incident which he had witnessed in his natural state of Bourne.” (PP 392)

When James met Bourne in June 1890, he tried to revive the Brown identity and memory by means of hypnotism to see “if in the hypnotic trance, his ‘Brown’

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memory would not come back” (PP 392). Indeed this Brown memory did come back “with surprising readiness; so much so indeed that it proved quite impossible to make him whilst in the hypnosis remember any of the facts of his normal life” (PP 392). The Brown identity, however, was not able to recall the Bourne identity: “He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but ‘didn’t know as he had ever met the man.’ When confronted with Mrs. Bourne he said that he had ‘never seen the woman before,’ etc. On the other hand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight, and gave all sorts of details about the Norristown episode.” (PP 392)

It is astonishing that James comes to the conclusion that “the whole thing was prosaic enough; and the Brown-personality seems to be nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of Mr. Bourne himself” (PP 392). However, the extracts could not be put together, although Bourne seemed to make comments on the edge of his two lives: “He gives no motive for the wandering except that there was ‘trouble back there’ and he ‘wanted rest’. [He is] trying vainly to remember what lay before and after the two months of the Brown experience. “I’m all hedged in,“ he says: “I can’t get out at either end. I don’t know what set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don’t know how I ever left that store, or what became of it.” (PP 392)

Eventually James concludes that despite the Brown extract, which existed within Bourne, there are two distinct personalities within one body as he could observe a recognizable change of manners during hypnosis, as “during the trance he looks old, and he sits screening his eyes” (PP 392). There seemed to be no possibility of running “the two personalities into one, and make the memories continuous” so that James therefore concluded that “Mr. Bourne’s skull today still covers two distinct personal selves” (PP 392; my emphasis). In contrast to Mary Reynolds consistent transformation throughout her whole adult life, Bourne’s mysterious second state of Brown never returned. James calls it a “spontaneous hypnotic trance, persisting for two months” (PP 392). The Brown identity never came back, a fact that distinguishes the case from others “whether it contains an epileptic element or not [...] in similar cases, the attacks recur”, as James notes, closing the case in The Principles of Psychology (PP 392).

5.5

A C ASE OF P ERSONALITY C LUSTERS : M ISS B EAUCHAMP (1906)

The “best-known case by far” (Spanos 1996: 208) in the United States was that of “Miss Beauchamp”, whose condition was fastidiously described by the prominent Boston scientist and specialist Morton Prince in his study on multiple personality. His theories were strongly influenced by Pierre Janet’s concept of dissociation. The full and comprehensive account of the condition of “Miss Beauchamp” is found in

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the book The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology published in 1906.6 As the dissociation of Miss Beauchamp was one of the most famous cases in the early 20th century, it also received considerable attention at that time. Reports on the case were regularly published in major newspapers, for example, in the New York Times. The phenomenon of Miss Beauchamp’s occurrence of different personalities is mentioned in Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious as a case of ‘personality clusters’ (Ellenberger 1970: 139). Ellenberger explains that for a long time only cases of dual personality were published. However, it was later “realized that the human mind was rather like a matrix from which whole sets of subpersonalities could emerge and differentiate themselves” and as mesmerists had already shown by hypnotizing their patients, a third personality could appear during a session “as different from the usual magnetic personality” (139). The third personality, however, could be a product of therapy but sometimes such personality clusters developed spontaneously. One example was the case of Miss Beauchamp: “Christine Beauchamp, born in 1875, was twenty-three years of age when Morton Prince became acquainted with her in 1898. At that time she was a student in a New England college, a well-educated but very timid person who spent all of her time reading books. She had a high sense of duty, was diligent, scrupulous, proud and secretive and showed a morbid reticence to talk about herself.” (Ellenberger 1970: 139)

The Miss Beauchamp’s physical symptoms included “headaches, fatigue, and an inhibition of the will” (Ellenberger 1970: 139), the latter being the reason why Morton Prince eventually had been consulted. Her social background was represented by an “unhappy, middle-class family” (Hawthorn 1983: 6). Several times between the age of thirteen and sixteen, Miss Beauchamp had run away from home and had also experienced “a number of psychic traumas” (Ellenberger 1970: 139). One concerns the difficult relationship with her mother, who had died when Miss Beauchamp was thirteen (Hawthorn 1983: 8). The mother had “exhibited a great dislike” toward the child, as it had her father’s features, making her therefore ignore the child except “on occasions of reprimand” (DP 12). Consequently, the child “was to suppress all disclosures of her mental life” (DP 12) that made “her morbidly reticent” (DP 12). Normal expressions of “the ordinary feelings of everyday child life” (DP 12) were not possible. The young Miss Beauchamp was also described as “a nervous, impressionable child, given to day-dreaming and living in her imagination [...] She lived within herself and dreamed” (DP 12). Morton Prince started the treatment with hypnosis, “which he found easy to do” (Ellenberger 1970: 140). While under hypnosis, the patient showed no specifically different behavior as “she shed the artificial reserve of her waking state” (140). However, some weeks later a sudden change occurred. Eventually there were three states which Morton Prince names B I, B II and B III:

6

Prince 1906; hereafter abbreviated DP.

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“A few weeks later, Prince was surprised to see that when hypnotized, she displayed one of two different states (which he called B II and B III, giving to the waking-state personality the name of B I).” (DP 140)

The case’s complexity derived from the fact that the ability of one personality to be aware of the existence of the other personalities did not apply the other way around. In other words, some personalities knew of the others, whereas some states remained ignorant. The normal state of Miss Beauchamp or B I knew nothing of her other two states. The second state or B II knew the first state or B I but not B III. Yet the third state knew everything about B I and B II. The awareness of other sides thus can be classified as reverse: “Whereas B II was Miss Beauchamp intensified, B III was quite the opposite: she was gay, lively, reckless, rebellious, and she often stuttered. B I (Miss Beauchamp in her normal state) knew nothing of her two hypnotic subpersonalities; B II knew B I but not B III. On the other hand B III knew all about B I and B II. The second hypnotic subpersonality, B III, whom Prince called Chris, chose the name of Sally.” (DP 140)

The Sally identity disliked and detested B I “whom she found stupid”, but she was not cultivated like B I and finally “manifested her existence indirectly in Miss Beauchamp’s life by suggesting to her stupid words and actions” (DP 140). Sally seemed to be strong and in control of Miss Beauchamp’s life: “A few months later, Sally appeared directly on the scene in the form of an overt alternating personality who knew everything about Miss Beauchamp, while the latter was constantly left puzzled and embarrassed, never knowing what practical jokes Sally had played on her in the intervals.” (DP 140)

Finally, the last personality emerged as B IV and is named “The Idiot”; it “seemed to be a regressive personality” (DP 140). In the end, Morton Prince amalgamated all personalities into the “normal Miss Beauchamp”. In his final conclusion of the case Morton Prince wrote: “During the past six years (1898-1904) the three personalities have been playing a comedy of errors, which has been sometimes farcical and sometimes tragic. They run on and off stage in a way confusing to the observer, changing places from moment to moment, each personating the others in scenes to which she was but a moment before a stranger.” (DP 7 ff.)

Morton Prince refers to the original Miss Beauchamp as the normal and real self, as the self she was born with and “which she was intended by nature to be” (DP 1). The personalities of Miss Beauchamp had “come and go in kaleidoscopic succession; many changes were often made in the course of twenty-four hours” (DP 2). These behaviors, Morton states, provoked “social complications and embarrassments” (DP 2) by changing moods and behavioral patterns that seemingly contradicted each other and thus lead to an “inconvenient mode of living” (DP 3). What is notable is how Sally came into existence. This state of Miss Beauchamp first occurred under hypno-

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sis while the patient had her eyes closed . Sally therefore could first only speak but not see. She claimed that it was “her deliberate purpose to get her eyes open” and thus be born and consequently even overcome the tedious Miss Beauchamp (DP 91). An explanation of Miss Beauchamp’s development of distinct personalities was found in severe traumatic experiences. Sally functioned as a co-conscious personality and was born when Miss Beauchamp learned to walk (Hawthorn 1983: 7): “[Sally] claimed to remember what she, as distinct from Miss Beauchamp, thought at the time when she was learning to walk. Then B I was frightened, she said, and wanted to go back, but subconscious Sally was not at all frightened and wanted to go ahead.” (DP 278)

It was already shown that Prince linked his theory of multiple personality to “a matter of brain associations” and the development of a therefore “disintegrated personality” to a loosening of normal associations which could eventually create the “doubling of consciousness” (DP 22). Hence, the dissociation of Miss Beauchamp emerged “in response to a traumatic social pressure” (Hawthorn 1983: 8), which was in this case to be determined as the death of her mother and also an incident during her young adulthood: “During this time she was a student at a hospital, and one appropriately dramatic night, when not only was there a violent storm raging outside but she had been terrified by a deranged patient rushing toward her, she caught sight of a young man in whom she had a romantic interest at the window of a room in the Nurses’ Home in which she was living. She managed to meet this ‘William Jones’ at the door of the Home without arousing the suspicions of the other nurses, and at the door an ‘exciting scene’ took place in which Mr. Jones apparently used extremely passionate language to her.” (DP 8)

The traumatic events (loss of mother and the above window scene) caused, according to Morton Prince, a dissociative retrograde amnesia “which removed all knowledge of the event, and for the next six years she alternated with a different, new personality” (DP 8). Prince also links the birth of the third personality to the shock when Miss Beauchamp read a letter of “Jones” consisting of the same words used at the door (DP 8). Eventually, three personalities of Miss Beauchamp were entitled as “The Saint, The Woman, The Devil” (DP 8), and the fourth was named “The Idiot”. Therefore B I symbolized Miss Beauchamp (“The Saint”), B II the hypnotized Miss Beauchamp (“The Woman”) and B III at last was Sally (“The Devil”), who was first named by Prince as Chris. These personalities had distinct behavioral patterns and were also easy to differentiate. According to the major American cases of multiple personality described by Morton Prince (The Dissociation of a Personality in 1906), Thigpen and Cleckley (The Three Faces of Eve in 1957) and then particularly Schreiber (Sybil in 1973), such distinct personalities were a phenomenon that is always emphasized. The observation, however, was mostly made by male doctors describing female patients. In the case here, the distinction of Miss Beauchamp’s personalities as The Saint, The

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Woman and The Devil “tells us a lot about Prince as well as about Miss Beauchamp” (Hawthorn 1983: 8) and their relationship: “It is interesting to note that very often when a male investigator is describing the difference between two personalities of a woman, one will be described as clearly prettier, which gives food for thought concerning the extent to which sexual attractiveness is exclusively physical.” (Hawthorn 1983: 8)

Prince describes Miss Beauchamp as basically “very suggestible” and manifesting “aboulia” which is “an inhibition of will by which a person is unable to do what he actually wishes to do” (DP 15). He adds that “there was also a decided limitation of the field of consciousness, in the sense that her mind at certain moments was strongly absorbed in and dominated by certain particular ideas” (DP 15). This condition was “carried to the verge of morbidness, or to what more exactly might be termed 'fixed ideas'” (DP 9) – the term “fixed ideas” deriving from Pierre Janet’s vocabulary. During therapy, Miss Beauchamp became more and more “psycho-neurologically disintegrated, so that all sorts of automatism and perverted reactions to the environment were permitted to the nervous system” (DP 65). After the distinct personality Sally (B III) was determined – “Sally had gotten her eyes open at last, and with the opening of her eyes she may be said to have been truly born into this world” (DP 96) – Miss Beauchamp, shy and inhibited, and Sally, strong and lively, then constantly fought, with Sally usually being the dominant personality: 7 “Continuing the conversation about French novels and wickedness, Chris [Sally] remarked laughingly, ‘She does not enjoy wickedness. I do. She thinks she is going to be a sister. She won’t as long as I am here.’

7

Miss Beauchamp had written a letter during her Sally state to her admired “William Jones”, in which she said: “To-morrow, mio caro amico, we go to the shore for the day. Please stop at P. & S.’s first and then meet me at the Union at ten. 'As always'” (Prince 1906: 97). In her Miss Beauchamp state, however, she intercepted this letter, titled (B), and another letter, titled (A), which contained the expression “Never again shall I be squeezed – never again be bored!”, and send them both to Morton Prince with another letter now written as Miss Beauchamp: “Dear Dr. Prince, - I do really think that, like those poor people of old, I must be possessed of devils. [...] All this is to explain my sending you the enclosed notes. [...] To-day my sin consisted in telling but half the truth, as you will see by looking at the notes, one of which [(A)] is very absurd, and wholly without meaning, as I told you. The other [(B)], as I did not tell you, is apparently a perfectly natural note. But it is not natural or like me at all. I do wish you would believe me, Dr. Prince. I know you wont. It is not because the note is wicked that I disclaim it [...] I am frightened and afraid of myself if such things are liable to occur at any time. I know that these two last attacks are different from any I have ever had. It is as though I were filled with the spirit of mischief incarnate. [...] And now, hoping most sincerely that you will forgive me, and wont be very cross because I have troubled you with this appeal, I remain, etc.” (DP 96 f.; my emphasis).

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‘Why?’ [With an expression of disgust on her face.] ‘I have a great objection to having nothing to eat, and doing things I am told to do, and going to church and being preached at. I have other things to do.’ ‘What?’ [Laughing.] ‘To smoke cigarettes.’” (DP 56)

As Sally, Miss Beauchamp could arrange dates with “William Jones” and also meet him. In her energetic Sally state, Miss Beauchamp was preferred also by William James,8 who was well acquainted with the case. When at Prince’s consulting room, Sally often seemed to be overpowering, Prince often eliminated the identity by means of anaesthetization. Prince’s daughter comments thus on the case: “Miss Christine L. Beauchamp [...] came at all hours to the house [...] At odd moments of the day or night she would appear, according to the crisis that her multiple and diversified personalities chose to present. ‘Sally’ was the most obstreperous and the strongest of all her diversified personalities. Sometimes if ‘Sally’ was too obstreperous, odors of ether would emerge from the office. At such times she was resisting hypnotic suggestion.” (Kenny 1986: 44)

Hypnosis had at first made it possible for the Sally identity to appear, she actually “came into the world during her time with Prince” (Kenny 1986: 145) and her condition became worse when with Prince (143). Yet the detailed description of this case, according to Morton Prince, proved the existence of multiple personalities; he surmised therefore: “The evidence given by all three personalities, as well as by the hypnotic selves, has been laboriously recorded” (DP 8). During therapy, Prince also had contact to the spiritist society, mainly to Richard Hodgon and other members of the “Tavern Club”, where spiritist imagery was cultivated (Kenny 1986: 145). Miss Beauchamp was also guest at the Society for Psychical Research as she was “well aware of the spiritist hypothesis and, in her guise as Sally, played at mediumship while in treatment with Prince”. In letters, she had mentioned that she “must be possessed of devils” (146). Thus, Prince was acting as an exorcist while Miss Beauchamp was under hypnosis in order to control the vivacious Sally identity. In chapter VIII “Subconscious battles: Aboulia, Impulsions, Obsessions” Prince describes such an exorcism: “One day, for instance, when asked whether she had made any more secret engagements, she admitted that she had, but refused to tell more because I would stop her fun. Remonstrances proved vain, so I told her she should be compelled by other means to submit. Putting my finger to her forehead, I made her believe I had the power of exorcism. The effect was remarkable. She shrank from me much as the conventional Mephistopheles of the stage shrinks from the cross on the handle of the sword, at the same time complaining that it made a ‘terrible’ painful

8

“Who & what is the lovely Sally“, James wrote to Prince, “that is a very dark point“ (Kenny 1986: 148).

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sensation run through her body. This was a feeling of coldness so intense that from its very painfulness it paralyzed her will and reduced her power of resistance.” (DP 137)

Miss Beauchamp declared that she could not remember the engagements that Sally had made. Moreover, it “distressed her to discover later that in this interval of lost time she had carried out plans objectionable to herself” (DP 128). The exorcism was set up “in a novel context” (Kenny 1986: 146) that was probably influenced by popular media and usual behavior at spiritist sessions and exemplified the mixing of culture and medical treatment. On spiritist sessions and hypnosis, Spanos notes that “James (1909) and other turn-of-the-century psychical researchers (for example, Flournoy, 1900; Podmore, 1902) were well aware that the spirit personalities exhibited by mediums were influenced by tacit understandings, social expectation, and sometimes outright fraud” (Spanos 1996: 206). In a critical account of the case of Miss Beauchamp and Prince’s attempt to find the “real self” of his patient, Ruth Leys states that the hypnotized patient is controlled not only by a dubious secondary personality (in this case Sally) but of external pressure and expectations. Thus, it acts out a mimicry or mimetic presentation of what the therapist himself interprets. The state of consciousness occurring during hypnosis is thus attributed to the literal other (cf. Leys “The Real Miss Beauchamp”). The real identity or rather, the real name, of “Miss Beauchamp” was Clara Norton Fowler (cf. Gifford 1978, McKellar 1979, Kenny 1986). Kenny describes Fowler’s life as characterized by its astonishing “upward mobility” as she had her own career of being a patient and eventually becoming “a high-society hostess” (Kenny 1986: 139). The case of Miss Beauchamp subsequently became part of the popular culture as well. Prince wanted to publish the case and create a sensation. With the hoped-for success, Prince wanted to influence the awareness and acceptance of multiple personality in the United States. Meanwhile, in Europe, the theory of psychoanalysis on the one side and the term of schizophrenia on the other side were about to absorb the theory multiple personality by eliminating the term hysteria, on which Prince and others had based their concept. As a renowned psychological authority in Boston, however, Prince described the case “for the general public with deliberately propagandistic intent” (139) creating a “great sensation” (Leys “The Real Miss Beauchamp” 43): “I remember that in 1906, when The Dissociation of a Personality was published, the work done outside of the psychoanalytic school was so little read that I determined I would, if possible, at least make ‘them’ read. So in writing the Dissociation I purposely, with ‘malice afterthought’, constructed it [sic!] in the form of a dramatic story of great length, 563 pages. As a scientific account it might well have been condensed within the compass of fifty pages. I think my little ruse was successful.” (Kenny 1986: 140)9

9

Kenny noted on this comment by Prince: “Perhaps colored by Prince’s later antipathy for psychoanalysis [matched by Freud’s antipathy for him] his statement about why the Dissociation was published cannot stand as it is” (Kenny 1996: 207 n28). Psychoanalysis was not successful at that time, but Prince was a successful doctor.

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Indeed, which must have been quite satisfactory for Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality influenced the popular culture of multiple personality. Consequently in the year 1913, a stage play was brought to the Belasco Theater in New York. Five hundred writers had participated in a competition and had sent their version (Hacking 1995: 232). Edward Locke had also worked on a play which referred to the case of Miss Beauchamp. He initially named it “After Many Days” and eventually renamed it as “The Case of Becky”. The play that Locke wrote “was a potboiler, but one that is highly revealing about what the public at that time thought possible and dramatically acceptable” (Kenny 1986: 158). Locke received “widespread attention” (157).10 There are three central characters in the play: Becky, the girl with two personalities; Emerson, the hypnotizer and neurologist; and “Professor” Balzamo, who is a charlatan and “evil stage-mesmerist” (Kenny 1986: 158). The normal self of Becky, named Dorothy, was sweet and innocent, whereas Becky was devilish: “Oh, I got her number! She thinks she’s foxy, but I know. She can’t hide anything from me...The damned little fraud: That’s what I detest about that woman: That’s what gets me going. Oh, she gives me the ginks. She’s so sweet, so sedate and good, so damned nice!” (Locke cited in Kenny 1986: 158)

Dr. Emerson, the benevolent doctor, comments on the two sides (good and evil) of the Dorothy/Becky character and thus sticks to a strict separation: “The vast warehouse of the brain, where everything is stored – the things we need – the things we don’t need – all the bad we know and force ourselves to forget – with lots of things we know that we really don’t know we know – the conscious mind having forgotten them. To apply the story to the present case: Dorothy is Dr. Jekyll; Becky, her other self, is Mr. Hyde.” (Locke cited in Kenny 1986: 158)

Whether the plain distinction between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is usually made, is correct, shall be analyzed later. As for Edward Locke and his dramatic approach to the topic, the two sides of medical care are clear: the good side represented by Dr. Emerson, and the bad side as its counterpart by Balzamo, who initially constructs a second personality in Dorothy just to prove his power. Balzamo’s evil deeds are brought to an end by an “electric hypnotic-induction machine [which Dr. Emerson] implants [as] a posthypnotic suggestion” (Kenny 1986: 159).

10

Some of the reviews seemed to be quite approving such as in the Red Book Magazine, which stated: “The uncanny fascination of the unseen forces that rule Becky in the new play of dual personality by Mr. Edward Locke [...] will be a signal for much speculation and discussion” (Kenny 1986: 158). Another review mentioned a “question of mental suggestion” which was to be “disputed as vigorously and also to as little purpose as the topic of the survival of personal energy after death” (158). In the American Playwright, the stage adaptation was praised for its “unflagging vitality: and that is art” (ibid. 211 n81). Yet the play was also considered “unimportant if true” (158).

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On May 15, 1913, the year when “The Case of Becky” was staged, the New York Times printed an article on the legal proceedings concerning the original idea of the play. A Miss Amelia Bachmann unsuccessfully claimed that Edward Locke had to be punished for stealing her idea of a fictional character with a dual personality. Her play was called “Estelle” and featured such a double-sided girl: “Miss Amelia Bachman began suit yesterday before Judge Mayer at the Federal District Court, as author of the play “Estelle”, for alleged infringement of copyright.”11 However, it was obvious that Bachman must have come across her theme in another case. It was the case of Estelle mentioned earlier.12 The characters of the two plays, however, still adhered to on the idea of a doublesided personality with strict behavioral patterns. This changed with another case when the idea of multiple personality was again first reported on medical files and later translated into a fictional work. This time the doctors themselves functioned as novelists. After a considerable time, the multiple personality eventually became popular again since the theory of psychoanalysis had then swept over the United States and ended the career of multiple personality. And after the publication of another case featured in the novel The Three Faces of Eve in 1957, the idea of multiple personality surfaced once more. The 1950s proved to be the years of a real multiple personality hype when it came to fiction, and it was the account of the psychiatrists Thigpen and Cleckley that prepared the ground for it. “In the interim between 1913 and 1957”, Kenny notes, “when The Three Faces of Eve was published, multiple personality nearly disappeared in the public eye and as a medical concept” (Kenny 1986: 159). Nevertheless, the case of Eve rescued the concept of multiple personality and made the diagnosis popular and adoptable for the mid-20th century.

11

12

New York Times. “Sues Belasco and MyKay; Says Her Idea of Dual Personality was used in “The Case of Becky“. 15 May 1913. The playwright Locke testified the transformation of the Prince case, which actually presented a triple personality “but the witness explained he had given Becky only a double personality to make it easier for the actress who has his heroine”, ‹http://www. query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-fee/pdf?_r=&res=9507E1D91F3AE633A2575 6C1A9639C946296 D6CF›. Web. 31 Oct 2010. Another connection to a fictional work is mentioned in Ruth Ley’s essay on the “real Miss Beauchamp” where she claims that Olive Higgins Prouty’s Novel Now, Voyager (1941) – made into a successful movie starring Bette Davis – varies the topic of transformation of the self and different names when the protagonist briefly adopts the alleged identity of a Renée Beauchamps (Leys 2000: 42). A rather more obvious connection is to be found in Shirley Jackson’s novel The Bird’s Nest (1954), which shall be discussed later on.

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T HE T HREE S ELVES OF E VE : T HIGPEN AND C LECKLEY (1957)

After famous cases such as Morton Prince’s “Miss Beauchamp” became part of the public awareness, another case contributed to the concept of multiple personality: the case of Eve Lancaster known as The Three Faces of Eve. Michael G. Kenny explained how such a concept of multiple personality “matched the experience of individuals and the circumstances of the societies in which they lived” (Kenny 1986: 162). The case of Eve was seen as a classic example of “'personal problems experienced by many women” whose difficulties were caused “by the operation of social taboos and conventions” (Hawthorn 1983: 17) thus creating a situation in which a feeling of conflict between rival demands of self-realization and social pressure is born (17). The problems and difficulties experienced by women and men, who had to balance their lives on personal expectations and societal limitations, were also mixed with another important factor: “The degree to which the incidence of multiple personality is influenced by a climate of public expectation fostered by the media itself” (Kenny 1986: 170). Corbet Thigpen and Hervey Cleckley, both physicians, described the case of Eve and “contributed a great deal to these developments” (171) of the popularization of multiple personality. The case “became a media event.13 Given the quasi-novelistic form in which it was presented, evidently it was meant to” (172). The cause of Eve’s fragmentation was, however, explained in no modest terms. Kenny sees it as “a marvel of nature” (172) and yet the therapists Thigpen and Cleckley later condemned “the profligacy and propagandizing” of multiple personalities (Hacking 1995: 41). However, they did not hesitate to transform a medical case into a media sensation by filming Eve and publishing their psychiatric account or study in the form of a novel, later even allowing the latter to be used for a movie adaptations: “They accused [the multiple movement] of finding vastly too many multiples. Eve, they implied, had been correctly treated, even if she later fell into bad company. A clinician might at best see one or two genuine cases of multiple personality in a lifetime. The epidemic that surged in the late 1970s was, they said, largely composed of unhappy people who cultivated symptoms that made them feel important, and was fostered by uncritical medicine.” (Hacking 1995: 41)

In 1984, Thigpen and Cleckley admitted that the publication of Eve’s case was in fact the account of such a genuine case of multiple personality. However, the success of

13

A video can still be seen at the popular website www.youtube.com, in which “Eve” displays her three characters. Whether these characters are really so different or not is questionable. One of the various videos online contains comments by Thigpen and Cleckley such as “Let us hear the various personalities speak” or states that the secondary “bad” personality of Eve Black gives “the impression of a reckless, fun-loving girl” whose gestures suggest “impish merriment.” Did_three_faces_eve. Youtube. 21 Apr 2013.

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The Three Faces of Eve as novel and later Hollywood movie created a culture of hysteria that was a fad (Kenny 1986: 171): “It seems that in very recent years there has been a further increase in the number of persons seeking to be diagnosed as multiple personalities – some patients move from therapist to therapist until ‘achieving’ the diagnosis – and similarly, among some patients who ostensibly have the disorder there is a competition to see who can have the greatest number of alter personalities. (Unfortunately, there also appears to be a competition among some therapists to see who can have the greatest number of multiple personality cases).” (Thigpen and Cleckley cited in Kenny 1996: 171; my emphasis)

Eve, however, displayed “merely” three personalities: Eve White, Eve Black and the healthy third mental state after therapy. In the year 1954, her case was published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (Thigpen and Cleckley 1954). The personalities in Eve are the innocent Eve White, who is a shy, bored and depressed housewife; and Eve Black, who symbolizes the vivacious part, a party girl, “leaving her host personality with unexplained hangovers and a reputations in local bars” (Acocella 1999: 2). Thigpen and Cleckley describe the patient’s background as religious: “Six years ago she married a young man. He was a faithful and serious member of the Catholic Church. As a Baptist, serious too in her own religion, she had had misgivings about the oath she was required to take, an oath promising that her children would be carefully brought up as Catholics. [...] At the first interview she admitted that she could not bring herself to send her little girl, Bonnie, to her husband’s church.” (Thigpen and Cleckley 1957: 8)

Eve Lancaster’s maiden name was in fact Eve Black “which suggests that one of her impulses leading to dissociation was a desire to regain the independence of a premarital status” (Hawthorn 1983: 29). The Eve Black identity was free to do whatever she wanted to do. Eve Black therefore symbolically functioned exactly as the Mr. Hyde figure did. The same applied to the other side of Ansel Bourne named A.J. Brown or Miss Beauchamp’s Sally figure. The different requirements of different situations triggered another personality. Interestingly, none of these secondary personality states survived in the end due to therapy or social pressure.14 Switches of personality states as escape were reported by Arnold M. Ludwig and others, who confirms a certain “‘automatic switch-over mechanism’ for the evocation of the appropriate, corresponding personality (Ludwig et al. 1972: 308 cited in Hawthorn 1983: 26). Henri Ellenberger comments on these switches that “the appearance and disappearance of the fugue state curiously responded to the needs of certain situations” (Ellenberger 1970: 26).

14

Fictional secondary characters, however, can survive. The Mr. Hyde figure did outlive the Dr. Jekyll figure, a fact which finally ended in disaster as known. The unnamed narrator in Fight Club is eventually confronted with the image of Taylor Durden, who survives (in the novel, the film version depicts a totally different ending).

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Hawthorne noted on the case of Eve that it resembled a typical example of “the double-bind” (Hawthorn 1983: 17). Eve cannot meet the requirement of her religion, a pattern that was “similar to that found in Morton Prince’s account of Miss Beauchamp’s entrapment between the rival demands of her sexuality and social convention” (17). From Eve Black emerged her “sweet sister“ Eve White without hypnosis, as Thigpen and Cleckley emphasize (Kenny 1986: 172). Although they recognize the case of Eve as multiple personality, the patient, as they stress, is not encouraged to create a secondary personality state (Thigpen and Cleckley 1957: 136), suggesting they are aware of such artificiality. However, they insist on the distinct personalities within Eve so that during therapy it is possible to change from one personality to the other by “flicking a light-switch”, as Kenney notes (Kenny 1986: 172). The patient is continually asked: “Can I speak to [whatever person they wanted]…?” Hacking does not considers the case of Eve as the beginning of the modern concept of multiple personality or the multiple movement, especially in the form of the “popularized book” being a best-seller (Hacking 1995: 40). Within what Hacking calls “the multiple movement”, the case of Eve does not constitute the prototype of the contemporary multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder, with a number of personalities or now more precisely identities. Relatively speaking, this case was still based on the duality of a good and an evil side. For a while, however, Eve did become the prototype of the modern multiple personality (Acocella 1999: 3): “In later cases, as in Eve’s, there was usually the good-bad split – ‘librarian by day and streetwalker by night,’ to quote MPD expert Putnam. Later multiples, like Eve, also tended to show asymmetrical amnesia, with the “good” personality remaining ignorant of the activities of the ‘bad’ one while the latter knew all about her prim counterpart and enjoyed her life hell.” (Acocella 3; my emphasis)

To become the prototype for the later multiple personality, Hacking maintains, the case of Eve also lacked the “framework” of child abuse (Hacking 1995: 41). Because of this lack of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) as a cause “no one who writes in movement literature has a good word to say for the book, and many critics voice hard judgment of her psychiatrists”, he notes (40). The Three Faces of Eve had been written “in an age of innocence” and therefore it did “nothing to make multiplicity intelligible” (41). As Eve consisted only of three personalities, the case is “light-years from more recent multiplicity” (41) as it is understood as the “ancient régime of MPD – only three alters, no sex abuse history” (Acocella 1999: 55; italics in original text). The Three Faces of Eve therefore “gave a misleading picture of MPD and ironically may have helped to obscure the clinical features of the disorder” (55). The history of this case, however, did not end with the publication of The Three Faces of Eve in 1957.15 After the book was turned into a movie The Three Faces of

15

In 1955, one year after the first scientific publication of the Eve case, Shirley Jackson published her third novel The Bird’s Nest. In the novel, a woman is suffering from a similar disorder. I shall refer to this book in a later chapter. Jackson extensively quotes Morton Prince and his book The Dissociation of Personality (1906).

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Eve in the same year, starring Joanne Woodward), several books followed written by Eve herself (or herselves).16 The real name of the patient was Chris Costner Sizemore, who “took over the story” (Hacking 1995: 41) and published three books representing her visions of her life. In fact, those books resemble the three faces of Eve (41). Using first a pseudonym, she published the story The Final Faces of Eve with the support of her doctors Thigpen and Cleckley in 1958. On May 25 1975, Sizemore revealed her real name in the Washington Post and published a book called I’m Eve in 1977. In this account, she “poured scorn” (Hacking 1995: 41) upon her former doctors and described her now more than twenty personalities as well as the discovery of her hidden history of child abuse (41). By then Eve or Sizemore and her more than twenty personalities had become one of the typical multiple personalities in the 1970s: “She did not so much join the movement as serve as a perfect exemplar of the new vision of multiplicity that emerged in the 1970s – including misdiagnosis or maltreatment by an earlier generation of doctors. She went on the lecture circuit denouncing her former therapists, although movement psychiatrists gave the impression of keeping their distance from her.” (Hacking 1995: 41)

The existence of the first personalities of Eve had to be explained also. In her final book, which was published in 1989 under the title of A Mind of My Own, Sizemore stated that the two personalities, which appeared in The Three Faces of Eve, were in fact “with her from birth. That is because they are past-life alters” (41). The novelistic version of multiple personality, however, as it was presented in The Three Faces of Eve, played a considerable role in finding a concrete phenomenon of an altered consciousness (cf. Kenny 1996: 172). Henry Hawksworth, for example, based his story of The Five of Me (1977) on Eve. Having a certain degree of experience in the mental health establishment, he was “well acquainted with psychology” and “the theoretical orientations of his therapists” (173). In order to prove his disorder, Hawksworth was to demonstrate his condition, while hypnotized, in front of a jury, after he was put to trial because of his violence (172). Another case was influenced by Eve as well. The serial killer Kenneth Bianchi, who was named the “Hillside Strangler”, stated that he suffered from multiple personality disorder, but was found guilty. During trial, a psychiatrist had “asked himself rhetorically whether it might be possible to fake multiple personality” and the answer was positive (173). It could be shown that Bianchi had read a considerable amount of literature on multiple personality and had also seen the movie The Three Faces of Eve (173). In a later case, that of Billy Milligan, Thigpen and Cleckley declared the de-

16

Watching the film version The Three Faces of Eve, the impression of a woman being suppressed in a male power system (the husband, the psychiatrists) is very evident. For example, the alter personality of Eve Black seems to be an independent woman almost like a Beatnik version of Eve White, the troubled housewife. Eve Black’s behavior, her smoking in front of the psychiatrist and so on was obviously not allowed in a restrictive environment.

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fendant to be guilty and testified that his diagnosis of MPD was a fraud (173). Milligan’s psychiatrist was Cornelia Wilbur, who was responsible for the most famous case of multiple personality in the United States: the case of Sybil.

5.7

F ACT OR F ICTION ?: T HE S IXTEEN P ERSONS

OF

S YBIL (1973)

“Only seldom”, wrote Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen on the case of Sybil, “can we date the emergence of a psychiatric syndrome with such precision: Multiple Personality Disorder [...] was born in 1973 with the publication of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book Sybil” (Borch-Jacobsen 1997). The case of Sybil revealed not only two personalities or maybe a third state but eventually exhibited the existence of sixteen distinct personalities. Psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Cornelia Wilbur, who treated the patient, was “the originator of the modern conceptualization of multiple personality disorder” and all who worked with MPD after the case of Sybil were “her offspring” (Loewenstein 1993: 51). This was the first American case to describe “the complexity of the alter system in MPD” and its relation to childhood abuse and trauma (51). The fragmented condition of Sybil was eventually interpreted as a development of sixteen distinct personalities due to an abusive mother. Schreiber’s account of the case is found in the novel Sybil, a “fictionalized ‘as told so’ story” (Hacking 1995: 41). It describes the therapy of Sybil, the diagnosis and the uncovering of the personalities by her therapist Wilbur, with whom the patient was even on very friendly terms: “The two women became friends, went for long rides in the country, and lived for a while in the same house” (42). Cornelia Wilbur had tried to publish accounts on the case during therapy, which began in the 1950s, but the psychiatric establishment refused a publication “apparently on the grounds that no one could take multiple personality seriously” (42): “One crushing insult followed upon a paper she read at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. Wilbur believed that the academy published all the papers that were read, but she was telephoned and told there were ‘space problems’. Since Sybil’s case would not be received by the experts, it had to be told for the public.” (Hacking 1995: 42)

Morton Prince had written about his conflicts with the theory of psychoanalysis and Freud. He had declared that he intended to regain the public’s attention by transforming the case of Miss Beauchamp into a more readable text (“So in writing the Dissociation I purposely, with ‘malice afterthought’, constructed it in the form of a dramatic story of great length” (cited in Kenny 1986: 140). In collaboration with the journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber, Wilbur could transform the case of her patient Sybil into a fictional story. The novel Sybil, however, was by no means the first literary account on the phenomenon of dual or multiple personality that received a wider audience. As shown, Eve came earlier but Sybil added the abuse. Fortunately for Wilbur, the novel Sybil could mention a number of successful descriptions and conversions of the multiple personality topic such as Hollywood movie adaptations of dif-

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ferent novels. Lizzie, which was based on the novel of Shirley Jackson The Bird’s Nest (1955), was released in 1956, starring Eleanor Parker as a woman with three identities and lives. The now classic thriller Psycho (1960) was realized by Alfred Hitchcock and based on the thriller with the same title written by Robert Bloch in 1959. In addition, there was The Three Faces of Eve, published as a novel in 1957 and made into a movie in the same year. All of these movie adaptations were blockbusters and played an important role in the American history of multiple personality as a culturally reflected syndrome. The character of Sybil herself is described as being aware of such fictional works as she saw the movie The Three Faces of Eve with a friend: “In 1957, for instance, when the movie Three Faces of Eve was released, Sybil and Teddy saw it together because they had heard it was about a multiple personality. In the movie Eve White changed into Eve Black, who, talking to the doctor, dropped her eyes coquettishly. Teddy grabbed hold of Sybil and whispered, “That’s exactly what you do.” Misunderstanding, Sybil thought that Teddy had meant that she was flirtatious. ‘Is this the way I act with people?’ Sybil asked in dismay. ‘No,’ Teddy replied. ‘That’s the way you look when you change from on to another. You have a sort of blank look just for a moment.’ ‘The movie was exactly like Sybil,’ Teddy later told Dr. Wilbur. ‘No,’ the doctor explained. ‘Sybil and Eve don’t have the same kind of personality. The reasons for being multiple personalities are not the same. But I do agree that Sybil and Eve have the same blank look when they change.’” (Schreiber 1973: 381)17

As mentioned before, The Three Faces of Eve had been written during an “age of innocence” (Hacking 1995: 41) when sexual abuse during childhood was not determined to be the main factor of dissociation and multiple personality. However, Wilbur’s intention to uncover a hidden childhood trauma “broke new ground because she actively sought out” specific traumatic experiences in Sybil’s past and accordingly “traced Sybil’s multiplicity to perverse, vindictive, and usually sexually oriented assaults by Sybil’s mother” (42). Wilbur’s psychoanalysis – whether that is the appropriate term or not as she uses drugs and suggestion to uncover the hidden trauma – was the first encounter with Freud’s theory with a concept (Wilbur’s own) of multiple personality. According to this theory, the discovery of the hidden or forgotten memory of childhood abuse was requisite. The therapy involved 2,534 office hours (Hacking 1995: 42), and included treatment with both hypnosis and the addictive drug sodium pentothal, the so-called truth serum. “A doctrinaire Freudian would work with Sybil’s memories of abuse in order to help the patient understand what they meant to her in the presents”, wrote Hacking (42), and that “it would be of little moment whether these were true memories or fantasies” (42). Sybil then, reliving an allegedly traumatizing mother-daughter relationship, “with its powerful images of a little girl tortured by her own mother,

17

Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sybil. New York: Warner Books, 1995 [1973]; hereafter abbreviated S.

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seems to have set the tone” (Kenny 1986: 176). The newly emerging public awareness of childhood (sexual) abuse and also the contribution of women’s emancipation and the civil rights movement had formed a fertile soil on which the modern multiple personality with innumerous splits could grow (Hacking 1995). Sybil’s case, however, was meanwhile deconstructed as a possible fraud and hoax (Rieber 2006) merely claiming to mean good for an oppressed woman. In her revealing book on the case Sybil Exposed, journalist Debbi Nathan confirms the now fully acknowledged controversy of the Sybil case and its fraud, or at least, shows how the alters were actually created in order to form a sensational example of multiple personalities (cf. Nathan 2012). What becomes clear in Nathan’s bestselling account is not only that now the prototypical case of MPD in the United States needs to be scrutinized (when beginning this study, this was already apparent in Rieber’s and Hacking’s academic writings), but that there is always a relationship of case/culture, a setting, a cultural embeddedness or an image or a story that needs to be maintained. Morton Prince and Cornelia Wilbur simply created their cases. Multiple cases, in this sense, never occur privately, but are always brought into the public domain. At least with Sybil, marketing strategies became visible thus becoming psychiatric folklore. In consequence, psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld, also critical concerning psychiatric myths, reviews this newest account of the case as interactive category, referring to Hacking, as the behavior of people shapes their conceptions about other people and thus reestablishes a corresponding behavior (cf. Lilienfeld and Berg). This psychiatric case gone folklore is, in his view, nothing more than a “psychological urban legend with disastrous consequences” (ibid.). The narrative style of the novel seems to leave out the perspective of Sybil (despite the beginning) and instead directs a lot of attention to the therapist. In the novel, the mother Hattie “had forged an intolerable reality from which Sybil had to defend herself in order to survive” (S 199) although the character Wilbur states that she was “aware that it was a psychiatric cliché to make a scapegoat of the patient’s mother” (S 199). During analysis, the personality “Vicky”, who is a strong and sophisticated side, points out that “it was unbelievable. [...] The things that Mrs. Dorsett did” (S 203). The torturer is not male. The Vicky personality is one of the dissociated sides from the main personality, “so that Sybil, herself, did not need to be conscious of those scars” (Hacking 1995: 43). Hacking also notes that only two years after the publication of Sybil, “sexual abuse and incest did…fully reach public consciousness” and as a consequence, Sybil “became a prototype for what was to count as a multiple (43). When Henri Ellenberger published his book The Discovery of the Unconscious in 1970, Cornelia Wilbur read the sections on multiple personality, the almost forgotten disorder and Ellenberger’s account is considered “a magnificent backdrop for the revival of multiple personality and dissociation” and the role both concepts played for “the unconscious before Freud” (Hacking 1995: 43). Sybil, “#1 Bestseller – over 6 million copies in print!” is therefore “the classic true story of a woman possessed by sixteen personalities”.18 Those personalities –

18

Cover text Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sybil. New York: Warner Books, 1995.

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“the cast of characters and dates of ‘birth’” (S 11) – are included the following list for the benefit of the reader: “Sybil Isabel Dorsett (1923): a depleted person; the waking self. Victoria Antoinette Scharleau (1926): nicknamed Vicky; a self-assured, sophisticated, attractive blonde; the memory of Sybil’s selves. Peggy Lou Baldwin (1926): an assertive, enthusiastic, and often angry pixie with a pug nose, a Dutch haircut, and a mischievous smile. Peggy Ann Baldwin (1926): a counterpart of Peggy Lou with similar physical characteristics; she is more often fearful than angry. Mary Lucinda Saunders Dorsett (1933): last name sometimes Baldwin; a writer and painter; extremely emotional; she has a shield-shaped face, gray eyes, and brown hair parted on the side. Vanessa Gail Dorsett (1935): intensely dramatic and extremely attractive; a tall redhead with a willowy figure, light brown eyes, and an expressive oval face. Mike Dorsett (1928): one of Sybil’s two male selves; a builder and a carpenter; he has olive skin, dark hair, and brown eyes. Sid Dorsett (1928): one of Sybil’s two male selves; a carpenter and a general handyman; he has fair skin, dark hair, and blue eyes. Nancy Lou Ann Baldwin (date undetermined): interested in politics as fulfillment of biblical prophecy and intensely afraid of Roman Catholics; her physical characteristics resemble those of the Peggys. Sybil Ann Dorsett (1928): listless to the point of neurasthenia; pale and timid with ash-blonde hair, an oval face, and a straight nose. Ruthie Dorsett (date undetermined): a baby; one of the lesser developed selves. Clara Dorsett (date undetermined): intensely religious; highly critical of the waking Sybil. Helen Dorsett (1929): intensely afraid but determined to achieve fulfillment; she has light brown hair, hazel eyes, a straight nose, and thin lips. Marjorie Dorsett (1928): serene, vivacious, and quick to laugh; a tease; a small, willowy brunette with fair skin and a pug nose. The Blonde (1946): nameless; a perpetual teenager; has blonde curly hair and lilting voice. The New Sybil (1965): the seventeenth self; an amalgam of the other sixteen selves.” (S 12; my emphasis in order to stress the various persons of Sybil)

According to the novel, there is also a hierarchy among the sixteen selves which results in a family tree. This provides some much needed orientation. The “family tree” and its “hierarchy of the sixteen selves” indicates Sybil Isabel Dorsett as the primary self. She is divided into Vicky (subdivided into Marcia, Vanessa, Mary, Helen, Clara, Sybil Ann, The Blonde), the twins Peggy Ann and Peggy Lou (both sharing Mike, Sid, Nancy Lou Ann), Marjory and Ruthie (S 9). The existence of male sex personalities, Mike and Sid in Sybil’s case, opened the floodgates for transsexual alters: “Sybil’s two male alters were prepubertal boySybils who never quite grew up” (Hacking 1995: 77). Like Sybil’s boyish alters, who showed some talent as carpenters, at that time coded as typically male, female multiple personalities after this case “developed male protector alters who were strong, heavyset, reliable – cowboys or truckers, for example” and with more alters to be

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discovered, “the number of cases with disclosed opposite sex alters radically increased” (77). Henri Ellenberger’s influence through his The Discovery of the Unconscious not only had an impact on Cornelia Wilbur but also with on Richard Kluft, who is known as one of the major therapists of MPD or DID. At first, he did not take any notice of the Sybil case as he was told the case was merely a fake. Ellenberger’s account of the Estelle-Despine case, mentioned earlier, fascinated Kluft. “Ellenberger’s uncritical account of a book published 130 years earlier served by chance as a model for an ambitious young man trying to carve out a new way in psychiatry” (Hacking 1995: 45). The scientific book Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder, which was edited by Richard Kluft in 1993, was dedicated to the memory of Cornelia Wilbur “who passed away April 10, 1992.” Wilbur’s account on the case of Sybil was by then considered as the most important pioneer of modern MPD (Kluft 1993: xv). Kluft, influenced by Ellenberger’s description of Estelle, and Wilbur with her own case of multiple personality therefore both served as pioneers in the success of multiple personality. The case of Sybil, however, was “never written up in the professional literature, where it would have been subjected to scientific standards of reporting” (Acocella 1999: 57). It was brought into public attention through a novel written by journalist and linguist, Flora Rheta Schreiber. The novel is divided into four parts: Part I: “Being”, Part II: “Becoming”, Part III: “Unbecoming”, and Part IV: “Reentry”. The four parts of the novel contain seven chapters (Part I), 10 chapters (Part II), 7 chapters (Part III), and finally 8 chapters (Part IV). It is introduced by a preface, which explains the first meeting of Schreiber with Wilbur and Sybil and the realization of the novel, which therefore sets a realistic framework for the novel, concluding with an epilog, which emphasizes the happy ending of Sybil’s story. The novelistic form of the book shows Sybil as a desperate character, whose other sides are present throughout her life causing time and mind gaps every time another personality emerges and takes over. In the first chapter, “The Incomprehensible Clock” (S 23-36), the text introduces Sybil’s experience with such time gaps or time lapses and her self-image and self-awareness. At the very beginning of the novel, which starts almost like a detective story or a thriller, she has no collection of the last five days: “she had lost five days” (S 31) finding herself in a strange and allegedly unfamiliar place. She feels uneasy because of the irrationality of finding herself in such an unknown place. Sybil also constantly feels guilty – “Free herself from possible guilt?” (S 27). She is blaming herself all the time when she is “overwhelmed by feelings of uneasiness and by strange stirrings within her” (S 25). Other people could “misunderstand her motives” (S 25) if “she were to ask the other passengers, what a fool they’d think her!” (S 29). She is “becoming annoyed with herself” (S 30) and has the feeling of “panic and a sense of remorse and self-recrimination” (S 31). These feelings arise when Sybil loses track of her daily routine and suddenly finds herself in another place five days later, a nightmarish place with “barricaded structures” (S 24):

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“Sybil Isabel Dorsett hastily flung her chemistry notes into her brown zipper folder and rushed to the door. [...] The door closed behind her. She was in the long, dusky hall on the third floor of Columbia University’s Havemeyer Hall. Then she was waiting at the elevator, the only person there. [...] Too long. The elevator, too, was taking too long.” “Sybil clutched for her zipper folder. It wasn’t there. The elevator wasn’t there, either, or the long, dusky hall. She was standing on a long, narrow street covered with snow.” (S 24 f.)

The sudden change of environment seems to offer “no exit, just as there had been no entrance” (S 25). She finds a hotel key with a room number and discovers that she is known at a hotel she can hardly remember. The scene is painted in monochrome, almost like a shadowy black-and-white film of “this no-woman’s land, where unreal silhouettes of men could flit by in the snow, reawakening the black and white images that had always terrified her” (S 27). In the hotel room, she discovers a sketch, “a black and white drawing of an isolated female figure perched on a cliff against a towering mountain that threatened to engulf it” (S 35). Although Sybil is aware of such time lapses, she does not entirely know what is wrong with her or that, underneath, there may be hidden selves controlling time and memory. During her first appointment with Dr. Wilbur, she therefore cannot admit the incidents, the “Wartime Within”, the title of chapter 2 (S 36-43). In the third chapter “The Couch and the Serpent” (S 43 – 59), Sybil therefore still feels restricted: “Sybil had not told the doctor about what puzzled her – some terrible, nameless thing having to do with time and memory. There had been times, for instance, during the last summer and early autumn, when Sybil had gone to the doctor’s office without, later, having any clear recollection of what had transpired.” (S 47)

There are periods of time Sybil cannot remember and “one time in particular stood out of memory. A paradox, a joke: remembering what you didn’t remember” (S 47). Nevertheless, Sybil experiences that “all her life people had said that she had done things she hadn’t done” (S 47). After returning to her usual paths and back to her parents, Sybil feels the pressure of her dominant mother. “Her mother’s omnipresence in her life had been almost a force of nature, as inevitable as the rise and setting of the sun” (S 41). Her mother “didn’t take orders; she gave them” (S 41). After Sybil sees the therapist Wilbur for the first time, the mother expresses her dislike toward the psychoanalyst. “Her parents, dissecting what the doctor said, also criticized the doctor herself” (S 45). The mother, “who saw everything in black and white, simply dismissed Dr. Wilbur as being wrong” (S 45). The different lifestyle (S 46) of Dr. Wilbur, who smokes during therapy, cannot be accepted. “The doctor belonged to another world” (S 46). Sybil’s moodiness, although a life-long characteristic of the young woman, is now claimed to be the responsibility of Dr. Wilbur (S 46). The parents, especially the mother, try to “brainwash” (S 46) Sybil to make her discontinue therapy. Sybil’s mother analyzes her daughter and determines that she will be better as soon “she’s growing up, and everybody gets more sense when they grow older and understand things better” (S 46). The author, Schreiber, leaves no doubt that this account of the mother is incor-

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rect as it sees Sybil only as a little girl: “Sybil was twenty-two, but her mother talked of that period of her life as a time not of maturity but of first growing up” (S 46). Later however, one reads that during therapy with Wilbur, the therapist, however, uses the same description: “‘Your mother trapped you, and it’s almost as if you have taken over trapping yourself,’ Dr. Wilbur would say. ‘But you’re getting rid of your mother.’ Sybil had already done so in her dream about the mother cat, but she was horrified by the unnatural desire. ‘I’m helping you to grow up,’ the doctor would continue. ‘You’re getting better, and you’re growing to be able to use all your talents.’ The incantation, the exorcising of Hattie Dorsett, would proceed.” (S 358, my emphasis)

The Wilbur and the mother figure also mirror each other in a very psychoanalytical sense. When Sybil is given drugs, she feels comfort in drowning in an anaesthetized dream. “The first pentothal treatment, administered by vein, appreciably diminished Sybil’s anxiety. In the sessions that followed, for fifty-six sometimes seventy hours after receiving pentothal, Sybil came to know a sense of freedom that never before had been hers” (S 355). However, the freedom and euphoria is “often deflated, sometimes destroyed by the reawakened memories of childhood horrors that Sybil had so painstakingly buried” (S 357). The comfort, however, that the drug provides is symbolized as close contact to the mother: “Becoming demanding about pentothal, Sybil also acted as if she could control the doctor and, by controlling the doctor, Hattie Dorsett. Safely ensconced in this double dependency, Sybil relived the relaxation she had known at her mother’s breast before being weaned and being confronted with the manufactured nipple that had supplanted the warm human one.” (S 361)

After the doctor refuses to prescribe more of the addictive drug, Sybil cries: “‘I don’t see. You want me to dissociate,’” Sybil replied bitterly. “‘If I didn’t, you’d miss seeing Vicky and all those other people you’re so fond of’” (S 363). Yet the doctor explains: “Pentothal brought you the relaxation of your mother’s breast, just as alcohol does for the alcoholics” (S 363). The different personalities within Sybil thus begin a conversation that is, in the sense of Morton Prince, co-conscious: “Accordingly, the first weekend in early March, 1959, was bad not only for Sybil but for ‘everybody else,’ as she called her other selves. It was the weekend of the weaning from pentothal. ‘What have I done that made Dr. Wilbur punish me by taking me off pentothal?’ Sybil murmured to Teddy Reeves [her boyfriend]. ‘What have I done that made the doctor shut me out?’ ‘The doctor is going to come,’ the Peggys kept saying. ‘We just know that she is.’ Marcia, shaking her head gravely, said, ‘No, the doctor isn’t coming and will never come again.’ Nancy said, ‘Who knows? She just might.’ ‘No,’ Vicky observed. ‘Dr. Wilbur isn’t coming. She isn’t going to give in about the pentothal. The decision to stop it was for our own good. She said we were becoming powerfully addicted to it, psychologically speaking. I believe in her.’” (S 362)

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The above quotation describes a dialogue between the different personalities. At this point of the novel in chapter 25 entitled “Beginning to Remember” (S 355-364), the patient Sybil has already formed those personalities, whereas the figure Peggy is the first one in chapter 4 as “The Other Girl” (S 59-71). Sybil has again gone through a phase where she loses track of time and cannot remember what she might have done: “It had happened again – this terrible thing that happened to time. It had followed her here, to the haven of the doctor’s office, this black shadow that followed her everywhere.” (S 65)

During another appointment, Sybil cannot control this ominous shadow; the other girl takes control of her body. “‘Did you live in Willow Corners?’ ‘I live there, ’ came the correction. ‘Jist everybody knows I live in Willow Corners.’ Jist. Sybil didn’t talk that way. The doctor was overtaken by an uncanny, eerie feeling.” (S 67)

A “profound distrust of people” (S 68) can still be observed and a “feeling of entrapment” (S 68). Yet there is something else, the appearance and the body seems to be changed as well: “From the moment the patient had dashed to the window, the doctor had been aware not only that her behavior was uncharacteristic but also that she actually looked and sounded different. She seemed smaller, shrunken.19 Sybil always stood as tall as she could because she considered herself small and didn’t want to appear so. But now she seemed to have shrunk into herself.” (S 68)

This appearance is that of a young girl as “the doctor had the distinct impression that she was dealing with someone younger than Sybil” (S 68). She therefore asks “Who are you?” (S 68) and the answer arrives promptly: “Can’t you tell the difference?” was the reply, accompanied by a resolutely independent tossing of the head. “I’m Peggy.” (S 68). Peggy transforms back into Sybil with a ”sudden movement“ (S 69): “Peggy had left the couch and was moving across the room with the same swift, spiderlike movement with which she had earlier rushed to the window. The doctor followed her. But Peggy had vanished. Sitting on the small mahogany chair near the desk was the midwestern schoolteacher – Sybil.” (S 69)

From this onwards, whenever changes occur, “the doctor knew the difference” (S 69). She consequently explains to Sybil what had happened:

19

It is notable that this changed appearance is the similarity between the text and the descriptions of Mr. Hyde in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

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“‘Don’t be frightened,’ the doctor said. ‘You were in another state of consciousness. You had what we call a fugue. A fugue is a major state of personality dissociation characterized by amnesia and actual physical flight from the immediate environment.’” (S 70)

By now, the different personalities can only take over the body one after the other. They are, in Henri Ellenberger’s sense, successive personalities and Dr. Wilbur diagnoses “a dual personality: Sybil and Peggy, totally different from each other. It seems quite clear” (S 70). Soon it is also clear that Peggy, who is divided into Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann,20 is not the last personality to be discovered. Vicky emerges in very dramatic ways. She is already there when Dr. Wilbur actually welcomes the patient Sybil in her office: “‘How are you today?’ the doctor asked. ‘I’m fine,’ was the reply. ‘But Sybil isn’t. She was so sick she couldn’t come. So I came instead […] I’m Vicky.’ Vicky did not merely walk into the consulting room; she made an entrance, with finesse and elegance. While Sybil’s movements were always constrained, hers were free and graceful.” (S 91)

As Sybil is not really aware of the other personalities (“She doesn’t know about the Peggys”, S 97), and there will be even more, Vicky seems to know everything. Her knowledge resembles the one of Miss Beauchamp’s secondary states with the original person, if there is a point in calling it that way, always being ignorant. Here the Vicky personality says: “I certainly don’t claim omniscience. But I watch everything everybody does. That’s what I mean when I say I know everything. In this special sense I am omniscient” (S 92). She knows that “There’s something else, Doctor. Something deep inside” (S 93). The Sybil character, however, is the original person as the hidden something deep inside her had occurred before Vicky was born: “Sybil was just a little girl then” (S 93). Vicky as “the woman of the world with graceful movements” (S 100) is the sophisticated part in Sybil. She is able to communicate in a very cultural and highly educated manner: “Sybil is not a femme du monde, a woman of esprit...She blacked out. So I took over.” (S 97). Vicky characterizes herself as normal as she would never go and see a psychoanalyst. The other personalities though “are neurotic, but I’m not. At least I don’t think I am. In this chaotic age one never knows” (S 99). When Dr. Wilbur wants to inform Sybil of her strange condition, Vicky tells her to be careful as “the rest of us know about Sybil, she knows nothing about any of us, never has” (S 98). The fugue states, which are Vicky’s argument, are different from the crowded situation of the body. “That’s very different from telling her that she’s not alone in

20

Sybil remarks on the two Peggys: “Well it seems to me that what arouses Peggy Lou’s anger makes Peggy Ann afraid. However, they are both fighters. When Peggy Lou decides she is going to do something, she goes at it in a pretty bull-headed sort of way. You see, Peggy Ann goes at things, too. But she’s more tactful” (S 94).

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her own body” (S 98). Vicky points out that “we’re people, you know. People in our own right” (S 99; my emphasis). The personalities do not only share the body as Vicky later explains: “we sometimes do things together” (S 168). In chapter 11 “The Search for the Center” (S 168182), the body of Sybil is “simultaneously occupied by Marcia and Vanessa” (S 177), and thus “the doctor wondered how she was going to be able to tell them apart” (S 177). The task, however, is not impossible as “after the first exchange of pleasantries, she was able to distinguish one from the other by the difference in their voices, which, even though both spoke with English accents in similar diction and speech patterns, were markedly individual” (S 178). Then the following conversation evolves: “As she had with Mary, the doctor began their conversation by asking, ‘What do you girls like to do?’ ‘Travel,’ said Marcia. ‘Go places,’ said Vanessa. ‘We’re always interested in new and different places to see and things to do. Life is for living.’ Marcia and Vanessa then talked about how they both enjoyed airplanes, big cities, the theater, concerts, places of historical interest, and buying choice books. ‘We have our own likes,’ Marcia explained, ‘but Vanessa and I enjoy things most when we do them together.’ (S 178)

Both characters – Vanessa’s voice is soprano, Marcia’s alto (S 178) – similarly make jokes and show a sense of humor by teasing each other. Marcia adds that “Vanessa...you’ve said enough. The way we’re talking to each other, the doctor will think we’re one person talking to herself” (S 179). By then, it is clear to Dr. Wilbur that she is confronted with a multiple personality. The further developments of altogether sixteen personalities prove her right. While at the beginning of the novel the reader is confronted with Sybil’s dissociation and embarrassing situations due to time lapses, the focalizer later seems to be Dr. Wilbur herself displaying her reflection on the strange disturbance of her patient. Prior to her special case of Sybil other cases were reported so that Dr. Wilbur can refer to typical classic cases: “Dr. Wilbur adjusted her desk lamp beam a fraction. Before her was almost the whole of the relatively sparse literature about multiple personality. In a pensive mood after Vicky had left her office, she had made a trip to the Academy of Medicine Library, where a librarian had assembled for her almost everything there was on this definitely established but rare illness. Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality, first published in 1905, which is well known to students of abnormal psychology, was the only one of the books she had read before. She had tried to get hold of a copy Dr. Corbey H., Thigpen’s and Dr. Hervey Cleckley’s 1954 article: “A Case of Multiple Personality” in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, about which some of

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her colleagues were talking. But this article, about a girl whose pseudonym was Eve, had not been available at the time.” (S 108)21

In addition to all these famous cases, the cases in the United States have already been referred to in particular; the classic French cases are cited: Felida X, Louis Vivet (Schreiber spells it Vive) and other cases (S 108). Following her idol Morton Prince, Dr. Wilbur tries to integrate the different personalities into the person Sybil, or rather a new Sybil. This case of multiple personality, however, seems to be a more complicated one: “As Dr. Wilbur realized that five new selves had been revealed, she looked back to the time when, after first meeting Vicky, she had pored over the literature of multiple personality. She had then speculated that Sybil’s case was more complex than that of either Miss Beauchamp or of Doris Fisher. Now she knew that the case of Sybil Dorsett, precipitated not by one trauma but by a multiplicity of traumas, was the most complex ever reported.” (S 313)

Whereas Louis Vivet had displayed eight selves, Sybil has sixteen. All of them with their individual story and trauma and each self has to be reintegrated into the new Sybil. The reader observes the reintegration of the different personalities by the dialogues between Dr. Wilbur and the selves, yet Sybil’s experiences or her perspective are not yet revealed. Under hypnosis, the personalities are contacted and persuaded to merge with Sybil and thus they have “to return to knowledge, the experiences, and the memories that had become theirs in the third of the total Sybil’s life that they not Sybil had lived” (S 314). Each personality “would have to be analyzed as a 'person'” (S 314). The first step to do so successfully must be the step of age adjustment as “twelve of the selves were female; two, male. All were younger than Sybil” (S 315). Sybil then refuses to co-operate: “But,” Sybil replied, with a twisted curve of her lip, “I’m not a patient. I’m patients” (S 324). The doctor replies: “You’re distorting the truth. The others are part of you. We all have different parts of our personalities. The abnormality lies not in the division, but in the dissociation, the amnesia, and the terrible traumas that gave rise to the others” (S 324). Sybil refuses contact with the others: “I don’t want to meet them. Why should I?” (S 324). Sybil’s first conscious contact with her other selves is realized through a tape recording of her other voices/selves. The doctor explains that when Sybil is “able to get angry in your own right” (S 327), she will become one person again and needs no other representative personality. As “only Sybil possesses none of the memories of the others” (S 356), treatment must be able to re-establish the memories. Wilbur again uses the drug pentothal, which makes Sybil feel relaxed and safe (chapter 25 “Beginning to Remember”). Slowly, the memory comes back: “Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the recollection was that Sybil remembered that at one moment she had been Mary, at the next Sybil Ann, and that when she was the one, the oth-

21

This case was that of The Three Faces of Eve. The name had been changed for marketing reasons to make it more popular.

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er was a person beside her, to whom she could talk and express opinions and from whom she could seek advice.” (S 358)

Now that she is aware of the others, life may be more complicated (such a setting unfurls in another novel by Matt Ruff Set this House in Order, published in 2003, with all the personalities in constant communication). Here Sybil writes a greeting card with different messages (“Multiple greetings – Sybil; Love – Vicky; Happy Holidays – Vanessa Gail”, S 361): “The selves alternated with each other, but they also coexisted. They obstructed some of Sybil’s activities, but they cooperated in others” (S 380). However, Sybil can only be healthy when all her personalities disappear. In order to achieve the goal of amalgamating Sybil’s selves into her new self, Dr. Wilbur rereads “the hypnotic sessions Dr. Morton Prince had conducted with Christine Beauchamp” (S 383). She also consults colleagues who tell her to “just keep going” (S 383). Therefore, she is willing “to experiment” (S 383) and permanently change childhood experiences through analysis (S 384). With hypnosis, Dr. Wilbur tries to adjust the personalities in terms of age as it “would be simpler if all the selves were of the same age” (S 384). Hypnosis is therefore the best choice: “Her patient was a hysteric. Since the time of Charcot and Freud hysterics were known to be readily hypnotizable. Dr. Wilbur decided at least to investigate the potential of this technique. Before she had become a psychoanalyst, she had used hypnosis successfully with other patients.22 Now she would experiment with hypnosis in analysis. Once again she decided that she was ready to pioneer.” (S 384; my emphasis)

The hypnosis offers Dr. Wilbur an opportunity to make the selves go back and forward in time (S 384): “Two-year old Ruthie was the natural point of embarkation. ‘How are you?’ the doctor asked after summoning her in one of the earliest hypnotic sessions. ‘Are you alright?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you remember me?’ ‘Yes.’ [...] ‘You know, Ruthie, you are two. Isn’t that right? Would you like to be three?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘In ten minutes I’m going to say it is five minutes of seven. Between now and that time, you are going to grow up one whole year. It’s going to be all right, Ruthie. You’re going to grow up, and later all the others are going to grow up too. Would you like to?’ ‘Yes.’” (S 385; my emphasis)

22

According to Robert Rieber and Herbert Spiegel, who actually hypnotized the real Sybil, this is not true.

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The adjustment is partially successful, but some of the others are frightened. In particular, the boys Mike and Sid feel that they may disappear, literally speaking of being killed. “There’s a rumor,” Sid explains, “that the girls are going to kill each other, that the time is coming when some of them won’t be” (S 387). The answer is that such a time may come and no one will be “by yourself” (S 387): “All of you are going to work together” (S 387). In the movie Identity (2003), such a killing of the personalities is actually shown without the audience knowing that the killing on screen only takes place during a hypnotic session and is merely the visualization of the patient’s inner world. Correspondingly, the fear of death is now real for the others now: “Dr. Wilbur felt assured by the age progression sessions, especially since genuine analysis was taking place. The boys had just revealed suicidal intent on the part of other selves as well as their own fear that integration would result in death for them.” (S 388; my emphasis)

In the end, Sybil’s other personalities reach the same age. Vicky notes: “Have I ever told you that Sybil would like to be me but doesn’t know how?” (S 388). Thus, integration will later be established. Now Sybil can gain new strength: “Seconds ticking. Minutes passing. Waiting, Dr. Wilbur could not know that there was sudden rapture flowing swiftly through the senses that belonged to the fifteen selves of her patient. In every vein and fiber of Sybil there was a quickening newness, as she and her other selves moved to a new phase of healing. Still in their hypnotic sleep they could feel a fluctuant wave, buoying them with new strength.” (S 390)

Another problem is reuniting Sybil. The others want to be treated as whole persons. In chapter 29 called “There are Me, Too” (S 392-400), the personalities claim their right to be and stay alive: “You see, now that she has gotten to like us, she feels a responsibility toward us and doesn’t want to destroy us” (S 397), Peggy says. This claim is voiced after Wilbur makes Sybil to meet them one after the other under hypnosis: “The others are right here, and you’ll have to choose the next one you want to meet” (S 393). During summer 1960, however, the reunion eventually takes place. Peggy Lou is also Sybil and Vicky is also Sybil. “We are Sybil” (S 399), they claim. Eventually, Sybil can finally express her hatred toward the mother – “I HATE HER!” (S 403) and can decide “to give voice to what had been buried deepest” (S 404). The religious personality Mary can step out of an imaginary igloo23 where she hid, and another personality state called the Blonde, who tries to evolve in order to prolong therapy, can also be absorbed. Still, Dr. Wilbur cannot help but wonder how the new Sybil is born: “The newly emerging Sybil, however, was very different what Dr. Wilbur had originally expected” (S 430). It is not the vivacious Vicky who will be the new center as she seemed to own all the memories and characteristics Dr. Wilbur considers essential and necessary (S 430):

23

Such an imaginary hiding place is also used in Fight Club (1996) and in Set this House in Order (2003).

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“The answer, therefore, had been to preserve the waking self as such while returning to it all the memories, emotions, knowledge, and modes of behavior of the other selves, thereby restoring the native capacities of the original child.” (S 430)

The “original child” is then restored so that “the days of Sybil’s dissociation and the spontaneous appearance of the secondary selves seemed over” (S 431). Vicky and the Blonde as well as all the other selves are reintegrated within a Sybil, who first denied their very existence, then hated and then loved them (S 436). Wilbur finally notes: “All personalities one” (S 436). The one and only personality as the goal of the therapy is also mentioned in the case of Miss Beauchamp as described by Morton Prince in The Dissociation of a Personality (1906). Dr. Wilbur refers to Prince and his hypnosis sessions. While Prince wanted to eliminate the vivacious personality Sally, Wilbur wants to establish the new Sybil upon the sophisticated Vicky character. Morton Prince writes about Miss Beauchamp: “My idea was that if B I and B IV could be fused into one character, a fusion which would be the resurrection of the original Miss Beauchamp and the restoration of the original mental relations, Sally would sink out of sight and disappear into her original subconscious abode, if she had one.” (Prince 1906: 398)

Miss Beauchamp “reverted completely to B I, she remembered herself as the New B I, and therefore still retained the memory of this revelation (Prince 1906: 407). Hence Prince can observe: “All were synthesized with and became a part of her own personal consciousness. Those feelings and those points of view to which she had been a complete stranger a few moments before, now seemed to be remembered as her own, and they continued to be her own points of view and her own characteristics. The two personalities were substantially one, and all was well.” (Prince 1906: 410)

In the novel Sybil, however, Dr. Wilbur has the opinion that Sybil’s new self should be based on the Vicky character as she is able to meet the obligations of a society which is basically a man’s world: “Since Vicky had all the memories and possessed more of the original Sybil than waking Sybil, the doctor had thought it might be a good idea to do away with all the selves, including waking Sybil [who is still insecure; my insertion], and allow Vicky to be the one self.” (S 430)

Such a Vicky character, lively and self-conscious, mirrors the Sally character in the Beauchamp case. Sally had caused “social complications and embarrassments” (Prince 1906: 2). Vicky, however, may be even able to be confronted with a world where women experience discrimination. The truth about Sybil therefore is, that “she’s a woman, and a woman can’t wow the world” (S 413). The boys, Mike and Sid, declare consequently that they are “not going to be part of a woman” which would be a bondage and not freedom (S 413):

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“But the big jobs in education are held by men. But Sid and I aren’t going to help her as we did in the past. We’re not going to build anything for her or play Mr. Fixit in her house. As far as that silly dream of being a doctor is concerned, she doesn’t have what it takes. All these years of studying science subjects that haven’t come naturally have gotten her nowhere. Medical schools are very selective about the women they take, and they’re not going to settle for her. This is still a man’s world, and women don’t really have a chance.” (S 413)

Miss Beauchamp also did not want Morton Prince to reintegrate her into the B I character. Therefore, she proclaims: “Don’t make me B I, Dr. Prince. It is giving me all that I most dread” (Prince 1906: 412). She refuses with all her strength to become that brave and nice B I character: “‘I shall remain B IV [Sally] all the time,’ was the way she did it. ‘No; B I.’ ‘Yes, I said B IV.’ ‘No, you shall stay B I.’” (Prince 1906: 417)

Both doctors, Wilbur and Prince, create their model patient. But whereas Prince is satisfied with the “new Miss Beauchamp”, Sybil later even denies that she has ever suffered from a dissociative disorder. “I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong. We both know there is”, she writes (S 374) and continues: “But it is not what I have led you to believe. I do not have any multiple personalities. I don’t even a ‘double’ to help me out. I am all of them. I have been essentially lying in my pretense of them. The dissociations are not the problem because they do not actually exist, but there is something wrong or I would not resort to pretending to be like that.” (S 374; my emphasis)

The sickness of Sybil, however, never was the main problem of the case. Her suffering was never questioned but her diagnosis was. In fact, Sybil is still the most controversial case in the history of multiple personality. In a now legendary interview with Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in the year 1997, Dr. Herbert Spiegel points out the major issues of the Sybil case.24 When Sybil’s therapist, Cornelia Wilbur asked Dr. Spiegel to participate in a book on Sybil and her multiple personality, he refused. He had treated the patient with hypnosis and noted her strong suggestibility and that she was “highly hypnotizable”. Spiegel differentiated between five states of hypnotizability and Sybil gained the highest grade, “grade five”. Wilbur’s first diagnosis was schizophrenia, but she consulted Spiegel because the therapy had not shown any positive effects after ten years of mostly psychoanalytical treatment. When Spiegel treated Sybil for a while, he also used hypnosis. Wilbur had learned some basic information about hypnosis and later used it with Sybil. During the sessions with Spiegel, Sybil suddenly asked whether Spiegel wanted her to be Helen, an alter personality: “Sybil said, ‘Well do you want me to be Helen?’”, and Spiegel said in the interview that “with Wilbur, Sybil felt an obligation to become another personality”. The sus-

24

All citations here refer to Borch-Jacobsen 1997.

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picion was that Sybil’s personalities were by-products of hypnosis and her therapy. Spiegel states that Sybil was “a wonderful hysterical patient with role confusion” but not a multiple personality. He saw her personalities “rather as game-playing” fostered by Wilbur as personalities on their own when they were in fact certain “perspectives, that she then called by name.” Spiegel summed up that “I could change Sybil’s state of awareness just by regressing her to this and that, but that didn’t make her a multiple personality”. Wilbur’s response was that if it was no multiple personality “we don’t have a book! The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won’t sell!” Thus, in Spiegel’s words, the case is based on storytelling and making up stories making Sybil “an artifact.” When Sybil was first diagnosed as a schizophrenic and then multiple personality, MPD had no entry in the DSM. In the year 1980, such an entry was finally incorporated. Later it was due to Spiegel’s efforts that the disorder of multiple personality was redefined as dissociative identity disorder or DID. It was necessary to point out that the secondary states were in fact not complex persons but other dissociated parts of a psyche. Spiegel referred to the case of Sybil as an “artifact that was created”25 and that Sybil may have suffered from a dissociative disorder but had not multiple personalities (cf. Jarey 2010). Interestingly, Janet had the same impression on dissociation. He believed that symptoms of dissociation could be “produced artificially” (Janet 1907: 86). However, the dissociation of Sybil occurred only during therapy. The artificial nature of Sybil’s dissociation or multiple personality of sixteen distinct characters is in the focus of Robert Rieber’s book The Bifurcation of the Self (2006). Rieber once received tape recordings of Wilbur’s psychoanalytical sessions with Sybil in order to study vocal differences. The recordings, put aside and forgotten for a long time, reveal, however that, according to Rieber, Wilbur had actually manufactured Sybil’s personalities. Her account on this case in the semi-fictional work of the novel Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber was therefore also fictional. The detailed scripts of these tape recordings therefore proved that Wilbur and Schreiber tried to construct a story around the patient Sybil (Rieber 2006). Rieber’s revelations are now part of the public multiple personality awareness culture, which means that there are now in fact considerable doubts concerning the truth of the Sybil case. The novel Sybil begins in the dramatized setting of a thriller genre with a lost woman experiencing surreal mind gaps. The narration shifts from Sybil’s inner world, told from a third person perspective, to Wilbur as central character struggling for a therapy, sometimes a brutal one. Whether

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Dr. David Spiegel also noted on the case of Sybil: “If the MPD therapists knew more about hypnosis, their diagnoses would be more accurate. As it is now, they don’t even know how they are molding their outcomes. They manipulate both the highly hypnotizable and the psychopath. The ‘grade fives’ are highly suggestible and gullible, and they just do what they’re cued to do, quite innocently. They seem like pure multiples after they’re coached. But most of the patients that the MPD experts have in the wards are not highly hypnotizable, so what they are actually playing around with are borderlines and psychopaths who enter into the game for different reasons” (Borch-Jacobsen 1997; my emphasis).

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we observe Miss Beauchamp, Eve or Sybil, the patient is literally never in control of her core identity or has true agency. While this study was in progress, Debbie Nathan published her already mentioned highly critical book on the case, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case (2012), in which she also portrays the case as fabricated and overdramatized. Despite these doubts, multiple personality still seems astonishingly alive. The question of the validity of multiple personality or dissociative identity understood as MPD is therefore a very important one when it comes to considering the culture or awareness of the syndrome. The “voices of doubt” have to be heard, as they are essential.

6 Voices of Doubt: The Validity of Multiple Personality Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! SHAKESPEARE MACBETH1 Multiple personality has become the most contested type of diagnosis in psychiatry. IAN HACKING REWRITING THE SOUL 1995: 9

Even those clinicians who were dominant in coining the meaning of the phenomenon admit that multiple personality disorder (MPD) or its renamed successor dissociative identity disorder (DID) remains a “controversial diagnosis” and still provokes ideological disagreements (Ross 1997: 61). As post-postmodern individuals we comprehend that contradictory emotions, various feelings or impulses may flow inside us. Choices have to be made – and there seem to be a myriad of opportunities, decisions have to be taken and eventually compromises may have to be reached. The result of these options and obligations may be a conception of a fragmented self in a postmodern incoherent world. “My body is not one but many”, says Joyce Carol Oates (Oates 1996: 233). Walt Whitman’s famous words from “Song of Myself (1855) underline a plural self-notion: “Do I contradict myself/Very well then…I contradict myself;/I am large…I contain multitudes” (Whitman 2001: 53). Does this feeling lead to a “split personality” or even to a multiple personality with alternating selves taking control of the mind? Is our core self only the host for innumerous personalities? When it comes to a disorder like MPD or DID, however, the “very existence of the multiple personality remains a debatable issue” (Kenny 1986: 162) which is always “shaped by currently fashionable theories” (168). Tracking a disorder like multiple personality or dissociative identity by merely relying on observable alternations of personality, the “American psychiatry is essentially based on phenomenology”, claimed psychologist Ira Brenner in Dissociation of Trauma (2001). Brenner asked whether American psychiatry by leaving out psychodynamics can actually lead to a full understanding of the condition and its origin and

1

See August Piper 1999: 3.

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cause. Skeptics, Brenner laments, consider the disorder as iatrogenic – caused by therapists – and fail to consider “profound trauma in childhood” (Brenner 2001: 37). Such a critical analysis, for example, is provided by sociologist Nicolas P. Spanos in his seminal study Multiple Identities & False Memories (1996). Both sides therefore represent the different views of multiple personality and dissociation. While one side represents the post-traumatic model (PTM), the other side stresses the sociocognitive model (SCM). The first side understands dissociation as mechanism of the psyche, whereas the other side believes that societal structures may help to proliferate wrong ideas about multiple personality. In his philosophical approach to MPD and the human mind Rewriting the Soul (1995), Ian Hacking emphasizes by the very title of his study that the conception of the self, the soul and the consciousness had indeed been rewritten by a new understanding of the context of our identity. “Some philosophers”, writes Ian Hacking, “and not a few clinicians, have wanted to make a quite different use of multiple personality. They argue that it shows something about what it is to be a person or even displays the limits of personal identity” (Hacking 1995: 6). According to Hacking, however, such a disorder cannot do this. Science writer Rita Carter states in her book Multiplicity (2008) that we all may experience the “evidence for human plurality” as “we act out a part, take on roles, live up to expectations and reinvent ourselves” (3). While Janet’s description of a disintegrated mind (désagreggation) referred to the normality of multiplicity in every human mind, some contemporary psychiatrists consider a fragmented self as sick and the occurrence of “separation of mental processes, thoughts, sensations and emotions” as symptoms of insanity (9). Carter contradicts the theory of multiplicity as insanity, for “it is not in itself abnormal. Rather, it is a manifestation of the extraordinary flexibility of the human psyche and is often perfectly healthy or even beneficial”. Hence, separate existences may even help us to “cope with the complexity of modern life and exploit the opportunities it offers” (9). The already mentioned Nicolas P. Spanos, who was “one of the world’s most respected investigators of therapeutically induced false memory” (Brainerd 2005: 404), however, presents in Multiple Identities & False Memories (1996) MPD as a sociohistorical product. His argumentation focuses on multiple personality not as a naturally occurring mental phenomenon or psychological strategy but as one amongst a number of psychological disorders or psychiatric syndromes that had been defined, accepted and popularized, and that literally changed the conception of the human mind and its coping strategies or surrender to distress (3). Such a changed conception can be seen in Carter’s definition of multiplicity as a natural impulse. However, Henri F. Ellenberger’s classification of real multiple personality as a mental disorder in his study The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) already included the statement that “such conditions are very rare” (132). Despite a pathological condition, the ordinary and normal individual may experience a milder form of inner complexity. Ellenberger may correspond to Carter when stating that “even a normal individual may experience similar feelings when shifting from sleep to a waking state and vice-versa” (132). Then again, a fragmented self-concept is more likely to be the result of an inner struggle as Saint Augustine experienced it in his Confessions. “Saint Augustine wondered about the shifts from his new Christian per-

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sonality back to his old pagan and about those in the opposite direction”, Ellenberger stated (132). While Carter denies the abnormality of a flexible, multiple self-concept, some psychiatrists or psychologists even deny the very existence of a mental disorder such as MPD or DID. They brand the spectacle of multiple personalities as mere nonsense. This view is mentioned by German journalist Rolf Degen in his book on folk psychology Lexikon der Psycho-Irrtümer (2000). Accordingly, psychologist and scientific publicist Robert A. Baker concluded in Mind Games: Are We Obsessed With Therapy? (1997) that there are no multiple personalities and that all reported cases may be the result of iatrogenesis and therefore created and manufactured by doctors. Hacking pointed out that “it might still be that many of the more florid bits of multiple behavior are iatrogenic” (Hacking 1995: 12). The question is when a feeling of inner plurality may count as a mental disorder. The renowned German psychiatrist Klaus Dörner agrees that iatrogenesis is a delicate matter and criticizes a shallow misinterpretation of the symptoms and its mingling with another diagnosis, namely schizophrenia. Concerning MPD or DID, he briefly concluded that “there is no such thing as multiple personality disorder” (Degen 2000: 250). William Brown reported his doubts to the medical section of the British Psychological Society: “There is much to be said for the view that the phenomena of multiple personality may be in the main artefacts, due to the hypnotic methods of investigation and treatment employed by their observers” (Hart 1926: 260 cited in Putnam 1989: 33). Believing thus in the possible plurality of the human mind may be enough to provoke such an artefact. The use of hypnosis suggests the idea of multiple personality as partly iatrogenic, confirms philosopher Kathleen V. Wilkes in her study Real People (1993), because subsequent to reported genuine cases and an increasing public awareness “nature follows art” (109). After the diagnosis, the therapists “naturally treat potential cases with keen interest and attention – thereby providing strong positive reinforcement to the patient to develop distinct and distinguishable alternate personalities” (110). Moreover, “role-playing, whether conscious or unconscious, whether in childhood or in the surgery, is an essential element in the etiology of the condition” (110). Nevertheless, although hypnosis, therapy, and role-playing may function as intensifiers of personalities, Wilkes remains interested in the very idea of people showing symptoms “that cannot be adequately described in any other terms other than those provided by the 'multiple personality' category and classification” (110). In his seminal book The Principles of Psychology (1906), American philosopher and psychologist William James already discussed the nature of the dual character of the human mind and poses the question, whether the split consciousness was really only to be found in the mind of the sick (or to be regarded as sick at all): “How far this splitting up of the mind into separate consciousnesses may exist in each one of us is a problem” (207). Hence, Carter’s multiplicity concept is again applicable. According to James, however, Janet referred solely to the “abnormal weakness” and hysterical mind, where the “abandoned part meanwhile may solidify into a secondary or sub-conscious self” (207). James mentioned the complementary aspect of split consciousnesses in the chapter “The Relations of Minds to Other Things”, and stated:

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“More remarkably still, they are complementary. Give an object to one of the consciousnesses, and by that fact you remove it from the other or others” (204). In his widely discussed article “The Manufacture of Personalities: The Production of Multiple Personality Disorder” (1995), psychiatrist Harold Merskey doubts that due to the widespread publicity of the concept of multiple personality, “any case now [cannot] arise without being promoted by suggestion or prior preparation” (Merskey 1995: 3). Therefore, the production of MPD is a “manufacture of personalities” and this has always been a fact since the report of earlier cases. Secondary personalities evolve during hypnosis, patients declare their diagnosis prior to therapy so that “publicity must also be suspected of producing such events” (3). Merskey referred to MPD as a ‘doxogenic disease’ and also considered it as a result of mental conceptions of the self: the “patients’ own mental conceptions (from doxa, meaning opinion, and genes, to produce)” consequently characterized the symptoms of the disease (40; italics in original text). Merskey therefore concluded: “I did not always disbelieve in MPD. I thought it might occur as a rare event. The astonishing growth of improbable cases prompted me to look more closely at the phenomenon, and it was only then that I came to the conclusion that there was no veridical evidence that would be adequate to support the diagnosis, and the mere spread of enthusiasm for it had itself served to make it impossible to prove that it existed.” (Merskey 1995: 40; my emphasis)

This statement reminds one of what psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel had said about the case of Sybil (Borch-Jacobsen 1997). Nowadays, the well documented proliferation of the diagnosis of MPD or DID in the United States during the second half of the 20th century, mainly during the 1980s and early 1990s, has provoked a lively discussion about the validity of multiple personality (cf. Spanos 1996; Piper 1997 and 2004; Showalter 1997; Acocella 1999). According to psychiatrist August Piper in his critical book Hoax and Reality (1997) there is no doubt that it has become a fad. MPD was “a major misdirection of concept and practice”, Piper claimed (ix). Therapy destroyed the life of the patients to scorched-earth wastelands (xiii). The contradictions of various definitions by psychiatrists made it nearly impossible for patients to determine the diagnosis as incorrect (5). Ian Hacking described the astonishing success of MPD in the United States as very unique. “If ever there was a movement, it is the multiple personality movement. It has a rather fresh, American quality to it. It appeals to down-home folks, who are much more at ease with the bizarre than city slickers are”, Hacking said (Hacking 1995: 39). Despite its popularity among psychotherapists and the resulting general awareness, the multiple personality or dissociative identity “is probably the most controversial entity in psychiatry history”, claimed Brenner (Brenner 2001: 37). The definition of multiple personality, as shown, has changed through time also due to this controversy (Hacking 1995). This indicated a shift from concrete and complex persons to personality states or identity states. From literal other people inside to the inner fragmentation. For Piper, however, this shift is merely cosmetic (Piper 1997: 3) as the results remain the same. The public awareness and perception of multiple personality has not completely followed these subtleties.

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Looking again at a more popular and common encyclopedia, the German Brockhaus Psychologie (2001) emphasized the controversy around the disorder of multiple personality referring to its supposed iatrogenesis. Iatrogenesis means that the symptoms are caused by the therapist or occur only after and due to therapy, when the different personalities or identities are distinctively named and perhaps eventually produced: “The therapeutical practice to name each single personality and to refer to them individually is controversial nowadays. That is the reason why the multiple personality is said to be an artificial product of therapeutics.” [Die therapeutische Praxis, den einzelnen Persönlichkeiten eigene Namen zu geben und sie jeweils als eigenständig anzusprechen, gilt heute als umstritten. So gilt bei vielen Experten die multiple Persönlichkeit als Kunstprodukt von Therapeuten.] (Bliesener, Thomas and Storke-Perschke. 2001: 384; my translation and my emphasis)

Perhaps no other syndrome has presented itself as such a wide spread phenomenon like MPD/DID. It has gained an enormous echo through mass media coverage and has consequently offered a wide range of creative interpretations throughout the 19th and 20th century (Spanos 1996: 287). In her detailed and surprising study Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder (1999), Joan Acocella examined the disorder’s journey throughout time and its success with professional therapists. An estimated 40,000 Americans, mostly women, were diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and experienced a nightmarish therapy. Whether these patients remembered especially severe childhood abuse or not, the therapy revealed and recovered memory of childhood trauma that allegedly had caused MPD in the first place thus turning the theory of recovered memory into a craze (Acocella 1999: 43). Such notion of the disorder as underlying strict rules is also called the “Wilburian paradigm” (6). Furthermore, Acocella stresses that the appeal of the professionals to such a rare mental condition to the professionals probably lay in its easy application to a lot of mental patients. “According to one authority, the average MPD patient meets the criteria for three to four other psychological disorders – another experts says ten – besides MPD, typical accompaniments including depression, antisocial personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder” (28). For many therapists, speculated Acocella, a “polyfragmented” multiple with 335 different personalities may be “a more interesting companion for three hours a week than a woman who passes bad checks and beats her children (antisocial personality disorder) or one who always feels tired, sad, and guilty and doesn’t know why (depression)” (28). It is important to note that such a discovery of more than 300 personalities inside one body has nothing to do with a felt inner multiplicity. MPD meant mental disorder. Yet its application to any patient seemed astonishing. August Piper confirmed this view of the easy application of MPD criteria to a patient (Piper 1997: 5). In Hoax and Reality (1997) Piper concluded that, lacking a coherent definition when a fragment or state is pathological, the moment when a mental diagnosis is valid can become blurred and blend into what Carter considers normal defining “each person a vessel in which different personalities [...] come and go” (Carter 2008, xiv). While even Morton Prince differentiated between acting, hypnotic states that are not em-

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bedded in a complex behavior of their own (Prince 1906: 4), Carter underlines her multiplicity model as also adaptable for role acting and the like: “In this state your behavior is an honest reflection of your inner self, and [...] therefore seems reasonable to describe it as the adoption of a different identity than an act” (Carter 2008: 15). These variations of multiple personality show a flexibility and construct of the syndrome. It can be embedded in heterogeneous contexts. It is in fact a “social construction”, as Acocella called it. Its liquidity perhaps explains its popularity especially when connected to theories of postmodernism. In order to understand the widespread diagnosis and the successful adaptation of the multiple personality metaphor into popular culture, “the ‘social construction’ of mental illness– the fact that the forms mental illness takes (indeed, the very notion that there is such a thing as mental illness) are the product of shifting cultural assumptions – must be taken into the account to explain the rise of MPD” (Acocella 1999: 28). The remains of multiple personality as dissociative identity disorder is what August Piper and Harold Merskey called the “persistence of folly” (Piper and Merskey 2004). He pointed out that after the publication of “several critical articles and books, the concepts of dissociative amnesia and dissociative identity disorder (DID) have suffered some significant wounds “so that by the end of the 1990s, the main dissociative disorder organization, the International Society of Multiple Personality and Dissociation (ISSMP&D), had dissolved. The journal Dissociation published its last edition in 1998” (Piper and Merskey 2004: 2). The ISSM&D had always tried to establish a lively communication between the publicity and concerned patients and let the latter “manifest their multiplicity in public” (Hacking 1997: 39). During the 20th century, the organization had already proved its own flexibility. As a result, “the multiple movement germinated in the sixties, emerged in the seventies, matured in the eighties, and is adapting itself to new environments in the nineties” (Hacking 1995: 39). Its absolute authorization as an accepted disease was gained, when in 1980 the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) added the official disorder of multiple personality. Consequently, study groups and special clinics spread all over the country. “Multiples were on the move”, summarized Hacking the hysterical referring to years around MPD during the 1980s (Hacking 1997: 51). In the year 1983, the ISSM&D was founded. During the 1990s, the movement split itself reinventing a “multiple subculture” (52). Educational structures had to be found not only to cater to “popular interest in order to attract paying participants” (53). According to Hacking, the question arose: “Who will own the illness: highly qualified clinicians with years of training, or a populist alliance of patients and therapists who welcome a culture of multiples and who cultivate personalities?” (53). This shows how important the public has always been. The disorder never occurred in private. It was performed. It needed an audience. However, it was controversial. The controversy always circled around the idea of suppressed memories, dissociated from consciousness. The main enemy of the ISSM&D was established in the False Memory Movement, also called “antimemory movement” (Hacking 1995: 54). As a clear opponent, it helped to re-establish the multiple personality movement with its newly named organization, the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) with highly revitalized

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members and activities like the annual conference on “Psychotherapy Outcome in Complex PTDS and Dissociative Disorders”. The new “host” (see Hacking 1995) of multiple personality as dissociative identity disorder is posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Both disorders entered the DSM in 1980 (Waugh 2006), yet PTSD seems to be the most contemporary of them. Within the theory of post-trauma, multiple personality survives as DID. The concepts of dissociative identity signs are exported from the North American countries around the world, in countries like India “where the cinema has influenced the production of dissociative signs” (Piper and Merskey 2004: 2). Piper criticized the deficiencies of DID literature. It shows “logical inconsistencies” as well as “internal contradictions” and never succeeds in solving a “conflict with known facts and settled scientific principles” (2). Piper charged that “1) there is no proof for the claim that DID results from childhood trauma; 2) the condition cannot be reliably diagnosed; 3) contrary to theory, DID cases in children are almost never reported; and 4) consistent evidence of blatant iatrogenesis appears in the practices of the disorder’s proponents” (2). Thus, Piper’s conclusion was that “DID is best understood as a culture-bound and often iatrogenic condition” (2). Here again, the sociocognitive model (SCM) opposes the idea of the posttraumatic model (PTM). The phenomenon of dissociative amnesia as a “culture-bound” syndrome is central in a study by Harvard psychiatrist Harrison G. Pope, who asked “Is Dissociative Amnesia a Culture-Bound Syndrome?” (Pope 2006). The study tried to track down such findings from a survey of historical literature. Both fictional and non-fictional works have documented “natural human psychological phenomena, such as depression, anxiety, delusions, hallucinations and dementia” (1). The question now is, “whether dissociative amnesia was similarly documented throughout history” (1). Was there a source to be found of dissociative amnesia before 1800? The study was unable to discover any texts. There is, according to this study, a proof of dissociative amnesia as being clearly culture-bound: “If dissociative amnesia for traumatic events were a natural psychological phenomenon, an innate capacity of the brain, then throughout the millenia before 1800, individuals would presumably have witnessed such cases and portrayed them in non-fictional works or in fictional characters. The absence of cases before 1800 cannot reasonably be explained by arguing that our ancestors understood or described psychological phenomena so differently as to make them unrecognizable to modern readers because spontaneous complete amnesia for a major traumatic event, in an otherwise lucid individual, is so graphic that it would be recognizable even through a dense veil of cultural interpretation. Therefore, it appears that dissociative amnesia is not a natural neuropsychological phenomenon, but instead a culture-bound syndrome, dating from the nineteenth century.” (Pope 2006: 1)

Thus, the disorder is not installed in our psyche but sociologically created. A critical reaction to the already mentioned sociocultural model of multiple personality and dissociation presented by Nicolas P. Spanos is that of psychologist David H. Gleaves. He stressed the relevance of the posttraumatic model (PTM) of DID and the inadequate analysis of Spanos (Gleaves 1996). In a study on dissociative identity disorder in relation to this critical view, however, it is clearly stated that such a posttraumatic

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model itself is insufficient and that there are also iatrogenic factors, which play an important role in the etiology of DID (Lilienfeld et al. 1999). What has to be taken into account is the lack of “cultural manifestations of multiple role enactments” in Gleave’s study and the “conceptual and empirical underpinnings” of PTM itself (507). DID and dissociation is also seen as a culture-bound syndrome, according to Harvard psychologist Richard J. McNally in his study Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory in 2005. The belief of traumatic amnesia theorists in the dissociation of traumatic memories is wrong, concluded McNally (817). The incapability of remembering severe trauma cannot be proved according to his studies. The “memory wars” among scientists represent a “correctly interpreted science in contrast to incorrectly interpreted science” (821). He concluded that “when the science is interpreted properly, the evidence shows that traumatic events – those experienced as overwhelmingly terrifying at the time of their occurrence – are highly memorable and seldom, if ever, forgotten” (821; see also Schacter 1999 and 2001). In other words, the idea of a dissociated secondary identity existing on its own is after all a myth. Being unable to recall a certain period of time is also one of the symptoms featured in court trials. Despite former verdicts, which found the defendant not guilty because of multiple personality, according to August Piper, there is now an agreement, that “US appellate courts have repeatedly refused to accept dissociative amnesia as a valid entity, and several ardent defenders of dissociative disorder faced criminal sanctions, malpractice lawsuits, and other serious legal difficulties” (Piper and Merskey 2004: 2). An interesting fictional version of such a view can be seen in William Diehl’s thriller Primal Fear (1993), which revolves around faking MPD in court. If the secondary personality, the Mr. Hyde, is guilty, the primary personality is not. Being actually a very rare syndrome, according to August Piper, the innumerous presentation of multiple and hidden personalities within human nature and fictional characters – the “Sybil-ing” of America (Acocella 1999) – has consequently provoked a lively discussion whether it even actually exists or not (Hacking, 1996; Piper, 1997; Spanos, 1996; Showalter 1997). As claimed by Acocella, the questions whether the disorder exists or not, can only subsist on absolute accounts. “MPD is a field of angry people, making absolute judgments. They believe that things are real or not real. According to MPD believers, the disorder exists, and not to diagnose it is negligence, even malpractice. According to MPD skeptics, the disorder is overwhelmingly iatrogenic, that is, created by therapy” (Acocella 1999: 28-9). Again in other words, you are either with us or against us. The prototypical multiple follows simple facts. Since the second half of the 20th century, the average modern MPD/DID patient has been female and behaves as if she is possessed by “two or more distinct identities” (Spanos 1996: 1). When referred to by name, the MPD patient displays different interpersonal styles as each part is based on “their own unique memories and experiences, and many of the identities claim amnesia for the other personalities with whom they coreside” (Spanos 1996: 1). A history of severe childhood sexual abuse (CSA) or even rituals in a satanical environment and satanic ritual abuse (SRA) are mentioned (cf. Coons & Milstein, 1986; Ross, Miller, Bjornson, Reagor & Fraser, 1991; W.C. Young, Sachs, Braun, & Wat-

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kins, 1991). In a recent, very controversial, non-fiction book on her personal experiences called Twenty-Two Faces (2012), Judy Byington describes her childhood memories and SRA. In Hystories (1997), Elaine Showalter defines this syndrome, which “has become epidemic in the U.S. since the 1980s” (159), as a media-driven mixture of a sickness with a considerable history and its origin in hysteria. This makes it a hystorie. These hystories are defined as “cultural narratives of hysteria”, which “multiply rapidly and uncontrollably in the era of mass media, telecommunications, and e-mail” (5). MPD here lines up in a parade of bizarre maladies such as Hysteria, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Gulf War Syndrome, Recovered Memory, Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), and even Alien Abduction. According to Showalter, the use of MPD/DID in fictional texts and fiction occurs countless times and resembles solely gender stereotypes. Next to being a stigma for insane women, the multiple personality became an expression of the powerless, as “looking at literary and social history suggests that for over a century, multiplicity has offered women a way to express forbidden aspects of the self” (Showalter 1997: 164), possibly a Bakthinian counter-narrative or carnival.2 The secondary identity or personality thus functions as a symbol of the excluded, even the unconscious. It mirrors what is wrong within society. Most importantly, it was a fictional work which influenced the perception and proliferation of the multiple personality: the novel Sybil (1973) by Flora Rheta Schreiber and Cornelia Wilbur. The success of the novel Sybil created a new MPD stereotype basing the disorder on severe sexual child abuse (Showalter 1997: 164; Hacking 1995: 40ff). According to psychiatrist Frank W. Putnam, this novel eventually “became a template against which other patients could be compared and understood” (Putnam 1989: 47). Sybil, noted Hacking and as noted before, symbolized the role model of the multiple personality in the 20th century. It “became a prototype for what was to count as a multiple (Hacking 1995: 43). In summary, the popularity of multiple personality is evident. Amazon.com lists more than 6.500 entries on MPD and more than 3.300 on DID. The syndrome, however, is still extremely controversial. Its origins are either considered to be influenced by external forces or linked to internal mechanisms of the traumatized psyche. The features of the syndrome, whether called MPD or DID, are connected to presentations within fictional works which work as role models. Such role models therefore need to be examined closely as they created a culture of multiple personality, MPD and DID. The second part of this study will therefore explore what is called here a culture-embedded syndrome. The syndrome cannot be understood without a close examination of corresponding fictional representations. These provide the very narrative of multiple personality. In consequence, a genre of multiple personality can be

2

This can be accepted although an illness or disorder, of which the latter suggests a “normal” order of the self within the idea of unity and a condition almost impossible to not relate to the post-millenium years, may have nothing to do with such forbidden aspects. Now it is – clearly stated by Carter in Multiplicity (2008) – actually necessary to experience the self as multiple and flexible.

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detected, subdivided into subgenres both in literature and cinema. These adaptations again create the basis for contemporary settings. And the multiplications never end…

Part II: The Culture-embedded Syndrome – Multiple Personality and Dissociation in American Fiction

7 Brand Identity and “Culture-embedded Syndrome”: Multiple Personality in American Culture Am I one person? Two? Maybe even more? Oh, great. Maybe There are a dozen of me, Doing drugs and sleeping around All up and down the state. HOPKINS IDENTICAL 2008: 536

In Ellen Hopkins’ visually challenging novel in verse Identical (2008), the female protagonist is in fact divided into two different personalities or persons presented as the twins Reanna and Kaeleigh. Her dissociation is the result of an incestuous abuse by her father. As in the seminal novel Sybil (1973), which became “a prototype for what was to count for a multiple” (Hacking 1995: 43), Hopkins’ protagonists demonstrate what is necessary to detect the typical dissociated multiple in terms of MPD in fiction. The inner fragmentation is presented in the form of different personalities, unaware of each other as being part of a divided mind; the split occurs after a severe trauma. Furthermore, this transformation into distinct persons occurs despite the fact that the disorder was renamed into dissociative identity disorder (DID) in the year 1994. “Under either name”, writes Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), “multiple personality has become a familiar history, and has developed its own styles of advocacy” (160). Indeed, the fictional adaptation of this psychiatric disorder is literally split into fictional representations and the attempts by the scientific community to re-define and re-place the disorder within the concept of (one!) identity fragmentation. This is clearly mentioned in the DSM IV-TR definition:1

1

The psychiatric field, however, is itself split into skeptics and defenders of both MPD and DID. In addition, the therapeutical settings have only changed insufficiently, as the notion of persons inhabiting one body is still adopted, Bruce Wenegrat concludes in his

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“It is a disorder characterized by identity fragmentation rather than a proliferation of separate personalities.” (APA 2000: 519; my emphasis)

However, adapting the idea of dissociative identity disorder at a fictional level represents rather a literal proliferation of separate personalities. The references to various cases of multiple personality in the first part of this thesis, were necessary in relation to the public awareness and fictional treatment of the phenomenon. The historical and classical cases alluded to are themselves an important and publicly quite wellknown factor of the phenomenon. In a way they provide a template for the development of fictional characters with multiple personality and dissociation. This study aims to offer another view besides presenting classical historical cases of so-called dual and multiple personality and an uncritical repetition of typical contemporary case studies of trauma or a skeptical deconstruction of popular ones and a complete negation of the phenomenon altogether: An analysis of the representation of the fictional character, who has also contributed to the awareness and perception of MPD/DID. Fictional characters are thus understood to have added an additional and considerable aspect to a syndrome, as was partly already shown by the cases described above, which slowly slid into fictionalized adaptations. Therefore the term of the “culture-embedded syndrome” will be mentioned in this context. It refers to multiple personality and dissociation seen as a cultural phenomenon with distinct references within the fictional genre of dissociated minds, making it thus self-referential, and also being an aspect of the popular culture and the collective consciousness. Newer and contemporary texts refer to former adaptations, thereby presenting the syndrome intertextually in an intracultural, self-referential manner. Given this culture-embedded syndrome, Canadian psychiatrist Harold Merskey and American psychiatrist August Piper (cf. Piper and Merskey 2004) do not regard MPD/DID as what Showalter calls a “spontaneous natural event” when she refers to other disorders than MPD/DID, which she also calls artificial or “hystories” (Showalter 1997: 161). Indeed, the phenomenon of multiple personality and dissociation is an amalgam consisting of fact and fraud, scientific study supporting or denying it as well as a mixture of myth-making and story-telling with fictional adaptations which all represent different sides of a single phenomenon. The syndrome is therefore also intercultural, resulting from an exchange between several fields such as psychiatry, psychotherapy, trauma theory on the one side (consisting of contradictory statements) and art, literature and film on the other side (creating controversy as well as reflecting it). Fictional texts, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), contributed considerably to the public awareness of the syndrome. After the publication of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s novel Sybil in 1973, MPD advocates succeeded in having the disorder included in the DSM-III (Rieber 2006: 105) and the MPD-epidemic of could start (cf. Hacking 1995, Spanos 1994, Showalter 1997, Lilienfeld et al. 1999). In addition, published medical case histories such as Thigpen and Cleckley’s The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and Morton Prince’s “Miss Beau-

book Theater of Disorder. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University of Medicine (Wenegrat 2007: 137-172).

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champ” (1906) deliberately courted public attention by presenting the cases as sensations, which the latter actually became “wherever English was read” (Murray 1930 cited in Leys “The Real Miss Beauchamp” 44). Sybil was successful as the prototypical case of MPD because her case addressed the topics of childhood sexual abuse, women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement and a recognition of trauma as an acknowledged condition (cf. Hacking 1995; Acocella 1999). Sybil seemingly gave the traumatized a voice to be heard (only to later force diagnosed people to perform this standard MPD, a standard procedure that signifies the dark side of psychiatry and a re-traumatization within psychiatric power systems). But as Showalter rightly observed, whether or not MPD/DID is a valid medical condition, and even though minor or major corrections of diagnostic details may have been added, the condition can still function unchanged on a fictional level (cf. Showalter 1997), since fiction also uses the metaphorical level (yet for the psychotherapists of the early MPD era, those metaphors were reality). Despite the inclusion of “correctional characters” who represent the controversy of the 1990s, the basic elements still remain. The mental split can also be presented as unchanged in terms of representing such an inner split at a metaphorical level of interactions between different personalities, as the clear reference to MPD in the DSM-III with “the existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities” (APA 1980: 259) shows. It may also be placed among more contemporary afflictions such as posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSD). Medical professionals continuously make such connections in order to keep the syndrome “up-to-date” or even fashionable. While the first cases of ‘dédoublement de la personalité’ and later the cases of “multiple personality” were associated with the diseases of hysteria (cf. Hacking 1995), nowadays dissociative disorders are more commonly linked to PTSD, which may be adapted to encompass everything and anything (cf. Merskey 2007). In fictional works, however, the split or dissociation of a consciousness still seems to be a genre of its own. It will continue to exist and will therefore strengthen its position within cultural structures. New fictional works, which contain and reflect multiple personalities or dissociative identities cannot deny a historical reference. They even cite former theories and translate the notion of a divided consciousness into the corresponding contemporary environment, zeitgeist and culture. One can find an example of such a new account with historical roots in the novel The Bird’s Nest (1954) by Shirley Jackson, who explicitly mentions Morton Prince and his The Dissociation of a Personality (1906). In addition to references to later works such as Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) and again Sybil (1973 and 1976 or 2008), Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1996) makes references in terms of the alter ego to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). It was this 19th century novella that actually created the pattern of multiple personalities and dissociative identities as a template the readers can recognize, and therefore they can understand the mental disorder of the split mind as a ‘split personality’ – often also misinterpreted as schizophrenia (see chapter 2). Such a self-referential pattern also creates an understanding of the inner division of consciousness as something to be represented in certain consistent ways. The questions then arise: how are such split characters presented? Is there in fact, as argued, a similar pattern, a template, which is used over and over again? If this is the

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case, how would a writer include the zeitgeist in terms of the cause and trigger of a mental split? Consequently, is there a recognizable shift in the way the mental disorder is portrayed in contemporary works of fiction? Is the renewed definition of MPD, defining the existence of distinct and complex personalities, now as DID, with only the presence of different identity states, shown in the fictional texts? And if so, how then would a text or a film change in terms of presenting the total dissociation as inner fragmentation rather than differentiated personalities? Would such a new definition still be recognized? The example of Jess Walter’s complex novel The Zero (2006), where the protagonist is traumatized after the experience of nine-eleven, suggests that this may be so to a certain extent, as do the plural identities of the characters in Siri Hustvedt’s sophisticated novel Sorrows of an American (2008). Being a culture-embedded syndrome, the representation of a split consciousness needs to include certain features in order to be clearly recognized or understood. The phenomenon of multiple personality and dissociation cannot be explained without such references. Certain semi-fictional or fictional characters – such as Sybil or Norman Bates, Tyler Durden and so on – contributed to the whole concept and the awareness and perception of its manifestation as a specific syndrome. Such a syndrome also contributes to people’s self-awareness as “the concepts that people hold of themselves are social products” (Spanos 1994: 4). A study called “Inferring the Popularity of an Opinion From Its Familiarity: A Repetitive Voice Can Sound Like a Chorus” (2007) can underline further aspects of a culture-embedded syndrome. When people form an opinion on something, they try to orientate themselves on what the majority believes. What is necessary here is the continuous repetition of such beliefs. The more often a person is confronted with a certain view, the more convinced the person becomes that it is correct. The number of repetitions contributes to the successful establishment of a given view. Eventually people come to accept it and adapt it to fit within their own value systems. Even minorities are only able to shape public opinion by repeating their view on a given manner often enough (cf. Weaver et al. 2007). Accordingly, the features of MPD/DID are a fixed and constantly repeated phenomenon. To position the disorders of multiple personality and dissociative identity as a culture-embedded syndrome, the perception and definition of the personal self within society also needs to be enhanced. In this understanding the self is not regarded as being atomistic, in the sense of political liberalism or libertarian concepts, but rather seen as embedded in societal and cultural structures. As Will Kymlicka pointed out in relation to the political theory of communitarianism and the notion of the political self: “On the liberal view of the self, individuals are considered free to question their participation in existing social practices, and opt out of them, should those practices seem no longer worth pursuing […] Communitarians believe that this is a false view of the self. It ignores the fact that the self is ‘embedded’ or ‘situated’ in existing social practices, that we cannot always stand back and opt out of them. Our social roles and relationships, or at least some of them, must be

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taken as givens for the purposes of personal deliberation.” (Kymlicka 1990: 207; my emphasis)2

In the case of multiple personality as a culture-embedded syndrome a generally understood representation of the symptoms also develops within existing social practices – for example, the psychiatric power system, psychiatric wards that were specialized in the treatment of MPD where experienced patients could train the newly diagnosed (cf. McHugh 2008), autopathographies describing the stereotypical features, blockbuster movies, bestselling books and so on. A representation is also understood as a performance, while acting-out and the symptoms are part of a generally accessible context. This context developed not only as a result of Mesmer’s public demonstrations, but also through Charcot’s shows of hysterical women (cf. Showalter 1985). Accordingly, audience awareness and perception have always been central to MPD/DID. Dr. Munthe, a contemporary witness of Charcot’s hysteria shows, observed: “The huge amphitheatre was filled to the last place with a multi-coloured audience drawn from tout Paris, authors, journalists, leading actors and actresses, fashionable demimondaines.” (Showalter 1985: 148)

The audience is introduced to the hysteric symptoms, hypnosis and other states of consciousness by means of exaggeration and sensationalism. Nowadays, people’s awareness and perception are shaped by television documentaries, such as Michael Mierendorf’s HBO production Broken Child (1993), and films like Sybil (1976 and 2008) or movies such as Identity (2004) (cf. Byrne 1998 and 2001). The television series, United States of Tara (since 2009) is an example of this.3 In such film productions, the symptoms are presented as absolute dissociation; the patient dissociates and externalizes other personalities which are then represented as distinct characters or persons of their own. Some past trauma has triggered the split; the alter personalities acquire the status of fully developed people.

2

3

On the notion of the self as “unencumbered” (liberal) or “encumbered” (communitarian) see also the political theory of liberalism versus communitarianism. Liberalism is understood as defining the self as independent from society rather than too restricted by societal and community boundaries, whereas communitarianism considers the self as embedded within societal structures. For more references, which evolved around John Rawls’s concept of justice, see: John Rawls. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971; Michael Sandel. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1982]; Robert Nozick. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwel, 1974; Amitai Etzioni. The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993; Martha Nussbaum. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Harvard: Belknap Press, 2006. Season 1 (premiere on January 18, 2009); season 2 (premiere on March 22, 2010); season 3 (premiere on March 28, 2011).

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The awareness of multiple personalities and dissociative identities as cultureembedded syndrome is also connected to other theories. If something, in this case a mental condition, is to be fully recognized, its fictional representation must follow the laws of marketing, and brand marketing in particular. Citing a fictional split character in the tradition of representing multiple personalities requires an implementation of the rules of marketing or branding: “Branding has been used ever since the earliest time to distinguish the goods of one producer from those of another. Indeed, the word ‘brand’ derives from the Old Norse word brandr, which means to burn. Brands were, and still are, the means by which owners of cattle mark their animals as their own […] with a means of recognizing and specifying.” (Stobart 1994: 1; italics in original text)

The producer is the author, who does not claim the complete rights to the brand “multiple personality”. The brand on the other hand, with its very distinctive characteristics needs to represent certain features, mostly through the adaptation of distinct personalities or people in order to symbolize the inner split. So the brand of multiple personality, and also dissociative identity, follows the cultural trope and definition of the double and the alter ego, as presented in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. The audience is aware of a division into distinct parts, which are represented as different people, thus making the disorder recognizable. With reference to the features necessary for the creation of a successful brand, marketing expert Paul Stobart explains: “The brand must be appealing; the consumer must recognize the brand qualities and attributes” (Stobart 1994: 11). The appealing part could mean that expressing one’s despair by using the available metaphor of MPD/DID could help to negotiate such despair as it is now recognizable by others – an acceptable “idiom of distress” (cf. Nichter 1981). In popular culture, trauma means inner split; inner split means MPD/DID. Furthermore, having established distinctive features, for example, by extraordinarily successful stories such as Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde in the 19th century or Schreiber’s Sybil in the 20th century, there is another factor that contributes to the success of a brand: The brand must be consistent. The brand must be meaningful differentiated; it must stand apart […] such that consumers recognize that the brand product has particular characteristics. (Stobart 1994: 11)

This quote by Stobart concerning the marketing of brands could help to explain why the newer definition of DID has not been as successful or popular as the former definition of MPD, or why shifts within the definition espoused by the professional community are not understood or entirely acknowledged by the public (the contemporary studies now refer to the syndrome as covert and not overt; cf. Spiegel 2011). DID is still perceived as expressing the distress as clearly and distinctly as MPD. The covert mechanisms the psychiatric community wanted to establish are not present in fictional adaptations. Concerning the success of brands and their connection to emotions, Leslie de Cheratony writes in From Brand Vision to Brand Evaluations:

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“Brands are powerful entities because they blend functional performance-based values with emotional values” (Cheratony 2006: 11). Major neuroscience studies show how we remember things especially because we connect them with emotion. This is shown in a brilliant and very accessible book called In Search of Memory (2006) by American neuropsychiatrist and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel. MPD/DID is all about emotion; traumatized, vulnerable emotions as well as shock and empathy felt by the audience. In Brand Strategy, branding consultant John Murphy points out that a “brand is a product or service of a particular supplier which is differentiated by its name and presentation” (Murphy 1990: 1). Accordingly, various authors or directors can be seen as suppliers, who refer to the MPD brand in order to present a fictional character and his mental state. The perception of MPD is part of collective memory and popular culture and as such it is shared as a common good and recognized by all. Consequently, “a brand then is a complex thing. Not only is it the actual product” but also it “has been developed over time” (Murphy 1990: 3). This explains why the seemingly outdated pathological concept of MPD still is so current. Murphy continues: “A brand then, acts as a gestalt in that it is a concept which is more than the sum of its parts and which takes a long time to establish in the minds of consumers” (2; italics in original text). Such a gestalt “needs to be coherent over time” and not be subject to rapid fluctuations in terms of the message, quality, positioning or overall moods (3). “A brand is therefore a ‘pact’ between the owner and the consumer” (3); and this reference to “a pact” neatly sums up the interplay between existing audience expectations and the representation of the split character. Changing the name of the syndrome from MPD to DID was intended to highlight the mental mechanism behind the split which, according to the theory, is a process of dissociation. In this way, the implication of a personality disorder referring to what happens inside the mind was negated. Representing a fragmentation of identity rather than an existence of separate personalities, DID is therefore understood as “a failure to integrate various aspects of identity, memory, and consciousness” (APA 2000: 526). There is, however, another important description in the DSM-IV-TR, which alludes to the experiences of DID, which shows yet another understanding. Instead of the identity being fragmented, “each personality state may be experienced as if it has a distinct personal history, self-image, and identity, including a separate name” (526). So one can still detect the old MPD system here. In The Great Ideas of Clinical Science (2007), the renowned psychologists Scott O. Lilienfeld and William T. O’Donohue showed that MPD/DID are both a socially constructed disease embedded within a certain culture. ‘Culture’ in this context is defined as being influenced by psychological processes whilst also influencing them (Ian Hacking would call this “interactive kind” when it comes to such looping effects; cf. Hacking 1988). They cite the definition of culture by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952): “Patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols…including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional…ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be

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considered as products of action, on the other, as conditional elements of future action.” (Kroeber and Kluckhohn cited in Lilienfeld and O’Donohue 2007: 376)

Lilienfeld and O’Donohue thus classify certain mental disorders as “partly socially constructed”. In The Great Ideas of Clinical Science (2007), they argue that “social construction rarely, if ever, operates in a vacuum to mold the manifestation of psychopathology. Instead, cultural and historical variables almost always operate against a backdrop of a preexisting psychopathological diathesis (predisposition)” (Lilienfeld and O’Donohue 2007: 347). Functioning as a social construction, a certain behavior may be understood as pathological in one culture, in which it is therefore sanctioned, but not in other cultures (349). Psychopathology, however, is not entirely imposed on the human minds as if there was a tabula rasa, but rather is understood as also being influenced by cultural backgrounds. Taking such positions into account, the DSM-IVTR also refers to so-called “culture-bound syndromes”, to describe and recognize states of possession and dissociation, without classifying them as mental diseases.4 Lilienfeld and O’Donohue highlight the interaction of cultural influences – which should not be misunderstood as culture-bound. One example of this is where there is a cultural disposition to accept trance states and an awareness of dissociation as being influenced by a “substantially increased media and professional attention” (Lilienfeld and O’Donohue 2007: 358). The diagnostic criteria of MPD were applied by a very limited number of psychiatrists as research has proven that “only three psychiatrists accounted for about 50 percent of DID diagnosis” (Holmes 2008: 275).5 Spanos, Lilienfeld and O’Donohue argue that “mainstream treatment techniques for DID appear to reinforce a patient’s display of multiplicity, reify alters as distinct personalities, and encourage patients to establish contact with presumed latent alters” (Lilienfeld and O’Donohue 2007: 358).6 As a part of certain cultures, such culture-bound syndromes (CBS) are to be understood within “their context of origin” (Lilienfeld and O’Donohue 2007: 351). Next to bulimia it is dissociative identity disorder, which is regarded as a culturebound syndrome in Western industrialized cultures (350). Regarding DID, they state the following:

4

5 6

The DSM-IV-TR refers to 300.15 Dissociative Disorders Not Otherwise Specified: “Dissociative trance disorder: single or episodic disturbances in the state of consciousness, identity, or memory that are indigenous to particular locations and cultures” (APA 2000: 532). The DSM thus places certain “stereotyped ‘involuntary’ movements or amnesia among culturally influences dispositions such as “amok (Indonesia), bebainan (Indonesia), latah (Malaysia), pibloktoq (Arctic), ataque de nervios (Latin America), and possession (India)” (532). The DSM-IV-TR includes also a “Glossary on Culture-Bound Syndromes” referring to dissociative experiences and somatoform disorders, mostly to trance states or states of possession (APA 2000: 898-903). See also Mai 1995 and Lilienfeld and O’Donohue 2007: 358. See also Wenegrat 2001.

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“According to the sociocognitive model of DID, patients actively seek to understand their psychological distress and do so in terms of available cultural narratives as well as suggestive therapeutic procedures. More specifically, proponents of the sociocognitive model contend that DID results from inadvertent therapist cueing (e.g., suggestive questioning regarding the existence of possible alters, hypnosis, guided imagery, media influences (e.g., television and film portrayals of DID, such as Sybil), and broader sociocultural expectations regarding the presumed clinical features of DID.” (Lilienfeld and O’Donohue 2007: 356; my emphasis)

This previously mentioned sociocognitive model or SCM (for example, Merskey 1995; McHugh 1993; Spanos 1996; Lilienfeld 1999; Lilienfeld et al. 1999, to name just a view) contrasts with the traditional post-traumatic model or PTM (Gleaves 1996; Ross 1997), in which dissociation is understood as a coping mechanism caused by severe childhood trauma (see Lilienfeld and O’Donahue 2007: 356). The SCM suggests that evidence of childhood abuse is not entirely accepted and still requires further validation (357). Furthermore, and more importantly, it understands the representation and awareness of “multiple identity enactment” as “shaped by cultural and historical factors” (357). Studies of well-known researchers of DID appear, even outside the USA, to considerably increase the popular perception of the diagnosis (358). Other factors contribute to the SCM: few psychiatrists diagnose DID, alters appear only during therapy, features of DID can be easily malingered (358). The cultural influences on DID, however, do not mean it is culture-bound. Public awareness of the condition and its consequent increase in diagnosed cases in the 1980s and early 1990s rather leads to the conclusion that “DID is a socially constructed and culturally influenced condition” (Lilienfeld etc. 2007: 358). Accordingly, in his studies on hysteria Ilza Vieth noted that: “The symptoms, it seems, were conditioned by social expectancy, tastes, mores, and religion, and were further shaped by the state of medicine in general and the knowledge of the public about matters.” (Viet 1965: 209 cited in Lilienberg and O’Donohue 2007: 359)

Lilienfeld and O’Donohue thus conclude: “Many mental disorders, including eating disorders, DID, and PTSD, are in part shaped by prevailing social, cultural, and historical norms, although the underlying personality dispositions to these conditions may be shared across most of even all cultures” (Lilienfeld an O’Donohue 2007: 365-366). In the classic study The Social Construction of Reality (1966), sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann introduced the term “social construction.” This referred to concepts or mental representations of people’s actions, which eventually became habitual over time. Through reciprocal interactions, a social reality could be constructed (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1966). Construction, however, seems too harsh as a term, the culture-embedded syndrome rather refers to metaphors with meaning. In Encounters (1961), a study on the sociology of interaction, Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman already focused on face-to-face interaction and mentioned a “simultaneous multiplicity of selves” (Goffman 1961: 132). According to Goffman, “in any work establishment, the individual becomes involved in social relationships

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and group formation” (135). Goffman’s assumption concerns social role-playing and therefore the cases he investigated show “that the individual limits the degree to which he embraces a situated role, or is required to embrace it, because of society’s understanding him as a multiple-role-performer rather than a person with a particular role. This view of the individual, which empties has particular role of all content and conceives of him, formally, as a person of many identifications, whatever these particular identifications are, is expressed in still other ways.” (Goffman 1961: 142)

The individual then (re-)acts according to the situation (being a doctor, being a mother, being a customer, being a manager and so on). This concept links to Judith Butler’s terms of performance and performativity. According to Butler in Gender Trouble (1990), where she presents gender as something to be understood in terms of performativity – “one is not simply a body…one does one’s body” (Butler “Performative Acts” 1990: 272). Performativity, however, is not to be misunderstood as performance. As Anthony Kubiak explained: “performance is too a priori, too conscious of itself and its biases and internal, social forces. Performance is more a showing than a becoming. The forces at work in performativity are more insidious, hidden, concealed, and self-concealing” (Kubiak 1998: 91). In “Splitting the Difference: Performance and its Double in American Culture”, Kubiak connects Butler’s theory to multiple personality. This is “a figuration of the performative that challenges […] more socioculturally driven modes of performance theory: multiple personality syndrome and the site of its emergent history, recovered…memories.” (Kubiak 1998: 92)

Kubiak states that “multiple personality disorder (MPD) victims seemingly enact tightly scripted but apparently unconscious” with their performance, “all the while acting in order to attain a ‘self-revelation’ that is, or might be, one more illusion, one more subterfuge” (Kubiak 1998: 92). Kubiak links the emergence of multiple personality and recovered memory “to American life and culture” and “deeper historical roots and ramifications” of the symptoms of hysteria “that speak both to the lack or dislocation of identity in American cultural history and the closure of memory (history) in a nation that might be defined by those very characteristics – lack of historical identity and lack of, or repression of, history itself” (111 n4). Whether history is repressed or not, what is important is the presentation of the multiple personality and dissociation as an externalization of personality parts as independent people. As such, enacting the de-individuated self “acts in a microtheatre of cruelty” (99) reliving traumatic events, which are said to have caused the split, often childhood sexual abuse (see also Hacking 1995; Spanos 1994), but increasingly embedded in a more

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general post-traumatic culture, which is necessary in order to lead to a pathological dissociation (cf. Merskey 2007, Mc Hugh 2008).7 It seems that for Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, the term of “social construction” is rather too overstretched. In fact, he claims there has been a proliferation of everything being solely socially constructed (cf. Hacking 1999). A culture-embedded syndrome, on the other hand, is not understood as being merely and totally constructed. It refers to what can be called the culture, cultivation and cult of dissociation, which has in fact produced a tradition of storytelling concerning the representation of split minds with innumerable fictional adaptations. Therefore, the presentation and representation, as well as public perceptions and awareness of the audience concerning multiple personality and dissociation and the translation into fictional texts are important. They also represent the embedded fictional self in societal structures. Such structures can then – in terms of fictionality and literaricity– be observed and interpreted. In his critical study Rewriting the Soul (1995), Ian Hacking focused in detail on the reality of multiple personality, which is insofar existent as the symptoms are displayed. His historical review of hysteria and multiple personality and the hype surrounding it until the mid-1990s presents the syndrome as being very deeply embedded in a mutual relationship between popular notion and scientific establishment (cf. Hacking 1995). A very clear position is offered by psychiatrist Paul McHugh, one of the major critics of MPD, in Try to Remember (2008). He concludes that there is a psychiatric clash over meaning, memory and mind. Dissociation, let alone multiple personality understood as many people inhabiting one body, is “not a mental condition that derives ‘from nature’” (McHugh 2008: 60). His assumption based on his experiences as one of the leading psychiatrists in the USA,8 who often encounters patients claiming to be multiples, is the following: “[MPD] exists in the world as an artificial product of human devising – an artefact of a most special kind. MPD is a behavioral posture. It emerges and develops during the therapeutic exchanges between distressed people (with any of several different kinds of mental disorders) and their psychotherapists.” (McHugh 2008: 60)

The phenomenon of multiple personality and the theory of dissociation, which point to the mind splitting into various pieces in order to forget a traumatic event, is “a behavioral artefact built on psychological assumption” (McHugh 2008: 122). McHugh further states that “MPD is by nature a behavior taken up by the patient to meet the

7

8

The cause of a split in fictional works is psychologically induced, for example, in Gene Brewer’s K-Pax (1995) or caused by societal dysfunction, for example, in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) thus being used differently as a metaphorical device. He is presently University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. From 1975 – 2001, he was the Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

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expectations” around him (132), as such it merely involves “mimicking” (133). Referring to Charcot’s clinic and the hysteria (“Bal des Folles”, Showalter 1985: 148) he produced in the Salpetière, as well as Salem witch trials, he states that “the behavior of MPD patients is expressed in ways that others construe and interpret as evidence of a hidden injury. MPD is thus a behavior made legitimate by and maintained through the social interactions it evokes with significant others. It is a socially constructed pattern of behavior.” (MacHugh 2008: 133; my emphasis)

Concerning the epidemic of multiple personality disorder following the success of both the novel (1973) and film (1976) Sybil, the social interaction of public awareness and conceptualization of the disorder is most intriguing. As Anthony Kubiak noted: “The multiple, in other words, could now [after the film Sybil], not only construct selves through the screen image but also could reconstruct itself constructing. The extent to which film may or may not have contributed or even given birth to the explosive phenomenon is an intriguing question which can also be asked in reference to the appearance of the television remote control…an experience that has been likened to watching a multiple switching among her personalities.” (Kubiak 1998: 100; my emphasis)9

The explosive phenomenon of multiple personality and dissociation takes place within the rhythm of mass media. The mass media display a reality of their own, thus creating a “transcendental illusion” (Luhmann 1996: 14). The influence of mass media on society is considerable (20) and the human being is then presented as a social construct (135). The mixture of real (presented) reality and fictional reality is not to untangle (148), and therefore “the difference between inside and outside of fiction, the difference between the narratives and the history of film on the one side and author, machinery of publication and recipient on the other side is constantly undermined by crossing the dividing line.” [Die Differenz von Innenseite und Außenseite der Fiktion, die Differenz von Erzähltem oder Filmgeschichte auf der einen und Autor, Publikationsmaschinerie und Empfänger auf der anderen Seite wird durch ständiges Kreuzen der Grenze unterlaufen]. (Luhmann 1996: 148; my translation)

According to Luhman in Die Realität der Massenmedien (1996), mass media also irritate because of a distortion of reality (174). Commenting on the influence of mass media and popular culture, George Lipsitz stated in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990): “The powerful apparatuses of contemporary commercial electronic mass communication dominate discourse in the modern world. They supply us with endless diversion and distraction mo-

9

See also Hacking: “The effect is similar to that of switching TV channels by channel surfing” (Hacking. 1995: 32).

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bilized to direct our minds toward advertising messages. They colonize the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives, seizing upon every possible flaw in our bodies, minds, and psyches to increase our anxieties and augment our appetites for consumer goods. Culture itself comes to us as a commodity.” (Lipsitz 1990: 4)

The term ‘popular culture’ is itself difficult to define satisfactorily. Following Lipsitz, “popular culture has no fixed forms: the historical circumstances of reception and appropriation determine whether novels or motion pictures or videos belong to a sphere called popular culture” (Lipsitz 1990: 13).10 It is this reception of novels like Sybil in the year 1973 – and its predecessor of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (1886) – which created another level of popular or mass awareness of a mental disease called ‘dédoublement de la personalité’ or ‘dual personality’ in the 19th century (the main studies were centered in France) and then in the 20th century multiple personality disorder (MPD; with the USA as center). As stated above, this was first mentioned the DSM-III in 1980. “The multiple movement was introduced not by The Three Faces of Eve but by a very different multibiography: Sybil, published in 1973” (Hacking 1995: 41). As Joan Acocella wrote in Creating Hysteria (1999), “the electronic entertainment industry was unquestionably the main source of imagery” concerning MPD (Acocella 1999: 48). “The media supplied alters, too”, says Acocella, such as Ninja Turtle alters or Mr. Spock alters (48). Next to television programs or Hollywood films, the Internet provides further fruitful information: “There are webs sites for multiples, web sites for ritual abuse claimants. By clicking on them, suggestible people can find out what curious signs led others to the discovery of their MPD or their cult history and begin looking for such signs in their own lives.” (Acocella 1999: 48)

Besides, the very notion of popular culture may contribute to a culture of fragmentation, thus positioning the disorder of dissociation as the central mental condition of our time. As such, multiple personality disorder or dissociative identities may exist “in a cultural force field that is increasingly open to considerations of multiplicity” (psychologist Sherry Tuckle cited in Acocella 1999: 49). The multiplicity of a human mind then may exist within a fragmented popular culture itself: “Similarly, individual artifacts of popular culture have no fixed meanings: it is impossible to say whether any one combination of sounds or set of images of grouping of word innately expresses one unified political position. Images and icons compete for dominance within a multiplicity of discourses.” (Lipsitz 1990: 13)

10

Following Lipsitz, the following quote is also essential: “Here I wish to avoid the debates about ‘popular’ vs. ‘mass’ culture, in which popular describes voluntary bottom-up creation and mass refers to top-down, mass marketed commercial culture. These polarities obscure the important grass-roots creation that takes place within ‘mass culture’, as well as manipulated mass aspects of ‘popular culture’” (Lipsitz 1990: 275 n9).

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This multiplicity of discourses clearly refers to the term of ‘postmodernism’. Any postmodern human being would therefore very well understand the meaning of being literally fragmented. Such a view on the multiple personality or dissociative identity is offered by James M. Glass in Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World (1993) and Jens Mergenthaler in Sollbruchstellen der Seele11 (2008). Both studies position the concept of multiple personality in the context of postmodernist theories. Such theories point to the break-up of rational structures (for example Lacan 1982, Glass 1993: 1), an alienated consciousness due to different metanarratives (Lyotard 1998 [1979], Glass 1993; 2), “polytheism of values” (Benhabib 1990 cited in Glass 1993: 3), fixed knowledge and flexible opinions (Rorty 1991, Glass 1990: 4) and so on. However, while Glass states that such a postmodern view on the multiple self is not an appropriate way to regard a real mental disease, which involves real suffering (Glass 1990: 157), Mergenthaler stresses the difficulties of an identity nowadays to remain somehow stable or unified and thus simply understands “multiplicity as metaphor” and collects anything possibly and randomly concerned. Such a metaphor comprehends the inner fragmentation as taking place within what was called a “dissociogenic culture” (Gold 2004). In Thomas Pynchon’s novel V (1961), such an experience is expressed in the following terms: “Chapter three. In which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations This helped ‘Stencil’ appear as only one among a repertoire of identities. ‘Forcible dislocation of personality’ was what he called the general technique, which is not exactly the same as ‘seeing the other fellow’s point of view’; for it involved, say, wearing clothes that Stencil wouldn’t be caught dead in, eating foods that would have made Stencil gag, living in unfamiliar digs, frequenting bars or cafés of a non-Stencilian character; all this for weeks on end; and why? To keep Stencil in his place: that is, in the third person.” (Pynchon 1961: 62)

Postmodernism may offer a convenient view of the self as being divided as a result of multi-tasking, being part of a “pick-and-mix generation” (the current term for the young adult generation which refers to their habits of consumerism; and the industry must utterly enjoy a “multiple costumer” who needs to buy all kinds of styles according to the prevailing mood), expressing itself on different levels of mobile mass communication similarly and exhaustingly, thus turning into a “protean self” within a fragmented world (cf. Lifton 1993). It displays a “transitorical identity” (cf. Straub and Renn 2002), and a “saturated self” (cf. Gergen 1991). Nevertheless, the notion of multiple personality or MPD/DID is that of a mental disorder and not a naturally felt

11

A literal translation of Mergenthaler’s title is: “Predetermined Braking Point of the Soul” referring to the fragmentation of the soul. Yet his study lacks consistency concerning the focus on multiple personality now widely understood as any kind of plural self-notion or multiplicity. Furthermore, several texts are analyzed expressing the distress of the nonsingular (post)modern self, for example Herman Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (1927). Finally the film version of Fight Club (1999) is discussed, which differs considerably from the novel version, a fact that is not mentioned at all in this study.

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division. Thus, MPD/DID is not plausible in societal zeitgeist terms only, but rather it must be positioned in the context of a socially constructed disturbance (cf. Hartocollis 1998) hence creating an expected enacting (cf. Piper 1997, 2004; Acocella 1999) when referring to it as culture-embedded syndrome. What made MPD/DID so controversial was also the fact that patients were subjected to so-called externally induced hypnosis (Piper 1997: 83). Pierre Janet already established the basis of hypnosis, which could create secondary states of consciousness. He created “false memories to neutralize traumatic memories” (Markman 2008: 103). Moreover, in 1889 French physician and neurologist Hippolyte Bernheim also intended to create “retroactive hallucinations” (cited in Markman et al. 2008: 103). The key concepts here are ‘suggestibility’, which indicates how hypnotizable a person is, but also ‘social compliance’, which refers to the pressure to please within given power structures (doctor-patient relationship, culture-bound syndromes and so on). Hypnosis had already demonstrated the power to influence people’s imagination. False memories were created and believed. “Bernheim (1889) also created a false memory of a horrific rape and demonstrated his subject’s willingness to discuss the traumatic event with a representative of the law (Rosen, Sageman and Loftus 2003)” (Markman et al. 2008: 104), and hypnosis became the tool for uncovering repressed memories (104). The creation of another mental state was a way of accessing a former traumatic event, as hypnosis can “induce a mental state that facilitates recall and enables the subject to produce more information than he would be able to provide in the socalled waking state” (Hayward and Ashworth 1980: 471 cited in Markman et al. 2008: 104). Thus, manipulation of the consciousness provides access to hidden traumatic events. However, the definition of multiple personality is not static, it is fluid. Renaming the disorder of MPD as DID also involved a reconceptualization, which enabled doctors to diagnose more people due to less restrictive criteria (cf. Hacking 1995; Conrad 2007). There is, as stated above, a clear difference between the popular notion of the disorder on the one side – it continues to be perceived and maintained in a way consistent with the older and stronger definition – and attempts of the scientific medical community to rename and redefine it due to an estimated misconception as a personality disorder. Instead, it is now understood in terms of dissociation as a normal coping mechanism, and it could therefore affect all of us. Because fictional characters tend to display the disorder in a more drastic way, fictionality actually narrows down the number of possible insane persons! Dissociative symptoms became the basis of explanations concerning strategies employed by the human mind to cope with trauma or deal with feelings of indisposition. As generally available culture-embedded syndrome, it seems to be a natural reaction of our psyche to dissociate. Hence, the “notion of multiple personality has become commonplace in North American culture, and it is now a legitimate way for people to understand and express their failures and frustration” (Spanos 1994: 3). Accordingly, in an interview entitled “Mutation” for the French magazine Homme Numéro 10 (automme-hiver 2005/2006) that also included the original version of the

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interview in English, the gothic rocker Marilyn Manson12 describes his creation of a persona: “I obviously created something for myself, because I didn’t feel that I was someone that I could ever appreciate. But I didn’t really create an alter ego, I created something that wasn’t afraid to do things […] I suppose if I was forced to go through some kind of rigorous type of therapy I would probably be told I had multiple personalities13 […] but only because I would antagonize the doctor into thinking so!” (Homme 10; my emphasis)

In 2002, the short film Inside, written and directed by Trevor Sands, was released starring actor Jeremy Sisto as a patient in a psychiatric ward or a prison. A nurse enters a padded cell to take the patient to the psychiatrist who needs to test whether the patient is in a sufficiently stable condition to be released. During the walk to the mental specialist, other nurses guard the patient and eventually more and more people appear. Among them are a little girl, a woman and different types of men. The crowd finally reaches another room where a female doctor awaits them and starts the conversation asking the patient about his different names and alter personalities. When she poses the question “Who am I talking to now?”, the crowd, which has gathered behind the patient, starts talking at the same time. One person after the other then answers the psychiatrist’s questions. Every time another personality takes control of the patient, the corresponding person behind him talks simultaneously. Eventually viewers start to suspect the psychiatrist of being one of the alter personalities, which is shown to be true when the real psychiatrist enters the room. The female psychiatrist alter is now placed behind the patient as the only person present in the room, the crowd has disappeared. With the help of this psychiatrist personality, the patient is able to perform as a rational being acting in accordance to the real psychiatrist’s expectations. In January 2009, the premium TV channel Showtime launched the first television series about a woman with DID. The series United States of Tara stars actress Toni Collette as housewife and part-time painter Tara, who manifests four different dis-

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Most importantly, it has to be mentioned here that the very name of Marilyn Manson refers to the dichotomy of the glamorous American side of Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe, whereas the other side in this case is represented by the leader of a both legendary and dubious cult, Charles Manson, who was seen accountable for the murder of actress Sharon Tate among other murder incidents carried out by drugged cult members (the dichotomy is something Marilyn Manson likes to refer himself to when asked about his pseudonym). Notable here is that the French translation reads as follows: “Je suppose que, si j’était obligé de passer, par une sorte de thérapie rigoureuse, on me dirait probablement que je souffre au moins de dédoublement de la personnalité. [...] mais uniquement parce que j’inciterais sciemment le médecin à le penser!” (Homme Numéro 10; my emphasis). The multiple personality is here the dédoublement de la personalité, which is the origin of MPD as created during the 19th century in France, later adopted to United States by Morton Prince, who stressed not the duality but the multiplicity.

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tinct personalities. The idea of creating such a television series around a multiple protagonist is believed to have come from Steven Spielberg, who produces the show. He contacted writer Diablo Cody, who won an Oscar for her script of the movie Juno in 2008, and suggested a female central character. In the series, Tara Gregson, a mother of two teenagers, stops taking her medication.14 Consequently, her disorder of DID (now correctly named) resurfaces. Her emerging alters include T, a wild teenage personality, a somewhat old-fashioned housewife called Alice, a male personality called Buck, and a strange, dark alter called Gimme. The transformation into each character is quite dramatic and absolute. The psychologist and sociologist Nicolas P. Spanos explained how people react when a mainstream culture offers such a representation of multiple personality thereby turning it into a culture-embedded syndrome: “In short, the sociocognitive perspective suggests that patients learn to construe themselves as possessing multiple selves, learn to present themselves in terms of this construal, and learn to reorganize and elaborate on their personal biography so as to make it congruent with their understanding of what it means to be a multiple. These patients are conceptualized as actively involved in using available information to create a social impression that is congruent with their perception of situated demands, with the self-understandings they have learned to adopt, and with the interpersonal goals they are attempting to achieve.” (Spanos 1994: 3; my emphasis)

With this conclusion in mind, it is interesting to look at the representation of multiple characters both in autobiographical and fictional texts. The role of the media, however, which reflects and discusses the “available information” as well as distributing it, plays a major role in terms of perceptions and awareness of multiple personality and dissociative identity. In his study on the serial killer and contemporary American culture Psychopaths (2000), Philip L. Simpson has pointed it out accordingly: “But it took the rise of a modern mass media before specific cases could transcend their singular temporal and sociopolitical contexts to become elements of a truly global contemporary mythology – heinous villainy masquerading behind a Norman Bates – or Ted Bundy – like façade of bland normality.” (Simpson 2000: 3; my emphasis)

Such a media influence connected with a certain social construction and culturally available “idioms of distress” (Nichter 1981) eventually result in what is here called culture-embedded syndrome. Yet while such a metaphorization is obvious and influential, there might be a clear differentiation between popular culture, general knowledge and those directly concerned, the patients diagnosed with the condition, with the latter forming communities in which they also defend their multiplicity although the heyday of the disorder is over. This is a self-conceptualization that needs to be acknowledged. Yet even in this context the entire (outside) picture of DID may

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No such treatment is suggested in DID therapies. Alter personalities are not said to be suppressed via medication (Wenegrat 2001).

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still be felt as a pressure to perform and hence conform to certain expectations, yet stereotypical fictional characters may also be helpful to make an experience of distress understandable. Artificiality hence transforms into a naturalized trope of trauma – within the model of the culture-embedded syndrome the brand of multiple personality flourishes and fosters the culture, cultivation and cult of it.

8 Creating a Public Consciousness: The Role of the Mass Media Due to a confluence of multiple trends, among which are the growth of relational theory, the resurgence of traumatology, and postmodernism, concepts of the multiple self have recently proliferated. HOWELL 2005: 39

Even today, our culture is influenced by a widespread media coverage on MPD “and the major components of the roles are now well-known to the general public” (North et al. 1993 cited in Spanos 1994: 241). As a consequence, we are already familiar with the major symptoms of MPD or DID. This is a fact that makes recognition within fictionalized narratives and films much more easier. Hacking confirms that due to such “media exposure, the circle has expanded to everyone in North America, for everyone knows about multiples now” (Hacking 1995: 222). In addition, Robert Rieber notes in his study on the MPD hype The Bifurcation of the Self (2006), that “few disorders are so shrouded by myth and distortion” as MPD and DID (xi). And he added that, as a result, “so many people are under the impression that the disorder, while a real one, is far more widespread than it actually is no doubt stems from the treatment it has received in the media” and that furthermore, there are only few real cases, but those were enough to shape and “fuel some disturbing social phenomena” (xi). Because the audience may not commonly be able to reproduce the exact terms of scientific studies or explicit details, they may not have access to detailed knowledge concerning developments, changes and current definitions of the disorder. Or, if such an access is given in the times of the Internet, such changes may not be noticed in detail. As noted above, the definitions vary considerably concerning the fragmentation into several complex personalities and distinct persons or, to use the currently preferred term, the “disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states” (APA 2013: 292), but generally the public and the representations of the disorder in fiction are still rooted in older concepts of MPD. In order to be able to recognize the psychological mysteries such as the multiple personality, or even the schizophrenic, the audience then also refers back to a certain prototype of the phenomenon and it is precisely this constancy that enables the disorder to work as a met-

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aphor within texts of fiction (cf. Hacking 1996, North 1993, Piper 1997). “The story of multiple personality”, writes Hacking, “is, in all too many different ways, a story about what I have called making up people” (Hacking 1996: 6). It is therefore “a public dynamics” (6). The dynamics of a case of multiple personalities as social hysteria is often mentioned: “The popularity of Miss Beauchamp was one symptom of an interest in mind cures and psychotherapy that swept through national magazines and newspapers from about 1905 to 1910. Popular curiosity forced the attention of a growing number of physicians”, says Nathan G. Hale in his foreword to Morton Prince’s Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality (Hale 1975: 12). In the early 21st century, it is not the phenomenon itself that raises questions about the mechanisms of the human mind and of the strategies our brains may invoke to in cases of trouble and trauma as Sybil did four decades ago. However, our astonishment about the notion that a darker other side may exist within us all still retains its mystique and MPD continues to work as a catchy headline. When singer and pop star Britney Spears was chased by a hoard of celebrity journalists and paparazzi, her strange behavior in public was soon diagnosed as the symptoms of a typical multiple personality. A very popular Internet website published the following headlines: “Britney Jumps between Personalities, and Britney’s Multiple Personality Disorder.” (n.pag.)1

Beneath a blurred photograph of a fleeing Britney, the articles speculated on Miss Spears’ present mental state: “In a very ‘Sibyl’ move, two of Britney’s inner voices were fighting for control last night – bouncing from British Brit, ‘Wea’s the cah?’ to Southern-fried ding dang Spears in just seconds.”

Furthermore, another article explained: “Sources are now painting a very disturbing picture of Britney Spears, or whoever she happens to be at any given moment. We’re told that the whole British accent thing – well, it’s more than an accent. Britney has multiple personalities, including, as people in her life call it, ‘British girl’. We’re told when Spears loses the British personality, she has absolutely no idea what she did during the time she assumed that personality. Sources say Brit has a number of other identities, where she becomes ‘the weepy girl, the diva, the incoherent girl’, and on and on. Sources

1

See ‹http://www.tmz.com›. Web. 18 Jan 2008. Tmz.com is a website wholly dedicated to the coverage and gossip on the life of celebrities and stars. It is updated hourly and works as major source for other mass media including print media and so on. The spelling mistakes in the quotes derive from the original entries.

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say Britney had become the British girl the day she didn’t show for her deposition and has no recollection of it.” (n.pag.)2

Whether these sources are correct or not, or whatever “we’re told”, this paparazzi parlance and seemingly close coverage of the tragic period of a public life shows how MPD is still used in everyday language. The concept of complex personalities or persons within one body still exists. The publication of these articles on an interactive multimedia website allowed the public to react officially to this news. A closer look at their responses shows distinct categories of reactions including the ironic, the skeptical, the personally concerned, paranormal and finally the scientifically educated level. All of them together constitute the current public understanding of MPD/DID: “Ironic: Skeptical:

Personally concerned: Paranormal: Scientifically educated:

Now, how convenient. Sorry, I don’t buy it – the entire multiple personality thing... What a load of crap. Shouldn’t one of these personalities be the polar opposite of what she is like the Librarian Britney, or Stepford Wife Britney...Even a Victoria Beckham Britney would be okay. An ‘Ellen’ Britney would also be entertaining...3. I have MPD and it’s no joke. Britney does not have it. She is a media ho... DEMON POSSESSION!!!THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELLS YOU!!! Okay. The reason this entire entry is difficult to take seriously is because there is no longer such a disorder called Multiple Personality Disorder. It is currently listed in the DSM-IV as Dissociative Identity Disorder, and symptoms must consist of many bizarre factors, which Britney may or may not exhibit. For credibility on a psychological standpoint alone, I would remove or edit this post. Or at least give the disorder the correct name.” (n.pag.)4

If the journalist had complied with the last entry (“give the disorder the correct name”), the headline would have probably failed to serve its intended purpose, which was to identify an easily understood mental disturbance based on a multiplicity of personality. As already stressed above, the problems of the public misunderstanding of the disorder – many personalities or real people within one body – was one of the reasons why MPD was renamed (numerous scholars have commented on this but for an especially lucid account see Spanos 1994, Hacking 1995, McHugh 2008). The novelist Matt Ruff intentionally used the term MPD in his novel Set this House in Order (2003) so that the reader could easily grasp the issues his protagonist was hav-

2 3 4

‹http://www.tzm.com›. Web. 18 Jan 2008. All of these variations of personality are based on famous celebrities. ‹http:www.tzm.com›. Web. 18 Jan 2008.

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ing.5 For personally concerned people, the difficulty nowadays may be to be recognized as suffering from a disorder formally called MPD, but no longer recognized as such, and to be taken seriously in spite of widespread doubts concerning the reliability of DID. The details of personality states are not considered at all. When celebrity and musician Courtney Love, the widow of the legendary singer Kurt Cobain, wrote on her personal website that she is now convinced that she developed multiple personalities, she followed the same pattern. She would consequently not suffer from a dissociative disorder, but from MPD and her “alter egos”: “Just want to hank allyou supportive lovely people and thank you for putting up with my kookoo bananas alter ego should; we give her a name? Should we give my alter ego a name? Hmnmmmm Cherry! ‘Cherry kookoo’ so if/when im overcome and blog again which i wont so i took a picture of a friend looking at me rather sternly to remind me not to – well know it was Cherry Kookoo, but i think I’ve killed her off. Back to my shopping basket! Your support means the world to me i read every comment! Rock on.” (n.pag.)6

Another contemporary example may be seen in the publication of Robert B. Oxnam’s autobiography A Fractured Mind: My Life with Multiple Personality Disorder. This book was published in the year 2005 as “a vivid narrative path into the recesses of one man’s mind” as quoted by the New York Times (also used as a reference on the book cover). Oxnam also developed distinct personalities. The explanation notes distinctly refer to complex personalities and name MPD rather than the unpopular DID, in order to make the disorder more understandable: “I tend to prefer that term” (Oxnam 2005: 263). In January 2008, however, the headlines chased the newspapers and online magazines, when former football star Herschel Walker announced the publication of his new autobiography. It was released eventually on April 14, 2008 with the title Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder. The afterword was written by Herschel’s therapist Dr. Jerry Mungadze, who directs a center for traumatized patients in Texas. Interestingly, the title includes the term of DID. It was interesting to observe whether the journalists would also use this current term. Of course they did not. Almost every article one can find on this subject mentioned multiple personality: “Herschel Walker reveals He Has Multiple Personalities ‘That’s all news for me,’ former Georgia coach Vince Dooley said in Friday editions of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. ‘All I know is whatever personality he had when he had the football was the one I liked.’

5

6

Section FAQ (frequently asked questions) by Matt Ruff himself on his official website. Obviously this intended use of the former term MPD raised a lot of questions among the readers. ‹http://www.atl.net/~storytellers/sethouse.html›. Web. 1 June 2009. Spelling mistakes included. See ‹http://www.entertainmentwise.com/news/43677/ courtney-love-blogs-about-multiple›. Web. 26 May 2009.

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‘Breaking Free’ will chronicle Walker’s life with multiple personality disorder, according to Shida Carr, a publicist at Simon & Schuster.” (n.pag.)7

Another headline stated: “Ex-Cowboy surprised by Walker’s multiple personality revelation.”8 Only one article referred to DID and its controversies later in the text, but still used the MPD in the headline: “Herschel Walker reveals he suffers from multiple personality disorder Herschel Walker doesn’t sleep. There is too much noise in his brain. There are too many thoughts. ‘I sent it to Simon and Schuster and they couldn’t believe it was written by a football player,’ Walker said. ‘It was just about the mind and how the mind works.’” (n.pag.)9

What is noteworthy in the last article is the fact that his book and the revelation of a psychological disorder may function as a general explanation of how the mind works. Here DID is, a “unique way of coping” according to Walker. “In order to deal with situations that are emotionally beyond the control of a person, that person may create alternate personalities or ‘alters’ to deal with those situations. Many times those ‘alters’ are the result of profound abuse or a traumatic event in a person’s life. For Walker that abuse was rooted in his childhood”.10 However, in the same article, the author, Carter Strickland, admits that “the diagnosis of DID is very rare and just as controversial. Many leading psychologists and psychiatrists are of the belief that the idea DID is planted into a client’s brain by an analyst. ‘A lot of people look at it and they think it is like Sybil,’ Walker said in reference to the most famous case of MPD diagnosed by Sybil Dorsett. ‘They think it all has to be negative.’”11 In addition, the critical views of two scientific experts are cited here. Jerry Kelley, who has a doctorate in psychology from the University of Arizona, states “that there have been cases where patients have sued therapists for implanting false memories.” Furthermore, the article says: “Kelley has successfully worked at overcoming the misdiagnosis of DID in several patients.”12 Dr. Paul McHugh, Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at

7 8 9 10

11 12

‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com›. Web. 18 Jan 2008. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent,/dws/spt/stories/011908dnspowalker. 8e14cf.html›. Web. 18 Jan 2008. ‹http://www.startribune.com/sports/vikings/16686526.html›. Web. 20 Jan 2008. ‹http://www.startribune.com/sports/vikings/16686526.html›. Web. 20 Jan 2008. Herschel Walker says here: “When I was a kid I had a speech impediment and I used to get teased all the time,” and: “I didn’t love myself and I didn’t know how to love myself.” And furthermore he adds: “People have to shift themselves and their personalities in so many different areas to be successful. You don’t want Herschel Walker the football player, babysitting your kids. Those are different people.” ‹http://www.startribune.com/sports/vikings/16686526.html›, Web. 20 Jan 2008. Ibid. Web. 20 Jan 2008.

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Johns Hopkins University, is another major expert; he adds that “I hold that this is a condition promoted by the interest that doctors take in it.”13 Ten years earlier, during the climax of MPD in American culture and public life, it was another celebrity who pronounced in Oprah Winfrey’s popular TV show and in an autobiography to suffer from multiple personalities. It was the actress and TV show host, Rosanne Arnold. Her book was called My Lives (1994) and included a list of her personalities at the end of the book. She claimed to have developed alter personalities in response to having been sexually abused by her parents. These publications make it clear that a knowledge of the MPD symptoms is not exclusively known to a few psychiatrists and patients, instead it has become a wellknown part of our culture as culture-embedded syndrome. Popular TV shows – among them Oprah Winfrey14 – have featured patients with MPD and therefore popularized the disorder. “All of these sources typically depict MPD patients in a sympathetic light, as people with highly dramatic symptoms who, with the help of devoted and empathic therapists, surmount numerous obstacles to eventually gain self-esteem, dignity, health, happiness, and much sympathetic attention from high-status others”, as Nicolas P. Spanos explained (Spanos 1994: 241). As MPD became an accepted way of coping with trauma and severe childhood experiences, “the idea of being a multiple, like the idea of suffering from peripheral possession or demonic possession, may provide people with a viable and face-saving way to account for personal problems as well as a dramatic means for gaining concern and attention from significant others” (241). The role of mass media in fostering and constructing the public perception of MPD was demonstrated in a report, in which a 17-year-old female patient states that her symptoms emerged after she watched the movie The Three Faces of Eve and read the book Sybil, two of the major influences in MPD pop culture (242). The film Sybil was seen by almost a fifth of the population in the United States. This literally makes it a mass syndrome, or rather a massively known syndrome. Nevertheless, mass media coverage is just a 20th century phenomenon. Soon after the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886, newspapers and magazines published articles about the phenomenon of split minds and memories. This media influence was one of the major sources of people’s knowledge about the phenomenon. Most of the patients diagnosed with MPD had been exposed to media depictions of MPD and also often other sources of cultural information, as explained by Carol North in a survey called Multiple Personalities, Multiple Disorders: Psychiatric Classification and Media Influence (North 1993). Concerning the media influence, Spanos also noted: “For instance, 53% of these patients had read books or articles, attended lectures, or watched movies by or about MPD patients. Some of these patients were exposed to information about MPD in professional settings. Thus, 17% of these patients had trained in the mental health field, 17% aspired to become mental health professionals, and 28% had extensive psychiatric or

13 14

Ibid. 20 Jan 2008. Who later also published an autobiographic text, which explained her suffering from MPD.

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medical knowledge. In short, the notion of MPD, and the symptoms associated with this disorder, are well-known in our culture.” (Spanos 1994: 242, my emphasis)

Spanos mentions the common “requirement of the MPD patient role” or even “rewards associated with that role” (242). Furthermore, after the publication of The Three Faces of Eve in 1957, the authors Thigpen and Cleckley were frequently contacted by people who had diagnosed themselves with MPD: “We have had long distance phone calls from persons announcing themselves as multiple personalities – one went so far as to have each personality introduce itself and speak in a different voice. Similarly, we have had photographs of the different personalities of someone claiming the disorder, and one woman changed handwriting styles from paragraph to paragraph in letter to us (we had reported that Eve had changed writing styles). [... ] Certainly a diagnosis of multiple personality attracts a good deal more attention than most other diagnoses. Some patients appear to be motivated by secondary gain associated with avoiding responsibility for certain actions.” (Spanos 1994: 242)

This kind of MPD self-diagnosis and the so-called “secondary gain associated with avoiding responsibility for certain actions” engendered a highly skeptical view of MPD (cf. Hacking 1995, Showalter 1997, Acocella 1999, Piper 1999, Rieber 2006, Wenegrat 2007, McHugh 2008, Nathan 2012). Even medical professionals started to turn away from MPD. “Many people today want no part of multiple personality disorder”, writes Joan Acocella in Creating Hysteria (110). Likewise, she especially refers to “leading authors” of the DSM, which was published in May 2013 in its fifth edition: “In a 1998 book called Your Mental Health, a ‘layman’s guide’ to the diagnosis manual, Allen Frances, head of the DSM-IV task force, and Michael First, the editor of DSM-IV, write that while they do not deny the existence of rare cases of MPD, MPD therapy ‘may do more harm than good. [...] We would recommend avoiding any treatment that seeks to discover new personalities or to uncover past traumas.’ Indeed, the authors recommend against trusting an MPD diagnosis: ‘A good rule of thumb is that any condition that has become a favorite with Hollywood, Oprah, and checkout-counter newspapers and magazines stands a great chance of being wildly overdiagnosed. [...] If you are wondering whether you qualify for this diagnosis, it is a very good bet that you almost surely do not.’” (Acocella 1999: 110)

As already mentioned, influential media coverage is not limited exclusively to modern or contemporary articles. In 1904, Dr. Boris Sidis, a psychotherapist and author writing on the phenomenon of multiple personality,15 published an article in The New

15

Dr. Boris Sidis, father of the famous child prodigy William James Sidis, published in 1904 his account on multiple personality in Multiple Personality: An Experimental Investigation into Human Individuality. Developing his concept of a dissociative mind, he wrote: “Mental systems not bridged over by memory are so many independent individu-

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York Times on “Two Men in One: Dr. Sidis Considers the Strange Case of T.C. Hanna as an Instance of Multiple Personality” (Sidis “Two Men” 1904). Drawing a link between the peculiar force inside Hanna and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sidis concluded that the difficulty of the two individualities or personalities inside Hanna “to form a unity” was due to the fact that they were opposed to each other (Sidis “Two Men” 1904). The headline of another The New York Times article published on 19 August 1906, suggests a curiosity: “The Quaduplicity of Miss Beauchamp Remarkable Case of a Young Woman Who Has More Identities Than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” (“Quaduplicity” 1906 n.pag.)16

The article cites the famous case of Miss Beauchamp, who had been in therapy with Dr. Morton Prince for more than eight years. Although the case of Miss Beauchamp and her mysterious disorder of harboring four distinct people within herself may have been a unique condition experienced by few, if any, its mysterious content aroused interested readers. The article specifically refers to a possibly common phenomenon, our “strange freaks of the subconsciousness” within our own mind and its different sides: “Who of us, snugly tucked away for the night, has not heard a still, small, inner voice whisper that we have forgotten to lock the front door or shut the furnace draught or put out the light in the kitchen. We did not notice the oversight; but this other fellow who lives under our hats, he knows all the time and takes advantage of the moment between sleeping and waking to call our attention to the matter. This same other self it is who wakens us at a predetermined hour in the morning, hunts round the pigeonholes of our brains for the word we have forgotten, and sometimes, when we run up stairs to change our neckties, completes the disrobing process and pops us into bed in spite of ourselves.” (“Quaduplicity” 1906 n.pag.)

This by all appearances quite normal young woman at first only seemed to suffer from nothing more than poor health (“The patient in question appeared to the world only as a rather nervous and absentminded young woman.”), yet soon the other side of Miss Beauchamp’s other side soon was revealed itself in therapy: “To her physician she proved to be the possessor of a most astonishing sort of a subconsciousness, a veritable genius of a subconsciousness, a Shakespeare or Julius Caesar among subconsciousness, such as has never yet been seen in any other human being.” (“Quaduplicity” 1906 n.pag.)

16

alities, and if started their career with a good supply of mental material, they form so many independent personalities” (Sidis cited in Van der Hart and Dorahy 2009). “The Quaduplicity of Miss Beachamp: Remarkable Case of a Young Woman Who Has More Identities Than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, New York Times published August 19, 1906; author unknown, n.pag.

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The article is structured as a serial, gradually conveying its sensational contents (“and bit by bit has been given to the public”). Similar to a serialized novel, the article therefore closes with the words: “This was the condition of affairs at Dr. Prince’s last report of the case. Another is promised by and by” (“Quaduplicity” 1906 n.pag.). Another article, published in 1918, describes a multiple personality concerning “distinct characters”. In his article “Says Medium cured Girl’s Mental Ills”, James Hervey Hyslop, a psychic researcher and parapsychologist,17 refers to a girl with dual personality: “Being one person sometimes and at other times showing the characteristics of someone entirely different” (Hyslop 1918 n.pag.). The publication of novels like Set this House in Order (2003) by Matt Ruff, which gained considerable attention as well as several book awards, and the release of movies such as Identity (2004) have added another brick to the wall of popular perceptions of dissociation as MPD with clear distinct personalities. The revival of the notion of MPD within popular culture is also supported by mass media programs such as television series. In 2009, the first television series on multiple personality, now correctly called dissociative identity disorder, was launched: The United States of Tara. The success of the series has ensured further seasons and more episodes. While experts of the scientific community are still struggling to establish the new definition of the disorder, the popular perception still refers to DID as MPD and the total division of consciousness via the often one-dimensional presentation of distinct characters. This kind of differentiation of alters as distinct personalities has been the cause of irritations for the scientific community since the popular conception of MPD ignores scientific standards or subtleties. Again, the fictionalized versions collide with the internal dividedness of dissociative symptoms and foster a presentation and even performance of varied personalities. The popularization of such concepts provides a recipe for “How do I develop MPD, not matter what they call it now?” Questioned on such a division between popular perception and scientific standards, even the expert Dr. Steven Gold, therapist and specialist of DID and dissociation, clearly stated that the misunderstanding and misconception of such popular forms of MPD could reestablish wrong concepts. Regarding United States of Tara he claimed that “a show on this topic has the potential to educate those who experience” the disorder (Dell 2009b: 423). Moreover, “the main character in the show, Tara, doesn’t act at all the way the majority of people with MPD/DID do” (423). In fact, the scientific community is already referring to so called ‘covert DID’, meaning that patients do not exhibit any perceivable symptoms. Therefore according to Gold, the show displays merely “an extreme version of DID that is only seen in a small minority of people who have it, and even then usually only occurs during periods of severe stress”. 18 Not unlike Sybil, Eve or Miss Beauchamp, the central character actually is a couple of central characters. “The greatest misconception portrayed on the show is

17 18

Two years later James Hervey Hyslop published his book Contact with the Other World (Hyslop 1920). The quotes mentioned here were given by Gold during an interview by Esther Giller. See ‹http://www.sidran.org/pdf/gold.pdf›. Web. 16 Apr 2009.

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that it is common for people with DID to switch from one personality to another in a way that is obvious to others”.19 Such change of speech patterns, mannerisms, and even clothing, however, is in no way realistic. These examples show that the public character of the disorder or MPD/DID manifests itself in the form of social hysteria. In an article ante-DSM-V, APA psychiatrist David Spiegel and others argued that DID is not necessarily overt but covert, stressing that “switching behavior need not be directly observed” (Spiegel 2011: 840). A newly added aspect is cultural embeddedness, indicating that the cultural background of patients (for example from Asian countries) needs to be considered. The article also mentions that alters share “stereotypical features” from the corresponding culture, such as “angry gods” and “vengeful ghosts” or “child alters” (845). Another factor mentioned in the article is the inheritance factor, signifying a “multigenerational DID” across generations or families (845). Eastern cultures here are understood as “sociocentric” and opposed to “more individually focused Western cultures” (845). However, taking these probably essential cultural aspects into account, this study here states that one needs to acknowledge that in our culture – writing from a Western point of view – there is also a culture of dissociation within Western beliefs, a culture of MPD or DID (whether understood as overt or covert).20 The corresponding cultural patterns are embedded in the cultural idioms and the collective consciousness; hence there is the culture-embedded syndrome. The apparent “exoticism” of other cultural backgrounds, which no doubt needs to be applied, is not entirely effective in terms of dissociation. There are now established Western “idioms of distress” (Nichter 1981) that have entrenched themselves, as this study stresses by citing numerous examples from literature and other media. And the omnipresent Sybil is certainly only one of them. The DSM-V fails to fully include this mainstream culture (the DSM-IV did so to a certain extent). The audience always feels an affinity to the presented symptoms, the display of various alter personalities, in fiction and in fact. The other side of the phenomenon in fiction is the inner world of multiples and how they depict their reality. The question might be: How is the reality of multiple personalities and dissociation presented in texts such as autobiographical novels and fictional novels? Other questions concerning the presentation of multiple personality and dissociative identity in fictional works are:

19 20

Ibid. It needs to be stressed here that in Germany such dissociation culture in terms of MPD/DID idioms does not exist in such a dominant way, although varied novels or narratives are also known here. This is why it is argued here that MPD/DID is culturebound. Sybil, for example, would not be so renowned in Germany even though the German psychiatric community of the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s absorbed several of the American non-fiction books and even Sybil. So far, only one German psychiatrist is known to be a specialist in the field, Michaela Huber. She published on the phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s when she stressed the separation of personalities and complete persons (for example, they had different shoe sizes and eye colors), and is now an expert on dissociation (cf. Huber 2002).

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What kind of constructions or metaphoric levels are common? Is there an explicit mention of the diagnosis? Is there a therapy in which the diagnosis evolves? Are there distinct personalities and even people? Is there a part of the consciousness that is externalized and does this part then personify another person? How is amnesia represented? Are the different personalities, if existent, mutually amnesic or co-conscious? How does the audience become aware of the mental split? Is the reader to know the disorder in advance or does a final twist ending reveal the real mental state of a fictional character? Is the technique of the unreliable narrator then adopted?21 What causes the split? Is there an environmental and societal reference or does the split occur only because of a personal trauma? Because the continuing popular success of autobiographical texts (or autopathographies) has made narratives or the mentioned idioms of distress available to public perception, the first analysis in this study will focus on such texts. They show that the trope of the multiple is acknowledged, accepted and applied. Here, the therapy rather than societal structures constitute the central setting. The patients are even free to evolve and generate several personalities understood as distinct and complex entities. The reader knows in advance that a mental disorder is being presented. Thus, one can concentrate on the representation of multiple personality from the “inside”. The narratives that are thus clear on the phenomenon as MPD seem to offer a handy DIY tu-

21

The term ‘unreliable narration’ here refers to the technique of irritating the reader so that he perceives imaginary secondary personalities as real persons. Originally, the term was coined by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961): “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the works (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (Booth 1961: 158-9; italics in original text). Since then, the term has been in the center of a debate that will not be the subject of this study. Important here is to note that whether the story is told by a character or told in the third person, the twist of the story is that seemingly real persons are merely secondary personality states of one person. Thus, the a posteriori genre of multiple personality texts, which uses the technique of unreliability, attempts to present complex and independent secondary personalities (interpersonal). The subjective view is thus presented. Other multiple personality texts offer the twist in advance. Then, the reader can concentrate in detail on the difficulties of obtaining a coherent life (intrapersonal). In the center of the latter, the reader is presented with one person only. For further details on the subject of unreliability in literary texts see the following studies: Tamar Yacobi. “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem”. Poetics Today (1981) 2.2: 113-126; Ansgar Nünning. “Deconstructing and Reconceptualizing the ‘Implied Author’: The Resurrection of an Anthropomorphized Passepartout or the Obituary of a Critical Phantom?”. Anglistik (1997) 8: 95-116; Ansgar Nünning, ed. Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. Trier: WVT, 1998.

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torial and serve(d) as templates when presenting the core identity, in a manner of speaking, of the proto/stereotypical case. These culture-bound symptomatologies may serve as psychopatho-cultural (pre)conditions, but they are simply also a culture’s beating heart.

9 Fractured Minds: Personal Narratives of Multiple Personality A two-page humorous vignette, “From the Files of Dr. Frontalobe” took the form of a series of firstperson case histories as told by their examining neuroscientist. The woman who used her husband as a tea cozy. The man who awakened from a forty-year coma with the urge to believe his elected officials. The man who turned multiple-personality in order to use the HOV lane. Sylvie laughed at the piece. “It’s affectionate. And anyway, it’s not about you, Man.” RICHARD POWERS THE ECHO MAKER 2007: 272

Concerning the idea of multiple personality, Ian Hacking noted in Rewriting the Soul, “there has always been a popular face” (Hacking 1995: 40). Fictional work was influenced by medical issues, controversial discussions and mysterious phenomena such as multiple personality. Robert Louis Stevenson was inspired by several psychiatric theories concerning the dual personality of man.1 Can a single case gain such an influence on public opinion and awareness of multiple personality? Hacking determines “three isolated initiating events” that marked its popularity (Hacking 1995: 42). One of them is Ralph Allison’s autobiography Minds in Many Pieces, which was published in the year 1980. It is one of the innumerable examples of a “charmingly romantic approach to write down personal experiences into an autobiographical form” (46). The two other examples are of course the famous Sibyl (1973) and Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970). Sybil is a novel written by the journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber and authorized by psychoanalyst Cornelia Wilbur, who based the fictional work on her most famous case and who herself was eventually influenced by Ellenberger. The popularized form of multiple personality and dissociation presents personal accounts, or autopathographies, which display the clear separation of personalities. If the assumption of existing “personality states” (according to the definition in the

1

For a closer look on these theories see chapter 10.

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DSM-IV) does not go as far as to incorporate the notion of distinct literal people existing within someone diagnosed with DID, such as “genuine entities” (Merckelbach 2002), it is consequently wrong and “a mistake to consider each personality totally separate, whole or autonomous” (Philip Coons cited in Hacking 1995: 17). Experts in the field were obviously struggling to find an appropriate definition of “personality, personality state, identity, alter, ego state” and so on, as there is not even one single term to define the dissociated consciousness. Even the disorder itself was subject of a possible renaming, as mentioned in the first chapter. The current DSM-V, which was eventually released in May 2013, still contains the term of DID. One of the many recommendations for the new manual, however, involved the expression of “self state” (Mergenthaler 2008: 35). Could this proposal possibly refer to complex persons with corresponding complex interactions as was previously determined by the DSM-III, which firstly included the disorder of multiple personality in the year 1980? According to the ‘coping theory’ (how to deal psychologically with traumatic events), the development of an “alter” could become an automatic and commonly known “habitual coping style” (Merckelback 2002: 482) after a severe trauma experience such as childhood sexual abuse (cf. Classen, Koopmann & Spiegel 1993), although during the last years such a traumatic etiology has been much in the center of attention and controversy (cf. Gleaves 1996; Piper 1999; Lilienfeld et al. 1999 cited in Merckelbach 2002: 482; McHugh 2008). Earlier studies on multiple personality and dissociation supported the idea of alters as literal personalities or entities, while more recent studies emphasize the point that “what is critical to understand is that acknowledging a patient with DID to have genuine experiences of alters as real people or entities is not the same as stating that alters are actually real people or entities” (Gleaves 1996 cited in Merckelbach 2002: 492). The conceptualization of alters as entities and hence autarkic persons may result in the patient engaging in “role enactment” (493). Is the adventure of experiencing dissociative identities not rather a “subjective meta-memorial” (493) incident as translated into a metaphor? The commonly available metaphor of MPD is a reality of its own, as psychiatrist Allen Frances also suggests (Frances 2013: 131) – it has nothing to do with a disorder occurring as “spontaneous clinical entity” (132). The alters as part of the self would point to a more genuine complexity of the human mind or a more literally multiple concept of the self or plurality of the mind (cf. Carter 2008). Therefore, alters are then part of the whole self. Even Colin Ross, one of the major specialists in the field, underlined the importance of such a multiple concept of the self (cf. Ross 1997) by stating that “the most important thing to understand is that alter personalities are not people. They are not even personalities” (cited in Merckelbach 2002: 482). The medical approach to a definition of alters is cautious and opposes the popular understanding of the disorder: “A reading of the North American clinical literature – as opposed to the sensationalized popular press accounts – quickly demonstrates that reputable clinicians do not believe that the alter personalities represent distinct people” (Putnam 1992 cited in Merckelbach 2002: 482). The sensationalized popular press then did (or still does) support the alters as distinct personalities and persons. How should anyone concerned cope with this or is this felt as a necessary figuration? When you were diagnosed with MPD or later DID,

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was it necessary to understand the experienced dissociative episodes as if they were in fact memories of other real people inside? Several autobiographies, or rather autopathographies, were in fact best-selling books and are therefore read by millions of people. Some of these personal accounts became classic texts about MPD (or later DID) and offered a detailed description of such distinct secondary personalities as persons of their own. They offer an interesting approach toward an “inside view” of what it meant (or still means) to experience DID. They also offer a relevant insight into the popularization of the disorder as they shaped the awareness and understanding of MPD and DID considerably. Any approach to a fictional representation of the disorder needs to take such texts into account. It is therefore necessary to take a closer look at some of the first-person accounts of dissociative identity disorder, published on the topic of multiple personality disorder, with most of them still employing the term MPD even though the new weakened definition of DID was already applied. Four books were selected in order to investigate such issues as constellation and definition of the alters, whether they represent those alters as whole entities and how they are displayed to the reader. For example, how would such books describe the dissociative experience of amnesia and fragmentation? Would there be an “inner self helper” (ISH)2 as a core? When in 1980, Ralph Allison, who actually suffered from MPD himself and later became an expert of psychotherapy, published his book Minds in Many Pieces, he defined his deep core self as such an inner self helper (cf. Hacking 1996: 47). Would such texts include the controversy? The narrative style of such accounts finally provides, at least theoretically, a great variety of representations the inner dividedness and the presentation of experienced dissociation.

9.1 T RUDDI C HASE : W HEN R ABBIT H OWLS (1987) The book When Rabbit Howls3 was published in the year 1987 and is said to be the first book “authored by a multiple personality.”4 A woman contacts a specialist in order to overcome her known incesthuous past. After the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder is made, the therapy reveals “ninety-two individual voices”.5 The book is composed of these different views of her alters, using a third person narration

2

3 4 5

Such an ISH “has no date of origin as an alter personality, The ISH is not born to handle the patient’s unexpressed anger or violent trauma”. Rather it “is present from birth and is present in a normal person as well as in a multiple, although in a multiple personality, the ISH appears as a separate individual” (Allison with Schwarz 1980 cited in Hacking 1996: 47). Truddi Chase. When Rabbit Howls. New York: Berkley Book, 1987; hereafter abbreviated RH. According to Sojourner: The Women’s Forum (cited as a review and “praise” inside the book). Text on book cover of When Rabbit Howls.

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from a retrospective viewpoint. For the reader, such multiple perspectives, which are certainly a reflection of the possibilities in this area, represents a total challenge. In the introduction to When Rabbit Howls, therapist Dr. Robert A. Phillips attempts to explain what kind of person the reader is going to meet in the text, namely his former patient, Truddi Chase. There is not a single person but rather persons or personalities inside her and even no Chase at all, as “the first-born”, Truddi Chase, “has not been present since she was two years old” (RH vii). The book When Rabbit Howls, Phillip declares, serves as “a direct window into the experience we call multiple personalities” (RH vii). As an inside report on how such a disorder feels, the reader is, however, not offered a text by one person alone, as this “is instead an autobiography constructed by the various personalities themselves” (RH vii) and therefore a “creation of the many persons who cluster within” (RH vii) Truddi Chase. Truddi herself is nothing more than “a façade who initially knew nothing about the others” (RH viii). 6 The artificial Truddi, somehow, has to be understood as being asleep while “the cluster of personalities” presents themselves “through her body” (RH viii). The persons refer to themselves as “the Troops”, also appearing as author(s) in the subtitle of the book, “The Troops for Truddi Chase” and explaining the multifaceted perspectives. Mentioning the controversy around the disorder, Dr. Phillips refers to the then current definition of MPD, which was described in the DSM-III in 1980 as “the essential figure is the existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities” (RH ix). Each of the personalities or persons in the book has its own distinct memories. Dr. Phillips refers to several medical testings which proved the different personalities as distinct and unique; he mentions especially Dr. Putnam and Dr. Kluft, two of the most prominent figures in the MPD movement.7 Dr. Kluft is still acting as an expert advisor for the television series United States of Tara, which was released in early 2009. The introduction, touching upon The Three Faces of Eve, Sybil and The Minds of Billy Milligan (of which the latter two were diagnosed by Dr. Cornelia Wilbur), understands multiple personality “not merely as a mood swing” (RH x) but defines the splits as distinct persons “housed in a body” (RH xi). Referring to the post-traumatic model of dissociation as “habitual coping style” (Merckelbach 2002), the splitting is

6 7

Chase therefore seems to share her ignorance and amnesia with patients such as Miss Beauchamp, who allegedly knew nothing about her Sally figure, her Mr. Hyde. The early years of medical research about MPD focused on the idea of finding definite differences between the personalities concerning “brain wave patterns, voice tone and inflection, eye responses” etc. (Introduction to When Rabbit Howls, ix). The Neodissociative movement takes up this approach (Nijenhuis and Van der Hart 1999). Notable, however, is the controversy around this differentiation (Merckelbach 2002), as there seems to be no sufficient definition about when an alter can be found and defined (for example Piper 1999). A characterization, however, is not found here as the persons mentioned in the book clearly do not function as round characters but are merely names with individual functions. Still they are conceived as persons.

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a “response of a creative mind seeking to escape the saturation of childhood terror and pain” (RH xi). This suggests child sexual abuse as the trigger of such a split. The trauma of abuse, also mentioned in Sybil (1973), is the central dilemma for the patient. The author’s note, written not by Truddi Chase but The Troops, explains that the book developed during the therapy with Robert A. Philips. Due to the “photographical conversations recall” of one of the personalities inside, which is called the Recorder, the situations could be reconstructed when tape-recording was not possible (RH xxv).8 Furthermore, the Troops make it clear that “fortunately, Dr. Phillips did not try to force us into somewhat established multiple patterns, but allowed us to discover and reveal our own” (RH xxv).9 The book’s narrative incorporates several separate sections, called the “Tunnel passages”, printed in italic type. Those sections symbolize, according to the Troops, “the inner walls of our fortress” (RH xxv). The personality named Ean, who “first refused the idea of integration”, speaks his mind and comments on actions and feelings. The therapy aims to eventually amalgamate the different persons or personalities into one, yet it is interesting to note that the Troops as writing the author’s note although they are supposed to be integrated. It is Ean who is opposed to such integration and “the melting of us all into one composite human being”. The Troops finally declare that they maybe “never accept that option” (RH xxv). The text is written in the third person singular; the Troops mention to the impossibility of writing in the first person singular (RH xxv): there is no “I” but “she” or “he”, a distant perspective which has helped to describe the suffering.10 Such a distance offers to “continue the performance” of the individual jobs, referring to jobs as certain tasks of each personality.11 The process finally ends not in the integration into one person, but a “cooperation of many” (RH 364, epilogue by Dr. Phillips). Through the eyes of Dr. Phillips, the reader is confronted with a woman, who acts in a “certain ‘richness’ of manners and expression” (RH 12) and a “variety of mannerisms” (RH 18). She seeks help through psychotherapy and had contacted him because of her former incestuous experiences. The sessions are recorded on tape and video. She sometimes refers to herself as “we” (RH 12) and suddenly talks in a child-

8

9

10 11

The question is, how could the many scenes with the character Dr. Phillip and an expert on MPD, Marshall, be written without the help of Dr. Phillip himself, which makes him a co-author, as The Troops are not present in these scenes. Whether this is entirely true, as far as the access through the text itself is concerned, is another question. I shall refer to this problematic diagnosis later on, as Truddi Chase establishes her alters only after the diagnosis. Throughout the book, external characters like the therapist and the patient, whose perspective is given by the text, function on equal levels. The corresponding section in the author’s note reads as follows: “Had we given up our names immediately in the manuscript and to Dr. Phillips as the sessions progressed, she [the “real or outside” Truddi Chase] would have retreated, perhaps, into an unreachable state of mind along with the cores, unable to continue the performance of her particular job” (RH xxv).

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like voice (RH 11). When asked about her background, she offers several typewritten pages, which state that “I don’t think we can refer” to Dr. Phillips as a doctor but as “Stanley” (RH 13). While the character Dr. Phillips, also used as a focalizer in the text, isstill wondering about the new patient, who apparently is “at war with herself” (RH 18), the reader soon learns about the women’s disturbance. It is the inner imbalance which creates the chaos within. A section from an auctorial narration point of view confronts the reader with multiple personality theory: “Had the pages been in their original handwritten state and not fresh off the typewriter, his suspicions might have been confirmed. He would have seen the numerous different handwriting styles. The journal notes were being delivered up to him, not by the woman as one single entity, but through her people – the others of whom she was merely a ‘part’. Sybil and Eve had handed the world bible on multiplicity. The Troop Formation was about to hand Robert A. Phillips, Jr., Ph.D., Psychotherapist, alias ‘Stanley’, a much different bible.” (RH 18; my emphasis)

The narration, here reflected by the Troops after therapy, accordingly situates the woman’s mental problems among the history of multiple personality and the classic texts. This view functions from a posterior position (see also Carlin 1995), which reflects upon a yet unnamed fragmentation. So far the reader has encountered several positions of internal fragmentation and inner monologue,12 and an auctorial point of view, which enables the story to be told. However, such an author consists of several entities: the Troops; the doctor, who is externally fragmented into a doctor and “Stanley” (a process undergone by the author or authors of the text); the dialogue between doctor and patient; and a perspective not told by the woman but written with a typewriter.13 Furthermore, the “Tunnel passages” represent the inner world as opposed to outside action such as a questioning by the therapist. The first word in italics reveals such an inside world (“as the word punishment entered her mind”, RH 20; italics in original text), followed repeatedly by several pages in italics: “Deep inside the Tunnel, that first questioning penetrated the walls of the Troop Formation. The thread posed by talking to Stanley – the first person with whom they’d ever shared so much and contemplated sharing more – the mechanism keeping so many unaware of each other since

12

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The inner monologues first show the doctor’s view of the woman (“her cheekbones were high, and her eyes, which were partially obscured by bangs, had an oriental slant” (RH 4), whereas the inner monologue of the woman reflects upon herself as feeling ugly: “It popped into her head, the long-ago conviction that she’d been born a mongoloid idiot” (RH 20). Thus different authors might be possible (Dr. Phillips and Truddi). The first part of the book treats the patient and the doctor equally concerning their point of view. The doctor, however, even is used as focalizer as the reader learns about the woman’s appearance (“She seemed annoyed, not at the heat, but the way it had rumpled her blue denim skirt and precisely ironed white blouse”, RH 19).

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birth was a strong one, but the tremor had been felt…For others, more insulated, only a question with no hint of the separateness behind it raced through their minds: Who is the woman? Their voices echoed from one wall to the other and no answer came. Of all the Troop members, only the Gatekeeper dared raise her eyes and stare down the length and breadth of the Tunnel Walls – to the deepest recess…The Gatekeeper wept, tears much like the confetti flicks with which the person before her ruled the Tunnel. Old, the Gatekeeper said to him. You are old. I feel you, a thousand years multiplied, by every leaf on every tree. Aye, he said… I know you, the Gatekeeper said. I know your name. Ean. She hesitated, grasping immediately that voicing his name was against the rules. Who is the woman? Not who, he said, and the brogue in his voice was rich an full, but what. Concern y’rsel’ wi’ that… Three personas sitting in prime command had been wrenched from the surface depths of their Troop positions. It had quickly become apparent to two of the three that they were not alone – as they both had always supposed.” (RH 22; italics in original text).

Outside, the unknown woman acts as a mere façade. The split inside is represented by the different names and their individual function: “As quickly as she felt it, the Buffer denied the women’s presence…; denied too, the other selves who were suddenly an overwhelming reality…The emotional reactions of the other Troop members were now single and separate and piercing, as if a thousand tiny razor blades hacked away with her…With great difficulty because it was one of the most complicated aspects, the Interpreter saw that throughout the woman’s life, there were time spans when neither the Buffer nor the woman were present…There was something very odd about her construction – her being…the Front Runner absorbed the individuality of her Troop charges.” (RH 23)

Each of these names are said to work as independent but co-conscious entities: “Thus did four of the Troop Formation’s upper echelon become aware of the existence of themselves and the woman – all as separate entities.” (RH 24)

The conversation between therapist and patient is also commented on from a more auctorial perspective: “The woman heard herself saying these words” (RH 26). The change of perspective is therefore astonishing. Parts of the book also resemble dialogues, for example, between the therapist and an expert on “the pulse of every happening in the mental health field (RH 30), situations without (!) the Troops present, which adds another perspective. Despite the confusing variety of perspectives in the text, the assertion of the Troops of the woman to have “an incredible memory before the age of two” (RH 30), is most interesting. “After that, it’s zip” (RH 30) works completely against common

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theories of ‘childhood amnesia’ yet within the logic of MPD.14 The woman also “could hypnotize or ‘lower’ herself into childhood recall” (RH 31). Another section states, however, that there is “little she remembered from the age of two” (RH 38). Even under hypnosis, the woman is still said to be unable of experiencing the abuse (by her stepfather, who is fictionally molested by another inner personality at the end of the book), instead it is a person called Rabbit, who suffers the pain. Persons are also described as co-conscious at times (RH 33), enabled by “thought transference” (RH 67). The patient knows that video tapes are used in a psychology class (RH 34) and even insists on being filmed (RH 49) and later the woman and Stanley lecture about MPD before other patients (RH 320). A female student refers to the records as that of a multiple (RH 41); she recognizes a “mirror-image of herself” (RH 41), yet the multiplicity, now a possible diagnose for Stanley, seems “another form of sanity” (RH 77). When Stanley talks about “fragmentation” of the self after sexual abuse (RH 78) and “emotions” within (RH 79), the patient insists on having different people inside her: “No. Even if it makes me crazy to say it, Stanley, I tell you, they were people” (RH 79, my emphasis) of whom she apparently has already given him a list with names (“the list she’d given him”, RH 79). The therapist finally confirms that “perhaps they are people” (RH 80). Other people, we are not told which ones were already on the list, are now “coming alive” such as Olivia “defined within the mechanism of the Troop Formation” (RH 117; italics in original text). When Stanley tells the patient about the diagnosis of MPD, the woman already knows what it means, stating thus her knowledge of the most popular cases: “‘Multiple,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘Three Faces of Eve, Sybil. I never wanted to read those books, never wanted to see the movies, either. What I’ve heard about them seemed so farfetched.’” (RH 138-9)

The “Troop Formation” (RH 144) then enters a face-to-face conversation with the therapist Stanley, who asks “Who are you?” (RH 142) and “Do you have a name?” (RH 147) to differentiate the persons.15 Additionally now those persons have constant

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The term childhood amnesia refers to the relative absence of memory before the age of 3 or 4 years. Among the many studies on childhood amnesia, the study of Eacott and Crawley stated that the relative memory of people would be characterized also by false memories (cf. Eacott et al 1998). Freud had already mentioned such a childhood amnesia mechanism in his lectures, although he interprets it as a repression (cf. Freud 1989). See also Bauer 2004. For a sophisticated fictional representation see Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (2008), which features the patient Ms. L., who displays exactly those symptoms of childhood memories and a second voice almost like another person. Ms. L. therefore has internalized the common narratives or a “language of propaganda” of MPD (Hustvedt 2008: 234). Such names are also: Twelve, Nails, Sewer Mouth, Zombie, Grace, Olivia I and II, Mean Joe (“Mean Jo emerged briefly”, RH 176), Lambchop, Suicidal Warrior, Irishman, Elvi-

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conversation even outside (without italics in the text that indicate the inner world) and are categorized by a strict hierarchy (RH 198). Superficially it seems as if the “Tunnel passages” become less and less compared to normally printed passages and the books ends with persons existing simultaneously, who eventually act out a fictional scene with the stepfather. The section contains something of a horror scenario with the stepfather being forced to swallow especially prepared pills with maggots intended to destroy him from inside out (RH 361). The persons will not integrate (“‘Does anyone want to remain separate?’, Stanley asks, RH 344) as they are “super-achievers with either superior or superintelligence” (RH 346) thus, experiencing problems with “electrical energy” (RH 346) and even exploding light bulbs. The reader is finally left with different persons continually communicating and the conclusion that there are more than ninety persons although they are often only mentioned once throughout the entire text. The vision of the encounter with the stepfather included the statement “I am lot of people” (RH 360). The book ends with a statement by a person called Irishman, who seems to have an “expression of a thousand worriers down through time” (RH 363) and leaves the reader with the impression that there is no real ending to the story. The next page offers the epilogue written again by the therapist Dr. Phillips, who concludes: “The story of the unfolding of the Troops in therapy has now been told” (RH 364). During therapy, the patient was working on a manuscript (after being taperecorded, videotaped and following a lecture before a group of incest victims and abusers), which subsequently became the book When Rabbit Howls. An integration does not take place and the reader is now told that “in the case of the Troops the firstborn is dead and the decision is to maintain multiplicity” (RH 264). How such multiplicity works in daily life is not answered, although we are told by the Troops about a job with a “somewhat autonomous position” (RH 365). The epilogue mentions another statement of the patient sixteen years after the first encounter with her therapist. It states that “the road has no beginning…no end” (RH 367). The book became a best-seller and Truddi Chase appeared in the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1987 and became also an even more distributed type of what it meant to be a multiple.16

9.2

J OAN F RANCES C ASEY : T HE F LOCK (1991)

In the year 1991, the autobiography The Flock was published.17 Similar to the complexity of When Rabbit Howls (1987), the book received considerable attention.

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ra, Seventh Horseman, Miss Wonderful, Black Katherine, Lady Catherine, Mable, the Junkman, the Outrider (the only person to have two identities, RH 316) etc. Most of the persons inhabit only some pages when introduced in the text. A real characterization is not presented despite the naming. Ophrah Winfrey also claimed to have multiple personalities that helped her cope with her own sexual childhood abuse experiences.

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However, unlike When Rabbit Howls, it offers a different point of view and is much less complex or confusing. The author Joan Frances Casey tells her story of therapy, diagnosis, symptoms of a fragmented existence and the final integration into one whole self. At the end of the book, the reader is informed that this whole self has been accomplished, albeit still being “aware of internal separations” (TF 285). The firstperson singular point of view, the “I”, provides a clear perspective. However, the story is precedent, by an author’s note, in which a definite author as a whole is questioned as the story is allegedly told from the standpoint of one of the former twentyfour distinct personalities: “Before my integration, ‘I’ meant, at various times, any of twenty-four personalities. It’s a confusing way to live and, with twenty-four points of view, a confusing tale to tell. My story is told here through the perspective of one major, growing, and changing personality – a personality which called herself Renee.” (TF ix; my emphasis)

In addition, the actual story is divided into four parts called book I to IV that are framed by a prologue by the main therapist Lynn Wilson and an afterword by Dr. Frances Howland, who explains the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder in medical terms.18 Accordingly, MPD develops after child sexual abuse as “an opportunity for protection, retreat, or repair” (TF 301). Thus, it is a creation of the person’s own “protectors from within”. MPD therefore “represents an extreme version of the human propensity for self-preservation” (TF 301). The original personality is unaware of alternate personalities” while “the alternates, however, may be very much aware of the activities and attitudes of the original” (TF 301). Again the definition refers to a mysterious other side, the Sally figure, the Mr. Hyde, the uncontrollable Taylor Durden. Yet throughout the text, such a bad side splits into many personalities, none of which really symbolizes such a dark side. Again, just like in When Rabbit Howls, it offers the experiences from inside a woman whose identity is fragmented into several distinct and complex personalities. The slight differentiation of the MPD definition into the term of the diagnosis of DID (with identity fragments) occurred only three years before the publication of the book. Nevertheless, the book continues to be in print and still has a wide circulation. The remarkable feature about this book is that it can be read as taking a skeptical view on MPD. Although The Flock is certainly regarded as one of the valuable accounts on the actual existence of the disorder as MPD, a considerable portion of the

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Joan Frances Casey. The Flock. New York: Random House Publishing, 1992 [1991]; hereafter abbreviated TF. Again, the reader is confronted with distinct “alternating personalities sharing the same body” (TF 300) with significant contrasting test results concerning Topographic EEGs, IQ and cognitive performance assessments and even different immunological constitution. The definition of MPD (not yet DID) clearly focuses on total independent entities, although they are sometimes physically co-existent.

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book’s sections that analyze the past are of a quite detached and reflective, to a certain extent even critical nature. This tendency is due to the Renee personality, who writes the text. No such critical accounts could be found in When Rabbit Howls. The book consists of two different alternating perspectives. The main focus is, of course, on the development and establishment of multiple personalities inside the patient Joan, who serves as one narrator and composes her sections in a first-person singular perspective. The second focus displays the comments by therapist Lynn, whose “case notes”, printed in italic type, describe the situations first told in the Joan passages now from the specialist point of view. As claimed by Lynn in the prologue, the two women “performed magic” during therapy (TF v). From a retrospective position, the narrator now calling herself Joan (actually Renee, as stated in the author’s note) analyzes her life and her feelings. The first situation describes the narrator finding that a “blankness throbbed within” (TF 4), and confronting a “mental scene” of desire to jump out of a window (“‘Jump!’ I heard the voice, felt the nudge. ‘Jump!’”, TF 4). The memory is “spotty even now, ten years later” (TF 4), experiences of “inside-out” (TF 5) occur. Lynn, the therapist is sought for help. From her retrospective perspective, the author lets us know that back then her feeling “was mine, but not mine” (TF 12) and “it was OK to feel two things at once” (TF 12): “I heard myself tell Lynn about my current relationship” (TF 14). The case note merely states an “apparent confusion”19 (TF 13; italics in original text). When Joan reflects on her sometimes childish feelings (“sometimes I saw myself react as a little girl”, TF 16), during therapy she merely mentions her relationship with her mother. Lynn’s case notes later of mention for the first time “periods of dissociation” (TF 16). The therapist concludes “I will continue encouraging her to talk” about such incidents, for example, finding herself at another place (“‘woke up’ at a shopping mall”, TF 16). Then Lynn writes: “PLAN: 1. Reread Three Faces of Eve and Sybil [sic!] and see if I’m on the right track. 2. Search for a knowledgeable consult (TF 17). Once again The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil are the prototype for a forthcoming diagnosis! Joan’s account continues: “Early in my first appointment in April, Lynn told me that she suspected that I suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder…She might as well have told me I was possessed by demons” (TF 17).20 Her subsequent refusal to accept such a diagnosis (by a psychotherapist, who is no expert in the field, and who tells the patient so explicitly) is deeply analytic: “I spent the evening ticking off why I wasn’t a multiple. Sure, I forgot things sometimes and failed to pay attention to everything I was doing. So did everybody else. Occasionally I heard myself saying something I didn’t believe, something that seemed to pop out of nowhere. Eric

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All citations in italic type are those of the therapist Lynn and are printed exactly the same in the original text. It is notable that the narrator’s denial of the disturbance is due to Renee telling the story. Renee denies the diagnosis and claims to play games or allegedly has a prominent position within the group inside (TF 48).

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Berne’s Transactional Analysis21 explained it perfectly: we all have various parts – parent, adult, child – within us.” (TF 17)

Later during therapy, the personalities will really “pop out of nowhere” and the case note describes: “Ms. Casey is terrified at the thought that she might be a multiple” and “Ms. Casey presented her multiplicity in a more florid way” (TF 18). Joan, now calling herself Jo or Renee, is “playing that game to release pressure” and “deceived” her therapist “into thinking I had multiple personalities” (TF 19). The therapist explains to her patient that they are “more than a voice” (TF 20). She insists: “The voices must go with characters…just tell me about the characters that you’ve been presenting to me” (TF 20). For Joan, the voices are merely voices, she clearly states: “I’m the real person” (TF 21). But the therapist again insists on a description of the corresponding psychical appearance. It is only now that we are confronted with Missy, the girl and a switch of narrated perspective. “I’m not sure about that,” I said with a flash of insight. Joan Frances doesn’t even have as much control as I have…That evening, Joan Frances called her mother” (TF 24; my emphasis). The therapist now feels “like a pioneer” (not unlike Cornelia Wilbur did with Sybil)22 as other medical specialists “didn’t believe in MPD” (TF 27).23 The differences of the personalities are too clear: “I even see physical differences among them. Renee’s hands seem delicate and long-fingered, and then turn rough and spatulate when Jo has control. The whole body seems to shrink when Missy is out. I can’t deny that I’m both intrigued and overwhelmed by this patient.” (TF 28)

Joan/Renee herself/selves write(s) on this enthusiasm in the corresponding section of the book: “Who is this Lynn Wilson and what is she trying to prove? Two months into treatment. I thought that by now Lynn would be sick of me, but instead she seemed more and more accommodating. Lynn gave each personality her home phone number and bought an answering machine so she’d know if anyone tried to reach her.” (TF 29)

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The theory of the “Transactional Analysis”, which was developed during the 1950s by US psychiatrist Eric Berne, is most interesting here. According to the theory of personality, there are three “ego-states” detectable inside the human psyche. Revising but not entirely replacing Freud’s terms of id, ego and super-ego, the first state is the Parent (extrapsyche), Adult (neopsyche) and Child (archaeopsyche). Each state may influence the acting-out of people according to their environment, for example, workplace, family etc. A further sub-division of these states control and influence people’s feelings, behavior and ways of thinking. For further reading see Berne 1964. “Dr. Wilbur’s pulse quickened at the challenge.” (Schreiber 1973: 110). Later on, different psychiatrists, who meet the patient, do not believe in the condition. The belief in such a condition, however, certainly is very important for the patient, although the narrator expresses a denial, as it is essential to her very existence.

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The dependency between patient and therapist is now mutual. Pleasing everyone around her seems to be quite a familiar habit of the narrator/author. The very story starts with a clear self-judgment: “Anyone can walk a tightrope. All it takes is practice and luck. I had the practice. For as long as I could remember, I had walked cautiously through life, careful to please whoever might be near” (TF 3). This craving to be admired or fit in also shows itself during therapy when the patient, for example, states in the very first session with the therapist that she “knew what therapists wanted to hear” (TF 7) or that “professionals don’t like their diagnosis questioned” (TF 17) or when a dependency is confirmed by the therapist herself: “her pathological dependency (TF 27). Now the narrator concludes that “I liked that Lynn liked me, and she had convinced me that the voices had minds and experiences of their own” (TF 30). The reader now is confronted with the typical multiple vocabulary: trauma, earlychildhood experiences, early split in personality (TF 35). Even Cornelia Wilbur appears in the book as a specialist who confirms the diagnosis. It is the therapist Lynn who teaches the patient about Sybil, her personalities and thoughts (TF 45), and discovers “many more personalities existed than those I had met” (TF 47), although later an “extreme suggestibility of any multiple” (TF 88) is admitted. The patient now holds “rare internal discussion” and concludes that “there were more personalities, each unique and important to the design of the whole” (TF 71). Throughout the book, the therapist talks with one personality after the other, for example, one called Isis or Rusty. In the beginning, the sessions are held twice a week up for several hours a day and embedded into a therapy called a “program of reparenting therapy” with the patient living together with Lynn and her husband Gordon as surrogate parents similar to Wilbur and Sybil. The personalities are now (book II) hierarchically structured into “autonomous personalities” (Jo, Missy, Joan Frances, Isis, and Renee); “single-motive” personalities with clearly defined tasks; and “past-keepers personalities” holding knowledge of the past (TF 75).24 The initial trauma triggering the split is said to have happened at the age of PPsix months (TF 77): “daddy’s hardness under her buttocks.”25 Outside therapy, the patient is faced with her skeptical partner Steve.26 Thus, the patient experiences two levels of reflection upon her multiple personality diagnosis: one within therapy and one outside. “More than one personality tried to persuade Steve that the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder was accurate, but he remained skeptical…Steve said that Dr. Wilbur spent her whole life trying to find people she could call multiple” (TF 127). Thereupon, the narrator remarks: “Though I appreciated the insight and revelations Lynn offered me, I needed to escape from them as well. I was glad to be living with Steve. His denial of the disorder brought freedom. I

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Another case note states: “Although some of the past-keepers are more fragments than real personalities” (TF 87). An indication in the book, which again reminded me of the term childhood amnesia. On such a sceptical view, the therapist notes: “I’ve generally ignored clinicians who deny the existence of MPD” (TF 113).

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didn’t want to think about MPD outside Lynn’s office, and I didn’t want Steve to decide that I was crazy. None of the others interfered. The personalities were all used to being treated as a single person.” (TF 83; my emphasis)

The patient’s attempt to focus on one personality and define a “core personality” fails.27 The therapist comments: “I can’t place importance on only one part of the totality” (TF 89). From a retrospective position the narrator can also reflect on the birth of new personalities: “I loosened the braid that Jo wore and shook my hair free around my shoulders. I admired my reflection in the store’s window. I wanted to hug my new self and the whole world. This was going to be fun…I was determined to block out all the other personalities, but quickly learned I didn’t have the power.” (TF 122)

The creation of new personalities inside therapy is another aspect. Again it is the patient who feels a need to please: “‘Now, Renee,’ Lynn chided, ‘you don’t need to create new personalities to please me. I care about all of you and I am really happy with the progress you are making in therapy.’ I still felt uneasy. That we didn’t have to create a new personality to please her didn’t guarantee it wouldn’t happen. And I was worried that Lynn wasn’t prepared for that possibility. Jo warned Lynn in her own way. ‘If I suddenly changed and became the person you wanted me to be, you wouldn’t even notice that I was really trapped inside,’ she accused bitterly. Jo II, the personality created to be what Lynn wanted, appeared a few days later during a session.” (TF 132-3; my emphasis)

The therapist’s husband, Gordon, helps her define her ability to function as a whole despite all new personalities, using the metaphor of birds, flying in formation, albeit being separate entities: the term of the flock is found (TF 155). Then again, the patient is defined from the outside. In book IV (TF 203-297) finally, after establishing the Flock in book III (TF 147202), the integration is eventually accomplished. The ability to function coconsciously (“The Alliance was loose enough so that Kendry, Isis, and I sometimes functioned autonomously but co-consciously”, TF 212) helps integrate some of the personalities, that is “merge” them (TF 216). Before the final integration can take place, an “intra-Flock conference” (TF 256) can be conducted by the patient without the help of the therapist, a “dream conference” (TF 254) with the personalities actually talking to each other with the help of the Unity personality: “KENDRA (in responds to Unity): Come on. After getting us up for this, you might tell us what it’s all about.

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The Jo personality reads Sybil and tries to accomplish (“her desire to be loved by Lynn”, TF 91) accordingly.

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UNITY: First of all, I did not get you up for this. I told you, you need not know you were up at all. JO: The reality of the situation is that the body is sitting at the typewriter. Whether any personalities remember it later or not, in some sense, I am up.” (TF 253)

A more detailed scene shows the final integration, when Steve, the skeptical partner, assists the therapist, who has held some sessions together with her husband.28 Steve mentions the metaphor coined by Plato, who said “if all of the parts of your soul were in harmonious order, then happiness just naturally follows” (TF 265). Accordingly, integration follows naturally: “‘I’ve spent a great deal of my life keeping my strengths separate because the Flock had been so hurt.’ I paused. That wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t them; it was me…They were me. All of the personalities of the past were now the many aspects of a brand-new me…I was the Flock, all of the personalities, flying around in formation in some tightly woven instinct to be one. A group mind with a single thought, moving toward a shared destiny.” (TF 284-285)

The integration at this point of the therapy was thus successful. But this is not the case with the narration of the book, however, and the integration of the narrator (who exactly? Joan?). Several partnerships seem to follow. All of them are stable. The sudden death of Lynn and her husband, however, ends the story with the patient feeling grateful (TF 297). The narration offers no clear and detailed distinction between the characters such as Renee or Jo, the main focalizer of the story. Renee expresses her doubts, Jo tries to conform to models expounded in the classic reads like Sybil. Such views are merely views. Nevertheless, The Flock explains the personalities as unique entities, literally persons with different opinions.

9.3

C AMERON W EST : F IRST P ERSON P LURAL (1999)

The division into several personalities as possible narrators always challenges the reader’s mind. What perspective is offered? In the case of Truddi Chase, the changing points of view may be owed to the very symptomatic disorder of MPD. The book First Person Plural, however, has a clear narrative perspective.29 It is the perspective of Cameron West who even kindly offers a list of his different personalities inside his body.30 In his account of his personal experiences, he faces his dissociative moments and the “coming up” of various personalities, which he calls people who individually

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Steve’s now positive reaction strongly supports the diagnosis of MPD. Cameron West. First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple. New York: Hyperion, 1999; hereafter abbreviated FPP. Cameron West holds a PhD in psychology. He wrote his dissertation on the experimental aspects of Dissociative Identity Disorder (according to biographical information about the author in First Person Plural). The book cover mentions West as having a PhD to stress his professional training.

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have their own memories and possess the body in different time periods. This happens when different feelings are involved, or appear when asked to come up. Voice, age, manners and appearance differ considerably. The main or core personality, West himself as Cam, has no memory of the past and the trigger of such a dissociated constitution. Once again, a child sexual abuse by his grandmother and mother (who denied such an abuse) is the reason for the disturbance. Now a male patient describes his struggle, which meets in every way the usual criteria of personal accounts of female MPD narrators. The first pages of the book provide a description of West’s various characters inside, entitled “my guys”. The details of each character vary to a great extent and resemble the list in the novel Sybil. The first few read like this: “Soul is an ageless alter who emerged early on and whose job it was to give me hope so I could survive. His presence is still felt, but he rarely comes out, even in therapy. Sharky is a primitive alter who at first couldn’t form words at all. He would grunt and swing his head from side to side and bite things, like tables and clothes and plants. One of the other alters drew a picture of him as a limbless being with a huge toothy mouth. Sharky has learned to talk and eat with his hands or a fork. He doesn’t come out too often, but he likes to share treats with the other. Davy is four. He is sweet and sad. He was the first to emerge, but he doesn’t come out much anymore. Anna and Trudi31 are four-year old twins. Anna is doe-eyed and happy, with a smile so big it makes my face hurt. She remembers her abuse, but feels no anger, no sadness. She loves a good cookie. Trudi is dark and brooding, a kid in the corner. She remembers, too, but only the pain and sadness and horror. Anna shares her cookies with her. Anna is a member of the core group of alters who come out with the most frequency. Mozart is six years old. He is very quiet and fragile and has difficulty breathing. Mozart doesn’t come out very often. Clay is eight and comes out frequently. For a long time he had an awful stutter and tense muscles, and he couldn’t look anyone in the eye. But he is much more relaxed now. The stutter is mostly gone, and he is learning to meet a person’s gaze. Clay has a scarf we wear every day. We never go anywhere without it. Clay is also a member of the core group.” (FPP vii-viii)

Besides these people inside West’s body, there are several others: Switch, Wyatt, Tracy, Lit, Nicky, Lake, Toy and Casey. The boys were Dusty; Gail; Keith; Bart; Kyle; Leif; Sky; Stroll; and Per, most of them with monosyllabic names. In the prologue of the book, the author and narrator Cameron West in medias res describes a brutal scene of depersonalization32 and outside-the-body experience. A “familiar force seizes” the narrator to cut himself with a knife (FPP 1). The destruc-

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Remember Truddi Chase! The term “depersonalization” refers to the experience of “briefly feeling detached from oneself or the environment; It is variously described as being in a dreamlike state; as if one is outside his or her body and is an observer; as a feeling detached from one’s surroundings, as if everything is ‘unreal’” (Holmes 2008: 271; my emphasis).

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tive person Switch, who will only be defined more closely later in the story, is the force behind such deliberate self-harm: “Suddenly, a familiar force seizes me…I’m now behind the man with the bloody arm, watching him lean over the sink. He spots me in the mirror, and like a balloon filling with molasses, I slowly expand and fill his body. Now I am inside…The eyes peer into the mirror, and from an island in my mind, I realize that it’s my face looking back at me, it’s my handholding the knife, my arm bleeding into the sink. Oh my God! Reality’s insect creeps up the back of my neck into my right ear and whispers one long, drawn-out word. ‘Welllcommme.’ Oh no, not again. Who cut me? Who? Who is doing this? A voice says, ‘It’s Switch.’” (FPP 1-2)

The book is divided into three parts: part one “The Sad Hotel” (FPP 9-162), part II “Circling the Drain” (FPP 163-288) and part III “Denial’s Rake” (FPP 289-346). The prologue with the knife scene claims to take place three years prior to the story, the epilogue is set one year after the last scene. Throughout the book, the settings depict a possible film version33 and emphasis on dramatic scenes.34 The focus of the narration clearly points at a picture-book miseen-scene, later contrasted by the narrator’s severe mental problems. Each of the first chapters ends with a dramatic sentence, which questions the superficial idyll and intends to create tension and suspense: “‘You’ll see. Everything’ll be all right.’ But in my heart, I didn’t really think it was true” (FPP 17); “I wondered if I would be [dead], too” (FPP 25); “She had her man back…or so she thought.” (FPP 33). The initial situation starts idyllically in a living room with “a white Berber carpet” and “luxuriously detailed books” on Rembrandt (FPP 9) as described by the first-person singular narrator: “I was lying on my back…” (FPP 9). The narrator’s description of his environment is mainly focused on materialistic details such as LL. Bean suede moccasins (FPP 10), green-and-brown suede Avia low-top hiking shoes (FPP 27), a silver-blue Mercedes 450 SLC (FPP 18), a silver Volvo station wagon (FPP 27), La Machine II food processor, Marcato Ampia Tipo Lusso Model 150 (FPP 275) and so on. The impression of a perfectly harmonious life of a well settled, upper middleclass family – there is Cam, the narrator, his wife Rikki and the son named Kyle – is contrasted by the poor health of the narrator, who first suffers from a sinus infection,

33 34

The film rights were bought by Hollywood actor Robin Williams. So far no movie version has been made. The indicated incest is investigated with almost detective-like ambition such as phone calls with relatives. Cam's repressed memory and his sudden outburst of alter personalities, who hold the incest memory, drives the narrator to the investigation about his past, which seems to be kept a secret by members of his family. Cam consequently is the outcast, the dramatic hero, who tries to unravel this secret. The first-person narrative certainly lends itself to such a dramatization. There is, however, no solution concerning the accused incest.

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later candidiasis and allergies.35 The shift of physical symptoms toward a psychological disturbance (“since I’d regained my health I’d been experiencing the oddest feelings in my head, like things were shifting”, FPP 34) is introduced by hearing voices inside: “inside my head is very loud. Something in my head…in my mind…is shifting constantly” (FPP 34). Arly Morelli, a psychologist, is consulted. Cam tells her that somehow he has lost his soul (FPP 38). The more he goes to the psychological sessions, “the worse I felt” (FPP 41). “The shifting”, acknowledges the narrator, “in my mind increased, and faint confusing whispers licked at me like flames up the inside of an old chimney” (FPP 41). The first incident at night is a nightmare with a voice forcing the narrator to write down the words “not safe” (the image of the scribbling is printed on page 43; further writings also appear in the book): “Safe not safe…safe not safe…safe not safe. The bizarre phrase repeated in my head. STOPPP!!! I looked over at Rikki, who was facing away from me, fast asleep. Safe not safe…safe not safe. ÄI clapped my hands over my ears, desperately trying to block the chilling phrase.” (FPP 42)

The “action inside” (FPP 46) the head seems to be uncontrollable as it is accompanied by memory lapses and weird situations (“Then I realized I was sitting on the ground. Where? I looked around. A shopping center?”, FPP 47) and Arly, the therapist, diagnoses experiences of dissociation (FPP 51). The narrator’s reaction is merely an astonishment: “What is happening to me? I feel possessed….Somebody else’s voice coming out of my face, is reading road sings out loud…I got disconnected?” (FPP 51). After the word dissociation has appeared, the next chapter jumps right into a brutal scenery of apparent abuse (“white pubic hair”, FPP 52), which suggests an abuse by the grandmother. Later, the mother is also accused of such an abuse, but she denies it. From now on, the vocabulary is typical: “The small person controlling my body drew another picture” (FPP 54); the persona “sad Davy”, a boy, is introduced (a drawing of sad Davy is printed on FPP 56). Next to the homodiegetic view, several situations without the narrator involved a display of dialogues between the wife, Rikki, and others. She is a psychologist especially dealing with problems of sexually abused kids - and friends or the therapist (FPP 58-59). Such scenes always try to focus on the Rikki’s emotional involvment

35

The first treatments Cam, the narrator, is going through are typical fashionable diagnoses such as candidiasis, blood food allergy tests (which are useless and even dangerous), immune system boosters and antitoxins. The expensive treatments (usually not scientifically sound) are preferably performed by a medical scene, which defines itself as holistic (“holistic practitioners”, FPP 28). On a critical fictional version of such treatments see also the classic novel about medical treatments and the role of expensive therapies The House of God (1978) by Samuel Shem, which is the pseudonym of Stephen Bergman, Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. On a review of psychosomatic illnesses and sensational treatments see also Shorter 1992.

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and enhance the suffering of the narrator but also depict the symptoms of dissociation: “It’s like it’s not even Cam,” Rikki said. “He’s gone and someone else is there” (FPP 59). The narrator’s reflection on his condition already points to dissociation: “a dream…or a flashback…or a memory or something” (FPP 56). When the therapist first refers to the persona Davy, the switch occurs instantly (FPP 64). Such switches are always described with the same short expression: “Shudder, switch, gone. And Davy was there” (FPP 64; my emphasis). The narrator now leaves the control of the body (FPP 69) to people inside who “come up” (FPP 68) and react, relive and abreact (FPP 69) memories, which Cam himself cannot recall. There are even more people inside (FPP 87): “Instantly, shudder, switch, and I was gone and Per was there. A strange warm calm filled my body as I felt him assume control” (FPP 90). Per knows “there are others” (FPP 91) and that “they’ll come out to see you. The door has been opened. It’s safe to speak…”(FPP 92). Every time when the people are named, they may come out: “‘Are you there, Clay?’...Shudder, switch, gone” (FPP 95). Consequently, the diagnosis of the therapist is dissociative identity disorder. The definition refers to “another part of his mind” which “comes forward to hold the memory of the pain” (FPP 97). Such parts are created constantly over time, and they eventually become alter personalities (FPP 97). When the therapist tells Rikki about DID, she immediately asks: “You mean like Sybil?” (FPP 98; my emphasis). The difference, however, is the total separation of the personalities in Sybil. Cam’s alters are said to “take over to greater or lesser degrees at different times. He’s aware when they’re out, and they seem to be aware of each other. That’s called co-consciousness” (FPP 98). The book thereupon follows the new definition of dissociative identity disorder, which refers to personality or identity states. The people inside Cam, however, are clearly defined as distinct personalities.36 Their different appearance is also underlined by the list of people (“my guys”) that were already mentioned. The vivid journals Cam keeps writing also show different writing styles closely following each other. Several pages are printed in the book. Typical dialogues between Cam, an alter and Rikki show how the book deals with the topic: “‘W-will y-you read me a b-book?’ Clay stuttered. Rikki let go of me, leaned back, and studied Clay a moment. Clay looked down at the floor. ‘Clay?’ she asked, checking. He nodded. Rikki patted him gently on the shoulder and said, ‘Clay, I need to talk to Cam for a minute, okay?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Cam?’, she called to me. ‘I need to talk to Cam.’

36

Next to the description is also a characterization such as “Stroll was the sexual one” (FPP 112). Just like in When Rabbit Howls by Truddi Chase there is also “a gatekeeper”, called Sky. Notable is also the personality called Trudi!

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Shudder, switch, back. ‘Yeah,’ I said weakly.” (FPP 102; my emphasis)

The mixing up of self-reference and perspective (Clay, me, him etc.) is also shown in another section: “Per wasn’t kidding when he said there were other. Alters began to emerge and communicate, and my blue journal became the town square…” (FPP 110; my emphasis). Now the astonishing control of his people inside (notable is that such a control and switch only occurs after the diagnosis) allows Cam to prevent his son from a possible encounter (FPP 111).37 The narrator, sometimes obviously too omniscient, tends to analyze his behavior (“It was a form of protection”, FPP 111) and is constantly able to switch whenever asked. The reader receives no sufficient or detailed explanation for the behavior. The facts are merely stated and switches occur: “Over a couple of months Arly, Rikki, and I met a parade of others. They arrived as strangers, guests in my sad hotel, moving their luggage into the already cramped quarters of my mind. Some came for brief stay, then faded back. Others took up permanent residence. My guys” (FPP 112). The people, the reader learns, enable Cam to exclude the memories, to place them outside himself. Later, Cam mentions the possible falsity of the abuse with Clay and Switch making everything up. Such a conviction, however, is merely called a “denial” by Rikki (FPP 134). If the condition on the other hand is denied by a therapist, a session can end abruptly. After the narrator moves with his family to California, quits his job and spends the whole daytime at home, a new therapist is needed. The encounter, however, only takes a minute: “Another therapist. Doesn’t know us. What if he’s mean. He doesn’t look mean. Mean? Uh oh, lots of leakage going on here...Uh oh, I’m losing it. Shudder, switch, and Clay was out. ‘I’m Clay,’ he said, his body tight as a cello string. [The therapist Dr.] Mosley jumped like a cartoon character… ‘What?! Who’s Clay? Why are you talking like a child?’ His voice sounded harsh, scared. Jeez, it’s just Clay. Testing this fucker…And suddenly Leif was there.” (FPP 211; italics in original text)

Leif shouts at Mosley (“Don’t you know anything about DID?”, FPP 212), and leaves the room. If a therapist gives attention to the symptoms, more personalities can occur. “Let them out, Cam,” Janna said softly. “They need body time” (FPP 271). Even more successful were earlier encounters within multiple groups. The meetings of such multiple patients create conversations, for example, among two kids:38

37

38

The therapist Steve, who videotapes the session, remarks upon this control: “That in itself shows a selflessness and an ability to cooperate that’s way beyond that of most of the multiples that I’ve worked with. It’s amazing, actually” (FPP 334). In his novel Set this House in Order (2003), author Matt Ruff will pick up on such situations with multiple people and their different personalities inside meeting each other.

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“‘Yeah!’, Inner jab from me. ‘I m-mean, n-no. N-not good for him.’ ‘Who, Cam?’ said Stephanie, who wasn’t Stephanie anymore. Clay looked over. ‘Y-yeah. Who’re you?’ ‘I’m Wobbie,’ she said. ‘I’m a boy, too!’ This was getting interesting. ‘Do y-you have a s-scooter?’ Clay asked. ‘A red one?’” (FPP 181)

With another personality coming up, Cam can get closer to Stephanie, who then has changed into a personality called Robbie. The teenagers almost kiss each other: “I was distantly aware of the nervous tingling of sexual excitement” (FPP 193).39 Eventually, at another hospital, the sessions are video recorded by a therapist called Steve and Cam is confronted with the sudden switches: “Steve started the tape rolling again and out came Bart, who looked totally different from Clay, except for the clothes, the body, and the face. This was so weird. A second ago Clay was out, all tense and talking like a kid, and here was Bart…And they both looked like me!” (FFP 320)40

After Bart on the videotape states that he knows “we were all patients in a hospital” (FPP 320), progress is diagnosed as the statement refers to a co-operation of the people inside. The watching Cam reflects: “That’s Bart. Progress. Progress. Progress. That was me, then Clay, then Bart. Look at it…Muh…muh…multiple. Okay okay okay. Multiple.” (FPP 320)

The recognition of the people as part of himself (“Per is part of me, too, Ding!”) creates an emotional scene: “I sprang from my chair and screamed the scream of the greatest sorrow and started to collapse, and Steve jumped up and grabbed me and held me and my arms hung limp at my sides and my head lay on his shoulder and the tears gushed and slapped the searing heat as billows of steam rose from the unutterable sadness. For Dusty and Clay and all the others. And, at last, for me, too.” (FPP 324)

The story melodramatically ends with a speech Cam gives at a conference about “connectedness”. In front of several hundred people, multiples and therapists, he gives a review of his experiences. The book closes with another statement by Cam and the fact of still having alters inside. West finally concludes his report expressing his desire to help other people face their diagnosis of DID. The book First Person

39 40

Cam also experiences another personality, who looks like a witch. Interestingly, Oxnam also had a witch inside. Such obvious switches were part of the outdated diagnoses of MPD and are not promoted anymore (cf. Dell 2009).

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Plural became a best-selling book. West also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1999.

9.4

R OBERT B. O XNAM : A F RACTURED M IND (2005)

While Truddi Chase splits into ninety-two different personalities, Joan Frances Casey into twenty-four, Cameron West into twenty-four people, the author of The Fractured Mind: My Life with Multiple Personality Disorder counts up to eleven different personalities inside.41 His personal account on the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder was given prior to the diagnostical change. The book, however, was only published in the year 2005 in times of DID. With Casey and West, Robert Oxnam shares an academic background. He is a highly acclaimed expert on Asia and woked in a series of different jobs such as teaching at universities in the USA and in China, working as a writer and producer of television programs on Asia, formerly functioning as the president of the Asia Society for over a decade, writing several scientific texts as well as novels. Oxnam himself even expresses his various occupations as performing acts because each task was actually fulfilled by another personality. The book offers a clear structure. Each chapter, Oxnam calls them section, is divided into different subchapters, which are given to the special view of each alter: “SECTION ONE Living in the World, Hiding in a Castle 1. Bob: ‘I Always Thought I Was Real.’ 2. Tommy: ‘Of course I am Angry. It’s Your Fault.’ 3. Young Bob: ‘I Whistle, and the Birds Sing Back.’

7 9 47 61” (FM xii)

There are six sections. The various sections clearly depict the inner Oxnam’s voices and sometimes differ considerably in style and vocabulary. The personality Bob, for example, who starts the story in section one, describes the first day with a therapeutic session in his life: “On a cold, cloudy afternoon in March 1990, driving my black Honda42 through the spiderweb of highways north of New York City, I had no idea that this day would change my life forever.” (FM 9; my emphasis)

Bob (“I always thought I was real…”, FM 9) is not the remaining core personality in another section entitled “Robert”. This Robert hence states: “This is Robert speaking. 41 42

Robert B. Oxnam.. A Fractured Mind. New York: Hyperion, 2005; hereafter abbreviated FM. Cameron West’s book was published by the same publishing house. Such details seem to be important for male narrators. See also my chapter on Cameron West First Person Plural. Certainly, Oxnam is an Asian expert and therefore drives a Japanese car. On the symbolism of car brands, see the movie Gran Turino (2009) starring Clint Eastwood, who also directed the movie. Eastwood drives a Ford, while the globalized son drives a Toyota. Young Asian boys in the neighbourhood drive a Honda.

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Today I’m the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My term for such an MPD role is dominant personality” (FM 11). Robert then is the survivor, the core personality, who reflects on the different inner voices or alters. His reports derive from a later perspective and consequently compose the whole book A Fractured Mind. Luckily, Oxnam could recall each personality and his/her feelings. He kept journals throughout the time documenting his therapeutic sessions, so the reader has a clear picture of this differentiation. The voice of Bob leads the reader through Oxnam’s life and career: “This feels so strange. It’s the first time in more than a decade that I’m speaking directly to outsiders” (FM 12). Details about early phases of Oxnam’s life follow: “My memories of childhood are very hazy” (FM 13). Just like West, Bob describes “severe self-punishments” (FM 17) such as hammering his head against the wall and also regularly scribbling the words “You’re stupid!” on any possibly paper available (FM 17).43 After reading Asian studies in Yale, Bob describes his desire to “live the dream of success” (FM 23) by obtaining a doctoral degree: “I just turned on my inner machine…and spit out a doctoral thesis” (FM 23). The 1980s, however, bring “dark clouds on my inner horizon” and “violent series of inner storms (FM 23). With the voice of Bob, Oxnam admits to have suffered both from alcohol addiction and bulimia (FM 26). During a stressful period of working as president of the Asia Society, the “inner problems” (FM 29) build up. Besides talking to himself, other symptoms concerning memory appear. Such “blank spots” and “zero memory” of incidents accumulate: “I had a severe headache and what seemed to be cigarette burns on my arm” (FM 31). After a collapse, Bob tells about the first encounter with Dr. Smith, who also happens to be a member of a psychiatric “association concerned with dissociative problems” (FM 51), and who diagnoses him as class-A alcoholic. Furthermore, Dr. Smith remarks: “I want to see you when you get back [from rehab]. Not just for the alcoholism. You’re a rather rare bird psychologically, you know. You’re a male hysteric. You need treatment” (FM 34; my emphasis). After rehab, Bob states that the real problems “were deeper, so much deeper, than I could have ever imagined” (FM 37). There is no escape from “a rising sense of inner foreboding” (FM 37). A published novel, called Cinnabar and written during “mysterious blank periods”, only receives lukewarm to hostile attention (FM 38). Alcohol, cigarettes, bulimia, rages, terrible fatigue, blank spots in memory, inability to work and a sense of hopelessness culminate eventually in the appearance of “Tommy”, a boy personality. In section two, this “Tommy” personality describes his first appearance during a session: “‘I don’t like you. I hate you!’ I was really mad. And I was on that stupid chair, in that stupid office. I said it and I meant it.

43

Cameron West describes a scene where he scribbles “Safe not safe…safe not safe” (FPP 42).

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Then that dumb shrink, he starts walking over to me, like he’s going to do huggy-shrink junk. He was making me feel stuck in this corner. ‘Don’t come near me,’ ‘I shouted. “Don’t you dare touch me.’ I would have hit him. He knew I was going to hit him if he came closer. I could see the worry in his eyes.” (FM 49)

When asked whether he is called Bob, the Tommy personality answers: “‘I’m not Bob.’” I laughed at him. “‘How could you take me for Bob? Bob’s old. Bob’s tired. I think Bob is dying.’” and “‘I’m Tommy’” (FM 50). During the next session, the Tommy personality has disappeared leaving Bob without memory of Dr. Smith’s encounter with Tommy. Dr. Smith diagnoses multiple personality, MPD: “‘Want to know what I think?’ Smith asked. I looked up. ‘I think you have a case of multiple personality. You’ve heard of it?’ I just kept shaking my head. ‘No?’ he said. ‘Never heard of multiple personality?’ ‘Yes. Of course I’ve heard of it. Everybody has. I saw Three Faces of Eve. But I’m not like that. I’m not a misfit. I’ve been able to do lots of things in life.’” (FM 51)

Moving from “skeptic to believer” (FM 52), Bob now consummates everything written about multiple personality disorder. One of the books he reads is Sybil: “On Monday, I found a spare hour to buy several books dealing with dissociation and multiple personality disorder, including the classic best-seller Sybil [sic!], which I’d never read…This time the project had an inescapable fascination: trying to figure out what was wrong with me. And selectively sampling the various psychiatric treatises, I devoured Sybil in about six hours. Page after page, I found details that dovetailed perfectly with my own story. Of course I had only one “alter” (as the psychiatric books called a separate personality)…And so much of Sybil herself hit home with me: meticulous organization, quest for perfection, obsession with time, self-abuse, always feeling she was “bad”, limited memory of childhood, deep desire for creative outlets, and sudden rages.” (FM 52)

Again Sybil is the template against which Bob’s own symptoms are reflected. Although Dr. Smith is not entirely enthusiastic about Bob’s keenness (“like an overzealous graduate student trying to impress a professor”, reflects Bob; FM 52), he nevertheless accords the patient with the most important features of MPD. The “goal of MPD therapy” is therefore to achieve “‘integration’, the unifying of all alters into a single, cohesive whole”; such a process often takes several years of therapy. The cause of MPD are “terrifying childhood traumatic experiences”; some parts absorb the pain, others survive by separating themselves from the pain. MPD, therefore, is “the ultimate survival mechanism. Before a MPD patient can “come together”, revisiting the original traumatic experience is necessary (FM 53). Dr. Smith concludes: “The good news is that it’s not like certain other disorders, manic depression for instance, which are related to genetic predisposition. MPD comes from the outside, from terrible things done by other people. That’s what causes someone to split into multiple parts, sometimes into lots of alters. I’ve heard of cases with over fifty alters.” (FM 53; my emphasis)

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After again mentioning the possibility of more personalities (“Are you saying there might be more personalities?”, FM 54), Tommy is again addressed during a session. The switch now comes consciously and is described within the Bob section as a “sudden warm dizziness…my eyes seem to roll into my head, and I could feel a tightening in my face and hands” (FM 54). A section by Tommy follows. Here the escape place called “the Castle” is introduced for the first time, an inner landscape, where the personalities are thought to exist. When Dr. Smith asks “Can you tell me where you live?” (FM 55), the Tommy personality answers: “I told him the truth. The Castle was Middle Ages-style, standing on a large hill. It was made of gray stones and topped with long walkways and towers at the corners. In front of the Castle was a drawbridge spanning a river leading down to a massive lake with a towering mountain range on the other side. Above the drawbridge was a high bell tower, featuring a large clock with golden hands and roman numerals and flags fluttering on top.” (FM 55)

Bob, however, lives outside the castle. When Dr. Smith asks about the room Tommy lives in and if there are other rooms, Tommy answers: “God, it’s a Castle! Of course there are other rooms!” When asked whether others live inside the castle, Tommy shouts: “Of course others life in the Castle” (FM 56). After this incident, Smith is entirely sure that he is dealing with a real multiple personality. “This is undeniable multiple personality disorder…The Castle is an organizing structure, many with MPD have something like it, perhaps a house, a garden, or a maze” (FM 57).44 It is Bob, who notices himself “swimming in a strange zone between utter shock and a desire to finally get to the core problem” (FM 57). Obviously now Bob knows what Tommy just said about the castle (“although Tommy’s tale seemed zany”, FM 58). In another chapter entitled “Young Bob”, a new personality is born. Young Bob, who mainly just sits and “sometimes plays the flute” (FM 62), likes reading and sailing. It is this Young Bob on the other hand, who mentions one more personality: Robbey. Whereas Bob reflects on these new names as “just stick figures” or “little bits of me”, Dr. Smith interprets them as whole entities: “‘Right here’ – Smith waved a finger at me – “that’s the problem in doing your own reading. Alters must be seen as real persons. They have their own unique experiences, abilities, memories. Alters have enormous differences – in voices, demeanor, literacy levels, even heart rates. Most of all, they have their own identities and their own feelings. Deny that realness and MPD therapy can’t work.” (FM 64; my emphasis)

44

Such an organizing structure as an outside or external place is also shown in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996). In the novel, the narrator meets his alter ego for the first time at a beach. The movie, however, displays the first meeting of the narrator and Taylor Durden within the narrator’s life during a business trip. In Matt Ruff’s Set this House in Order (2003), the personalities meet within a cave. Such a cave is also shown in the film Fight Club (1999), but only with guided hypnosis during self-help meetings.

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Dr. Smith, however, answers to Bob’s fear of merely being a “collection of people” (FM 64) that in a “literal sense, the alters are all part of you” (FM 64). Nevertheless, the setting is cast. This seems to be the starting signal for other personalities to reveal themselves. In section two, Robbey and Bob appear. In a chapter, Robert – the remaining core personality – again speaks, interrupting the sections of the book. He describes his birth in the 1990s as the outcome of therapy (“I was sort of a late bloomer in the MPD therapy”, FM 75): “I came out of the closet – literally – making my appearance without Bob even knowing it” (FM 75). So far it is Bob, who describes in detail his real encounters with former President Bush and his wife or the therapy session. Next to the fragmented therapy sessions and the individual chapters in the book, Oxnam could therefore function very well on the outside. The Robert personality now is in charge of the castle replacing Bob, the career personality. Robert quits his job at the Asian Society feeling relieved (FM 105). An internal discussion between Bob and Robert seals the new structure inside with Robert in charge. Robert, the reader learns, finally functions as the outcome of a “tripartite merger of Bob and Robbey, into me, Robert” (FM 123). The dark side, however, also remains strong and bad boy Tommy states in a session that he is receiving orders from someone else. This is the Witch personality, who appears in section three for the first time (FM 124). With the Witch as another darker personality within the castle, it is now possible to create the path toward the trigger situation. The other side of Robert, who thought perhaps to be safe, is also symbolized by the personality Eyes, who “knows all but cannot speak” (FM 129). Eyes can scan the inside of the castle and reveals a huge library where every memory is carefully stored (FM 133). The personality in charge of the “archives” is the Librarian (FM 135). The Librarian is a female character and the “I” narrator (Robert) experiences a near auto-sexual encounter with her (“transpired energy”, FM 138). The trauma that needs to be discovered in order to overcome the problem of fragmentation, seems to be described in the “Baby Book” (FM 138), and it is the dominant personality Robert who seems to be the one to discover it: “I felt strangely empowered, as the only personality who had ever explored so deeply into the secret recesses of the Castle. I had redefined “dominant personality” in terms of inner knowledge rather than outer power. And I had done so without the presence of Dr. Smith.” (FM 140)

The terror felt by Baby, a personality that holds the memory exclusively, is described in chapter twelve, which is later called the “original trauma” and “like the hurricane’s eye” (FM 171). Similar to the case of Cameron West, it was the mother who causes the trauma: “‘You are worst this time. A terrible boy. You must be burned.’ No! I screamed. No! I am picked up. Taken to the stove. There is a pot of boiling water. No! Please no! My hand. Don’t pull my hand. No! My hand is taken close to the pot.” (FM 142)

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Upon the revelation of the trauma, Dr. Smith is satisfied with that encounter and does not want to address Baby again (“We don’t have to go back”, FM 152). Definitely, Robert re-experiences the situations, so Dr. Smith feels no need to tell his patient about the sessions with other personalities. The remaining personalities are presented now to the reader with a closer description of each character: Robert, Bobby, Tommy, Witch and Eyes (FM 161-162). The core personality Robert now tries to hold a “fragile cluster of divided personalities” (FM 174). One episode, however, experienced by the Bobby personality, refers to adultery: “I said that the marriage was between Robert and Vishakha [the wife], not Bobby and Vishakha. I always liked Vishakha and I was happy for Robert. But I wasn’t married to Vishakha. She was like a nice aunt” (FM 202). Robert, or rather Bobby, gets away with it. Eventually, Robert can co-exist with Wanda, the Witch turned into a beautiful woman displaying a more transcendental and Buddhist self, and Bobby, the good boy (FM 235). According to Dr. Smith, these three personalities could merge into being parts of a new composite personality by blending their values. The triangle now still exists within Oxnam, according to the book at least. It is clear that Robert symbolizes the Western part, Wanda the Eastern part and Bobby the inner child. At the end of the report, Oxnam slightly switches personal pronouns: “Against this hopeful backdrop, it is sometimes tempting to forget that we have multiple personality disorder” (FM 253; my emphasis). The epilogue is written by Dr. Smith himself, who refers to the change of diagnosis MPD into DID. The change, however, would not affect Oxnam: “Having started working with multiples when the official diagnosis was multiple personality disorder, I tend to prefer that term. It is more direct than the current dissociative identity disorder,45 which may be more precise a term, but seems too abstract. Perhaps best of all, just multiple personality is a descriptive term rather than an official one and puts us on strong literary ground. Out of habit, both Bob and I tend to revert to the acronym MPD, even though it is outdated. Please forgive us.” (FM 263; my emphasis)

In the case of Oxnam, however, the personalities were literal and had shown definite characteristics. Thus the diagnosis of MPD seemed to be more appropriate.

C ONCLUSION This chapter presented the narratives of personal accounts of multiple personality disorder, multiple autopathographies – two where published before the diagnostical change in the year 1994 with the DSM-IV – as a clear distinction of personalities or persons. As early as 1984, there were critical voices pointing to a mistake, when “each personality [was considered to be] totally separate, whole or autonomous” (Hacking 1995: 17). According to the leading psychiatrist David Spiegel, whose ef-

45

This was chosen because of the literal translation of MPD!

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forts made a renaming of MPD into DID possible, “there is a widespread misunderstanding of the essential psychopathology” (18) concerning MPD and personalities as literal entities (cf. Merckelbach 2002). Here, however, the alters were obviously such entities. As the texts have shown, the presentation of the alters or alter personalities is therefore without any doubt that of personalities understood only as separate persons. They are named and thus interpreted as such separate persons inside the body. However, MPD activist Putnam himself stated: “very little is known about the alter personalities and what they represent” (cited in Hacking 1995: 18). The examples here also showed that the various alters emerged only during therapy and were felt as the literal innumerous Other(s). In When Rabbit Howls (1987), the patient insists on persons inside: “I tell you, they were people” (RH 5). In The Flock (1991), the therapist insists on persons inside: “The personalities were all used to being treated as a single person” (TF 83). In First Person Plural (1999), the patient calls his persons inside “my guys” (FPP iiv). In The Fractured Mind (2005), the therapist insists that “alters must be seen as real persons” (FM 64). Some of the books mention The Three Faces of Eve (1957), but all books refer to Sybil (1973). The male patients, Cam and Oxnam, had alter personalities, who engaged in more or less serious encounters with women. Both males also had a bad/evil other side, which was said to act independently (Switch for Cam, and Witch for Oxnam). The concept, such as independently acting personalities or uncontrollable persons inside, is derived from the theory of dual personality or later multiple personality during the 19th century. This theory was transferred into the concept of dissociation, which was said to be caused by traumatic experiences, and since Sybil (1973) those are linked to childhood sexual abuse. The idea of the “dual nature of man” or the existence of several egos within the body (von Braun and Dietze 1999: 7) were also already mentioned in the classical texts of dissociation – presenting a fugue of the protagonists – and multiple or “multiplex personality” – often conceptualized in terms of the double or doppelgänger. The symbolism, which connected the other side(s) of the human mind to certain values (evil or conscience), is similar to those shown in this chapter. Fictional representations of psychiatric models, moreover, contributed to the idea of the split mind, just as Sybil has in the personal accounts. A major fictional text is certainly Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). His presentation of a dual existence within one body worked as a template for all fictional and autobiographical texts on multiple personality and dissociation. Thus, as early fictional texts, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson” display other sides as externalized and thus embodied in another person. Leaving autobiographical and semi-fictional texts aside now, the next step of this study is to look closer into fictional adaptations which evolve around multiple personality. Again it is of interest how the split is symbolized, why it occurred and if it is embedded in a societal structure pinpointing the metaphoric meaning of fragmentation.

10 “Man’s Dual Nature” – Classical Literary Texts of Dissociation: Wakefield, William Wilson, Dr. Jekyll, and the Other Side She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. LEWIS CARROLL ALICE IN WONDERLAND 1865: 19

Hyde, Hyde. Someone is spending my money for me, The money I earn I never see, In all things I do he interferes, All I know is trouble as soon as he appears. Mister Hyde, Mister Hyde, Mister Hyde, Mister Hyde, Hyde. THE WHO “DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE” 1968

More than one hundred years divide these two quotes, but the perception of the human mind or ego as divided into several states of consciousness or even people, who possibly cannot be controlled, is a major subject in the fictional representation of the psychopathology of multiple personality and dissociation both in high and low culture. The dual or multiple consciousness, the “disintegrated ego” (Maudsley 1883), or the idea of the human personality as a “multiplex personality” (Myers 1896), inspired innumerable writers to develop fictional characters driven by a mysterious other side, and such scientific theories were also inspired by fictional adaptation just the same.

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The emergence of the other side in fictional texts due to such a mutual exchange is of course primarily and firstly linked to the literal trope of the “double” or “doppelgänger”. The concept of the doppelgänger therefore “assumes the moral dualism of man” (Tymms 1983: 77). The dual nature of man, mentioned by Robert Louis Stevenson in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), is the natural prerequisite of fictional characters to literally get lost due to their inability to either control their double or integrate their other side into a holistic conception of the self. Concerning her disintegrated personality, Dr. Morton Prince noted on his patient Miss Beauchamp in The Dissociation of a Personality (1906): “Miss Beauchamp is an example in actual life of the imaginative creation of Stevenson, only, I am happy to say, the allegorical representation of the evil side of human nature finds no counterpart in her makeup.” (Prince 1906: 2)1

When the famous multiple personality Sybil alludes to her inner estrangement in the novel Sybil (1973), she sees herself as a Jekyll-and-Hyde fragmentation: “‘This condition,’ the doctor went on to explain, ‘is more complicated than the fugue states we’ve already discussed. In a simple fugue there’s just a loss of consciousness, but your fugues are not blank.’ ‘I’ve always called them my blank spells,’ Sybil said. ‘To myself, that is, never to anyone else.’ ‘While you yourself lose consciousness,’ the doctor continued, ‘another person takes over you.’ ‘Another person?’ Sybil asked, stunned. The question was again mere echo. ‘Yes,’ the doctor replied. She started to explain, but Sybil interrupted. ‘Then I’m like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?’ Dr Wilbur slapped her hand in her fist. ‘That’s not a true story,’ she said. ‘It’s pure fiction. You’re not at all like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson wasn’t a psychoanalyst. He created those two characters out of his literary imagination. As a writer he was concerned only with spinning a good yarn.’” (Schreiber 1973: 114-5; my emphasis)

Similar to “mythopoetic figures as Frankenstein, Dracula, and even Alice (in Wonderland)”, it is the dichotomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which eventually became “autogenetic” (Oates 1995: 198). This refers to the absorption of Stevenson’s fictional multiple character into popular culture and the collective imagination (Harman 2006: 301), whether people have read the original story – published as a “shilling shocker” – or only heard about it. Being such an autogenetic and therefore popular figure, mentioning the very name of Dr. Jekyll reveals the real character of any protagonist. In the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1999), the plot closely refers to the story of Stevenson translated into postmodern terms of existence. The nameless Narrator hence eventually reveals his mental condition to his

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That statement is insofar not entirely correct as Dr. Prince later referred to Miss Beauchamp’s other side Sally as “the Devil”. He therefore did use the allegorical level of such a story like Stevenson’s (Prince 1906: 8).

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girlfriend Marla, and she asks him “You’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass?” (chapter “Mea Culpa”).2

10.1 D OPPELGÄNGER , D OUBLE ,

AND

ALTER E GO

Before analyzing Stevenson’s fictional character, it may be of interest to go backwards in time, as the origins – or at least roots – of the double or secondary state seem to be the basis for creating a new level of suspense, in the sense that it was not the supernatural that could be held responsible for an uncontrollable thread of horror and terror, but the human mind itself, thus evoking what was usually called the mysterious ‘unconscious’.3 As a singular definition, the literary term ‘double’ or ‘doppelgänger’4 may be a problematic one (cf. Fröhler 2004), as this also points to an external Other that may be nothing else but another level of consciousness. Nevertheless what is of major concern in this study is the focus on an internal split of a singular consciousness that is specifically expressed with the psychiatric term of multiple personality disorder or MPD5 and its follow-up model of dissociative identity disorder or DID, or at least its reflection in popular culture.6 Such an internal split may produce, as already shown in the personal accounts of multiple personality disorder in chapter 9 (“Fractured Minds”), a countless number of secondary personalities, who are experienced – and it is the experience of real or fictional characters and its representation by the author which are important – as existing entities inside or even outside one’s mind. Another factor in analyzing fictional texts, besides the explicit mention of multiple personality in 20th century or contemporary texts is the metaphorical level. The authors represent the internal fragmentation and they do so by using different devices: another supposedly real character, another state of consciousness. The writers were deeply influenced by the zeitgeist and the then current definitions or scientific approaches toward the unknown of a seemingly divided self – in contrast to the Car-

2

3 4

5

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In the novel, however, which is the main source of analysis instead of the film in the third part of this study, the nameless Narrator is answered: “Just like Tony Perkins’s mother in Psycho” (Palahniuk 1996: 173). For a short reference to the film see chapter 13. For a detailed history of the term and its dynamic within psychology see Ellenberger 1970. The term doppelgänger dates back to Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs (1796), where the term “doppeltgänger” is mentioned first and explained as follows: “so heißen Leute, die sich selber sehen”. Translated it means: “so people who see themselves are called” (Fonseca 2007: 187). Remember the definition in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III): “existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities” (APA 1980: 259). Remember the definition in the fourth and current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV): “presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states” (APA 1994: 487).

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tesian idea of “an indivisible, unified, continuous, and fixed identity” (Slethaug 1993: 3) – such as the successively theories of mesmerism, dissociation, dual and later multiple personality or psychoanalysis (cf. Ellenberger 1970; Frenzel 1988). Besides the influential writer Robert Louis Stevenson, this chapter focuses especially on American texts. As stated before, it is the division or split of the consciousness which may lead to an exterior (double or doppelgänger) or interior (alter ego) division (cf. Pizer 1998). Both divisions are understood as merely metaphorical, symbolizing an inner split and they certainly derive from only one singular mind: “Ever since their mystery is not understood on magical terms anymore, such fictional doublings of humans represent an ego-split or a loss of identity of a character because of a mental disorder.” [Seit ihre Rätselhaftigkeit nicht mehr vom Glauben an Magie abgefangen war, sind solche fiktiven Doppelungen des Menschen durch eine auf seelischer Störung beruhende Ich-Spaltung oder durch den Identitätsverlust einer Person einsichtig gemacht worden.] (Frenzel 1988: 94; my translation) The double may manifest itself externally – or be experienced as such an appearance – whereas the alter ego is understood as “an antithetical self” (Rogers 1970). The doppelgänger, double or alter ego represents the “inner duality” (Rosenfield 1963: 328); the “abject” (Kristeva 1980)7, which “constitutes the other side of seemingly stable subjectivity” (Creed 1986: 121); the Other (Foucault 1973, Beaudrillard 1990, Ricoeur 1992), which is an unacceptable or merely unknown part of the self, and which was “outsourced”,8 and in a final twist ending is eventually revealed to the reader and consequently either integrated or at least understood by the fictional character as part of the self which may or may not be controlled. In Ricoeur’s terms, which he used in Oneself as Another (Soi-même Comme Un Autre) published in 1992, the “idem-identity” (or sameness) is doubled by a flexible or fragmented “ipseidentity” (selfhood) (see Ricoeur 1992: 3ff.). According to Foucault, the madness is a mirror of sanity (Hacking 1998: 27). Again multiple terms exist. The double – in opposition to “Platonic soul-mates” (Herdman 1991: 14 cited in Fröhler 2004: 16) also understood as opposing selves (Rank 1941 cited in Fonseca 2007:190) – or doppelgänger is linked to different genres such as science fiction, fantasy or horror (Fonseca 2007: 190). The horror particularly exaggerates the double and the other as it “is filled with doubles because the genre is based on the idea of Otherness, where the Other comes to represent those parts of the self that society, and perhaps the individual as well, finds unacceptable” (190). Consequently it is via this

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Julia Kristeva’s term of the abject or abjection “works as a means of separating self from other, the centre from the margin, the human from the non-human” (Baker 2007: 166). The term “outsourced“ refers to an act of subcontracting a process, for example, such as manufacturing a product in order to cut costs. Here it points to the mental process of externalizing an inner part of the self in such a way that a feeling of responsibility does not apply as someone else is guilty. Accordingly, Dr. Jekyll employs such a meaning of outsourcing when he states: “It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty” (Stevenson 2006: 57).

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projective process to experience the other individual as his double. Thus, only that alter ego becomes a true double-ganger who possesses this uncanny, inner affinity with the prototype” (Schmid 1996: 28 cited in Fröhler 2004: 18). The shadowy other is presented in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)9 with the means of the late 19th century “urban Gothic”, as a scientific approach is intended to create a secondary self (cf. Scholz 2003: 9). As the Gothic genre also focused on the assumption of “fragmented, plural, performative and anxious subjects (or range of subjectivities), constructed (incompletely) by contemporary discourses” (Baker 2007:164), such a discourse in terms of degeneration applies especially to Jekyll and Hyde, whose scientific approach opposes a “stable masculinity” or a stable unified and controllable soul. Hence, Gothic fiction deconstructs the transparency which the Enlightenment intended to establish (165).10 Rational reason is contradicted by the mysterious, the madness and the abject, the literal Other. Therefore, the secondary self or other side enhances an obscure and uncontrollable duality of the human mind, of which later Dr. Jekyll himself muses that “man is not truly one, but truly two” (JH 52). For Michel Foucault, the Other is a metaphor of the unknown inside the mind, the Freudian unconsciousness, or “unthought” (Simpson 2000: 12): “The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled-up nature or a stratified history; it is, in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time in and identical newness, in an unavoidable duality…it is both exterior to him and indispensable to him in one sense, the shadow cast by man as he emerged in the field of knowledge; in another, the blind stain by which it is possible to know him. In any case, the unthought has accompanied man, mutely and interruptedly, since the nineteenth century.” (Foucault 1973: 326; my emphasis)

The ‘unthought’ is accompanied with another concept of Freud, the ‘uncanny’, according to which that what was “intended to remain secret, hidden away” eventually “has come into the open” (Weinstock 2008: 57). In psychoanalytical terms, although Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis appeared only after the theories of dual consciousness and dissociation, the double can be un-

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Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Oxford: University Press, 2006 [1886]; hereafter abbreviated JH. For further readings on the term of Gothic literature refer to: Rosemary Jackson. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981; Patrick Mc Grath. “Transgression and Decay”. Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late-Twentieth-Century-Art Christoph Grunenberg, ed. Boston: MA: MIT Press, 1997. 153-158; David Punter. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980; David Punter and Glennis Byron, eds. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

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derstood as such an unknown part of the self.11 His term of ‘the uncanny’ (das Unheimliche) is generally referred to when the literary terms of double and doppelgänger are mentioned. Equally, Freud analyzed the motive of the double in a German Romantic text by E.T.A. Hoffmann whose novel The Devil’s Elixir (1815) revolves around the doppelgänger theme (Fröhler 2004: 3). Freud points at the unknown or insecure reality of the double when the hidden (heimlich) surfaces and becomes partly known and partly scary (unheimlich) (Freud 1947): “Within the Ego a particular agency is slowly shaped that is able to oppose itself to the remaining Ego, functioning as an observation and critical view of the self.” [Im Ich bildet sich langsam eine besondere Instanz heraus, welche sich dem übrigen Ich entgegenstellen kann, die der Selbstbeobachtung und Selbstkritik dient.] (Freud 1947: 247; my translation) “The quality of the uncanny can only derive from the fact that the double is a creation that belongs to an overcome condition of a very early mental stage, which, however used to have a friendlier meaning. The double has become a chimera, just like the gods became demons, after their religion was brought down.” [Der Charakter des Unheimlichen kann doch nur daher rühren, daß der Doppelgänger eine den überwundenen seelischen Urzeiten angehörige Bildung ist, die damals allerdings einen freundlicheren Sinn hatte. Der Doppelgänger ist zum Schreckbild geworden, wie die Götter nach dem Sturz der Religion zu Dämonen werden.] (Freud 1947: 248; my translation)

As the double is also understood as the ‘shadow’ of the self, psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of such a shadow also applies. Henri Ellenberger thus states: “The shadow is the sum of those personal characteristics that the individual whishes to hide from the others and from himself. But the more the individual tries to hide it from himself, the more the shadow may become active and evil-doing.” (Ellenberger 1970: 707)

Several examples of inner dividedness are shown here to present the fragmentation and disintegration of fictional characters, suggesting an awareness of the self as not being a single and unified person but rather adopting another identity and developing even another personality, and therefore being many people (cf. Hawthorn 1983): Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” (1835), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1840), and finally Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” offers an incoherence of a conception of the self, identity and consciousness according to a report by a third-person narration. Hence, it demonstrates an attempt to double the self by inventing another level of existence through an interruption of connectedness to the society (dissociative fugue).

11

The case of Anna O. was still influenced by the theories of a secondary self. Anna O. herself stated she experienced a second self and talked in that state of consciousness only in English hence inventing the term ‘talking cure’ (Breuer and Freud 2007).

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Poe’s “William Wilson” offers an incoherence of the self as a whole and consequently presents a splitting of the mental elements of conscience and evil. He therefore refers to a societal and mental connectedness on the one hand and an egocentered, libertarian and atomic self on the other, told in a non-reliable first-person narration of literally doubling the self (mental dissociation). Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde offers an incoherence of the self as being not willing and able to balance the moral side and the evil side in one body. To mask the sinful inner elements means to transform physically and consequently interrupt a suppressing connectedness with society and create an independently acting automaton (mental and physical dissociation).

10.2 N ATHANIEL H AWTHORNE : “W AKEFIELD ” (1835) Besides Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, “a multitude of popular novels and cheap literature, which are entirely forgotten today, were published in the 1880’s involving themes of somnambulism, multiple personality, and crimes under hypnosis, and those themes certainly contributed to shaping the mentality of that period” (Ellenberger 1970: 166). Prior to the mental and physical division of Dr. Jekyll, other fictional characters were connected with a mental division and even a personification of another – possibly evil – side. The fixation on a certain intention, or a kind of addiction, which may – just like the uncontrollable Mr. Hyde side – lead to a total separation of the mind, is mentioned, for example, in Chapter 44 (“The Chart”) in the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, which was published in 1851. On the mysterious force inside Captain Ahab the narrator reports: “For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, what at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and evils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own.” (Melville 1992: 219; my emphasis)

The living principle or soul, as Melville describes it here, hints at a hidden force inside Ahab, almost emerging like those secondary states that were produced during sessions of hypnosis by magnetizers. Ahab’s fixed idea, described in Pierre Janet’s term and linked to secondary states, however, emerges automatically within due to

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his obsession to kill the white whale.12 Such forces inside the human mind aroused interest in the United States during the 1830s with magnetism and thus dubious secondary states of consciousness receiving increasing public attention. This influenced writers such as Edgar Allan Poe13 (Ellenberger 1970: 161) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (cf. Coale 1998). Whereas the consciousness of Poe’s character William Wilson functions not only divided into levels of dreams, hallucination and the reality of the Other as part of the self, the consciousness of another fictional character resembles a different mental division: the central protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield” (1835).14 While William Wilson was not able to flee from his double, the personified conscience, other minds have tried to escape into a fantasized second identity or personality, thus creating their dreams of escape on another level and in another life. While Wilson was hunted by his shadow (Jung), conscience or (un)consciousness (Freud) thus dissociating a secondary personality (Janet), the tendencies of a mental escapism, combined with physical travel could develop a secondary state of identity, another self. In “Wakefield”, a separateness of consciousness with regard to identity, also a self-reference, is already connected with a separateness of appearance. The other side, however, is not totally personified by a double or literally transferred into another body; it continues to exist next to the former self. Such “mad traveling” (cf. Hacking 1998) is mentioned as another dissociative disorder, like the psychiatric term of ‘dissociative fugue’. The mind literally flees into another state of consciousness. The Diagnostical and Statistical Manual defines this mental escape currently as follows: “300.13 Dissociative Fugue (Formerly Psychogenic Fugue) A. The predominant disturbance is sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one’s customary place at work, with inability to recall one’s past. B. Confusion about personal identity or assumption of new identity (partial or complete). C. The disturbance does not occur exclusively during the course of dissociative identity disorder and is not due to the direct effects of a substance (e.g., drugs of abuse, medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., temporal lobe epilepsy).” (APA 1996: 995)

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In the tradition of Gothicism, Herman Melville used the metaphoric Gothic setting in his novel Moby Dick (1951) to characterize Captain Ahab as well as to refer to superstitions and the settings like the ship Pequod, which is “an aqua-Gothic haunted castle” within “mysterious oceans, whose depths hinted of mystery and the unknown” (Fisher 2002: 75). In his short story “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar” (1845), a magnetizer appears and keeps the deceased body attached to the dying man’s spirit (cf. Ellenberger 1970: 162). Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Wakefield”. Twice-Told Tales. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974 [1835]. 130-140; hereafter abbreviated W.

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The formerly valid definition of dissociative fugue is included in the DMS-IV. Unlike the earlier name of ‘psychogenic fugue’ in the DSM-II-R, the new definition merely refers to a “confusion about personal identity” and needs no actual “assumption of a new identity” (APA 1996: 995).15 A prototype of such a mental fugue state was the already mentioned Ansel Bourne in chapter 5, who left his hometown to establish a new life with the name of A.J. Brown (cf. Kenny 1986). A fictional adaptation of such a personality escapism, or rather an anticipation or account of it, is described in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story. In “Wakefield”, the seemingly omniscient narrator tells the story of a man – “let’s call him Wakefield”, (W 130) – who leaves home one day, lives a parallel life just next door observing his wife and her grievance only to return home twenty years later. Instead of presenting a narration from the inside with a first-person narration, the report is given by the narrator who remarks on the truth of the incident. “In some old magazine or newspaper, I recollect a story, told as truth” (W 130). Compared to a real case, Wakefield resembles the typical fugueur, the French patient Albert,16 whose presentation of four different mental states formed the picture of a divided mind just as the very first case of multiple personality of Louis Vivet (cf. Hacking 1995; 1998). Likewise, Albert also experiences an inner urge to leave a home and an established identity: “He wept because he could not prevent himself from departing on a trip when the need took him” (Hacking 1998: 7). Hawthorne’s narrator, however, refers to the “originality” (W 130) of Wakefield’s case as it is “probably never to be repeated” (W 131),17 which is insofar true as the diagnosis of dissociative fugue exists in the medical books only cosmetically, that is, it is very rarely applied in real life (Hacking 1998: 12). Wakefield on the other hand, is presented as an everyday man, whose normal oddities are not too special, and whose longing for escapism appeals to “general sympathies of mankind” or even enhance “a hero’s character” (W 131). What is most interesting is Wakefield’s motive, which drives him to abandon his established existence. But Hawthorne cannot provide an entirely satisfying answer. Like Ansel Bourne, Wakefield is “divided against himself” (Kenny 1986: 71). Yet the act of abandoning the former self results in the adaption of another identity. Different clothes symbolize another self as “the new system now being established” (W 135). However, Wakefield does not control his other self, he is “spell-bound” (W 137) and “he has lost the perception of singularity” (W 137). Confused now, he is “seldom […] conscious of it, but deem himself the same man as ever” (W 138). Twenty years pass and he cannot recall the time as the other self: “Scarcely longer than the week to which Wakefield had at first limited his absence” (W 138). Such an amnesia, dissociated from the mind in terms of multiple personality, makes Wake-

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Siri Hustvedt uses the thematic of dissociative fugue in her novel Sorrows of an American (2008), which will be analyzed more closely in chapter 22. Albert’s therapist, the French Dr. Tissié, later renamed his diagnosis as a case of “pathological tourism” (Hacking 1998: 27). But the narrator tries to explain Wakefield’s ordinary existence as being not “perplexed with originality” or eccentricity (W 131).

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field unaware of his secondary side (“this is a secret from himself”, W 135). He is therefore “the Outcast of the Universe!” (W 140), although the escape (“Wonderful escape!”, W 135) is “a basic element in Wakefield’s ego-centered appraisal of his situation” (Newman 1979: 16). “The ‘voyage’ is our metaphor for self-discovery”, states Hacking in Mad Travelers (Hacking 1998: 28). Albert’s obsessive and uncontrollable journeys were systematically pointless, less a voyage of self-discovery than an attempt to eliminate the self (Hacking 1998: 30). Wakefield is outside himself, thus not integrated or in control of a constant identity (cf. Cameron 1987). As a hysteric fuguer, he would accidentally happen to travel somewhere without being able to control it (Hacking 1998: 41). This fact symbolizes an establishment of his other side. A former term of dissociative fugue referred to such an uncontrollable force inside: ‘ambulatory automatism’, which again refers to doubling of personality (Hacking 1998: 42). A later diagnosis would be called ‘dromomania’: “Dromomania […] meant a nervous disposition, a state in which one had a compulsive drive toward taking flight. The fugue became the episode, and dromomania became the disorder of impulsive fugue, covering not only hysterical and epileptic fugues but also people who did not fit either label but were, to use the imported American diagnosis, neurasthenic. The name was preferred […] over automatisme ambulatoire, because there was no commitment to the idea of automanism, to amnesia, to change in identity, or to confusion about identity.” (Hacking 1998: 45)

Whereas Wakefield balanced more or less successfully two different identities, other fictional characters fled within their minds. Their experience, however, does not display the different states of consciousness as another distinct personality or person, but it is told with the means of an allegory. This represented another level which “implies a split or separation” as a “detached sphere” in order to show the inner conflicts (Cameron 1987: 415). Washington Irving’s short story “Rip van Winkle” (1819) presents a man who tries to get away from his matrimonial sufferings by escaping into the woods. He falls asleep and awakens in another dimension or state of consciousness. After twenty years, the return to his former home reveals a total change of culture. The time spent is detached from the logic of the usual life experiences. Such a detachment, however, is still told in terms of the possible supernatural (Hayes 2002: 76). An experience of additionally not being able to integrate a hidden inner aspect and desire into normal life is presented in the short story “Young Goodman Brown” (1835): “‘Young Goodman Brown’ is the story of a literal journey into the forest, yet Hawthorne has so contrived the journey that it must be read as a journey into the self, into the interior world of dreams.” (Gollin 1979: 123)

Young Goodman Brown experiences a secondary state of consciousness, seemingly a dream state, where he meets all his acquaintances and his wife, whom he observes in a strange ritual with sexually connoted symbols. When Brown returns to his

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hometown after he left for the woods, where he had his strange visions and emotions, his former self has changed due to the possible hallucinations of his diseased mind (Newman 1979: 347). While William Wilson’s other side is personified by his double, Wakefield travels like Brown does internally into another existence and hence becomes “another man” (W 135). He acquires his new identity as he is “buying a new wig, of reddish hair, and selecting sundry garments, in a fashion unlike his customary suit of brown” (W 135). The change therefore “is accomplished” and “the new system being now established” (W 135). The force inside him (“beyond our control”, W 136), which makes him try to duplicate him on the one hand (“it is in another world”, W 136) just to watch his former existence now only symbolized by the grief of his wife, doubles him seemingly internally and externally as the new Wakefield feels he cannot return to his former existence. He is convinced to have been abandoned by society because he himself has abandoned his former singularity (W 138). This refers to an experience of depersonalization.18 What remains, what is left behind are merely the memories of a man called Wakefield (Cameron 1987: 420).

10.3 E DGAR ALLAN P OE : “W ILLIAM W ILSON ” (1840) The terror, wrote Poe in the preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), “is not of Germany, but of the soul” (Quinn 1969: 129). He then referred to the topic of dual personality, which was presented as a prototype in stories by the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, such as The Devil’s Elixirs (Die Elixiere des Teufels), which was published in 1815 and 1816, and Der Goldene Topf published a year before (Pietsch 2008). Whereas the double in The Devil’s Elixir personifies the evil side of a monk’s personality quite similar to Jung’s concept of the shadow (see Ellenberger 1970: 162), Poe uses the dual personality in another way in his short story “William Wilson”. It was published in 1839 and a year later as part of the short story collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.19 In the short story “William Wilson”, Poe uses the Gothic traditions “to create fine psychological fiction” (Fisher 2002: 84). The changing settings – Eton, Oxford, the

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As mentioned before, the term “depersonalization” refers to the experience of total estrangement from the inner ego. Parts of the body can be experienced as belonging to someone else. The same applies to the environment, which was actually known but now seems wrong and foreign (Peters 1997: 114). A similar experience can be felt when someone suffers from ‘Capgras-Syndrome’, which refers to the inability to recognize a person which with he is confronted in such a way as to be able to identify that person. Consequently, the person is perceived as a doppelgänger. Capgras is also related to psychotic conditions (ibid. 85). A fictionalized version of Capgras is shown in Richard Power’s novel The Echo Maker (2006). See Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” published in 1840. The reference here is taken from Harry M. Geduld, ed. The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Companion. New York: Garland Publishing, 1983. 55-65; hereafter abbreviated WW.

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cities of Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow, which the protagonist heads for due to his inner unrest and his hope to escape (“I fled in vain”, WW 63) – and the description of a confused architecture such as the school building (“incomprehensible subdivisions”, WW 56) symbolize the fragmented mind of William Wilson, who is haunted by his double. The reader perceives the double as another real person next to Wilson and only at the end of the story does he learn that this double is actually a part of the narrator. However, Poe certainly gives hints at the beginning: “the most inseparables of companions”; “imitate me to perfection”; “singularly alike” (WW 57). He even admits, in a way, his imagined and personified other side: “Yet I must believe that my first mental development had in it much of the uncommon, even of the outré” (WW 56). During the story, the narrator tries to separate himself from his second self, which is both experienced and presented more and more as kind of a stalker20 with impossible manners: “He mingled with his injuries, insults or contradictions an inappropriate, and assuredly most unwelcome, affectionateness of manner” (WW 57; italics in original text). This double of William Wilson is first introduced as completely resembling the narrator, who himself merely adopts the very name of William Wilson to report on his experiences (“In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson, a fictitious title not very similar to the real”, WW 57).21 During childhood, the double appears for the first time when living inside the school building and its innumerable wings as well as the classroom and its “grotesque figures and other multiplied efforts of the knife” (WW 56) evoke nightmarish scenes. Wilson is an outsider, has no playmates but the other William Wilson, who even shares the same birthday22 and physical appearance (“we must have been twins”, WW 57) with him: “The same name! The same contour of person! The same day of arrival at the academy! And then his dogged and meaningless imitation of my gait, my voice, my habit and my manner!” (WW 60). The only difference, however, is the “weakness in the faucial or guttural organs”, which consequently prevents the double “from raising his voice at any time above a very low whisper” (WW 58). Thus – after the nature of the double as part of Wilson’s psyche is eventually revealed – the voice of William Wilson II, probably so – merely emerges inside the narrator’s mind: “In his singular whisper grew the very echo of my voice” (WW 58). Although the narrator is mocked by his

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The term stalker refers to a person who follows and watches another person for a certain time in a very excessive and threating way. For further references see Keith E. Davis et al., eds. Stalking: Perspectives on Victims and Perpetrators. New York: Springer, 2002. What really is the intention of the narrator here? If he is dying – as he has harmed not his double but himself at the end of the story and telling his life from a retrospective position shortly before the suicide – why should he hide his real name? Supposedly, he dies in the room, alone, in front of a mirror. If he writes down his memoirs for an educational purpose, there is in no possibility whatosever of hiding his real identity. Poe certainly uses the twist ending to ensure a certain suspense, but one can perhaps conclude that the narrator even hides himself from his real self thus doubling his name – as only he knows his real name (see also Wuletich-Brinberg 1988: 204). Edgar Allan Poe gave William Wilson his own birthday, the 19th of January.

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double – a “copy” with “strangely sarcastic smiles” (WW 58) – an act of selfmutilation is prevented only by the shock the appearance of the sleeping double causes: “Assured that he was asleep, I took the light, and with it again approached the bed. Closed curtains were around it, which I slowly and quietly withdrew. The bright rays fell vividly upon the sleeper. I looked, and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit was possessed with an objectless horror.” (WW 5060)

Wilson, however, cannot at this stage of the story detect the double as part of himself (and certainly the reader is also not meant to discover this fact), although the retrospectively narrating self does know. Moreover, on later occasions when Wilson tries to indulge in his “delirious extravagance” (WW 60) and his tendency to be a “professional gambler” (WW 60), the double appears out of nowhere, identically dressed, resembling and mirroring the narrator from the outside. The narrator’s villainous spirit – looked at from a certain third position of estrangement from the inner selves (evil/conscience) – can therefore be stopped only by the double, which is the conscience, the rational side of Wilson. A third position in the sense that Wilson I is able to feel the influence of his moral side, the double Wilson II, but can only later recollect and classify this strong moral force as being not someone else’s but part of his own personality, thus creating an integrated rational side represented by the selfreflecting narrator.23 The revelation of the double as being himself is only told in the last scene of the story when Wilson tries to kill his offender, thus actually unknowingly committing suicide. The moment of death brings ultimate realization: “It was Wilson, but he spoke no longer in a whisper. And I fancied that I was speaking when he said: You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward you are also dead – dead to the world, to heaven, and to hope! In me did you exist – and in my death, see by this image which is your own, how utterly you have murdered yourself.” (WW 65; italics in original text)

These last words of his double, his very own, display yet another psychological factor of the narrator: his reliability. There was no strange persecutor but only one William Wilson. It is not the double who imitates, but the narrator who exists “in me.” The narrator disguises himself, wears a mask. And it is his double, who tears it off during a masquerade.24

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Such a third state could be compared to the third and “healthy” state of Eve in The Three Faces of Eve (Thigpen and Cleckley 1957) and the new Miss Beauchamp in The Dissociation of a Personality (Prince 1906). See also the chapter on Fight Club. Poe accused Hawthorne of plagiarism concerning a similar masquerade scene in “Howe’s Masquerade” (James 1965: 112).

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With regard to the nature of the other self, as far as it is presented in this study and reflected the medical accounts of historical and popularized cases as well as the personal accounts of multiple personality, the quality of the other side of William Wilson, although experienced by himself as an uncontrollable threat from outside, does not represent subsequently the evil or suppressed side, but his conscience. This is in contrast to Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde.25 In Stevenson’s terms, the short story “William Wilson” is told by the Mr. Hyde side (whereas in Stevenson’s story Mr. Hyde remains silent). Consequently, the evil side is bewildered by the intervention of his double. At the peak of a possible betrayal, the double suddenly appears: “‘Gentleman,’ he said, in the low, distinct, never-to-be-forgotten whisper which trilled me to the marrow of my bones. ‘I make no apology for this behavior, because in this behaving I am fulfilling a duty. You are beyond doubt uninformed of the true character of the person who has tonight won at écarté a large sum of money…I will therefore put you upon an expeditious and decisive plan of obtaining this very necessary information. Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve.’” (WW 62; italic in original text)

The double here is the spoilsport, seemingly the kind Dr. Jekyll side or the innocent Miss Beauchamp, who crosses the path of the uncontrollable devilish side, the narrator, who then needs to be controlled and who can only be controlled by this conscience self. Dealing with his inner moral conflicts of betraying his fellow student at Oxford, he recalls the control double or rather the other William Wilson will appear automatically and annoy the evil side. Interestingly, every time the narrator consumes too much alcohol (“the excesses of the wine table”, WW 64), he – just like Dr. Jekyll the other way around – awakens his doppelgänger, who may even help by becoming “perfectly sober in an instant” (WW 60). The natural condition of William Wilson I, the narrator, is the extreme and evil side. It is stopped when a psychological control within his absolute devilish side is disabled by a psychogenic drug: alcohol. Then the control side, the human side would emerge, his appearance hence a reminder of the hidden, rational inside – or a super-ego authority in Freudian terms (cf. Freud 1946). As already stated, the reliability of the narrator’s account questions the experiences described. For it is the evil side, who reports here! A hint of his unreliability – thanks to the author Poe – is already given at the very beginning of the narration. He is a “descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament” is worth mentioning as well as the characteristics of being “self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices” and “evil propensities” (WW 55). Surrounded by an environment, which seems itself to be housed by paradoxical people – appearing to be pious and decent on the outside, yet acting rigorously by applying draconian measures like the principal of the school (WW 55) – the division of the mental state unfolds when the childish side encounters a more adult side thus creating a double. With the short story “William Wilson”, Poe created his “most explicit [treatment] of the Double-theme”,

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See also Sullivan 1976.

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writes Patrick F. Quinn in The French Face of Edgar Poe (1954).26 Furthermore, the first-person account in “William Wilson” offers the narration of “a man’s struggle with, evasions of, and final disastrous victory over, his own conscience, the spectre in his path” (Quinn 1954: 221). As such, the incidents of the story are recalled as if they were part of a dream (222).

10.4 R OBERT L OUIS S TEVENSON : S TRANGE C ASE J EKYLL AND M R . H YDE (1886)

OF

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Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson” displayed two opposing characters, the narrator, himself divided into a retrospective self and an evil self, and his double who haunts him. In a twist ending, the reader learns about the two Wilsons representing two sides of one mind. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the reader again is seemingly confronted with two very opposite people, Jekyll and Hyde. Dr. Jekyll, the central character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, develops a drug which creates a separate personality, that of the character Mr. Hyde who then embodies entirely Jekyll’s evil inner forces. The phrase “a Jekyll and Hyde”, according to the The New Oxford American Dictionary, applies to “a person displaying opposing good and evil personalities” (Jewell and Abate 2001: 929). Dr. Jekyll symbolizes thus the good side of the human mind, whereas the dark side is represented by the evil Mr. Hyde. Whether this popular clear distinction is valid or not will be examined here. The “outsourced” evil, that is the absolute and literal embodiment of seemingly devilish and sinful spirits, does not deflect from stains on an otherwise clean slate.27 Quite the reverse, as Dr. Jekyll actually includes both evil (id) and gentleman (superego), therefore merging into the real ego of Dr. Jekyll. Even if such a Freudian division may convincingly apply, this division already focuses on a tripartite self. Within Dr. Jekyll, however, there are seemingly only two forces competing with each other. The two forces function within the individual. Accordingly, Sigmund Freud stated in Civilizations and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) in the year 1930:

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According to David Ketterer in The Rationale of Deception in Poe (1979), Quinn “was the first critic to isolate the doppelgänger theme in Poe” (Ketterer 1979: 101). Beside the dividedness in William Wilson, what is most astonishing here – quite likely to be both accidental and intentional though – are the very names of Wilson and Quinn, as both names are used by one person in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1987). In the first story “The City of Glass”, Quinn is the name of the protagonist, who publishes detective stories with his pseudonym William Wilson, and who is later mistaken as a certain Paul Auster. See also chapter 7 on the term of postmodernism and fragmentation. See Robert J. Lifton in Nazi Doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of Genocide (1986). Lifton refers to a ‘doubling’ of the selves in order to commit evil deeds (for example as a doctor in Auschwitz) and act on the other hand as a loving husband and father (Lifton 1986: 425).

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“Individual development seems to us a product of the interplay of two trends, the striving for happiness, generally called ‘egoistic’, and the impulse toward merging with others in the community, which we call ‘altruistic.’” (Freud 1946: 134)

These two poles are exactly what represent the Jekyll/Hyde division. While Hyde is detached from society and a social conscience (‘black, sneering coolness,’ JH 7) Jekyll desires to keep his good reputation (“my active goodwill”, JH 62). On such a doubling as part of the true self, Foucault reflected: “[It is] the inexhaustible double that presents itself to reflection as the blurred projection of what man is in his truth, but that also plays the role of a preliminary ground upon which man must collect himself and recall himself in order to attain his truth. For though this double may be close, it is alien, and the role, the true undertaking, of thought will be to bring it as close to itself as possible; the whole of modern thinking is imbued with the necessity of thinking the unthought.” (Foucault 1973: 327)28

Similar to that concept, the British psychologist Donald W. Winnicott developed his theory of the ‘true self’ and the ‘false self’. He noted: “The concept of a False Self needs to be balanced by a formulation of that which could properly be called the True Self. At the earliest stage the True Self is the theoretical position from which come the spontaneous gesture and the personal idea. The spontaneous gesture is the True Self in action. Only the true Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real. Whereas a True Self feels real, the existence of a False Self results in a feeling unreal or a sense of futility. The False Self, if successful in its function, hides the True Self, or else finds a way of enabling the True Self to start to live.” (Winnicott 1960: 148)

The “blurred projection of what man is in his truth” is reflected in the Hyde personality. To analyze the text, however, exclusively on psychoanalytical terms is not valid insofar as Stevenson’s contemporaries were not Freud, who followed later, but Henry Maudsley with The Disintegration of the Ego (1883), Frederic Myers with The Multiplex Personality (1886), and W.T. Stead with Has Man Two Minds or One? (1893).29 In fact, the psychoanalytic theory could only develop because of the prior scientific concepts of dual or multiple personality (cf. Fröhler 1988: 31). Stevenson was also well acquainted with the current psychiatric theories (Hacking 1996: 72). He even corresponded with Pierre Janet while he wrote Jekyll and Hyde (1996: 278 n.12) and read the medical magazine The Lancet (Hennessy 1974: 166). Although Stevenson denied any influence of medical theories on dual personality, his wife stated his high interest in scientific magazines, where he could well have read a suitable article (Showalter 1991: 105). Furthermore, he developed the idea of a divided mind

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See Simpson 2000: 12. The three books are printed in an edition of Jekyll and Hyde. See Roger Luckhurst, ed. Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And other Tales. Oxford: University Press, 2006. Appendix A-C, 163-183.

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and according division of lifestyles in a fictional adaptation of a real person, Deacon Brodie. He led “a secret nocturnal life of crime” in Deacon Brodie, or, The Double Life published in the year 1880 (Stiles 2006: 879).30 Stevenson’s uncle, Dr. George Balfour, was a well-known physician in Edinburgh and secretary of the Edinburgh Psychical Society (Eigner 1966: 37 cited in Straub 2006: 77). “I had long been trying to write a story on this subject”, wrote Stevenson, “to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelming the mind of every thinking creature” (Harman 2006: 300). The psychological theories of such a double being or a dual consciousness fitted perfectly to Stevenson’s “creation of an artifact resembling the exterior self” (Rosenfield 1963: 326 cited in Fröhler 2004: 18). In Disintegration of the Ego (1883), Maudsley noted on the “intricately complex organization” (163) as the basis of both mind and body, concerning the “conscious or infra-conscious” (163). But there still is a “unifying centre” and the brain “is the central organ” (163). A disintegration of the ego occurs when such an inner organization is endangered: “That being so, it is made evident that disorganization of the union of the supreme cerebral centres must be a more or less dissolution of the conscious self, the ego, according to the depth of the damage to the physiological unity.” (Maudsley 163)

In Multiplex Personality (1886), Myer’s theme was “the multiplex and mutable character of that which we know as the Personality of men” (168). The “yet unrecognised modifiability” of “hysterical transfer” offer accurate examples of “morbid disintegration” (168). Interestingly, Myers refers to normal multiplicity, that is, the “spontaneous readjustments of man’s being are not all of them pathological or retrogressive” and alterations could even be experienced agreeably and be “beneficially acquired” (168). Such cases of well-balanced inner diversity, however, seem rare: “The dissociation of memories, faculties, sensibilities may be carried, without resulting in mere insane chaos, mere demented oblivion. These cases as yet are few in number. It is only of late years – and it is mainly in France – that savants31 have recorded with due care those psychical lessons, deeper than any art of our own can teach us, which natural anomalies and aberrant instances afford.” (Myers 168)

Myers is here referring to the Salpêtière and Charcot’s hysterics. As indicated, Stevenson himself was well acquainted with medical theories on dual personality. He claimed, however, to have been influenced by a dream. He published “A Chapter on

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Four years later, in the year 1884, the play went on stage but did miserably (Luckhurst 2006: xi). The term “savant” refers to a mental state of persons with developmental disorders (such as autism), characterizing an outstanding intellectual ability, which contrasts the otherwise limited mental abilities (cf. Treffert 2009). See also Gene Brewer’s novel K-Pax (1995), in which the secondary personality displays extreme intelligence, whereas the primary personality is dull and catatonic (See chapter 12.4 on the protector inside).

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Dreams” after the publication of Jekyll and Hyde to offer an explanation concerning his first inspiration. Stevenson mentioned here in a third-person narration a “small theater of brain” (Stevenson 2006: 151) where the human mind can fall for the dream states and man can “dream in sequence and thus lead a double life” (153). The small theater of brain is managed by “little people” who bring along the stories and inspirations (155). In “Has Man Two Minds or One?” (1893), W.T. Stead questions the mental unity of the human mind, and on the already rich tradition of dual personality and secondary states of consciousness he noted: “The fact that there is another side to the human personality, or rather the whole of the Ego is not manifested through the small portion of animated clay which acts as a two-legged telephone to communicate with its fellows seems to pretty well established…the Ego is much wider and greater than its conscious manifestation.” (Stead 1893: 177)

Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in January 1886. Maudsley’s theories were published about three years prior to it. Myers concluded on his multiplex personality in November 1886, commenting heavily on Stevenson’s fiction (Maixner 1981: 212ff.), and Stead drew his conclusions about ten years later. Nevertheless, the theories of dual personality were already published and broadly discussed. Eugène Azam studied the case of Félida and her ‘dédoublement de la personnalité’ from 1858 to 1893 (Ellenberger 1970: 136). The case of Sergeant F. and his brain injuries, which caused a shift of moods and strange transformations from a normal into an animalistic state, was linked to the phenomenon of ‘double brain’ (Stiles 2006: 893). Major magazines published articles on men’s dual nature, for example, the articles in Cornhill Magazine “Have We Two Brains?” in 1875 and “Dual Consciousness” in 1877, which were probably read by the interested Stevenson (891). It is clear after all, that humans are multilayered, multidimensional beings. The general assumption is that the dissociated personalities Jekyll and Hyde, who share one body, are clearly representing a good (Dr. Jekyll) and an evil (Mr. Hyde) side of one mind. On such a contrast Myers notes: “Or sometimes the personality oscillates from one focus to another, and the rival impulses, which in us merely sway different moods, objectify themselves each in persona of its own” (Myers 1886: 172). Again, just like in “William Wilson”, the real nature of Jekyll and Hyde is revealed relatively at the end of the story in the account of “Doctor Lanyon’s Narrative” (JH 45-51). Whereas in “William Wilson”, only the first-person narrator reported on his estrangement and his hallucinations, Stevenson offers a number of narrative perspectives. This narrative split of voices resembles the perception of modern fiction where a more unified textual character gives way to an increasingly fragmented presentation such as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Thomas 1988: 73). First of all, the different chapters are told in a third-person perspective with Mr. Utterson, Jekyll’s lawyer, functioning as a focalizer or “narrator double” (Rogers 1970: 93). Hence, the first chapters are intended to present the other dissociated personality of Dr. Jekyll, the mysterious Mr. Hyde, as a real person and thereupon irritate the reader later. When in the first-person account of Dr. Lanyon, himself a doctor, the metamorphosis of Hyde into Jekyll is revealed (JH 5-44). Only the last chapter “Henry Jekyll’s Statement of the

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Case” (JH 52-66) offers an insight into a first-person narration of Dr. Jekyll himself, another level of narration that doubles the earlier narrated incidents. As Mr. Hyde’s appearance differs considerably from his friend Dr. Jekyll, the narrator Utterson, who leads the reader through a variation of a detective story,32 therefore never questions the existence of a Mr. Hyde. Pursuing the very nature of Mr. Hyde, Utterson’s narration functions now as a kind of “pursuer double” (Rogers 1970: 93), and the mysterious Mr. Hyde and especially his connection to Jekyll needs to be examined. Jekyll and Hyde are as different as two doors, to which each character is connected correspondingly. One door is “blistered and stained” (JH 6) thus referring to Mr. Hyde, and the other wears “a great air of wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness except for the fan-light” (JH 16). In such darkness lies Dr. Jekyll’s other side. This shadowy side is personified by Mr. Edward Hyde, who is described in terms of evolution and degeneration as manifested by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) (cf. the editions of Darwin 1996 and 2004, see also Hendershot 1998, Scholz 2003). Accordingly, “man still bears in his bodily form the indelible stamp of his lowly origin”, as stated by Darwin in The Descent of Man (Hendershot 1998: 97). Another scientific field applies to the degeneration of Mr. Hyde: the theories of criminology, which connected crime with the physical appearance. The “criminal man”, according to a concept of Cesare Lombroso first published in the year 1876 (cf. Lombroso 1972), had the same features described as those of Mr. Hyde’s (cf. Oates 1995; Scholz 2003). The “outward physical defects and deformities are the visible signs of inward and invisible faults” (Oates 1995: 202). There are, however, some difficulties involved with referring to Hyde as a solely “ape-like” personality. It is even more complicated, yet clearly described by Stevenson. An analysis of the text as Stevenson’s reaction toward the Darwinian decline of civilized man as Cyndy Hendershot does in The Animal Inside (1998), and as others did with mentioning the animalistic characteristic of Hyde (see Veeder and Hirsch 1988), fails to take one factor into account: the multiplication of Jekyll and Hyde themselves or the dynamic of their individual development and the different phases of their relationship. Dr. Jekyll himself not only remarks on his inner dualism, but on a multitude of fragmentation: “Man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (JH 53). As Derrida noted on the split inside:

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On Stevenson’s attempts to create such a detective story, Vladimir Nabokov commented: “Stevenson’s story is […] lame as a detective story. Neither is it a parable nor an allegory, for it would be tasteless either. It has, however, its own special enchantment if we regard it as a phenomenon of style. It is not only a good ‘bogey story’, as Stevenson exclaimed when awakening from a dream in which he had visualized it much in the same way I suppose as magic cerebration …It is also, and more importantly, ‘a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction.’” Nabokov states that critical quotations in this essay are drawn from Stephen Gwynn, ed. Robert Louis Stevenson. London: Macmillan, 1939; see (Nabokov 1980: 180).

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“For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles…What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.” (Derrida 1976: 36 cited in Simpson 2000: 11)

The “multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (JH 53), which Dr. Jekyll feels he is composed of, seems a “dangerous plurality of selves proposed by Henry Jekyll himself [which] suggests that the subject is, in fact, only one of many ‘denizens’, and has no more claim to be an originary self than the seemingly secondary, abject Hyde” (Baker 2007: 167). The origin, however, is Dr. Jekyll. He contains both (“the profound duplicity of life”, JH 52) a Jekyll reputation and socially embedded upper class fellow (“honourable and distinguished”, JH 52) and Hyde, his evil forces (“the evil side of my nature”, JH 55). As mentioned later, Vladimir Nabokov recognized here three distinct personalities (Nabokov 1980). The three personalities share four phases of mutual dependency. When Dr. Jekyll was young, he could indulge in several excesses – now judged “the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition” (JH 52). In order to keep the image of a clean and good Jekyll on the outside (“carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public”, JH 52), the Hyde disguise had to be developed and separated (“housed in separate identities”, JH 53). Now a balance between reputation and evil forces is established and experienced as a relief and described as the other twin: “The unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of his extraneous evil.” (JH 53)

Such a settlement – fixed with paying cheques “in the name of Henry Jekyll” (JH 57) after Hyde’s excursions of “vicarious depravity” (JH 57) – is experienced as a kind of contentment, on which later Freud noted in Civilization and Its Discontent (1930): “Evil is often not at all that which would injure or endanger the ego; on the contrary, it can also be something that it desired, that would give it pleasure” (Freud 1946: 106). As already mentioned, Myers also referred to a healthy multiplicity, which is “beneficially acquired” (168).33 In this phase of having successfully separated both extracts inside him and balancing both (“the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde”, JH 19), Jekyll looks healthy and seems relaxed according to Utterson (“large handsome face”, JH 18). The Hyde body is even a personified fountain of youth as Hyde, again according to Utterson, seems a “young man” (JH 16), although certain

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Such a concept of a healthy multiplicity is also mentioned in Rita Carter’s Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality (2008).

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tendencies of deformation already refer to a “troglodytic” appearance, which causes unexplainable uneasiness in other people (“displeasing”, JH 9).34 The next step is the imbalance after one year of being Jekyll I and Hyde I – “nearly a year later” (JH 20) – each seemingly separated both mentally and physically but co-conscious as they still have the cheque arrangement to compensate victims (of otherwise not specified crimes).35 Jekyll pays for Hyde’s failures.36 Two incidents of automatic transformations occur, described in Jekyll’s statement, the first two months prior to the murder, the second after it. The balance between Jekyll I and Hyde I (or the first phase of their relationship, which could have lasted for ever as intended), is initially endangered when Jekyll awakens as Hyde in Jekyll’s house: “Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde” (JH 58). The second incident occurs in public in Regent’s park: “I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy” (JH 62). The first incident in his private rooms already changes the drug itself; it was a Jekyll-to-Hyde drug (at free will). Now it is used as Hyde-to-Jekyll drug (necessary): “this reversal of my previous experiment” (JH 59).37 Between the automatic and involuntary transformations, the incident of the murder happens, symbolizing the total collapse of the first dichotomy. The two forces now compete, as Jekyll discovers his escape identity Hyde is now unsafe (“a known murderer”, JH 62). The imbalance influences Jekyll (Jekyll II) – “Dr. Jekyll looking deadly sick” (JH 24) – while the Hyde II personality seems to have grown stronger: “The power of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll” (JH 65). The change occurs as a shift of powers. Jekyll decides here to get rid of Hyde: “The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot […] Hyde was henceforth impossible” (JH 61). In this phase of imbalance, it is the suppression of Hyde which is a relief: “Jekyll was now my city of refuge” (JH 61). In the third-person narration with Utterson as focalizer – as mentioned before, all of the third-person narration is dou-

34 35 36

37

The common chimpanzee is called “pan troclodytic.” On the suspense such unnamed and therefore only imaginative crimes may cause, see Renata Kobetts Miller’s “Hyde’s Silence” (Miller 2005: 7-20). Ursula Link-Heer (Link-Heer 1999: 40) compares the fictional case of Jekyll and Hyde with real cases of dual or multiple personality. She refers to the Jekyll and Hyde personalities as mutually amnesic, which is not correct! Both can communicate and later the forces even compete. Dr. Jekyll himself notes on that fact: “My two natures had memory in common” (JH 59). The arrangement of the payments, for example, proves such knowledge and also Jekyll’s change after the murder. If he was amnesic, the murder committed by Hyde would not have affected him. He is also concerned about himself and not Hyde, as to which point the crime may affect himself (“I cannot say that I care what becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character”, JH 25). On such a co-consciousness see Morton Prince in The Dissociation of a Personality (1906) and Henry Ellenberger in The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) – “mutually cognizant” (Ellenberger 1970: 133). Vladimir Nabokov calls it the “chameleon liquor, the magic reagent” (Nabokov 1980: 180).

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bled by Jekyll’s later statement. Jekyll confirms to Utterson that he would not be seeing Hyde anymore. “I am done with him in this world” (JH 24). A letter by Hyde, stating to have fled somewhere safe, is given to Utterson, whose assistant notes a certain similarity of handwritings38 between Hyde and Jekyll, but Utterson remains silent (“I wouldn’t speak of this note, you know”, JH 27). But Hyde is stronger. Jekyll’s will has no power anymore. When Hyde commits the murder, he is for the first time described as “ape-like” – as narrated from a posterior omniscient point of view with the maid servant as focalizer. Now he also perceives himself as ape with “apelike tricks” (JH 65). The butler describes him hence as being “like a monkey” (JH 39). Instead of pleasure, the Hyde personality only offers mere destruction: “Hyde in danger was new to me…Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with a great effort of the will […] He, I say – I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human” (JH 63). Dr. Jekyll’s true nature – an uncontrollable evil force, which is felt as “inorganic” (JH 65) – wins in the end, it cannot be hidden let alone sufficiently controlled. Four different phases of mental and physical dissociation can thus be detected: being Dr. Jekyll experiencing both parts within himself (I); the division into the two bodies and the two personalities, well-balanced as intended and enjoyed (II); a competition between the two bodies and personalities (III); the final stage as the body submits to the Hyde appearance and the Jekyll personality commits suicide (IV): Dr. Jekyll (containing both civilized and evil)

Jekyll I (can now tolerate the dryness of his

Hyde I (pale and young,

balance

Jekyll II (wants to get rid of Hyde) “sick”

but tendency to be deformed, troclodytic)

existence) “healthy”

Hyde II (now ape-like,

imbalance

monkey)

Hyde (totally uncontrollable and merely evil)

38

In the third-person narration, Utterson’s assistant, Mr. Guest remarks that “the two hands are in many points identical: only differently sloped” (JH 27). Jekyll notes in his statement that Hyde’s handwriting is “sloping my own hand backward” (JH 57). Just like the “ape-like” descriptions, the word “slope” is doubled in the two different levels of incident description (third-person narrators such as Utterson, the servants and so on versus Dr. Jekyll’s statement).

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The societal environment plays a major role when a division seems necessary in order to fully express both felt tendencies (the general acceptance, the unrestricted animalistic forces). Accordingly, the mysterious Mr. Hyde is reflected with the morals of the typical Victorian bourgeois. This point of view is important regarding the strangeness of the Jekyll/Hyde case. In the eyes of the “normal”, ordinary Victorian Dr. Jekyll, for example, the dissociation of another possibly evil side is not only necessary but also useful. Dr. Jekyll’s acquaintances resemble humorless and elderly men, whose probable vitality, if there is any, is covered with Victorian dust. Dr. Lanyon, in Dr. Jekyll’s terms, is a “hide-bound pedant” (JH 18) when he opposes Dr. Jekyll’s early theoretical musings, and Mr. Utterson himself, in Freud’s terms, represses a more vital side. The very first sentences of Jekyll and Hyde therefore settle the later point of view regarding Hyde’s appearance: “Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye. […] He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years.” (JH 5)

From this point of view – Nabokov states that Stevenson’s artistic purpose was to make “a fantastic drama pass in the presence of plain sensible men” (Nabokov 1980: 188) – Mr. Hyde is described to Utterson by Mr. Enfield as barely human: “It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut” (JH 7). The incident, which was observed by Enfield, occurs when Mr. Hyde “with a kind of black, sneering coolness” (JH 7) tramples over a little girl. Hyde is “like Satan” (JH 7), “a damnable man” (JH 8). “There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable”, says Enfield and concludes on the impression such a deformed appearance gives: ”I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere” (JH 9). When Utterson, Jekyll’s lawyer, learns about Dr. Jekyll’s will to leave his properties to a certain Mr. Hyde, he is alarmed: “I thought it was madness and now I fear it is disgrace” (JH 11). As now Utterson’s “imagination also was engaged” (JH 13), he spies on Hyde and plays ‘hyde-and-seek’ (JH 14): “His curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde”, JH 13).39 Why would Jekyll have a bond with a deformed man, muses Utterson. In Utterson’s eyes, Hyde is “pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without nameable malformation” (JH 15). “God bless me”, whispers Utterson, “the man seems hardly human!” (JH 16). Hyde is “something troglodytic”, thus resembling an ancient cave-man and has “Satan’s signature upon” his face (JH 16). By now, the actual person of Dr. Jekyll has not appeared yet (he is only present as Mr. Hyde, who is hunting the night streets of London). Before

39

A Hollywood film, which varies the thematic of multiple personality, is called Hide and Seek (2004). The film is later described in the film chapter (see chapter 13).

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the eyes of a maid servant with romantic musings, Hyde kills an “aged and beautiful gentlemen with white hair” (JH 20) in “an ape-like fury” (JH 20) and is later referred to by a policeman as “particularly small and particularly wicked-looking” (JH 21). Jekyll’s own servant, Poole, describes Hyde as being “more of a dwarf” (JH 38), but from his lower-class point of view still a gentleman: “there was something queer about that gentleman” (JH 39). Poole recognizes through the keyhole a creature “like a monkey” (JH 39), which is “weeping like a woman or a lost soul” (JH 40). Jekyll is certainly lost, as behind that “red baize door” (JH 41) in his study Jekyll fights with his evil side. He has just finished his personal account of the strange case, when Utterson and Poole enter his cabinet, which is connected to Jekyll’s house (“communicated separately by a second flight of stairs”, JH 41).40 The body of Hyde, first not recognized as that of Jekyll, lies “sorely contorted and still twitching” (JH 41) as Jekyll has poisoned himself. To the reader, the secret is revealed earlier through Dr. Lanyon’s narrative displaying the transformation of Mr. Hyde into Dr. Jekyll. A creature in Lanyon’s eyes, “something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence” (JH 48) transfigures into Dr. Jekyll: “O God! I screamed, and O God! Again and again; for there before my eyes – pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death – there stood Henry Jekyll!” (JH 50)

While in this section, the truth of the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde is revealed, the most interesting part of the story is offered by Dr. Jekyll himself. Thus, the last chapter of Jekyll and Hyde features Dr. Jekyll’s narrative of his “full statement of the case” (JH 52). At an earlier stage of the story, the reader has already learned about the period in which Jekyll is occupied first preoccupied with his idea of the human dividedness. In Pierre Janet’s term, this ‘fixed idea’ subsequently dissociates Hyde. In Enfield’s eyes, Jekyll transformed mentally “more than ten years” (JH 12) before. Utterson remembers Jekyll’s youth as being wild: “He was wild when he was young” (JH 17), thus age becomes an excuse for having engaged in excess. Jekyll is now of a certain age, trying to hidehis true relation with Hyde.41 Utterson reflects on Jekyll’s appear-

40

41

Again like in Poe’s “William Wilson”, the metaphor of the house is compared to the mental fragmentation. The connectedness of Jekyll’s two houses (representative front house and the hidden medical theatre with the cabinet) refers to the Jekyll/Hyde attachment. Nabokov states on the comparison: “The relation of Jekyll and Hyde is typified by Jekyll’s house (Nabokov 1980: 184) and “just as Jekyll is a mixture of good and bad, so Jekyll’s dwelling place is also a mixture, a very neat symbol, a very neat representation of the Jekyll and Hyde relationship” (188). On the very names of Jekyll and Hyde, Nabokov wrote: “The names Jekyll and Hyde are of Scandinavian origin, and I suspect that Stevenson chose them from the same game of an old book on surnames where I looked them up myself. Hyde comes from the AngloSaxon hyd, which is the Danish hide, ‘a haven’. And Jekyll comes from the Danish name

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ance as totally opposed to Hyde: “A large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness” (JH 18). The nervous ticks of his alter ego Hyde – Dr. Lanyon notes on the “shocking expression of [Hyde’s] face, with a remarkable combination of great muscular activity” (JH 48) – are those of a later deformed Hyde as a “young man” (JH 16). And “nearly a year ago” (JH 47) Jekyll’s journal entries, which cover “a period of many years” (JH 47) end abruptly. The highly honored Dr. Jekyll, medical doctor, doctor of civil laws, doctor of law, fellow of the Royal Society (“M.D., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S”, JH 11), engages excessively (“several hundred entries” marked with the word “double”, JH 47) in the development of a potion to double himself. When he eventually succeeds, the potion rejuvenates him. On this first transformation Dr. Jekyll writes: “The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of great sickness […] I felt younger, lighter, happier in body.” (JH 54)

The new and finally more vital Hyde personality is therefore awakened to embody “my original evil” (JH 54). Dr. Jekyll knows he is both morally connected to his environment and yet an autarkic evil; he has been searching for the one and only formula to not only extract his evil side but to conceal it by a perfect masquerade (“to conceal my pleasures”, JH 52) and therefore dissociate his two elements physically, host in a way by even two physical appearances with corresponding emotions. When the desired physical split is eventually successful, the mental forces compete in order to conquer and control the body of Dr. Jekyll and hence transform into either Jekyll or Hyde as needed. At the beginning of his statement, Dr. Jekyll attempts to explain such intentions as a scientific construction to conclude on the given psychology of every human mind: “That man is not truly one, but truly two” (JH 52). Due to an already experienced “duplicity of life” (JH 52), he desires to eliminate the bond of Dr. Jekyll, who houses Jekyll and Hyde: “I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of the elements. If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable.” (JH 53)

The first sections are told in the Dr. Jekyll first-person narrative (“I for my part, from the nature of my life”, JH 53), and later splits the ego or Dr. Jekyll part into a Jekyll and Hyde part (“the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both”,

Jôkulle, which means ‘an icicle’” (Nabokov 1980: 182). But the name Hyde is homophone with hide, and Jekyll could as well be divided into Je (ego or I) and kill (Niederhoff 1994: 38).

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JH 53). The change in perspective is insofar significant, as – not unlike the third position detected in Poe’s “William Wilson” – the narrator views himself “as if from the outside” (Oates 1995: 203). The following sequence is also cited by Oates: “But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatred, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic.” (JH 65; my emphasis)

When Dr. Jekyll first looks at his second appearance and personality, which he wanted to create in the first place, Jekyll observes that the devilish elements – which also seem “natural and human” (JH 55) – of his psyche to have surfaced on the physical level: “The evil side of my nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed […] it had been much less exercised and much less exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll.” (JH 55)

Therefore, the dynamic of the Jekyll/Hyde relationship shown as the evil side has eventually become a personality of its own and later a transcendental Other. According to Vladimir Nabokov in his lecture on Jekyll and Hyde (Nabokov 1980), the text displays actually three personalities. They are the Dr. Jekyll personality, which tries to scientifically divide the outside in order to cultivate both moral and evil mental elements; the then extracted personalities of Jekyll, who can remain sober and moral and judge the other personality, Hyde, who is merely evil and conveniently blamable: “It follows that Jekyll’s transformation implies a concentration of evil that already inhabited him rather than a complete metamorphosis. Jekyll is not pure good, and Hyde (Jekyll’s statement to the contrary) is not pure evil, for just as parts of unacceptable Hyde dwell within acceptable Jekyll, so over Hyde hovers a halo of Jekyll, horrified at his worser half’s iniquity.” (Nabokov 1980: 184)

The inorganic force of Hyde cannot be stopped. Dr. Jekyll’s problem of is not to feel only shame for the crime committed by Hyde, certainly as he admitted, he is radically both. The incapability to control the switches (“balance of my souls”, JH 62) and the fact that Hyde personality turns out not to be the expected niche of perfect disguise (after the murder) as well as the fact that Jekyll is well and comfortably received in a very distinguished society, are the reasons to get rid of the experiment.

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But Hyde cannot be eliminated so easily. In a central scene, Hyde suddenly emerges automatically: “There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at least; and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural, like a return to the old days before I had made my discovery […] the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill […] I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down: […] I was once more Edward Hyde.” (JH 62)42

Thus, a connectedness with the others, their resemblance in oneself, means a probable limitation and elimination of the self, which wanted to cultivate also the Hyde personality. Consequently, the convenience of being both Jekyll and Hyde is endangered: “A moment before I had been safe of all men’s respect, wealthy, beloved […] and now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows.” (JH 62)

Although the Hyde personality offers a clearer self-conception (“in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic”, JH 62), there is also a comfort in being recognized by other people. Moreover, Hyde is disrespected and a criminal, too. In a sense, and in psychotherapeutical terms concerning multiple personality disorder therapy of integration, a lame Jekyll side, who is not in touch with the world let alone himself/himselves, would not (want to) know the Hyde side first and then be co-conscious and eventually merge into a Dr. Jekyll personality. By then he would be aware of each mental element as part of one mind and know now of the impossibility to be divided. Dr. Jekyll does admit his devilish desires, but he says he is not a hypocrite (JH 52). It is true, he may not be a hypocrite now, being honest about his condition(s), but he used to be. The idea of a clean Jekyll was hypocrite, too. The very idea of splitting is hypocritical. Consequently, according to Vladimir Nabokov in “Dr. Jekyll”, there are actually three personalities: “Jekyll, Hyde, and a third, the Jekyll residue when Hyde takes over” (Nabokov 2003: 183). He explains such tripartite division visually, as the Jekyll personality contains the Hyde personality in the first place, and the Hyde person-

42

In their seminal semantical study The Discursive Mind (1994), Rom Harré and Grant Gillett reflected on the very nature of Miss Beauchamp’s selves as they were expressed with individual pronoun systems. Accordingly, Miss Beauchamp had developed three distinct selves as she expressed them by such a pronoun system (Harré and Gillet 1994: 109 ff.). Dr. Jekyll, however, has only one position to point at his other two selves. The other side, Hyde, for example, remains silent (cf. Showalter 1991, Miller 2005).

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ality is projected or ejected under the influence of the drug. Therefore, Nabokov asks whether Dr. Jekyll is entirely good: “No, he is a composite being, a mixture of good and bad, a preparation consisting of a ninetynine percent solution of Jekyllite and one percent of Hyde (or hydatid from the Greek ‘water’ which in zoology is a tiny pouch within the body of man and other animal [...]). Thus in a sense, Mr. Hyde is Dr. Jekyll’s parasite.” (Nabokov 1980: 182)

Although forced to admit being both Jekyll and Hyde, “Jekyll’s morals are poor from the Victorian point of view” (Nabokov 1980: 182). As such, he is a hypocrite, “a hypocritical creature carefully concealing his little sins” (182). The little sins, however, mingled inside Dr. Jekyll as Hyde, who is a “mixture of good and bad” can be recognized clearly as they “can be separated as Hyde, who is a precipitate of pure evil, a precipitation in the chemical sense since something of the composite Jekyll remains behind to wonder in horror at Hyde while Hyde is in action” (182). The “concentrate of pure evil that becomes Hyde, who is smaller than Jekyll, a big man, to indicate the larger amount of good that Jekyll possesses” becomes uncontrollable in the end (182). Although Jekyll now exists as “a kind of smoke ring, a halo”, the Hyde segment seems to now fall out “of the remaining ring of good” as a “black concentrated evil” (184). Even if the devilish Hyde still feels an urge to change back into Jekyll, the former constellation and the control of two opposing sides is impossible now (184). Dr. Jekyll himself states: “At all hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened…I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.” (JH 64-65)

This report of Dr. Jekyll on the present uncontrollable force called Hyde, which is no longer part of himself but an independent evil side, demonstrates Dr. Jekyll’s inability of to keep his Jekyll personality alive in order to subjugate Hyde. Hyde becomes the dominant person now instead of a “subordinate station of a part” (JH 65). Furthermore, the “horror of my other self” finally offers no other solution but to extinguish the body of Dr. Jekyll. When the rest of the potion can eventually retain the Jekyll personality, as Hyde is now nearly constantly in control of the body, a suicide is the only solution to the catastrophe. The first appearance of Hyde had been that of youth, now it is only decay: “This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life.” (JH 65)

Concerning the mere evil and thus uncontrollable force, it is not important at all whether Dr. Jekyll or his other friends share homosexual tendencies. There are certainly ways to prove a double life of homosexuals at that time, as Elaine Showalter showed in Sexual Anarchy (1991). Such a repression of desire would eventually even

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point to a trauma, which literally causes the split; although a drug is developed, which might have then given rise to a “dual brain” (cf. Stiles 2006).43 According to Dr. Jekyll, however, a dual nature is inherent to man and the drug merely physically emphasizes the mental split. Leaving such psychological musings aside, the evil within the “multifaceted Dr. Jekyll” (Baker 2007: 167), nevertheless points to the existence of something purely devilish, the uncontrollable other side in the human mind or man’s natural dual nature. It is, however, only important that Dr. Jekyll wants to commit something criminal, something that is not allowed and therefore sanctioned, no matter what it is exactly. These crimes would be defined differently in different times, at a Victorian or a contemporary time level. After all, a murder occurs. This criminal mind, the vital desires, the unbound forces are what makes the story timeless. This uncontrollable force, the Hyde side and the evil side of William Wilson, who tries to betray others, is the other side. It was outsourced, externalized and thus literally personified. Wakefield attempts this but fails and returns to his old identity. William Wilson succumbs to his doppelgänger and cannot exist further. Jekyll’s selfafflicted division – it could be called an auto-iatrogenic fragmentation – eventually personifies a part of himself and becomes uncontrollable, acting as an independent personality. All of these fictional characters have to beware of their other side, and their inner multiplicity presented with separate identities, doubles and other persons influenced considerably later fictional adaptations. This indeed varied the theme of multiple personality and dissociation that repeated also the clear split and the absolute personification into independent mental entities and still related to the earlier concept of inner fragmentation as stated with the definition of MPD and as also becomes clear in the following chapters.

C ONCLUSION This chapter concentrated on the classical fictional texts of multiple personality and dissociation. These texts – by Hawthorne, Poe and Stevenson – showed an outsourced, externalized other side, which then embodied in another person who confronts the protagonist and who works as is an opposite force. The reader is to be surprised by a twist ending in contrast to the before mentioned autobiographical personal accounts or autopathographies of multiple personality, which were discussed in order to understand the fragmentation psychologically and in terms of post-traumatic dissociation. In fictional texts, however, societal structures, which define the protagonists as embedded selves, are of major importance since they even cause the desire to split, as these structures suppress other, morally forbidden, facets of the identity. The fictional texts here may serve as psychological cases, after all they present the human psyche with an uncanny darker, unconscious side, yet they use the split also metaphorically within a critique of the social order and its double standards albeit pinpointing a single person’s ability to extract the devilish part or side entirely.

43

On the phenomenon of “dual brain” see Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly (1973), in which the drug Substance D causes a split brain syndrome.

11 Beyond Control: Multiple Personality in the American Novel of the 1950s That was one thing to be thankful for – he wasn’t reponsible for all this. ROBERT BLOCH PSYCHO 1959: 1271

The psychologization of multiple personalities in American fictional texts of the 1950s is obvious. This is partly due to the efforts of (American) psychiatrists to unveil the other side(s) in single spectacular cases of dissociation such as Eve, which influenced the writers considerably and signified a dominant era of multiple texts. Partly it is due to pure sensationalism as the uncanny other side as an uncontrollable force serves well the requirements of suspense. And in an era of paranoia – communist tendencies alarmed the Western countries – the perception of an artificially induced killer side seemed literally mind-blowing. In the course of the 1950s, the common awareness of the phenomenon of multiple personality and the mysterious hidden side within reached a significant peak. Such awareness is reflected in the prevailing “attention to all forms of mental illness” as “a hallmark of postwar American culture”, writes Marta Camerino-Santangelo in Bernice M. Murphy’s book on writer Shirley Jackson (Caminero-Santangelo 2005: 52).

1

Similar to Robert Bloch’s psychopath killer Norman Bates, Jim Thompson depicts a mentally disturbed killer in The Killer Inside Me (1952). In contrast to Bloch’s multiple personality killer Bates, it features the first-person narration of a serial killer, who struggles with what he calls “his sickness”. Even though there is no specific mention of a multiple personality, the thriller is a good example of a seemingly functional sociopath. As such it is not unlike the narration of James Lasdun’s The Horned Man (2002), which I mentioned before in chapter 2. It is not included in this chapter but only referred to with a quote. Like Lasdun’s novel, the first-person narration could be read in terms of an unreliable narrator, perhaps representing another level of consciousness. Both novels, however, are more easily read as examples of a schizophrenic mind, or rather it can be seen as an example of total loss of reality and rationality. On the schizophrenia in The Killer Inside Me (1952) see also Kenneth Payne 2002 and Dorothy G. Clark 2009.

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Despite the general scientific rejection of multiple personality as an accepted and established diagnosis during the first decades of the 20th century (cf. Taylor and Martin 1944; Harriman 1942), which caused the dissociation phenomenon to disappear due to the establishment of schizophrenia and psychoanalysis (cf. Hacking 1995), the popular culture of the 1950s indulged on a literary level in the topic of mad multiple minds (Wilkes 1981: 331). Moreover, the display of multiple personality became somehow fashionable treating both male and female multiple characters who felt torn apart within the culture of postwar America. While the female characters failed to feel integrated and therefore developed a fragmentation within, even due to a traumatic event such as in The Bird’s Nest (1954) or in The Beast in View (1956), the male subjects would externalize their inner fragmentation, which derived either from brainwashing experiments – shown in The Manchurian Candidate (1959) – or a denial of external circumstances such as the death of the mother in Psycho (1959). While the female characters question their very subjectivity –“Who am I?” – the male characters may even choose from a variation of more or less functioning selves: “Who else can I be?”.2 The male protagonist of Psycho, for example, can function very well for a long time and the inner split into three personalities helps Norman Bates to balance his life. The female protagonist of The Bird’s Nest, however, cannot experience such a “successful” inner separation. The outburst of her inner multiplicity only means total loss of control and no balance whatsoever. First of all, the female multiple character would consequently represent the incompatibility of daily life requirements of the 1950s culture with suppressed desires or craved opportunities within societal structures, and women eventually would even be subject to a “social rearrangement of gender roles” (Caminero-Santangelo 2005: 52). The postwar idealization of women’s natural domesticity thus collided with the short period of seemingly achieved positions such as “women’s wartime occupation of traditionally male jobs” (53). Such a “refiguration of women’s roles” (53) was clearly demonstrated by different versions of multiple personalities in the 1950s: the nonfictional case of Eve retold in The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and novels such as The Bird’s Nest (1955) by Shirley Jackson and Beast in View (1956) by Margaret Millar. While the doctors of Eve, Thigpen and Cleckley published the case under the name of A Case of Multiple Personality in 1954, they were asked to rename the novelist version in order to increase its success with the public. When movie star Kirk Douglas bought the film rights to The Bird’s Nest, which had considerable successful, Hollywood became very aware of the mysterious phenomenon of multiple personality meaning distinct personalities or persons inside. In the year 1957, two major

2

Certainly the moral of the stories requires a non-successful male multiple personality or even more a punished multiple personality, because it did function. Norman Bates in Psycho is revealed as the murderer, the protagonist of The Manchurian Candidate will finally not operate as the assassin the way the manipulators intended, although he finally does become an assassin (by killing the manipulators). The protagonist of Beast in View is confronted with her alter ego, whom she developed because she asks herself “Who must I be?”

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films were released that ultimately formed the popular perception of multiple personality.3 The first film was Lizzie, the film adaptation of The Bird’s Nest which came to the theaters in April. The second was The Three Faces of Eve, released in September during the same year. While Lizzie, starring Eleanor Parker, only received little attention, actress Joan Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve even won the Oscar.4 Both storylines were based on Dr. Morton Prince’s study on a dissociated personality. While Eve’s therapist claimed to have found a real multiple woman and thus referring to Morton Prince, Shirley Jackson even emphatically mentions and recites Prince’s case of Miss Beauchamp described by him in The Dissociation of a Personality (1906). Each of these women, the real Eve and the fictional Elizabeth in The Bird’s Nest or Helen Clarvoe in The Beast in View represent the incapability of merging different selves or given roles, all of them feminine stereotypes, into a dynamic subjectivity that is observed and felt as totally normal. In order to understand the female characters, they are diagnosed as a multiple personality, that is, their selfperception must be divided and re-told in terms of madness. The novels of the 1950s, which focus on multiple personality, could not, of course, refer to the multiple topic shown later in Sybil; and consequently they do not offer a range such as Sybil’s sixteen (or even Truddi Chase’s ninety-two) personalities. The huge success of The Three Faces of Eve in 1957 was therefore certainly an impact on later fictional variations. Earlier than 1957, writers, especially Jackson, could already refer to former examples such as Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality (1906), which displays at least four different personalities within Miss Beauchamp, also unsuccessfully struggling against a male dominated society.

11.1 S HIRLEY J ACKSON : T HE B IRD ’ S N EST (1954) In Shirley Jackson’s novel The Bird’s Nest, which was published in 1954,5 the same year when Thigpen and Cleckley publicized their case of Eve in A Case of Multiple Personality, the central female protagonist is torn apart and fragmented into seemingly four different persons inside, each named individually. The protagonist, who is introduced as Elizabeth, seems to host different selves later called Beth, Betsy, Bess and Lizzie. Elizabeth Richmond is sent to a psychiatrist to treat her contradictory behavior. The therapist, Dr. Wright, hypnotizes the patient and reveals the condition of multiple personality. Dominated by her dark side, called Betsy, Elizabeth tries to es-

3

4 5

See also the references to The Three Faces of Eve (1957) in the novel Sybil (1973) as well as in the personal accounts of multiple personality in several autopathographies. Both cases are repeatedly mentioned, both popularized cases created a public awareness and became a part of pop culture. See ‹http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article.jsp?cid=218371mainArticleId=218365›. Web. 31 May 2009. Shirley Jackson. 1955 [1954]. The Bird’s Nest. London: Michael Joseph; hereafter abbreviated BN.

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cape but eventually fails. During supplementary therapeutic sessions, Dr. Wright establishes the healthy personality of Beth as the central and only new self of Elizabeth. The book closely follows not only Elizabeth’s point of view told in a third-person perspective, which again is diversified between other selves such as Betsy or Beth, but also relates the therapy sessions with Dr. Wright. His first-person point of view appears to add a more scientific perspective, which resembles that of Dr. Morton Prince and his study The Dissociation of a Personality (1906) and even cites extensively from it (Oppenheimer 1988: 162). Due to the variation of the point of view the construction of the novel itself is polymorph and not single-minded, as it is told by different voices. Whereas the reader directly learns about Dr. Wright’s view of the case in his corresponding sections, Elizabeth is presented more distantly from a thirdperson narrative. The interpretation of her inner life also reveals the construction of her varied selves as distinct personalities via Dr. Wright’s retrospective account. There is no personal account at all of Elizabeth herself in a first-person narrative. This lack of an “I”-narrative perspective from Elizabeth’s point of view presents very clearly suggests the lost subjectivity of the protagonist (or at least can never offer a total inside, although some parts are reflected as a stream-of-consciousness). By showing Dr. Wright’s quite obvious ego-centered and dominant narration that reveals his real character to the reader more precisely than the true self of Elizabeth, the character Elizabeth is literally re-told by the psychiatrist. Jackson’s close knowledge of Prince’s study of Miss Beauchamp demonstrates that the therapy both imposes itself on and deletes the multiple selves within the female patient and therefore offers a similar “violence [Dr. Prince’s] rhetoric inflicts on his subject, Christine Beauchamp, in the service of the (re)production of gender” (Caminero-Santangelo 2005: 58). The diagnosis can be made by describing and more importantly naming the different parts of the patient. The cure follows the same pattern by first turning the patient literally upside down via hypnosis in order to later produce a wholly functioning female mind and a seemingly healthy unity. The chapter on the healing process is entitled “The Naming of an Heiress” (BN 251). Through the relatively limited view of other perspectives, such as the Elizabeth’s dominant aunt or the authority of Dr. Wright, Elizabeth herself may only find her core identity through the perception of others. In the beginning of the story, Elizabeth’s condition is compared to an old ramshackle museum, which is falling apart (BN 3). Elizabeth’s “personal equilibrium” (BN 5) lacks any kind of agency: she has “no friends, no parents, no associates, and no plans” (BN 6). Her self-perception does not exist; she does not even know how to address herself: “She was not even interesting enough to distinguish with a nickname; where the living, engrossed daily with the fragments and soiled trivia of the disagreeable past, or the vacancies of space, kept a precarious hold on individuality and identity, Elizabeth remained nameless.” (BN 6)

Being “merely herself” (BN 7) means only nothingness. The most “outstanding traces of her presence (BN 6) are letters she usually signs with “per er” (BN 6) or receives as E. Richmond. The act of writing letters to herself, however, which are signed with

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Lizzie, is the only proof of her own existence and her only means of communication with others (not knowing it is a conversation with herself, although she is not aware of the letter writing). Such an inability to adjust to the outside world is also reflected by the character Aunt Morgan, with whom Elizabeth lives. Aunt Morgan, a masculine “personality of the gruff, loud-voiced woman” (BN 10), very fond of alcohol and aspirin, “leaving humanity behind” (BN 213), only experiences changes via altered house decorations but herself never alters materially or mentally. However, the changes of Elizabeth’s mood are observed very closely and without sympathy. Next to her spinsterish, dusty and petty bourgeois influences on Elizabeth, whose fortune she administers, it is Dr. Wright, calling himself “an honest man” (BN 35), who dominates Elizabeth. Both Morgan and Dr. Wright are even in competition with each other concerning their prevailing influences on the twenty-three year old “girl”. Dr. Wright’s account on the case of Elizabeth, whom he describes as “colorless” and “a bit prim” (BN 36), recites psychological terms by Dr. Morton Prince. Elizabeth symbolizes the damsel-in-distress, whose symptoms resemble that of Miss Beauchamp: “Miss R.’s symptoms- dizzy spells, occasional aboulia,6 periods of forgetfulness, panic, fears and weaknesses which were causing her to function poorly at her employment, listlessness, insomnia – all indications of a highly nervous condition, perhaps of an hysteric, had been faithfully reported to me.” (BN 37)

The symptom of aboulia obliviously prevents Elizabeth, or Miss R. – yet another name for the nameless – “from uttering a syllable” (BN 37). Naming the patient and her dark other side is another act of imposing an outside interpretation on her inside fragmentation. The reader already learns in the first chapter, entitled “Elizabeth” (BN 3-34), that she seems to experience, at least according to Morgan, some kind of memory loss when she suddenly “shouts out this obscenity” (BN 32; italics in original text) during a boring and embarrassing vocal number by a friend of Aunt Morgan. She seems to be telling the obvious truth, yet she is later unable (or unwilling) to remember this impoliteness. In the course of therapy with Dr. Wright, the old-fashioned psychiatrist, she will gain some kind of ability to monitor her actions, a change that eventually turns her into a seemingly healthy nice young woman according to the 1950s rules. By means of hypnosis, Dr. Wright treats his patient and discovers Miss R.’s dark side, the Sally or Mr. Hyde side, who, just like Sally in The Dissociation of a Personality (1906), insists on “opening her eyes”. This would indicate her actual birth, her existence and her ability to interact with someone else. However, Dr. Wright urges her to keep her eyes closed when she is in the hypnotized state:

6

In the original text, Jackson also explains the expression, which was used by Dr. Prince as well (Prince 1906: 139): “a state which I can describe for the layman who reads and runs as an inhibition of will, preventing a desired action” (BN 37; Jackson citing Prince).

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“‘May I open my eyes?’ she asked meekly. ‘You may not.’ ‘I shall open my eyes.’ ‘You shall not.’” (BN 61).7

Being in a hypnotized state, Miss R. is afraid of being forced into answering some “embarrassing questions” (BN 45), as Dr. Wright notes. Indeed, she would have remembered some kind of sexual abuse by her stepfather Robin. Later in the novel, Jackson gives several hints concerning such an abuse, although she never clearly names it. As Miss R. on the other hand is “a willing and cooperative subject” (BN 45), Dr. Wright is able to hypnotize her. While the original Miss R. seems dull and not at all appealing to Dr. Wright, the hypnotized state amazes him: “I was surprised at her appearance of pleasant, intelligent comeliness” (BN 46). “For the first time”, Dr. Wright affirms, her face “seemed pretty to me” (BN 46). The attraction of her prettiness, however, is later counteracted by her selfconfident character.8 The personality in the waking state – “sullen, silent, looking anywhere” (BN 47) – is not the personality in hypnotic trance. Dr. Wright therefore decides to identify a R1 and R2 personality (BN 48-9). The “friendly R2” (BN 57), which also is “my pretty one” (BN 59), however, turns into another state, subsequently named R3: “Ruefully, then, I added a new number to my notes – R3, the hateful, the enemy” (BN 59). Citing Dr. Prince, “the medical authority” (BN 65), Dr. Wright eventually finds his diagnosis: “Cases of this kind are commonly known as ‘double’ or ‘multiple personality’, according to the number of persons represented, but a more correct term is disintegrated personality, so each secondary personality is a part only of a normal whole self. No one secondary personality preserves the whole physical life of the individual.” (BN 63)9

Despite the conclusion on a disintegrated personality, Dr. Wright – just like Dr. Prince – insists instead on each named state as whole personality with corresponding characteristics. R1 = Elizabeth (“nervous, afflicted by driving pain”, BN 64), R2 = Beth (“the happy girl”, BN 64), R3 = Betsy (“wanton”, BN 64). The variations on Elizabeth are derived from a children’s song. Miss R. herself recites: “Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy, and Bess, they all went together to find a bird’s nest…Perhaps, you handsome Doctor Wrong, you would care to rename us?” (BN 66). Starting with

7 8

9

Sally was born when she opened her eyes (Prince 1906: 96). Her personality in hypnotic trance needs to be kept in check just like the Sally personality, with whom Dr. Prince had a great deal of trouble. See my chapter on the case of Miss Beauchamp: “Sometimes if ‘Sally’ was too obstreperous, odors of ether would emerge from the office. At such times she was resisting hypnotic suggestion” (Kenny 1986: 44; my emphasis). See also Prince 1906: 3.

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namelessness in the first place, Miss R. now can display various names. At the same time she renames Dr. Wright and calls him Dr. Wrong.10 The failure of others to recognize Elizabeth’s subjectivity at the opening of the novel is indicated by such a former namelessness (Murphy 2005: 73): “But naming is as much an attempt to control another as it is a recognition of that other. Dr. Wright suppresses the radical instability suggested by Elizabeth Richmond’s multiple personalities by shoring up each personality into a separate feminine type with her own name. His original attempt to categorize the personalities through a numerical system is resisted…by Betsy, who offers her own system of categorization.” (Murphy 2005: 73)

Indeed, the naming of different fragments or individual parts within the patient seemed also fundamental to Dr. Morton Prince, whose study on the multiple personality or disintegrated personality of Miss Beauchamp is also based on such designation. In their philosophical book on the mind-body relation The Discursive Mind (1994), Rom Harré and Grand Gillett analyze Prince’s account of different personalities within Miss Beauchamp by investigating into the origins of such selves as presentations of a pronoun system within language itself, that is, naming the personalities also creates them: “To see the power of pronoun systems in the presentation of self, and how they can even override the uniqueness of a person’s embodiment in just one body, we can examine a case of socalled multiple personalities, that is, a case where we become convinced that there is more than one self embodied in a particular human body.” (Harré and Gillett 1994: 109)

According to Harré and Gillett, “the interesting thing from our point of view is how Dr. Prince came to decide that Miss Beauchamp had a dissociated personality, or multiple personalities, and what were these ‘personalities’?” (Harré and Gillett 1994: 109). In terms of discursive psychology, they ask: “How did [Dr. Morton Prince] decide that, in Miss Beauchamp’s one body there were three speaking persons?” (109). Three main pronoun systems could be found in Miss Beauchamp and therefore seem to present three selves.11 By ensuring the patient that the outside “She” was also the

10

11

The only occasion for Betsy to fight Dr. Wright’s domination is when she re-calls him as Dr. Wrong: “‘Then tell me who you are,’ said Betsy. ‘I am Doctor Wright.’ ‘Indeed you are not,’ said Betsy, laughing. I took a deep breath and thought briefly and lovingly of punishments for Miss Betsy; ‘I am Doctor Wrong,’ I said, and very softly, too.” (BN 80) The division of Miss Beauchamp’s personality (cf. Harré and Gillett 1994: 109): Miss Beauchamp

Chris/Sally

I

You

Miss X –

You

I

She

She

You

I

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inside “I”, as Harré and Gillett wanted it, Prince tried to unite the different selves of Miss Beauchamp. Before Dr. Wright/Wrong can unite his patient, Miss R./Elizabeth can escape her supervisors when she lets her Betsy personality take control. In the chapter entitled Betsy (BN 87), the reader can follow her on a trip to New York City, even though she is always struggling with her alters inside. It is the Betsy personality, who is coconscious (according to Ellenberger’s terms) with other selves:12 “Betsy could feel that they were beneath” (BN 93). Betsy also recalls certain experiences with Robin, her stepfather, which point to a possible sexual abuse. It is he who subsequently brings Betsy to life: “Robin splashed at Betsy and he said ‘Betsy is a mean girl’” (BN 98). Trying to interact with strangers, in a café or on the streets, in order to find her mother, also called Elizabeth Richmond, Betsy attempts to mention the abuse: “‘But then why did Robin run away?’ he asked. ‘Because I said I’d tell my mother what we did.’ She looked up, dumfounded, fork in hand; ‘no’, she whispered, staring fearfully, ‘no’ she said, and then, just like Elizabeth, ‘why?’ looking from him to her plate to her fork to the pastries, ‘why are you talking to me?’ she said.” (BN 124; my emphasis)

In a desperate effort to obtain a stable identity, she repeats again and again her origin, her name: “My name is Betsy Richmond, and I was born in New York. My mother loves me more than anything. My mother’s name is Elizabeth Richmond, and my name is Betsy and my mother always called me Betsy” (BN 95). When looking up her mother’s name in a telephone book, she finds innumerous entries: “RICHMOND ELIZABETH, and below that, RICHMOND ELIZABETH” (BN 128).13 The symbolic setting of her fragmentation, her inability to refer to herself, is shown in a scene that recalls the Lacanian mirror-stage or a female William Wilson who cannot recognize herself though: “‘Lizzie’, Betsy said cruelly, ‘Lizzie, come out,’ and Elizabeth, looking for a moment out of her own eyes, saw herself standing naked in a strange room before a long mirror, and, turning to cower fearfully against the mirror, she began to cry, and clutched at herself, and looked with horror into the room. ‘Where?’ she said, whispering, ‘who?’ and searched with her eyes, hoping perhaps to catch sight of her attacker, of the villain.” (BN 106)

12 13

Betsy calls Elizabeth, her dull self, Lizzie. She is mixing up her own identity with that of her mother, perhaps also because of her suggested relationship with Robin. An inner voice constantly recites her reflection on Robin: “Call me Lisbeth like you do my mother, because Betsy is my darling Robin” (BN 107). And certainly the name of Richmond itself indicates a multiplicity inside.

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Her attempt to establish a life of her own ends in the hotel room where the Betsy personality violates Lizzie and tries to strangle her, thus even trying to commit suicide.14 In such a desperate state, Dr. Wright meets again with his patient in a hospital. She is now Betsy, “considerably younger…being physically ageless” (BN 142) – remember the first descriptions of Mr. Hyde! – and in total despair. Back in his office, however, Elizabeth/Miss R. cannot recall her New York trip. Again under hypnosis, she seems to be the R2 or Beth personality, which Dr. Wright thought to be the most pleasant. Although now each personality is aware of “individuality to resist being pushed under” (BN 149), trying each to be the dominant personality left, Dr. Wright attempts an integration of each of the selves into one consciousness. To “manufacture a final endurable personality” (BN 151), Dr. Wright states, he desires Beth, whom he considers the nicest self, to be the core identity of Miss R. Creating yet another seemingly distinct personality (R4 = Bess)15 under hypnosis. Dr. Wright, now referring to himself as “much like a Frankenstein with all the materials for a monster ready at hand” (BN 154), notes on his creatures: “Without enthusiasm, I added R4 to my notes, and hoped she was the last; each of Miss R.’s varying selves, I thought, proved more disagreeable than the last” (BN 153). The Sally personality of Miss R., the stubborn self, who is very well aware of the fact that her aunt Morgan still manages her fortune, needs to be deleted: “There isn’t any Betsy” (BN 163). The final self of Miss R./Elizabeth, however, who seems to be nice, pleasant and obsequious, has no name at all. Her inventors, Dr. Victor Wright and Aunt Morgan, argue about the last name: “‘Victoria?’ suggested the doctor. ‘Morgan Victoria,’ Morgan amended generously.” (BN 275)

The seemingly bitter sweet ending of the story, Elizabeth/Miss R. between her socalled new parents, Aunt Morgan and Dr. Victor Wright, is not beneficial after all. Dr. Wright, part of the third-person narration in the last chapter called “The Naming of an Heiress” (BN 251-276), himself is lecturing on a suitable metaphor: “‘Each life, I think,’ said the doctor, ‘asks the devouring of other lives for its own continuance; the radical aspect of ritual sacrifice, the performance of a group, its great step ahead, was in organization; sharing the victim was so eminently practical.’” (BN 273; italics in original text)

14

15

Elisabeth’s attempts to struggle herself – second self Betsy is symbolized by an evil uncontrollable hand –resemble the situations in which the unnamed narrator struggles with his alter ego Tyler Durden, but actually with himself. Thus the secondary selves become “an organ without a body” as Slavoy Žižek notes on Fight Club and thus demonstrate “the autonomization of one its organs” (Žižek 2003: 113). The psychological term of ‘transitivism’ applies as well. The patients would confuse “one’s own symptoms onto a double” (Hustvedt 2010: 121). Dr. Wright names her Bess, because “I choose to” (BN 150).

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The group around Elizabeth/Miss R. can now function without being interrupted by a Betsy personality. Although relieved briefly when she can experience a real escape into freedom – “I haven’t any name, she told herself, here I am, all alone and without any name” (BN 253) – in the end she will be re-named by others. Until then she can claim: “She laughed, too, holding both their arms [Dr. Wright/Aunt Morgan]. ‘I am happy’, she said…‘I know who I am’” (BN 276). But does she really know it? The price is a commitment to the requirements and expectations of her environment. When asked about her real suffering, Dr. Wright tries to explain the condition, but nobody actually listens (BN 274). It is all merely due to a “nervous fever”, the possible abuse by Robin is never mentioned again. Commenting the ending, Judy Oppenheimer wrote in Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (1988): “Such a vision might seem to be ripe for feminist interpretation, and on the surface Shirley’s work does adapt well to that lens. Her protagonists are invariably women, and strangers in land not theirs. Their position, teetering on the brink of reality, seems a brave, even noble reaction to their presence in a world they never made – and do not accept. When […] Elizabeth settle[s] in the end for integration, the result is diminishment.” (Oppenheimer 1988: 164)

Similar to Miss Beauchamp, the emerged secondary selves may not survive as they might be too vital. A “true self” is established by the therapist who defines a suitable identity with convenient features and adequate behavioral patterns.

11.2 M ARGARET M ILLAR : B EAST IN V IEW (1955) While Elizabeth Richmond may have survived due to a seemingly successful adjustment to the outside world, Helen Clarvoe in Margaret Millar’s thriller Beast in View (1955) utterly fails.16 The very last sentence of the novel offers that twist: “She pressed the knife into the soft hollow of her throat. She felt no pain, only a little surprise at how pretty the blood looked, like bright and endless ribbons that would never be tied.” (BV 249)

Helen Clarvoe commits suicide in the end. She does, however, not merely kill herself, but she is also the murderer of her other side. Her former attempts to escape her dull life therefore could only meet with disaster. Trapped in a hotel room, just as the Betsy personality in The Bird’s Nest during her escape trip to New York City, she is confronted with the outside world and her inner self or her other side. To realize her dividedness is to recognize but not accept her failure. The consequence is the act of murder. The split between Helen and her evil side reveals a female killer. The “pure terror-suspense-mystery story” (Boucher 1984 n.pag.) of The Beast in View was first published in 1955 but was still in print several years later. In the 1983

16

Margaret Millar. Beast in View. New York: International Polygonics, 1983 [1955]; hereafter abbreviated BV.

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edition of the novel, Millar herself wrote in the introduction: “Ghosts and goblins may frighten the average five-year old, and invasive creatures from outer space disturb his older sibs…But the real fear of the average adult must be what lies in the deepest shadows of his own mind” (Millar 1983: 1). What hides in the deepest shadows of Helen Clarvoe’s mind is her other side. When Millar had already completed half of her novel, she was astonished to discover a television play by Gore Vidal, which dealt with the same issue of a split personality. She subsequently rewrote the final twist of her story. The idea of her husband Ross Mcdonald “was elementary but it altered the whole book: Retain the split personality theme but make Helen Clarvoe’s alter ego a real person. He saved the book from becoming what would have been by this time a cliché. Instead, it is something of a minor classic” (Millar 1983: 250). Margaret Millar’s Beast in View won the Edgar Allan Poe award in 1956 and was reviewed as an excellent example of a suspense thriller “complete with murder, detective and a surprise twist” (Boucher 1984 n.pag.). Anthony Boucher additionally wrote in the New York Times in 1984 that it “was a study in abnormal psychology, so admirably written with such complete realization of every character that the most bitter antagonist of mystery fiction may be forced to acknowledge it as a work of art.” In the year 1964, the thriller was made into a film, which was part of the television series of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The protagonist in Beast in View, however, has indeed to deal with a cliché or at least a clear distinction between a dull side and an evil side. Helen Clarvoe is her dull side, the ignorant side, which has no ability to remember and seems to be not viable. The other, functional side is named after a real character in the novel, Evelyn Merrick. While the real Evelyn Merrick is a somewhat ideal woman (“in her quiet way, she was just about the nicest girl in the world”, BV 195), the imagined Evelyn Merrick is actually evil trying to focus on her possible excellence and merit. Although Margaret Millar still follows the pattern of a detective puzzle, she tricks the reader and makes him believe that the person Evelyn Merrick, from whose perspective several chapters are written, is in fact the real character Evelyn Merrick. On the other hand, it is only Helen who imagines being Evelyn. The lawyer, Mr. Blackshear acts as a classical detective and finds a person called Evelyn Merrick, and he only manages to discover that the real Evelyn is healthy and sane. Only the last chapter reveals the fact that it is Helen, whose alter ego is an evil side called Evelyn. Throughout the book, the reader is convinced that the real person Evelyn Merrick is the villain, especially because of the narrative perspective with a quasi omniscient narrative voice and inner monologues by a character called Evelyn, who is actually Helen in disguise (cf. Finke 1983: 95 ff.). Helen’s first encounter with her other side happens via a phone call. An Evelyn Merrick – her imagined alter ego – contacts and threatens her. The reader cannot detect whether the caller is real or not. The narrative is constructed from a third-person omniscient point of view displaying Helen’s inner world as a real conversation between Helen and Evelyn, but the text provides hints. While Helen is trapped in her loneliness (BV 9), as she “had severed too many connections in her life, she had hung up too often, too easily, on too many people” (BV 8), it is Evelyn, who knows everything about Helen: “You’re so jealous you’ve blacked me out” (BV 6). Helen is the

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one who cannot remember: “And I know why you can’t remember (BV 5)”, says the imagined Evelyn. Although Helen knows “how to deal” with other people, the ones from the lower classes, she is seen by others as “a thin, frightened ghost trying to avoid real people” (BV 10). She has blacked out Evelyn and her evil or strong side, because she “was the kind of person who always locked things up whether they were valuable or not” (BV 10). The telephone conversation is held internally in Helens mind with the alter ego Evelyn being co-conscious, but again not co-aware: “The voice was quiet, smiling. ‘Is that Miss Clarvoe?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You know who this is?’ ‘No.’ ‘A friend.’” (BV 3)

In real life, Helen will not speak her mind. This is the case when it comes to her mother and her brother Douglas. While her inner voice – already referring to the Evelyn side but not naming her - tells her to state her displeasure, her super-ego, her monitoring ego Helen is still able to act according to a general politeness: “She stared at what she had written, subconsciously aware that a mistake had been made but not seeing it at first. It looked so right, somehow: I hope that all is hell with you and Douglas. I meant to say well, Miss Clarvoe thought. It was a slip of the pen” (BV 15; italics in original text). Although the phone call with her second self Evelyn only occurs in Helen’s fantasy, using the phone is a major symbol in the book. Helen threatens people with phone calls pretending to be Evelyn. Two other phone calls with her mother demonstrate the mood shifts and differences between the personality Helen and the personality Evelyn. While during the first phone call with the dominant mother, Helen seems to be dull and silent (“Do speak up, Helen”, BV 81), she can later turn the tables and dominate her mother when in her Evelyn state: “Well, you needn’t shout,” Evelyn said coldly. “‘I’m not deaf, you know. I have what you might call 20-20 hearing.’ ‘I’m sorry I – shouted.’” (BV 188). After the threatening phone call with her alter ego, Helen, who knows that people consider her “somewhat odd” (BV 15) and a “natural victim for jokers” (BV 16), discovers a more frightening fact: someone must have stolen money from her. She contacts her lawyer and her property administrator Mr. Blackshear to find a certain Evelyn Merrick as Helen believes her to be the thief. The lawyer follows the traces of Evelyn Merrick, who throughout the book apparently contacts several people via telephone and threatens them. Helen’s homosexual brother Douglas, for example, is shocked by such a phone call when the personality Evelyn talks to his mother and reveals to her that he has an affair with the photographer Terola. Pretending to be someone else is another major subject in the novel. Douglas, who later commits suicide, consequently tries to disguise his homosexuality: “He was the wren and the rain, he was the wind and the trees bending under the wind. He was split in two, the mover and the moved, the male and the female. All these years, the clock murmured, all these years” (BV 147; italics in the original text).

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Performing an act or a role therefore seems essential not only to Douglas, but also to minor characters such as idealized women who work as models for indecent magazines. A “Hudson School of Charm and Modeling”, where Helen goes as the imagined Evelyn to “become immortal” (BV 52), transforms ordinary girls into “selfconscious young women in various stages of charm” (BV 46), adjusting them to the idealized image they have of themselves (“let them study themselves in the mirror and they tell me what’s wrong”, BV 49; italics in original text). The motto is: “We will make you a new person” (BV 45). After Helen in her Evelyn state murders her brother’s lover Terola, who could have identified her as she lets him take pictures of her, a model seeks to perform the act of telling everybody about the murder in order to become the center of media attention (“Nola Rath’s performance”, BV 169). Helen’s mother, called Verna, has “a closetful of punctured dreams” (BV 80) on perfecting herself (dieting, conversation, acting up etc.). Blackshear sees her “in character, playing the role she thought was expected of her, the pretty and frivolous wife of a man who could afford her” (BV 91). Images of the perfect and desirable woman reflect what Helen desperately wants to be, and this is also the image she has of Evelyn when they were both young and schoolmates. Young Evelyn once was the admired girl in the center of everybody’s attention. When Helen first tells Blackshear about a dream she had of Evelyn as the suspected thief, she states that she was “blond, coarse-looking, made up like a woman from the streets” (BV 32). However, the Evelyn-performance Helen tries to give is not at all ideal as she is described as “a scrawny brunet very poorly dressed and made up like a tart” (BV 50). The idealization of Evelyn as the perfect mask only takes place in Helen’s mind. Imagining the perfection, Helen can only feel relieved when she herself becomes the idealized Evelyn. Her dull existence as Helen is contrasted by the feeling of liveliness when being in her Evelyn state. The threatening calls she makes even revive her: “At a quarter to ten Evelyn Merrick stepped out of the telephone booth, stretched her left arm to relieve the cramp and smoothed her skirt down over her hips. Usually, after making a series of telephone calls, she felt a certain relief and relaxation, but tonight she was still excited.” (BV 106)

Being Evelyn then is the solution to her identity problem because for Helen, Evelyn is the faultless blueprint of a successful woman. The reason why Helen develops an Evelyn character is offered in a chapter about Helen’s youth when young Evelyn was her best friend: “Right from the beginning they had been the closest of friends” (BV 116) Exchanging “clothes and secrets” they go to a Halloween party “dressed alike, at Evie’s suggestion” (BV 116). But while Evelyn gets every kind of attention, Helen remains a shrinking violet: “The rest of the evening was a nightmare for Helen. She stood in a corner of the room, rigid, tongue-tied, watching Evie surrounded by boys, laughing, humming snatches of music, floating

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gracefully from one partner to another. She would have given her soul to be Evie, but no on offered her the chance.” (BV 117)

When her father asks her about the party, she is not able to tell the truth about the embarrassment and enviousness she experienced. She remembers observing young Evie and retells Evie’s positive experiences as if they were hers. The father is satisfied with his daugther’s seeming success, yet when a concerned teacher calls to inquire about the unhappy Helen, the lies come to light, and young Evelyn again is an inapproachable ideal: “Why can’t you try to be more friendly, like Evie”, asks the father (BV 121). He merely declares: “Your punishment, Helen, is being you, and having to live with yourself” (BV 122). The parents’ conclusion on the affair is the statement: “What a pity we didn’t have a girl like Evie!” (BV 124) and as a result Helen attempts to develop her Evelyn personality. After her father’s death, Helen receives a considerable fortune, so she is able to abandon the outside world by retiring completely after she moves into a ramshackle hotel. But inside the hotel she remains the dull Helen reaching slowly into the outside world via phone calls she makes as Evelyn.17 Outside, she adopts her alter ego Evelyn and tries to escape Blackshear who is following her and still is convinced that he is chasing the real Evelyn Merrick. Nevertheless, the clouds of total madness accompany Helen’s symptoms of being split into two persons. She develops paranoid delusions – “Sometimes her mind clicked noisily like a metronome and spies could tell from its frequency what she was thinking” (BV 182) – and compulsive acts: “As she waited for an answer, she totaled the numbers. Thirteen. Add one and divide by two, that made seven. Everything had to make seven. Most people didn’t know this” (BV 187). When she meets photographer Terola to get the pictures he made of her, he calls her crazy: “Crazy. Not a word to use lightly” (BV 185). She constantly kills him in her imagined Evelyn state. During his investigation, Blackshear finally meets the real Evelyn Merrick, convinced she is the murderer of Terola. The reader believes it too, as he has followed an Evelyn throughout the book. The real Evelyn Merrick seems nice and healthy despite the crime she apparently committed: “It was Blackshear’s first sight of Evelyn Merrick, and he thought how ironic it was that he should see her like this, laughing, greeting a dog – the gentlest creature in the world” (BV 202; italics in the original text). As this encounter with Evelyn is Blackshear’s first, the contrast between her appearance and her act of murder is complete. Having talked to Miss Merrick’s doctor, Blackshear can offer the explanation for this behavior: she must be a multiple personality (BV 201).18 Evelyn’s friend, Claire, cannot understand Blackshear’s diagno-

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The house metaphor for Helen’s fragmented mind also applies here. Helen can hear the voices of the neighbors as she can hear Evelyn’s voice. This is obviously the diagnosis of the doctor. He gives it as he must adjust Blackshear’s report to a psychiatric explanation. The diagnosis, however, is correct, it is only not the right diagnosis for the real Evelyn but for Helen.

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sis: “‘Perhaps the one you know is. The other’…‘There is no other!’” (BV 201). Blackshear tries to explain Evelyn’s criminal forces: “Blackshear wondered when the split in her personality has begun. Perhaps it had been there from infancy and no on suspected…Of one thing he was almost certain, the split in her personality was complete. The woman he was talking to was unaware of the existence of her deformed twin.” (BV 207)

Blackshear has correctly identified the condition of the real Evelyn Merrick’s mind: there is a multiple personality. So far, however, he does not know who the actual multiple is. Blackshear’s “job was to wait until the change occurred and the twin took over” (BV 207), and he will be able to observe the change or at least hear the change through the hotel door when later he and Evelyn confront Helen with her disorder. Helen is still not aware of her other side. And neither is the reader. The real Evelyn Merrick can, after all, still be the threat. But Helen still blames Evelyn of having influenced her, and although this is correct, she cannot realize that this Evelyn is her own imagination, her alter ego: “Evelyn was the one who initiated things, who formed the ideas and made the suggestions. I was the one who tagged along. I worshipped her, I wanted to be exactly like her, I would have followed her anywhere, like a sheep, the goat, the victim.” (BV 231)

Without Evelyn, Helen muses, “I was nothing, but with Evelyn beside me I could see people looking at us with interest and curiosity, yes even interest” (BV 234). The Evelyn imagination is strong and vivid, it even becomes a hallucination: “Miss Clarvoe looked back at the shop where she’d seen Evelyn Merrick just before the accident. The girl had left. Or else she had stepped farther back into the shadows to wait” (BV 224). The narrative shows Helen’s inner monologue and switches into a first-person perspective, when showing the Evelyn side takes control of Helen: “Then someone spoke my name and I turned and saw Evelyn Merrick. She was standing right beside me, smiling, very sure of herself…I could never fool Evelyn. She said, ‘scared, aren’t you?’ and she took my arm. I didn’t mind…The contact made me feel secure. ‘Come on, let’s have a drink some place.’” (BV 229)

In the last chapter, the real Evelyn eventually meets Helen who wonders about Evelyn’s changed appearance. In her fantasy, Evelyn was the heroin, the perfect woman. Now Helen is confronted with the reality of Evelyn herself (“grim faced, cold-eyed stranger, dressed all in black as if in mourning”, BV 233). Evelyn therefore seems to have adapted Helen’s dull look in reverse (“black jersey dress”, BV 32). Helen locks herself up in the hotel room (“lock myself up against all the ugliness”, BV 240), and Blackshear now confirms:

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“She has a rare form of insanity, Miss Merrick, the disease I thought you had. A doctor would call it multiple personality. A priest might call it possession by a devil. Helen Clarvoe is possessed by devil and she gives your name to it.” (BV 243; my emphasis)

The last victim of evil Evelyn, who declares she is the only one who can control Helen (“I am the only one who knows how to treat her”, BV 241) is herself. Talking in another voice – “It was not Helen’s voice…it was loud and brash and shrill, like a schoolgirl’s” (BV 243) – she pretends to be younger and experiences herself as a person in her own right. However, Helen’s delusion is total: “And suddenly she wheeled around and ran across the room to the mirror. The face she saw in it was not her own” (BV 247). Instead, she sees many faces “revolving like a ferris wheel” (BV 248). Drowning in a multitude of these voices inside – “What’s the matter with you, kid, are you crazy? Why can’t you be more like Evelyn?” (BV 248) – she eventually realizes her state: “She stared in to the crystal ball of the mirror and she saw the future, the nights poisoned by memories, the days corroded by desire” (BV 249). Looking down to a knife in her hand (“it alone could speak the truth”, BV 249), Helen finally kills herself: “She pressed the knife into the soft hollow of her throat…” (BV 249).

11.3 R OBERT B LOCH : P SYCHO (1959) When it comes to male serial killers in American fiction, “multiple personality is a popular defense” (Showalter 1997: 163). The female characters, however, also described in the previous sections, also display a certain kind of violence – toward themselves, toward others, even killer instincts. In Beast in View (1954), the Evelyn personality in Helen tried to conserve her existence by eliminating possible threats, which she had provoked in the first place. The first male multiple character analyzed here in Psycho, is similarly trying to protect himself and his Mother,19 literally his “(m)Other” (Žižek 1992: 229) personality from outside danger. Norman Bates, arguably one of the most famous serial killers in American fiction, appeared first in the short novel Psycho by Robert Bloch in the year 1959.20 Written in the rush of several impressions, Bloch finished the book in 1958: “The total elapsed time between first inspiration and final perspiration was about seven weeks” (Larson 1989: 70). His inspirations might have been more than just one.21

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Throughout the analysis of Psycho I shall write “mother” when referring to the real mother of Norman Bates. Writing in capitals – “Mother” – is a reference to the personality within Norman’s mind. I shall therefore also refer to it as Mother personality. Robert Bloch. Psycho. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000 [1959]; hereafter abbreviated P. John A. McDermottt claims that Robert Bloch was probably also inspired by two other novels: Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily (1930) and Metalious’s Peyton Place (1955). Peyton Place also explores the Oedipal complex – a seemingly pathological relationship between mother and son – and even refers to a character called Norman Page, who is dominated by his mother; in A Rose for Emily, a father figure dominates the daughter, who

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The main reference is certainly another famous serial killer, actually the one, whose questionable fame became part of “an eminently marketable form of contemporary folk legend” of innumerable serial killer fiction and films (Simpson 2000: 2): Ed Gein.22 The fictional figure Norman Bates (“the fat man”, P 29) clearly resembles Gein, especially the character in the novel, less so in the film.23 Gein, who lived in the little town of Pleinfield in the so-called “House of Horror” had dug up several female corpses, among them his mother: “The ‘gory details’ were sparse enough: a small town recluse was discovered to have murdered several women; butchering and flaying them in a manner indicating severe mental illness. What intrigued me, living in a similar rural community at the time, was how anyone could perpetrate such crimes in such a psychotic state and yet remain undetected for years by his neighbors.” (cited in Larson 1986: 83)24

The apparent normality or harmlessness of Bates, who also remains undetected for more than twenty years, is also expressed by his very name. Norman splits into Norma and a personality later called Normal. On the other hand, the very name of Norman Bates may point at the possible anywhere/everywhere atmosphere of the setting: Gein’s small town called Plainfield is turned into the fictional place Fairvale, which could be situated somewhere between Norman (Oklahoma) and Batesville (Arkansas) (David 2000: 215). The façade that Bates manages to maintain as a protection only covers the total chaos inside. Such a fictional killer, however fragmented he may be, “bears little relation to his real-life counterparts such as the psychosexually disturbed Ted Bundy or Ed Gein” (Simpson 2000: 20): “In fiction, serial killers are often more exotic in terms of methodology and pathology, as identifiable ways, not matter how restrained the narrative treatment overall. They are violent but less impassioned examples of what John Fraser has defined as the violator figure in literature,

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later lives with the corpse of a former lover for a couple of decades in the same house (cf. McDermottt 2007). For further readings about American serial killer and the emergence of criminal psychology and profiling see especially the popular account by Robert Ressler, former FBI agent during the 1970s: Robert Ressler and Thomas Schachtmann. Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI. New York: Macmillan, 1993. Gein “inspired” the genre of serial killer fiction in a substantial way. Thomas Harris describes a killer in The Silence of the Lambs (1988), who chases and skins women in order to create a costume made of the skins. Gein carried around parts of his victims just the same way. Whereas the Norman Bates in the novel is fat and quite unattractive, the actor Anthony Perkins personifies the role in Hitchcock’s film version of 1960 as a rather handsome young man, a fact which makes him even likeable (see also Žižek 1992). See the afterword by Thomas David in Bloch 2000: 214.

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one who is so obsessed that he or she literally loses self-consciousness in an ‘ntensity of passion’ not unrelated to ancient definitions of demonic possession.” (Simpson 2000: 20)

The villain behind the Norman façade is disguised, even literally. When Norman becomes Mother or, in terms of demonic possession, is possessed by the evil spirit of his mother, he needs to transform first on the outside as well. Makeup and clothes are necessary accessories. During the change, however, Norman seems to black out. The last chapter of Psycho is mostly dedicated to the analysis of Norman’s psyche. Here the reference to the term of multiple personality finally occurs and the reader eventually recognizes the twist. Sam, who was engaged with Mary, Norman’s first victim, reports the result of the psychiatric test conducted by Dr. Steiner to Lila, the sister of Mary: “According to Steiner, Bates was now a multiple personality with at least three facets. There was Norman, the little boy who needed his mother and hated anything or anyone who came between him and her. Then, Norma, who could not be allowed to die. The third aspect might be called Normal – the adult Norman Bates, who had to go through the daily routine of living, and conceal the existence of the other personalities from the world.” (P 198-9; my emphasis, italics in original text)

Although Sam here reflects on “three facets” and a “third aspect” of Norman, which all three have lived inside him, the single facets/aspects are also referred to as personalities. Throughout the novel, these personalities are indeed presented as very distinct and competing single entities. Such a presentation is the clue to the twist ending, as the reader, at least theoretically, is not aware that the Mother is merely a hallucinatory evil personality within Norman’s mind. In reality, of course, the reader or moviegoer most probably knows the story, just another Jekyll/Hyde-syndrome as an “autogenetic” text, to cite again the term by Joyce Carol Oates (Oates 1995: 198). One may have never read it, but may know it somehow. In the end, the Mother personality is victorious. In the text, however, Sam explains the characteristics of such facets/aspects: “‘Of course, the three weren’t entirely distinct entities, and each contained elements of the other. Dr. Steiner called it an unholy trinity.’” (P 199; my emphasis)

The unholy trinity is actually displayed as three different personalities: a) Norman, the dull outside, who seems to be “kind of an odd one” (P 152) as he is unstable, childish and frightened; b) Mother/Norma, who, as the killer, represents the evil side and in her opinion can eventually successfully blame Norman for the killings; c) the middle stabilizer side, the Normal personality, who is in charge of cleaning everything up and controlling everything as well as analyzing the crime. The Normal personality wants to overcome the domination of the Mother personality, but fails. The contrary personalities – reflecting possible but not confirmed former experiences – Norman and Norma/Mother are constantly fighting each other. Norman, however, always seems to be split into two, or at least has evil parts inside himself. He reads about abnormal psychology, has the hobby of stuffing animals, and is evil even be-

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fore he identifies with the mother. In reality, he has killed her and her lover then conserves his mother’s corpse and adopts the Mother personality as he is unable to cope with a solitary life. The Mother personality, however, is on the one side the leading figure for him. On the other side, he needs to be prevent her from being discovered. Officially, Norman is well aware of the fact that his mother has died. The plot begins with Norman sitting in the parlor reading a book on an ancient Inca tribe and their cachua, a victory dance around a dead human victim, whose body is used as a drum (P 5).25 When Norman hears a noise, he rises hastily because he believes his mother may detect his strange readings (P 3). Thus, the mother already works as a correctional force inside Norman, trying to control him: “He could tell now that she was going to be difficult” (P 7). Norman’s feelings about the macabre ritual are his private pleasure: “Norman smiled, then allowed himself the luxury of a comfortable shiver. Grotesque but effective – it certainly must have been!” (P 5, italics in original text). When Mother later kills Mary and detective Arbogast, she is also effective, but the Norman personality is frightened. The third-person narrative treats Norman and his imaginary second self, Mother, on the same level. Therefore, the reader believes the Mother to be a real character: “Actually, he was aware of the footsteps without even hearing them; long familiarity aided his senses whenever Mother came into the room. He didn’t even have to look up to know she was there.” (P 6)

According to the narration, dialogues between Norman and Mother can be conducted just as between real persons.26 The relationship between Norman and the dominant and restrictive Mother is therefore presented in such a dialogical structure with Norman constantly referred to as “boy”. In fact, Norman is already forty years old and the Mother personality can clearly analyze her boy’s real problem: “You make yourself sick” (P 8). Norman cannot hold his ground against Mother: “‘That’s the real reason you’re still sitting over here on this side road, isn’t it, Norman? Because the truth is that you haven’t any gumption. Never had any gumption, did you, boy? Never had the gumption to leave home. Never had the gumption to go out and get yourself a job, or join the army, or even find yourself a girl – ’ ‘You wouldn’t let me!’ ‘That’s right, Norman, I wouldn’t let you. But if you were half a man, you’d have gone your own way.’ He wanted to shout at her that she was wrong, but he couldn’t. Because the things she was saying were the things he had told himself.” (P 8-9)

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Robert Bloch is hence citing a ritual, which could refer to the Cthulhu myth his idol horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft created, with whom Bloch also corresponded (David 2000: 218). The film version of Alfred Hitchcock offers the different voices of Norman and his mother. The mother, however, has no body left and only re-lives through Norman’s mind (Chion names it Acousmère, Chion 1992: 197).

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The boy Norman seems to be imprisoned – “all the familiar objects in the room, suddenly became hateful just because of long familiarity; like the furnishings of a prison cell” (P 9) – but he is not able to escape. “Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed” (P 9), muses Norman. Norman seeks to explain to Mother his sense of connection with her. He quotes from a theory he has read in another book on abnormal psychology: the Oedipus situation (“those filthy things you used to read”, P 11): “‘But I was only trying to explain something. It’s what they call the Oedipus situation, and I thought if both of us could look at the problem reasonably and try to understand it, maybe things would change for the better.’” (P 11-12)

Mother merely claims that he is “a Mamma’s Boy” (P 12). Norman – not aware of the fact that he is fantasizing Mother’s voice in his head – has no power whatsoever. Everything he tries to hide Mother knows already: “I know what you are thinking, Norman. I know all about you, boy. More than you dream. But I know that, too – what you dream” (P 12). In such a way Norman and Mother work very coconsciously. The Mother personality, the Sally or Mr. Hyde personality, however, still has control. Although Norman tries “to remember” (P 13) by telling himself “she is an old woman” (P 12; italics in original text displaying the inner monologue of Norman), his struggle to overcome her dominance just begins – and eventually fails. Mother fixes everything, and also in the end, blaming the crime on Norman. The crime of killing people is triggered by a young woman called Mary. She is the personified desire within Norman. However, such a desire, which he tries to keep private, wakes Mother’s controlling personality. The possible threat of another woman as the center of Norman’s sensuality has to be extinguished. Next to Norman, the text also uses other characters as a focalizer. The later victim, Mary, is introduced as what appears to be a major protagonist only to be killed during the famous shower scene by Norman dressed as Mother. Mary herself seems to be split into different levels of consciousness. She is the patient girl, who is waiting to marry Sam (“she thought of herself as being so calm, so cool, so composed”, P 27), and consequently adapts to societal patterns; but she is also a thief, acting on impulse: “Yes. It was true. All of us go a little crazy at times. Just as she’d gone crazy, yesterday afternoon, when she saw that money on the desk” (P 41). Her clean Mary side also needs “to remember” (P 14) what the emotional Mary side did. As a result, Mary herself feels shattered: “Looking at herself in the big mirror and seeing this drawn, contorted face peering back at her. She’d thrown something at the mirror, and then the mirror broke into a thousand pieces and she knew that wasn’t all: she was breaking into a thousand pieces, too.” (P 17)

Mary reveals what Norman always tried to hide and therefore embarrasses him. As Mary is an outsider, who does not know about the actual death of Mrs. Bates, Norman can tell her about his mother. He speaks bluntly with Mary: “I tell myself that she’d be lost without me, now – maybe the real truth is that I’d be even more lost without her” (P 36). When Mary calls the old mother, who forbids Norman to “han-

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dle firearms” (P 37), to be maybe better off in an asylum, Norman’s Mother personality surfaces for just a moment: “’She’s not crazy!‘ The voice wasn’t soft and apologetic any longer; it was high and shrill” (P 38). The Norman personality does not seem unable to remember, he does not want to remember, although he can very well analyze his situation: “Yes, I stopped her, I was to blame for that! You don’t have to tell me about jealousy, possessiveness – I was worse than she could ever be. Ten times crazier, it that’s the word you want to use” (P 39). The text very clearly mentions the inability “to get near a woman” (P 40) or to accept advances, even only mentally. From a convenient distance, Norman can peep on Mary, who steps into the shower, but he cannot possess her entirely. His reflection on such an inability only exposes the reason: “Because you’re impotent” (P 50), an exclamation of Mother. A desired relationship with Mary only provokes Mother who still resides in the Victorian house, physically as a dead, preserved body as well as a spirit and secondary personality: “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill the bitch!” (P 47).27 And this is what she does, killing the “bitch Mary”, the nasty girl, who is cut into pieces by Norman when the Mother personality takes control. To disguise the crime, Norman must again rely on Mother, who murders the detective Arbogast. Both victims are thrown into a swamp, behind the house when Norman is in his state as the “normal” personality, the inner self-helper and coordinator. The presentation of distinct personalities is clear both in the novel and the film adaptation. Such a presentation is essential to misleading the reader or moviegoer in order to create the final twist ending. If you believe two people to be entirely two people, how could you know that one of them is only imagined? You are simply not supposed to know it. In the novel, the Norman personality and the Mother personality are, as argued before, clear opponents. After the murders, it is Norman who wants to “outsource” the crime, that is, he claims not to be responsible for it: “Mother had done that to him. Mother had done that to the poor, helpless girl. She had taken a butcher knife and she had hacked and ripped – nobody but a maniac could have committed such an atrocity. He had to face facts. She was a maniac.” (P 68; italics in original text)

By claiming not to be responsible, Norman “outsources” Norma as the responsible force. He doubles himself, to use a term by Robert Lifton mentioned in Nazi Doctors (1986).28 On the term of “doubling”, Straub wrote in The Roots of Evil. The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence:

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Again, and beautifully displayed here, houses symbolize the minds of the protagonists. The mother is connected with the old house, Norman to the more modern motel. The corresponding images of the film version are clear, especially the frightening camera movement toward the dark Victorian house, situated on top of a hill, belonging to the mother world. Robert J. Lifton allegedly also worked for several institutes as well as the American Government to develop brain-washing programs, so-called “Mind Controls” (cf. Reichert 2008: 84-85). On brainwashing see also The Manchurian Candidate (1959).

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“Lifton [in Nazi Doctors 1986] asks how the Nazi doctors could do what they did and at the same time (some of them) show kindness to inmates, treat prisoners who were pressed into work as doctors with professional courtesy, and go home to be kind husbands and fathers. His answer is that the Auschwitz environment forced them to adapt. They did so by doubling. This is a process whereby two opposing selves are created, one of which is responsible for evil. The two selves seem encapsulated, walled off from each other to avoid internal conflict […] Doubling is an appealing concept and may accurately describe some perpetrators.” (Straub 1989: 143)

As Straub continues to criticize such a doubling automatism, he rightly confirms that in the case of the Nazi doctors one important aspect is not covered, the pleasure of doing what they were doing as they were convinced of it in terms of ideology and a rewarding dictatorial power system: “It suggests, however, that human beings are incapable of such evil while acting out their ‘ordinary’ selves. It suggests that the killers acted independently of or contrary to their ordinary selves […] But they were not ‘uninvolved persons’ as they were ‘ideologically committed Nazis.’” (Straub 1989: 143-4)

For Norman again, such a clear split is not exact. It is convenient to blame Mother (and the novel as well as the film version certainly show the competing forces). Norman is co-conscious and co-aware, although not entirely aware of Mother as imagination. This is even unimportant, Mother is a dominating part whatsoever. But Norman, as functional multiple, can easily switch from one state to the other, the different personae are clear and distinct (the film version shows Anthony Perkin’s changing facial expression in close up when his frightened Norman changes into the controlling Normal, it also shows a vague figure in the mother disguise). Killing another human being is forbidden, although Norman has the ability to feel attracted to such crimes (as his books on abnormal psychology suggest). Consequently, Norman has to get rid of Mother, the killer, the insane, just as Mary had suggested: “Maybe he wouldn’t even have to do that much – anyone who saw Mother, listened to her wild story, would know she was crazy. And then they’d lock her up, lock her up in a place where she didn’t have a key and couldn’t get out again, and that would be the end.” (P 68)

But Mother will not surrender. When Norman Bates is interrogated by a psychiatrist and held at a police station, the Mother personality takes over completely. She struggles to appear innocent and blames the crimes in an inner monologue to Norman, the boy (“The bad boy was dead, instead, and that was as it should be”, P 202), and the bad man: “But all she did was watch. The bad man had really committed the murders and then he tried to blame it on her. Mother killed them. That’s what he said, but it was a lie.

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How could she kill them when she was only watching, when she couldn’t even move because she had to pretend to be a stuffed figure, a harmless stuffed figure that couldn’t hurt or be hurt but merely exists forever.” (P 203)

Norma also claims to be not responsible for the crime. And Norma will exist forever; she is not only the killer of Mary and Arbogast but also of Norman, the boy and the adult Normal, who has unsuccessfully tried to start a revolution against her. Norma is the Mr. Hyde and Sally side; like Mr. Hyde she is successful. Whereas Norman initially has to use alcohol in order to let her come out (“That’s what he needed – a drink; P 46), Norma later needs to come up even without the help of a drug – remember how Jekyll first evoked Hyde, who in the end was able to overwhelm the other side, Jekyll, his creator. Norman or Normal, however, are both unable to handle the situation, it is Norma who has to help: “Nothing helped, because he was what he was, and that wasn’t enough…If there was going to be any help at all now, it would have to come from her… ‘All right,’ Mother said. She didn’t seem surprised at all. ‘We’ll take care of this. Just leave everything to me.’” (P 122)

This is a statement within Norman’s mind, and Norman is well aware of his inability to control the situation. The desire to conserve and maintain – Norman’s hobby is taxidermy (P 37) – the dominating mother environment, which serves at the same time as helpful control center, is symbolized not only by the very body of the mother but again by a house metaphor: “Usually, even when a house is old, there are some signs of alteration and improvement in the interior. But the parlor she peered at had never been ‘modernized’ (P 33). Within the house, the room of the mother, the décor of this room “is still alive” (P 183), and its “floral wallpaper, the dark, heavy, ornately scrolled mahogany woodwork” (P 33) evaporates the only sustainable energy. Within it resides Mother, who will still and exclusively exist even in Norman’s body: “She was the only one left and she was real” (P 203). The plot therefore seems to reverse the beginning. While the first chapter shows Norman as the focalizer, the last chapter enters the mind of Norman who now has become only and exclusively Mother, the then remaining person and focalizer left who is enjoying her victory over the boy and body.

11.4 R ICHARD C ONDON : T HE M ANCHURIAN C ANDIDATE (1959) There is one thing that most of these novels of the 1950s on multiple personality have in common: the dominating mother figure. She needed to be aggressive, attacking and even threatening. Some succeeded in the end. Norman Bates was deleted in order to set the Mother personality free. Elizabeth Richmond eventually subordinated to herself to please her aunt Morgan, a substitution mother figure. When the novel The Manchurian Candidate was finally made into a movie in the year 1962, president J.F.

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Kennedy instantly asked “Who is going to play the mother”.29 In the novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959) by Richard Condon, it is the mother figure again, who manipulates the son, Raymond Shaw, in order to create the perfect assassin.30 Besides this view on evil mother figures, one major topic of The Manchurian Candidate strongly reflects not only the era of the Cold War but even the very notion of post-9/11 USA. The war on terrorism, as the Bush administration called it, provoked threats by terrorists and introduced such expressions as “homeland security” as well as the “patriot act.” Former President George W. Bush stated in the National Strategy for Homeland Security in 2002: “We are today a Nation at risk to a new and changing threat. The terrorist threat to America takes many forms, has many places to hide, and is often invisible.”31 Like the Boston bombers from April 2013, the thread comes from inside the nation similar to the plot of the psychological TV series Homeland (produced in 2011 by Fox for the channel Showtime showing an American soldier who was supposedly brainwashed by the enemy). In fact, the terrorist threat in The Manchurian Candidate is also invisible, it comes from a programmed American resident who is in the end ineffectively brainwashed and later unintentionally functional: in the end the manipulators are the victims, so stability is restored again. The Mr. Hyde side evoked here could not be controlled completely (also according to the very nature of the other side). The term ‘brainwashing’ was popularized by the journalist and CIA employee Edward Hunter and dates back to 1951 when the cooperation of American prisoners during the Korean conflict was revealed (cf. Marks 1991).32 The idea of brainwashing refers to procedures of hypnosis and torture in order to activate “killing machines” or “create human automatons” (Spanos 1996: 49):33 “Supposedly, such long-term programs of brainwashing can produce human robots who respond automatically to posthypnotic cues, develop a slavish loyalty to their torturers, adopt the

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See inside commentary printed on the DVD edition of the film. John Frankenheimer. The Mancurian Candidate. München: Süddeutsche Zeitung Cinemathek. The mother was played by Angela Landsbury. Richard Condon. The Manchurian Candidate. New York: Penguin Books, 1959; hereafter abbreviated MC. See ‹http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/nat_strat_hls.pdf› for the National Strategy for Homeland Security 2002. Web. 14 Sept 2009. See also Edward Hunter’s book on brainwashing published in the year 1958 (Hunter 1958). Paul McHugh refers to The Manchurian Candidate motive in his book on psychiatric concepts on dissociative identity disorders as social constructs Try to Remember (2008). He describes a case of a woman, who later was able to sue her therapist and thus went down in the history of False Memory and MPD as a hoax (Burgus vs. Braun, see also Acocella 1999). Her therapist “told her he could turn her into a ‘killing machine’ responsive to coded messages, such as depicted in Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate. All communications with her family in Iowa were stopped when she received a Valentine card from one of them” (McHugh 2008: 116).

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beliefs of the cult, and exhibit amnesia for whatever the cult leaders wish them to forget.” (Spanos 1996: 49)

Following the dual or multiple personality pattern of Jekyll/Hyde or Miss Beauchamp/Sally, such human robots would be independently functioning with Mr. Hyde or Sally impulses. In the case of The Manchurian Candidate, it could be predetermined and controlled (cf. Harriman 1942). The narrative of the novel – an omniscient third-person perspective – itself never loses such a control, and interestingly the name of dual or multiple personality is never mentioned explicitly, although the inner split is obvious. The implantation of certain ideas into the mind was already mentioned in the year 1873 by Liébeault, who wrote: “An idea induced during artificial somnambulism becomes a fixed idea and remains unconscious after awakening…More than that, while the mind is occupied with the daily actions of normal life which the subject accomplishes consciously and of his own will, some of the ideas suggested in that former passive state continue their hidden movement. No obstacle can hinder them in their fatal course.” (cited in Ellenberger 1970: 149)

In order to establish such a hidden side and thus induce a fatal course, Raymond Shaw, the main protagonist of the novel, undergoes several levels of brainwashing, as the enemy – Chinese and Usbek psychiatrists – begin “the complex work on the reconstruction of the sergeant’s personality” (MC 37). To understand the “deepest wellsprings of human behaviour” (MC 38) is the essential approach: “Conditioning is based upon associative reflexes that use words or symbols as triggers of installed automatic reactions “(MC 38). Dr. Lo, who is demonstrating his influence on Raymond by making him kill two fellow soldiers, thus develops his theories: “Yen Lo approached human behaviour in terms of fundamental components instead of metaphysical labels. His meaningful goal was to implant in the subject’s mind the predominant motive, which was that of submitting to the operator’s commands; to construct behaviour which would at all times strive to put the operator’s exact intentions into execution as if the subject were playing a game or acting a part.” (MC 38)

Such an approach to human behavior succeeds in making the patrol of nine American soldiers, who were captured in order to be brainwashed and given a “mental massage” (MC 40). They believe “that they were leveling off on a Sunday night after a terrific three-day pass from a post forty minutes outside of New Orleans” (MC 39). The “possessed internal weakness” of especially Raymond gives him “incredible strength for an assassin” (MC 46). The most shocking scene in the novel, the first dreamlike sequence in the later film version, demonstrates the power of such an assassin when Raymond kills his fellow soldiers: “Yen [Lo] nodded to Raymond, who pulled at either end of the white scarf with all the considerable strength of his long arms and deep torso and strangled Ed Mavole to death among his

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friends and his enemies in the twenty-first year of his life, producing a terrible sight and terrible sounds” (MC 56) “Apologizing for presenting his back to the audience, Raymond then shot Bobby Lembeck through the forehead at point-blank range.” (MC 57)

Such a controllable behavior is the result of various impacts on the human mind, Lo further explains. The experimental subject needs to be influenced by drugs and tests (MC 52), which produces artificial memories, for example, to forget the actual treatment. The doctors are thus “multiplying Raymond” (MC 51). The contrast of outside behavior and inside impulses or feelings, however, applies both to Raymond and his mother. The importance of role acting according to the most efficient self-presentation and thus manipulation of the environment and society is stressed throughout the novel – by Raymond’s interacting with people and his mother’s control of him and her pretending to embody the perfect politician’s wife. Hence, Raymond’s original characteristics make him the perfect target of being himself manipulated. He is, in Dr. Lo’s words, “a man of melancholic and reserved psychology…At the core of his defects is his concealed tendency to timidity, sexual and social, both of which are closely linked, which he hides behind that formidably severe and haughty cast of countenance” (MC 49). As Raymond is himself torn between his super-ego and his id, to adopt Freudian terms here, he can be easily manipulated. Dr. Lo therefore analyzes: “His soul has been rubbed to shreds between the ambivalence of wanting and not wanting; of being able and unable: of loving and hating; and…his feeling lives like two brothers, at one and the same time Siamese twins and deadly enemies.” (MC 50; my emphasis)

The first chapter – with Raymond as focalizer producing a stream-of-consciousness34 – reveals Raymond’s capability to control his action while internally opposing them: “I am playing the authentic war buddy so deeply that I will have to mail in a royalty check for the stock rights” (MC 11). Beneath his kindness and his self-analytical inner perception of his role acting, the unconsciousness hides the killer instinct. Such an instinct is not meant to surface: “The critical application of deep suggestion was observed during the first eleven hours of immersion when the primary link to all future control was set in. To this unbreakable link would be hooked future links that would represent individual assignments which would motivate the subject and which would then be smashed by the subject’s own memory, or mnemonic apparatus, on a pre-signaled system emanating from the first permanent link. At the instant he killed, Raymond would forget forever that he had killed.” (MC 53; my emphasis)

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The characterization of Raymond in the beginning is not that of a very amiable person. The inner monologues reveal Raymond as a cold and manipulating person. However, it is important to know that this Raymond is already the Mr. Hyde existence and thus not at all likeable. Beyond this Hyde side the real Raymond, the original Raymond endures.

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In order to trigger Raymond’s installed killer instinct of, a “suggestions of supreme authority” is needed, which is symbolized by an “ordinary deck of playing cards” (MC 54). The cards are necessary to suggest playing solitaire, which means to get ready for the next killing. The final trigger then is the queen of diamonds (MC 55). The queen of diamonds herself is certainly personified by Raymond’s mother: “‘The queen of diamonds, in so many ways reminiscent of Raymond’s dearly loved and hated mother’” (MC 244), explains Dr. Lo. After divorcing Raymond’s father, whom she was not able to launch into an important political position let alone that of the president of the USA, Eleanor Shaw focuses on John Iselin, whom she can control easily (“Johnny Iselin had agreed with everything she said”, MC 72). Her extreme ambition (“I have to lead Johnny”, MC 142) of producing a man of importance next to her had already shown as a young woman: “Her ambition was an extremely distressing condition. She sought power the way a superstitious man might look for a four-leaf clover. She didn’t care where she found it. It would make no difference if it were growing out of a manure pile.” (MC 70)

Eleanor’s control of John – she maintains “a remarkable hold over Johnny” (MC 74) – eventually turns him into a weakling: “The truth is that the marriage was never consummated. Johnny, that old-time mattress screamer and gasper, although throughout his life quite capable of getting and giving full satisfaction with other women, found himself as impotent as a male butterfly atop a female pterodactyl when he tried to have commerce with Raymond’s mother.” (MC 74)

Johnny, the “caricature of a pious man” (MC 74), is also supplied with drugs by Eleanor. She is, as queen of diamonds, the control center of the manipulation. Even Eleanor as an early matured girl is presented as such a manipulation when Condon suggests a possible incest with her father: “She had loved her father with a bond so secret, so deep, and so thrilling that it surpassed into eternity the drab feelings of the other people…and she would slip out of her long woolen nightdress and wait for the warmth of him and the wonder of him” (MC 77). While the manipulative mother attempts to maintain her control on Raymond, two former wartime comrades of Raymond’s unity suffer from the same nightmare. During their dreams, the same images reappear again and again: “Of the nine men left from the patrol that had won Raymond the Medal of Honour only two had nightmares with the same awful context. They were separated by many thousands of miles and neither knew the other was suffering through the same nightmares, scene for scene, face for face, and shock for shock. The details of the nightmares and the rhythm of their recurrence were harrowing.” (MC 118)

Reliving their brainwashing procedures, however, they cannot detect the real meaning of these nightmares. Raymond’s friend Marco is investigates the fantasies (“remember the dreams while he was awake”, MC 119) and is eventually convinced of Raymond to be manipulated but he is eager to assure Raymond of such a suspicion.

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“‘They are inside your mind. Deep. Now. For eight years…all the other things they were going to do inside your head and have already done from inside your head.’(MC 225)…They made you into a killer. They are inside your mind now, Raymond, and you are helpless. You are a host body and they are feeding you.” (MC 225-226; my emphasis)

Nevertheless, triggered by the playing cards and the queen of diamonds, Raymond successfully commits his first murder without hesitation and fully concentrated. After the murder, Raymond has no memory at all, his evil side is constantly under control. Even when he is trying to be over accurate (“two minutes late”, MC 133) and nervous, simply mentioning “solitaire” can regain total power over him (MC 134). When the ordinary Raymond side hears of the murder, he is “distraught” (MC 147): “He had had great regard for the old man and fondness that was unusual inasmuch as he felt fondness for only two other people in the world, Marco and Jocie, and Jocie should not be included in the category because the feeling for her was vastly different again.” (MC 147)

Jocie is the love of Raymond’s youth, whom he later secretly marries. The affection toward women makes the difference clear between Raymond in his original state and the Raymond after the brainwash. While Raymond I could not even kiss Jocie (“You never even kissed Jocie, did you, Raymond”, MC 224), Raymond II contacts prostitutes (“He bought the sex he needed”, MC 110). Marco himself perceives his own oversexed behavior, which has been planted inside the soldier’s mind just to amuse the manipulators and operators, who supervise and trigger each murder: “‘One of their guys with a big sense of humour thought it would be a great gag to throw you a bone for all of the trouble they were going to put you to, and fix it up inside your head so that, all of a sudden, you’d get interested in girls, see?’” (MC 225)

When Jocie by mistake becomes the eyewitness of Raymond shooting her father, she is also killed instantly. “Jocie came into the room saying, ‘Daddy, what is it? What is it?’ Just as Raymond shot him. A hole appeared magically in the Senator’s forehead…He shot her without moving from the left hand.” (MC 272)

Raymond, the killer automaton, suddenly has feelings of grief, he cannot understand: “He could not control his grief any longer but he could not understand why he wept. He could not see. Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss.” (MC 272)

Working with his grief, Eleanor forces Raymond to fulfill the main task: “We may reply now, my dearest, for what they have done to you, to me, and to your lovely Jocie” (MC 278). While Raymond is in his seemingly controlled second state, Eleanor thinks she can reveal to him, without endangering herself, who she really is: “I told them to build me an assassin” (MC 279). Eventually, Raymond who is meant to kill the current president of the United States to make Johnny, who is running for vice-

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president, next head of the state, does not do what he is supposed to do. Instead he breaks loose and shoots his mother and Johnny. The brainwashing can therefore free his unconscious will of deleting his dominant mother. No trigger is needed or, to be more precise, the trigger helped Raymond to realize his deep inner wishes. Such hidden desires – namely to get rid of the over-manipulative mother – were mentioned already earlier in the novel: “All the cameras were strewn about in the grass while everybody waited for the President to arrive. Raymond wondered what would they do if he could find a side-arm some place and shoot her through the face – through that big, toothy, flapping mouth? Look how she held Johnny down. Look how she could make him seem docile and harmless.” (MC 64)

The separateness of Raymond I and II is not complete. He can remember his acts of killing and he interprets them correctly as an act of crime, making him even realize that he was the killer of his beloved Jocie. Consequently he turns the weapon on himself and commits suicide: “They backed up on the catwalk as he came toward them, and then they heard the third shot sound inside the booth – short, sharp, and clean. No electric chair for a Medal of Honour man, Marco said…listening for a memory of Raymond for the faintest rustle of his ever having lived, but there was none.” (MC 299)

In Raymond, the separateness of the forces are not outsourced as clear entities or persons. Yet the experiment of brainwashing intends to create an alter Raymond who is totally controllable from the outside by certain authorities. The novel, the film versions of 1962 and 2004 alike, evoke the fear of an artificial secondary personality with supervised abilities beyond the manipulated individual’s control. It is the same fear Dr. Jekyll has of the autonomously functioning Mr. Hyde.

C ONCLUSION In the four novels presented here as examples of fictional multiple personalities and dissociation, the texts clearly displayed distinct persons interacting with or counteracting each other. Also they showed mental states that are totally separate and thus uncontrollable. While the female character in The Bird’s Nest (1954) is revealed as a split individual and thus shown torn apart in a repressive society, which is ruled by authoritative figures, the second female character in Beast in View (1956) will only reveal her real dividedness in a final twist dictated by the rules of suspense crime thrillers. Multiple personality again is represented in terms of separate personalities, although imagined, but also experienced as different persons. The first fictional male character, Norman Bates in Psycho (1959), consists of a tripartite character divided into Norman, Norma and Normal. The text shows him and his secondary states as distinct people opposing and competing with each other. Then again, these are only revealed in a twist ending. The second male character in The Manchurian Candidate

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(1959) is presented as being brainwashed and therefore manipulated. The interest of the reader lies in the question whether the manipulation is successful or not; the mental condition is mentioned and psychologized. All texts featured separate and externalized forces, represented as distinct personalities or people. Although The Bird’s Nest (1954) suggests that Morton Prince’s concept of multiple personality as internal disintegration or identity fragmentation, the conclusion is that there are indeed several distinct people inside one body (similar to Prince’s sensational case of Miss Beauchamp). The outsourced forced – artificially created during hypnosis or by brainwashing techniques or deriving from inner mysterious mental conditions – cannot be controlled. They act on their own, just like Mr. Hyde. Consequently, the other side is also understood as an evil force beyond control.

12 Further Divisions: Subgenres of Multiple Personality and Dissociation Fiction since the 1970s Hank makes the world safe. He is a good and loving husband and father. He is one hundred different versions of himself, and only one of them is a killer. SHERMAN ALEXIE FLIGHT 2007: 58

The establishment of multiple personality and dissociation within fictional texts representing distinct personalities and externalized – mostly evil – forces is managed by several usages of the other side within a fictional character. Dealing with an uncontrollable and mostly unmanageable other side can be presented in different forms. These may be classified into several subgenres of multiple personality and dissociation that display certain differences concerning the task of the other side and hence its representation in the texts: 1. Fictional texts show the other side as the devil inside, referring to a force inside as originally coming from the outside. Thus, the other side is an outside threat, it is foreign, the embodied Other, which is totally uncontrollable in terms of psychology. The example here used is The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty. It actually revolves strongly around psychological theories of dissociation, which, however, cannot explain the actual problem of demon possession presented in the novel. 2. Fictional texts also show the other side as the spy inside as presented by The Manchurian Candidate (1959) and other examples of the spy thriller genre. Thus, the other side is an inside threat, artificially manufactured by authorities with the help of brainwashing or drugs. This other side needs to be controllable and functioning, although the action this artificial side takes is beyond the experiences of the brainwashed person. The example here used is A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick and other references.

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3. Fictional texts also present the other side as the killer inside in thrillers such as The Beast in View (1956) and Psycho (1959). The other side is an inside threat, outsourcing the evil impulses, which are uncontrollable and conceived as other persons. The example used here is “Secret Window” (1990) by Stephen King, which presents the other side as an imagined other person, who is seemingly an outside threat but who actually derives from within. 4. Fictional texts also show the other side as the protector inside, referring primarily to the psychological theory of dissociation as a mental mechanism to cope with traumatic experiences. In this form the other side is an inside mechanism, psychologically triggered and externalized also in terms of total embodiments into other persons. The example here is K-PAX (1995) by Gene Brewer, which is written in a dialogical form presenting sixteen therapeutic sessions. This subgenre signifies the pure form of MPD/DID fiction as it distinctly refers to the psychological mechanism according to the dissociation theory. All these clearly distinguishable subgenres of multiple personality and dissociation fiction will be described in more detail below. It is noteworthy that they still and mainly represent the inner split mostly with externalized or outsourced other sides as distinct persons pointing to the prototypical popular notion of the stronger definition of MPD as overt phenomenon, although newer examples might include a reference to DID now (which again is mostly defined by the stronger MPD definition in the fictional texts and films). This is represented nevertheless with the concept of dissociation that is depicted as final twist of a fragmented mind which is actually one fragmented mind of one person. Yet the fragmentation, as differentiated in the named subgenres, functions in terms of outsourcing and comprehends the split as autonomous entities beyond control.

12.1 T HE “D EVIL I NSIDE ”: D ISSOCIATION AS D EMONIC P OSSESSION In his exceedingly successful novel The Exorcist (1971), author William Peter Blatty confronts the reader with a possessed character, the young American girl Regan.1 An evil demon, which originally comes from Northern Iraq, misuses Regan’s body and soul to commit his devilish acts. When the healthy and average and all-American pre-teen Regan first is possessed by a demon named Pazuzu, severe changes of her appearance and behavior can be observed. The cause of this change, however, is considered by Regan’s single mother to be a medical problem; she believes that there must be some kind of a strange disease that merely needs to be treated. Regan’s mother, to whom the author refers to as Chris, and several physicians and specialists struggle to find the appropriate diagnosis. Nobody, of course, at first believes in a

1

William Peter Blatty. The Exorcist. 1971. New York: Corgi Books, 1971; hereafter abbreviated E.

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demonic possession. Later, after initial efforts seem to have no effect, such a suspicion is raised almost purely because no other rational medical or psychological explanation (“temporal lobe”, E 111) remains. On such rational grounds, the apparent mood changes of Regan lead to the possibility of a dissociative mind as the doctors try to find an appropriate interpretation of the symptoms. The girl speaks in tongues, other foreign languages and uses vulgar words to offend her mother and the doctors. As the demon cannot be seen by instruments or X-ray equipments, any form of medical examination is inadequate. Consequently, it is Regan’s psyche which has to be the cause of her mood changes and misbehavior: “‘Then hysteria, maybe,’ offered the consultant. ‘I’ve thought of that.’ ‘Sure. But she’d have to be a freak to get her body twisted up like she did voluntarily, now, wouldn’t you say?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I think it’s pathological, Sam – her strength; the paranoia; the hallucinations. Schizophrenia, okay; those symptoms it covers. But temporal lobe would also cover the convulsions. There’s one thing that bothers me, though…’ He trailed off with a puzzled frown. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Well, I’m really not sure but I thought I heard signs of dissociations: ‘my pearl’… ‘my child’… ‘my flower’… ‘the sow’. I had the feeling she was talking about herself. Was that your impression too, or am I reading something into it?’ Klein stroked his lip as he mulled the question. ‘Well, frankly, at the time it never occurred to me, but then now that you point it out…He grunted thoughtfully. Could be. Yes. Yes, it could.’” (E 111; my emphasis)

The neurologist explains to Regan’s mother that “there haven’t been more than a hundred authenticated cases of split personality, Mrs. Mac-Neil. It’s a rare condition” (E 112). Regan’s exceptional body convulsions and odd contractions (“her body upward into an impossible position”, E 110) can, in psychiatric terms, also be explained by a dissociative mind, as “pathological states can induce abnormal strength and accelerated motor performance” (E 112). Earlier in the novel, an imaginary playmate is described, a Captain Howdy. Regan also first mentions him as chasing her, forcing her body to perform impossible tricks. Regan’s mother describes the scene: “She’d been sitting in the kitchen, Chris told the doctors, when Regan ran screaming down the stairs and to her mother, cowering defensively behind her chair as she clutched Chris’s arms and explained in a terrified voice that Captain Howdy was chasing her; had been pinching her; punching her; shoving her; mouthing obscenities; threatening to kill her. There he is! She’d fallen to the floor, her body jerking in spasms as she gasped and wept that Howdy was kicking her. Then suddenly, Chris recounted, Regan hat stood in the middle of the kitchen with arms extended had begun to spin rapidly ‘like a top’, continuing the movements for several minutes, until she had fallen to the floor in exhaustion.” (E 114)

The scene reveals another side of Regan that raises her mother’s suspicion: “It was like she was someone else” (E 115). After another attack, the mother is relieved to recognize the real self of her daughter again: “‘Oh, Rags, you’re back! It’s really

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you!’” (E 121). Regan herself feels the possession but cannot explain the experience. For her, the imaginary friend could be the reason: “‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘I don’t know why he does it to me.’ Tears rolled down from her eyes. ‘He was always my friend before!’/‘Who’s that?’/‘Captain Howdy! And then it’s like somebody else is inside me! Making me do things!’” (E 121). After Regan mentions Captain Howdy, a psychiatrist tries to hypnotize her and within a very short time, Megan is transferred in to this altered state of consciousness (E 122): “‘Extremely suggestible,’ the psychiatrist murmured. Then he spoke to the girl. ‘Are you comfortable, Regan?’ ‘Yes.’ Her voice was soft and whispery. ‘How old are you, Regan?’ ‘Twelve.’ ‘Is there someone inside you?’ ‘Sometimes.’ ‘When.’ ‘Different times.’ ‘It’s a person?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Who is it?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Captain Howdy?’ ‘I don’t know.’” (E 122-3; my emphasis)

The psychiatrist tries to contact that mysterious person within Regan, as this person is also hypnotized by him and therefore forced to answer. Now the conversation with that person begins with Regan as medium. The demon not localized or named by anyone so far answers backwards. When asked who he is, he states “nowonmai” (E 123) thus stating “I am no one”. When asked where he comes from, he says “dog”, which means that he comes from God: “Dogmorfmocion” (E 123). The situation escalates; Regan acts violently and howls like a wolf. After Regain eventually loses consciousness, “something unspeakable left the room” (E 125). In an effort to explain Regan’s condition, the psychiatrist refers to the term of multiple personality and dissociation: “‘We use concepts like ‘consciousness’ – ‘mind’ – ‘personality’, but we don’t really know yet what these things are…Not really. Not at all. So when I start talking about something like multiple or split personality, all we have are some theories that raise more questions that they give answers. Freud thought that certain ideas and feelings are somehow repressed by the conscious mind, but remain alive in a person’s subconscious; remain quite strong, in fact, and continue to seek expression through various psychiatric symptoms. Now when this repressed, or let’s call it dissociated material – the word ‘dissociation’ implying a splitting off from the main-stream of consciousness – well, when this type of material is sufficiently strong, or where the subject’s personality is disorganized and weak, the result can be schizophrenic psychosis. Schizophrenia means a shattering of personality. But where the dissociated material is strong enough to

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somehow come glued together, to somehow organize in the individual’s subconscious – why, then it’s been known, at time, to function independently as a separate personality; to take over the bodily function.’” (E 127; italics in original text)

The concept of dissociation is therefore the most rational explanation. Regan’s behavior is consequently referred to as hysteria. Dissociation seems to be “the paramount feature here, even multiple personality” (E 128). Psychoanalytically speaking, the girl seems to feel guilty as her parents separated earlier and therefore experiences a kind of “conversion hysteria” (E 128). The psychiatrist’s interpretation suggests a problem with Regan’s mind: “‘…assuming it is conversion hysteria stemming from guilt, then the second personality is simply the agent who handles the punishing. If Regan herself were to do it, you see, that would mean she would recognize her guilt. But she wants to escape that recognition. Therefore, a second personality.’” (E 128)

This second personality is therefore Regan’s Mr. Hyde, her Sally figure hence the other side. Regan’s other side, however, still remains mysterious. It is, of course, the evil demon, ancient and skilful. And such a second personality seems to be unusual, the psychiatrist admits. The “inside tragedy” (E 129) of the girl still remains unsolved. The story of The Exorcist, the novel as well as the cult movie, shares one feature with an important predecessor of multiple personality and dissociation in fiction or as a metaphor: the knowledge of the reader or moviegoer thus functioning again as an “autogenetic” story like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, to apply again the term used by Joyce Carol Oates (Oates 1995: 198). Almost everyone who reads or watches the horror story The Exorcist knows the twist, knows the reason in advance why Regan behaves so oddly, as indeed does almost everyone who has never read the novel or watched the shocking movie.2 While a reader of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) may have to finish the text to meet the other side of Dr. Jekyll, the reader (or moviegoer) of The Exorcist meets the demon from the beginning and knows more than the fictional characters within in the story who surround the possessed Regan. In a world of reason and Enlightenment, an artifact from religious convictions, a paranormal entity appears to be just not possible. This opposition of epistemology and reason versus ancient superstition may be one aspect of the novel and the film. Yet in the prologue to the novel, the spirit called Pazuzu is introduced. He is the demon who comes from Northern Iraq, inadvertently released during archeological excavations. Father Merrin, on the first pages merely referred to as “the old man in kakhi”, knows that something extraordinary is going to

2

The film version (1973) clearly visualizes the demon, or rather a theatrical Mephistopheles figure, whereas the novel offers detailed theories of the split mind and the mechanism of multiple personality and dissociation. On the several film versions of director William Friskin’s classic horror blockbuster see Arnzen’s essay “There Is Only One” (Arnzen 2004).

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happen: “He knew. It was coming” (E 17). It is the demon from Iraq trying to invade the United States via a pre-teen American girl, literally the total opposite to each other (cf. Simpson 2008).3 While Father Merrin foresees the danger and therefore really believes in the demon’s power, all other characters have yet to find their belief in the existence of evil. This evil, however, can only be overcome by the belief in God and his mercy, and the vixtim can only be healed by way of this religious awareness. Only the devout priest and trusting catholic can offer a solution. Thus, Benjamin Szumskyj concludes in his introductory notes in American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty (2008): “What the Exorcist has achieved then, is the re-evaluation of the relationship humanity has with God and the explanation of the concept of good and evil in a manner that does not purely rely on the sayings of an institution and its interpretation of reality. Rather, it relied on the overwhelming evidence that exists before us but that we sadly choose to ignore.” (Szumskyj 2008: 4)

The psychiatrists, strictly rational in the beginning, however, even share such a belief with the religious characters, the priests. After being unable to explain Regan’s condition on medical terms, they suggest a somnambulistic disturbance of the mind. It is a type of disorder seen almost only “among primitive cultures. We call it somnambuliform possession” (E 161). Such delusion can only appear if the sick person strongly believes in that condition. It can be caused by almost anything, such as “alien intelligence; a spirit” (E 161). The hostile second personality behaves “malevolent, always hostile toward the first” (E 161). But such a condition can still only occur if the person believes in possession, it is therefore “autosuggestive” (E 163) transforming the spirit into a real entity. Dealing with questions of belief, the specialists advise an exorcism. If the person concerned really has faith in the exorcism, the second personality or demon can disappear.4 While the exorcism of Regan is performed because of her alleged somnambuliform possession, it is in fact the regained faith of a priest that finally eliminates the demon. Father Karras, priest and psychiatrist, has lost his faith and is only certain about his doubts (E 55). His inner voice thus reveals that there is “room for doubt. Always room. Interpretation” (E 239). The misery of poverty, the sickness of his old

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Philip L. Simpson’s most interesting essay on the constellation of a demon from Iraq in the Middle East, which seems to threaten the United States, can be read as “a metaphor for mainstream American anxiety about the assimilation of Arab and other Eastern influences into the middle classes” (Simpson 2008: 27-28). Thus the demon is connected to an ethnic Other as well as a supernatural (29). Note that Dr. Morton Prince also tried an exorcism with Miss Beauchamp: “Putting my finger to her forehead, I made her believe I had the power of exorcism” (Prince 1906: 137). Henri Ellenberger also referred to demon possession as the cause of multiple personality before psychological reasons pointed to a more rational explanation (Ellenberger 1970: 13).

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mother, and the circumstances of her lonely death (“He should never have left her”, E 54) lead to a considerably depressive mood. Dealing with his doubts and feelings of guilt, Regan’s mother consults the skeptical man in order to carry out an exorcism. It is not the priest within Karras who accepts the necessity of the treatment, but the psychiatrist. The first encounter with Regan, now turned into a horrible creature, reveals his doubts. “You have no faith in me”, states the demon, and therefore no faith in god. A doubtful Karras is no danger: “They sent you! We have nothing to fear from you at all” (E 195). Now it is obvious that there is a demon struggling with “the Regan identity” (E 198) and “the demonic personality” (E 198) takes over not talking backwards but highly intelligible (“Regan’s precocity of intellect”, E 216). Still, Karras’ diagnoses a split personality (E 202). The atheist mother desperately seeks the healing through exorcism, the priest, in “a state of ignorance” (E 197), only accepts “mind over matter” or an “emotionally disturbed adolescent” (E 198). Karras explains the condition of Regan while in shock caused by the first encounter with the changed girl: “‘Seventeen billion cells…we see that they handle approximately a hundred million messages per second; that’s the number of sensations bombarding your body. They not only integrate all of these messages, but they do it efficiently, they do it without ever stumbling or getting in each other’s way. Now how could they do that without some form of communication? Well, it seems as if they couldn’t. So apparently each of these cells has a consciousness, maybe, of its own. Now imagine that the human body is a massive ocean liner, all right? And that all of your brain cells are the crew. Now one of these cells is up on the bridge. He’s the captain. But he never knows precisely what the rest of the crew below decks is doing. All he knows is that the ship keeps running smoothly, that the job’s getting done. Now the captain is you, it’s your waking consciousness. And what happens in dual personality – maybe- is that one of those crew cells down below decks comes up on the bridge and takes over command. In other words, mutiny.’” (E 203; my emphasis)

The features of Regan’s sickness, however, may conform to the pattern of a demonic possession. Karras therefore needs to check with The Roman Ritual5, in which the priest finds each symptom and can compare it with that of the patient. Karras develops other doubts, may Regan really be possessed? After examining Regan again, who almost changed entirely into a strange creature with horrible features, Karras still believes to have recognized two more distinct personalities within Regan (E 228), one of them a gibberish character.6 This occurs only under hypnosis including a character

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The Roman Ritual is used as a manual for the signs of demonic possession. The Catholic Church still refers to it. It may be the daughter of Karl, the German servant of Chris. The demon imitates people around him. Karras’ suspicion was that Regan was imitating several people she once met or was told about, like Karl’s daughter, who actually talks gibberish. The reader, being confronted with Regan’s possession by a demon and also by real people, that could just as well be imitated, is offered possibly different views of the real causes of Regan’s behavior. Perhaps she is really faking it, maybe because of the separation of her parents

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named Dennings, after a British protagonist, who died earlier in the novel under mysterious circumstances. Dennings, the reader assumes, may have been killed by the demon. However, Karras fears an exorcism could enforce the development of the symptoms and even make the patient believe in her possession. Consequently, this could lead to a reinforcement of the syndrome. In Karras’ inner struggle between the priest and the psychiatrist sides of him the medical practitioner still prevails. It is his belief in medical explanations (E 235) such as the dual personality which produces different voices on tape recordings (E 238). Despite the foreign tongues and the stigmata, Karras still has doubts about an actual possession: “Fraud. Conscious or unconscious. Still fraud” (E 239) and “that’s just what it is, hysterical imagining. And yet…” (E 243). At the end of the third part of the book called “The Abyss” (E 185-264), Karras contacts the bishop who refers him to the experienced Father Merrin. He was the “philosopher-paleontologist” with a faith of his own. “His books had stirred ferment in the Church, for they interpreted his faith in the terms of science, in terms of a matter that was still evolving, destined to be spirit and joined to God (E 270).7 Father Merrin recognizes the demon Pazuzu as soon he meets the possessed girl. The exorcism needs to be performed without hesitation (E 277). “This time,” the demon tells Merrin, “you are going to lose” (E 280). It is Karras, still believing in multiple personality, who wants to inform Merrin about the case: “‘I think it might be helpful if I gave you some background on the different personalities that Regan has manifested. So far, there seem to be three.’ ‘There is only one,’ said Merrin softly.” (E 283; my emphasis)

There is merely the demon, and there is father Merrin. It is a contest between the two (E 289). There is only one, Merrin says. It is the demon he recognizes (E 293). The reason of possession, the very purpose, the author Blatty lets Merrin explain, may only be the love God feels for the humans.8 The point is “to make us despair” and to “see ourselves as ultimately bestial” (E 293), which may be the unconscious fears of our own devilish side that we interpret as being the reason why God may not be able

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(“This crisis could bring them back together”, E 241) or because of her successful mother, who is a movie star. Of course Regan is not intended to be a fake character in the end. She certainly is the innocent girl being possessed by a real devilish demon. This is the twist. The demon is real. The demon already mentioned Merrin. Karras transcribes recordings of the demon which reveals Merrin’s name. Merrin and the demon are therefore recognized as acquaintances and rivals. It is a personal struggle. Merrin “happens” to be around when Karras contacts the bishop. The demon may have followed Merrin, or Merrin may have followed the demon. When Merrin enters the house for the first time, the demon is aware of his presence and calls out his name. Merrin also mentions his repeated encounters with the demon (E 293). A similar explanation is offered by the blockbuster film Constantine (2006) about a paranormally gifted detective who captures demons.

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to love humans. Everything the characters may try to eliminate in their consciousness in order not to deal with the guilt they may feel is personified by the demon. The guilt hunts them as the demon hunts them and as the priests hunts the demon. “Won’t you face the truth, stinking scum”, shouts the demon when imitating Karras’s mother, whom he fears to have left dying alone without her son (E 298). “Why you leave me to die all alone, Dimmy?”, the demon asks with the voice of the mother hitting Karras’ deepest feelings of guilt (E 298). The demon’s intention here seems to unveil the unconscious or very consciously repressed fears or to pointedly address the bad conscience raging inside the humans. The demon himself is acting just like a multiple personality by imitating persons he once met or are known to the people around him. One time he is howling like a wolf, another time he is Dennings: “Then Denning appears” (E 298). The demon therefore is not entirely and solely himself but multiple, acting on different levels (vocabulary, intelligence, character traits or states of consciousness). Regan behind him is only able to shimmer through his appearance, the Dennings character with sophisticated British accent, the gibberish girly character, Karras’ Italian mother and finally the core demon who speaks different languages fluently like Greek, Latin or even German.9 The subject of demonic possession as a predecessor of multiple personality or the experience of dissociation as “the devil inside” has been influential ever since the novel and movie The Exorcist (1973) were released. The reason why the novel is of significant interest is the focus on the research of Regan’s symptoms. The novel deals in considerable detail with medical and psychological explanations, although the author primarily intended to display a case of demon possession.10 Ignoring the reason of Regan’s behavior for the moment (whether she was really possessed, whether demons are believed to exist and what philosophical opinions are shown by the possible existence of the evil in our world), there still remain the symptoms. These symptoms are those of dissociation. The fifth edition of the DSM also includes dissociation as such an “experience of possession” in the definition of DID (APA 2013: 292). In the novel The Exorcist (1971), the reader is clearly confronted with several distinct personality states which are given names, such as Dennings. Therefore, the novel is an excellent example of displaying dual or even multiple personality. The reader is confronted with such theories even more than the recipient in the cinema, who will watch a horror movie with special effects. The evil is displayed effectively and distinctly in the movie. Already in the first scenes in the house the audience is presented with the devil’s face in brief cuts to a Mephistopheles figure; after all this is still

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As different American novels use German phrases, it is notable here that Blatty spells German correctly. The reader of the novel, however, may as well believe there might be another explanation. The detailed medical and psychiatric theories concerning demonic possession, dual personality and dissociation may indicate this. The movie, however, definitely and undoubtedly shows the devil’s face and appearance.

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nothing more than the image humans obviously share when referring to “the Devil”. The final scene explicitly shows a devilish vision displaying green eyes. His evil spirit wanders from Regan to the priest Karras, and finally it is clear – at least in the director’s cut of the movie – that Karras has regained his faith because of the presence of the Devil and is thus able to inhale the spirit. His suicide possibly ends the devil’s existence.11 The topic of demon possession as a variation of multiple personality disorder is also shown in the case of a German woman who allegedly was possessed with a demon spirit and who died after an exhausting exorcism. The parents and the priests were held responsible for her death.12 Anneliese Michel was born in 1952 into a Catholic family. Between the age of 16 until her death in 1976 at the age of 23, she had experienced severe psychiatric symptoms. Her disturbances are now said to be those of epilepsy, but were interpreted as signs of demonic possession. Consequently, an exorcism ritual was felt to be the cure. Tape recordings of Anneliese’s voice during those sessions prove the brutal character of the exorcism performed on her.13 The case still remains mysterious and her grave in Klingenberg am Main in Germany is still a place of pilgrimage for Catholics. Two film versions were produced from her story: an American and a German version. These two films are of interest concerning the display of demon possession as multiple personality. While in the American version the possessed woman is clearly linked to the tradition of performing multiple personality syndrome, the German version is much more cautious. What kind of differences can be shown here? The American version of Anneliese Michel’s story is the movie by Scott Derrickson called The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005). It was promoted as “based on a true story” and became a huge success. The movie focuses on a trial against a priest, who performed an exorcist ritual with a girl named Emily Rose. During the movie it is made clear that mysterious incidents may lead to the conclusion that evil demons really exist and that the existence of evil, here within a human being, again leads to the conclusion that the mercy of God also exists; the priest therefore did no more than his duty. Flashbacks show Emily’s strange symptoms and the exorcism, which result in her death. The movie also focuses mainly on horror shock elements and confronts the audience with Emily being possessed by six supernatural demons. During the exorcism, Emily is able to escape her room, where she was tied to her bed. These scenes are closely related to scenes the audience already knew of the film The Exorcist (1973). In the central scene of the movie, one finally learns about the six demons in-

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Accordingly, the devil dies with Karras and is therefore conquered. The first version of the movie did not clearly state such an end of the evil spirit, a fact that may have helped to create a legion of exorcist movies. Blatty himself wrote a sequel to The Exorcist named The Legion (1984) (cf. Arnzen 2004). The court sentence was lighter than most observers of the case expected. The priests and the parents were found guilty of negligent homicide. These tape recordings are still available online. See ‹http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Anneliese_Michel›. Web. 9 Aug 2009.

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side of Emily. In a ramshackle barn, Emily finally displays the different spirits inside her: “[Priest]: Tell me your name, wicked one! [Emily]: [counting quickly from one to six in English] [Priest]: He who commands you is he who ordered you thrown down from the highest heaven into the depths of hell. In the name of our lord, Jesus Christ, I now command you: Tell me your name! [Emily]: [counting quickly from one to six in German] [Priest]: Hear, therefore, and fear, Satan, enemy of the faith. Give me your name, demon! [Emily]: Names! Names! [counting quickly from one to six in a foreign language] [Priest]: Ancient serpents, depart from this servant of God! Tell me your six names! [Emily]: [In foreign languages in a dual voice] We are the ones who dwell within! I am the one who dwelt within CAIN! [Hebrew] I am the one who dwelt within NERO! (Latin) I once dwelt within JUDAS! [Greek] And I was with LEGION! [German] I am BELIAL! [Assyrian Neo-Aramaic] And I am LUCIFER, the devil in the flesh! [English]” (chapter 19)14

The different voices and screams of the possessed Emily nearly sound like the recordings of Anneliese Michel’s exorcism and clearly relate to them. During the spectacular scene, emphasized through dramatic music, the wind theatrically howls and Emily’s face changes into a monster’s appearance with glowing eyes in the dark. The strange voices of Emily even mention the name of Lucifer himself. Nearly all demons are recorded in the Bible. According to the movie the supernatural may really exist. The apparition of the Virgin Mary convinces Emily to scarify her life in order to make people understand that if the evil is so apparent within her body, the love and power of God also exists. The supernatural setting of The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) is contrasted by the German movie version in 2006 called Requiem. The film by director HansChristian Schmid also based the story on Anneliese Michel’s exorcism, but focuses almost exclusively on the distress of a young woman named Michaela Klinger who is torn between her deeply Catholic family and the promises of the Hippie era. Her life in provincial Southern Germany and her struggles as a student is endangered by unexplained symptoms such as epileptic seizures and depressive moods. She attempts to find her independence, but eventually fails. Her bigot mother, whom she never

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Cain and Abel are the first and second son of Adam and Eve. In the Bible they are mentioned in Genesis 4:1-16. Nero (37-68) is well known as persecutor of Christians. He was emperor of Rome. Judas belonged to the original apostles of Jesus, whom he is said to have betrayed. The demon or demons Legion are mentioned in Mark 5:9 and Luke 8:30. In Mark 5:9 Jesus asked a possessed man “What is thy name?”, and the man answered: “My name is Legion, for we are many.” Belial is a demon in the Bible characterizing the worthless (in the Hebrew Bible, he is mentioned, for example, in Deut. 13:13). Lucifer is the name given to Satan in the Christian belief (Isiah 14:3-20) and refers to him as a fallen angel.

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seems to have pleased in her life, only turns to her daughter when Michaela finally admits to be possessed by the devil. The exorcism itself, however, and the deadly outcome is not shown at all. It is Michaela’s slow gliding into madness, her rebellion against a conservative family, the incapacity to meet the demands of her life as a student, her poor health and her refusal to swallow pills against epilepsy that is the central motive of the movie. The narrow-mindedness of Michaela’s environment eventually leads her into a situation she cannot possibly escape. While her friends at the university try to help her, she refuses a medical or psychiatric diagnosis and returns to her family, where she will ultimately become the victim of an exhausting exorcism.15 There is not a single drop of blood in this movie, whereas The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) makes extended usage of special effects and focuses mainly on Emily’s horrible appearance and screaming. While in Requiem (2006), the desperate protagonist only once mentions her doubts about her identity and her fear of losing herself, Emily names her six distinct demons. Requiem is more a personal tragedy filmed in Dogma style that almost gives the impression of a documentary rather than a fictional story.16 While Emily finally sacrifices herself and her body in order so safe the whole world and all human beings so that people may realize the existence of a merciful God (something the film so clearly mediates in a melodramatic manner), Michaela only seems to accomplish the expectations of her devout but unemotional mother. The real tragedy of someone who believes and is believed to be possessed by evil spirits is much more convincing in Requiem as it shows all everyday experiences and the fear of losing one’s bearings. The sensationalism of The Exorcism of Emily Rose by contrast only functions as another horror movie. In terms of multiple personality syndrome, the audience is clearly referred to distinct evil demons within Emily. By comparison, the unknown and satanic part of Michaela is also connected with societal change, the struggle for identity and the inability to detach herself from the parental home and its values. The societal references in The Exorcist (1971) display the fear of a changing Western world, which is confronted with ancient Eastern devilish and therefore uncontrollable forces. An innocent girl, untouched literally by any possible ideologies, is condemned to be inhabited by an outside threat. Other examples of possible demon possession and psychological theories of repression and dissociation are Brent Monahan’s The Bell Witch: An American Haunting (2000; film version by Courtney Solomon in the year 2005 with an emphasis on sexual abuse by the father) and Justin Evan’s novel A Good and Happy Child (2007) as well as the movie Jennifer’s Body

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Beside the voice recordings of Anneliese Michel, there are also photographs of the dying girl to be found in the Internet. These pictures show a shockingly starved woman. The term “Dogma” refers to a filming technique that aims at presenting fictional scenes almost as realistically as if they were documentary scenes, with a minimum of artificiality, for example, by not using excessive make-up or special effects. Thus the cinematic style seems like a direct observation of the scenes, which focus on psychological experiences of the protagonists. On the “dogma 95” technique see Mette Hjort (Ed.). 2003. Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95. London: BFI Publication.

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(2009), to name just a few. An example of alien possession and experienced multiplicity is Stefanie Meyer’s bestselling mainstream novel The Host (2008).

12.2 T HE “S PY I NSIDE ”: D ISSOCIATION IN S PY T HRILLERS If the individual and his very own consciousness are manipulated by an institution in order to create false identities, the manipulated mind finds itself in a state of total loss of control. Raymond Shaw in the thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1959) by Richard Condon experienced such a loss of inner integrity when a killer identity was built into his mind. “False consciousness is a bad state to be in”, argued Ian Hacking in Rewriting the Soul (Hacking 1995: 256); a loss of control certainly is. Manipulation in order to create the perfect agent or assassin points to another genre of multiple personality: the multiple spy thriller. The protagonist’s threat is derived from an artificial split inside, which creates false identities. Such identities need to be controllable and functioning, as states or institutions seek to bring the perfect mental Frankenstein into being. The inability for the manipulated to gain control over their lives and identities is another feature of the multiple spy thriller. Either the agent attempts to set his mind in order again, like in Legends (2006) by Robert Littell and in Mosaic (1999) by John Maxim, or the separation of artificially installed identities is total and the loss of mental control definite. Such a loss of identity is described in the science fiction thriller A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick.17 The fragmentation not only occurs within the protagonist Bob Arctor, whose second personality is an undercover agent named Fred, but also within fragmented societal structures.18 The multiple spy thriller thus not only focuses on the internal personality split and disconnectedness but also on the interaction of individual and society as well as its underlying political structures. Bob Arctor, who is less and less able to differentiate his Bob identity from the Fred identity, eventually becomes Bruce. He is the near brain-dead automaton who is trapped in his nopersonality-at-all body prison: “There is little future […] for someone who is dead. There is, usually, only the past. And for Arctor-Fred-Bruce there is not even the past; there is only this” (SD 210). In A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick refers to autobiographical experiences of drug abuse during the 1960s. In the author’s note, Dick explains how such experiences caused a mental destruction, which again punished the users “beyond belief” (SD 218). Similar to the drug induced dissociation of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Dick’s protagonist Arctor/Fred/Bruce – “Arctor-Fred-Whatever-Godknew” (SD 21) –

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Philip K. Dick. A Scanner Darkly. London: Orion House, 1999 [1977]; hereafter abbreviated SD. Such a fragmented societal structure is meant when the citizens are divided into the drugaddicted “dopers” and the ordinary people called “straights” (SD 20); the “undercover narcotic agents” (SD 17) are opposed to the drug dealers.

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is split into separate personalities after consumming the drug ‘Substance D’.19 The isolation the drug produces also symbolizes the isolation from one’s inner self: “a vague blur and nothing more” (SD 15). Bob Arctor, who is also an addict, is turned into the undercover agent Fred, whose task it is to detect the drug production and its dealers. The society in the novel is portrait as mainly paranoid. Therefore, the identity of the agents is hidden because of possible double agents, who could undermine the police. The agents thus wear protective covers of so-called “scramble suits” with technical membranes that transform the agents into neutral beings.20 As the Bob Arctor personality – this is certainly a telling name referring to the noun actor (“In the script being filmed, he would at all times have to be the star actor. Actor, Arctor, he thought”, SD 106) – is officially drug addicted, Substance D can produce the final damage. Being the neutral Fred in the scramble suit, his task is to observe the suspect Bob Arctor; a constellation which creates the situation of self-observation that eventually leads into a blur of self- or selves-identity. Fred is supervised by medical specialists, who check on Fred’s growing brain damages. In the third-person narratives with mainly Arctor/Fred and finally Bruce as focalizer, several insertions such as Goethe’s Faust (“Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! In meiner Brust…”, SD 145; italics in original text), which interrupt the fluidity of the text, point to the major topic of human duality and the neuro-damage phenomenon of double brain. Hence, it is symbolized by such a split narrative structure: “Within the apparently meaningless lines is a familiar object that we would all recognize. You are to tell me what the… Item. In July 1969, Joseph E. Bogen published his revolutionary article ‘The Other Side of the Brain: An Appositional Mind.’ In this article he quoted an obscure Dr. A. L. Wigan, who in 1844 wrote: The mind is essentially dual, like the organs by which it is exercised […] – (1) That each cerebrum is a distinct and perfect whole as an organ of thought. (2) That a separate and distinct process of thinking or ratiocination may be carried on in each cerebrum simultaneously. In his article, Bogen concludes: ‘I believe [with Wigan] that each of us has two minds in one person. There is a host of detail to be marshaled in this case. But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance to the Wigan view: that is, the subjective feeling possessed by each of us that we are One. This inner conviction of Oneness is a most cherished opinion of Western Man…’

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The name Substance D. stands for “Dumbness and Despair and Desertion, the desertion of your friends from you, you from them, everyone from everyone, isolation and loneliness and hating and suspecting each other. D…is finally Death. Slow Death” (SD 19-20). The scramble suits consist “of a multifaced quartz lens hooked to a miniaturized computer whose memory banks held up to a million and a half physiognomic fractionrepresentations of various people […] The wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him – or her – was meaningless” (SD 16).

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‘…object is and point to it in the total field.” (SD 86; my emphasis to highlight the interrupted sentence).

The total division of mind is finally reached when Arctor/Bob suffers from a ‘split brain syndrome.’21 The inner disconnectedness thus impedes a distinction of identities: To himself, Bob Arctor thought, How many Bob Arctors are there? A weird and fucked-up thought. Two that I can think of, he thought. The one called Fred, who will be watching the other one, called Bob. The same person. Or is it? Is Fred actually the same as Bob? […] I’m the only person in the world that knows that Fred is bob Arctor. But, he thought, who am I? Which of them is me? (SD 75; italics in original text) “‘Aw,’ Fred said, and swiveled back to his holos. Oh goddamn, he thought, that day Barris gave us the tabs at the roadside – his mind went into spins and double trips and then split in half, directly down the middle.” (SD 132) “This is awful, he thought, thinking about this. Not Arctor as suspect but Arctor as…whatever. Target. I’ll keep on watching him; Fred will keep on doing his Fred-thing; it’ll be a lot better; I can edit and interpret and do a great deal of ‘Let’s wait until he actually’ and so on…” (SD 133) “And then the other side of his head opened up and spoke to him more calmly, like another self with a simpler message flashed to him as to how to handle it.” (SD 135; my emphasis)

Now the Fred personality in the scramble suit is put on the person Bob Arctor (“He always had a strange feeling as to who he was”, SD 20) thus observing himself. The surveillance cameras record Arctor’s interaction with his friends and his nearly lover Donna. Fred – watching himself as Arctor recorded on “holo-tapes”, which produce the pictures on the dark scanners – eventually cannot distinguish his identities anymore as the drug causes severe brain damage: “‘The most dangerous kind of person,’ Arctor said, ‘is one who is afraid of his own shadow’” (SD 102). Such damage, which finally produces the third identity Bruce, was intended in the first place without Bob Arctor’s knowledge, as the double agent Donna herself works for the government (SD 186): “Donna said, ‘I think, really, there is nothing more terrible than the sacrifice of someone or something, a living thing, without its ever knowing. If it

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The phenomenon of the split or dual brain is also subject of an article about the medical cause for Dr. Jekyll’s separation into two distinct personalities (cf. Stiles 2006). In A Scanner Darkly, the medical specialists explain the phenomenon of the split brain as follows: “Damage having taken place in the normally dominant left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is attempting to compensate for the impairment. But the twin functions do not fuse…” (SD 168). Thus “it is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror” (SD 169).

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knew…’” (SD 203).22 The Bruce identity enables the police to smuggle him into rehab centers, called “New Path”. It is there where Bruce finally discovers the production of Substance D. The substance is derived from the blue flower mors ontologica – “Death of spirit. The identity” (SD 202) – which is even cultivated within the rehab centers. But Bruce may not be able to communicate his discovery (SD 217), he may only observe what he discovered: “The dead…they are your cameras” (SD 210).23 Further variations on multiple personality and dissociation within the mind of an agent or spy are the spy thrillers Mosaic (1999) by John Maxim and Legends (2006) by Robert Littell.24 Both thrillers were published explicitly as MPD (not DID) novels of the after-Sybil area. Whereas Philip K. Dick refers to the phenomenon of split brain syndrome, Mosaic and Legends depict MPD as the cause for inner fragmentation and identity blur. In John Maxim’s Mosaic, a New York Times bestseller, the government develops a special program (“The Chameleon Project”, M 32) to create the perfect assassin: “Grayson hesitated, but he opened the binder. His eyes fell on the title page. It read, ‘The Uses of Multiple Personality Disorder.’ Grayson scanned a few pages. He tried to hide his dismay. The report dealt with turning MPD, a crippling mental illness, into some sort of military asset.” (M 18)

Just like a Manchurian Candidate, such an assassin needs to be controlled by both the government and himself as he develops a “‘functional’ MPD” (M 32). The author explicitly mentions the controversy (“pop psychiatry”, M 28) around it – “I’ve read some studies on the subject of multiples. That mechanism probably doesn’t exist because the disorder itself is delusional. What you see is no more than subconscious role-playing by people who have come to believe that they’re multiples” (M 19) - only to conclude that in his novel so-called “natural multiples” are the target for certain brainwashing projects. The specialist Dr. Zales is controversial himself as he manipulates patients on the one hand and benefits from publishing bestsellers on MPD. On the other hand, he declares in a later book that all alternate personalities are fake (M 38ff.). He himself functions as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein, whose method includes hypnosis, drugs and the means of “Recovered Memory Theory” (M 36). Such memory therapy, RMP, works on repressed traumatic memories.

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Donna herself feels split into two levels: “I am warm on the outside…but inside I am cold all the time” (SD 204). There is, however, a glimpse of hope as Bruce picks up the flower and keeps in his damaged mind, hopefully at least, to show it to his friends at the rehab center. The very last sentence reads: “A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving” (SD 217). John Maxim. Mosaic. London: Piatkus, 1999; hereafter abbreviated M; Robert Littell. Legends. New York: Overlook Press, 2005; hereafter abbreviated L.

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For the government program, however, the so-called “Mosaics” (M 39) are important. This term refers to “those multiples who’d been multiples since birth” (M 39). The dissociation of the individual minds – artificial or natural – is total, thus a creation of actual multiple personalities with distinct and complex features are constructed: “Consider this, Roger, from your own perspective. Each of these people Teal is studying has as many as four distinct personalities. They’re apparently able to call on them at will. What if you had four or five of your own when you were on these deep cover assignments? Imagine not just pretending to be someone else. Imagine becoming that person.” (M 19; italics in original text)

The natural multiples (“It was one of her male alters. Her only male alter”, M 43) are co-conscious and are therefore communicating with each other. Each personality is displayed in the text as a talking character. In the spy thriller Legends (2005) by bestselling author Robert Littell, the topic of multiple personality is also directly mentioned when identities are “fabricated” (L 33). MPD here is again the method by which an agent functions. There is no hint to its renaming as DID. Instead, MPD as fragmentation into distinct personalities is referred to as the underlying cause for the protagonist’s depression and identity search: “You have a very original take on MPD” (L 36). This quest for the original identity occurs because the CIA and a special “Legend Committee” (L 60) invents several identities – called legends and incarnations – in order to send the agents on different missions. Martin Odum, who is such an agent, seeks to uncover his original name as he mixes up the several legends inside his mind.25 In the first-person narrative, he muses: “In my new incarnation I was supposed to be something of an expert on the subject, the person I was becoming…” (L 33). Each of the legends is provided a résumé with name, country of origin, family life and occupation as well as habits such as smoking or prejudices against the other sex: “Once the committee had decided on the name, the rest of the cover story fell neatly into place” (L 61). The latter characteristics – consumption of cigarettes, how women are treated – are, however, the only features which may differentiate the legends, although they also have individual skills. Fortunately, the most appealing legend eventually uncovers a hidden and repressed traumatic event and is therefore able to install his original and core personality. Further variations on the multiple spy thriller are Robert Ludlum’s novels The Bourne Identity (1980) and The Bourne Supremacy (1986), which deal with repressed memory and amnesia concerning the original identity.26 A similar topic is displayed with the film Cypher by Vincenzo Natali (2001), in which an agent discovers his real identity next to a fabricated self.

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Other identities or legends are called Dante Pippen or Lincoln Dittmann. Sequels to Ludlum’s novels were written by Eric Van Lustbader: The Bourne Legacy (2004), The Bourne Betrayal (2007), The Bourne Sanction (2008), The Bourne Deception (2009) and The Bourne Objective (2010).

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12.3 T HE “K ILLER I NSIDE ”: D ISSOCIATION AS S ERIAL K ILLER S TORY Telling the story of a dual or multiple personality with a killer alter includes mainly a male character. The very nature of dissociation seemed to understand male patients in terms of violence (cf. Hacking 1995). Multiple personality was also popular as a “defense for male serial killers” such as “The Hillside Strangler” Billy Milligan (Showalter 1997: 163). Billy Milligan was tested and later treated by Cornelia Wilbur, Sybil’s very therapist, who explained his violence with an aggressive alter. The fragmented minds of protagonists in fictional works often have an alter with this kind of aggressive behavior or even a killer instinct, which then commits the crime while the core personality, often also functioning as the focalizer, is presented as innocent and ignorant of the killings. The personalities thus represent not merely parts of one mind, but they also understand multiple personality as creating distinct persons with different levels of consciousness. The narration of such stories offers a certain suspense level of a “whodunit” as the reader is usually not fully aware of a killer alter. Therefore, the revelation of a killer alter as actually being inside the mind of a character and not a separate other person serves again as the final twist. In the story collection Four Past Midnight (1990), thriller author Stephen King uses the genre of “the killer inside” as the final twist in “Two Past Midnight: Secret Window, Secret Garden”.27 The house metaphor28 is again widely stretched as the walls show cracks, symbolizing the fragmented mind of the protagonist. The thread originates from within; there is no outside danger as in the demonic possession examples. The trigger of the crack within is again a traumatic experience, in psychoanalytical terms a kind of primal scene actually when Mort catches his red-handed (SW 316). The center of the story develops around writer Morton Rainey who tries to overcome his writer’s block by retiring from the world into a secluded house at a lake. Haunted by the experiences of an upcoming divorce and the sexual unfaithfulness of his wife, he unknowingly creates a killer personality within his mind called Shooter, who eventually attempts to kill his wife. The shooter personality symbolizes not only Mort’s inability to go through with the killing, but also Mort’s unconsciousness and desire to get revenge. At first, Mort is not able to understand the Shooter personality as existing within himself. The reader is presented with Shooter as a real and threatening character in the story. Mort himself, trapped in a mental situation of delusion – King notes in the foreword that he was interested in the mental situation “when the window between reality and unreality breaks (King 1990: 303) – is confronted with Shooter as a possible threat of the “Crazy Folks”. As fanatical readers of his novel,

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King, Stephen. “Two Past Midnight: Secret Window, Secret Garden”. Four Past Midnight. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990. 303-483; hereafter abbreviated SW. Such references to the house metaphor occur, for example, with the small secluded house where the central protagonist Mort lives, which shows cracks in the walls or the former home he burns when he is the Shooter identity in order to eliminate places where Mort found his stability.

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such people could easily become stalkers. Shooter claims that Mort has stolen his very own story. The very beginning of the story presents the first face to face encounter:29 “‘You stole my story’, the man in the doorstep said. ‘You stole my story and something’s got to be done about it. Right is right and fair is fair and something has to be done.’ Mort Rainey, who had just gotten up from a nap and who was still feeling only halfway into the real world, didn’t have the slightest idea what to say. This was never the case when he was at work, sick or well, wide awake or half asleep; he was a writer, and hardly ever at a loss when it became necessary to fill a character’s mouth…He thought: This man doesn’t look exactly real. He looks like a character out of a novel by William Faulkner.” (SW 308; italics in original text)

Indeed, the man is called John Shooter, and he is a character out of Mort’s mind. In terms of a Faulknerian character it is in the film version that Shooter talks in a distinct Southern dialect. Shooter not only symbolizes the evil forces within Mort who cannot bear to lose the control over his love life, but also the personified guilt as Mort has built his success as a writer on plagiarism. Then again, it means that Mort has lost his control over his professional life. Such guilt of being a plagiarist (“because the first thing he’d felt when he read those three sentences was guilt”, SW 318) is only mentioned in the novel. The film version Secret Window, quite a successful production with Hollywood star Johnny Depp as Mort Rainey, merely focuses on the divorce and Mort’s desire to kill his wife. The murder takes also place only in the film version released in the year 2004.30 It follows the endings of the story, Shooter and Mort both wrote individually (which of course refers to Mort rewriting his own story as Shooter), and which are also given in the short story: “‘I know I can do it,’ Tod Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. I’m sure that in time all of her will be gone.” (SW 321; Mort’s version in his story called Everybody Drops the Dime) “‘I am confident I can take care of this business,’ Tim Havelock told them, and helped himself to another portion of beans from the brimming, steaming bowl. I’m sure that, in time, her death will be a mystery even to me.” (SW 321; Shooter’s version in “Secret Window, Secret Garden”; italics in original text)

Shooter’s story is typewritten, whereas Mort uses only “a screen-and-keyboard unit of his word processor” (SW 462). When Mort discovers the hidden Royal typewriter

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This personal encounter of the characters Mort Rainey and Shooter, however, is the result of the total split and separateness of the two components within Mort, his seemingly normal consciousness and his unconscious evil side. The film version is called Secret Window (2004) by director David Koepp, starring, as stated, Johnny Depp as Mort Rainey and John Turturro as Shooter (Columbia Pictures).

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in the study closet, he suddenly knows who Shooter really is: he is not real as a living person, but as an imagined character, a second self:31 “There was no John Shooter. There never had been. No, Mort said. He was striding back and forth through the big living room again. His headache came and went in waves of pain. No, I do not accept that. I do not accept that at all.” (SW 456; italics in original text)

But “all the pieces of the puzzle” (SW 456) point to a possible mental disturbance. Mort hears a voice inside his head telling him to be very sick (“You’re very sick. You’re a very sick man”, SW 458; italics in original text). Hence, Mort explains his behavior in terms of a multiple personality: “And, after an interval, the little voice asked quietly: Why did you do it, Mort? This whole elaborate and homicidal episode? Shooter kept saying he wanted a story, but there IS no Shooter. What dou You want, Mort? What did you create John Shooter FOR?” (SW 459; italics in original text)

Mort cannot remember any murder he committed earlier in the story: “Yes, but I don’t remember any of this, so how?” (SW 458), whereas Shooter is able to remember everything about Mort: “I know you, Mr. Rainey. That’s what matters” (SW 309; italics in original text). The secondary personality again is omniscient. The primary personality is ignorant, seemingly innocent. The film version clearly displays a multiple personality disorder. In the film scene when Mort eventually discovers Shooter to be the imaginative evil side of himself, actor Johnny Depp is seen as triple on the screen. Each Johnny Depp figure then has its own body language and can thus be differentiated: the core identity is still insecure and astonished, another figure displays his casualness. The three figures are now co-conscious and talk with each other, explaining the condition. Furthermore, this is symbolized as mental fragmentation through the expanding crack in the wall as well as Mort’s depersonalization when he looks into the mirror but only displays the image of his back so that on screen various images of the back view are presented. First,

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Stephen King even offers another supernatural twist. In the epilogue to the story, it is revealed through Amy, Mort’s divorced wife, that somebody else saw Shooter and his old car: “‘…but you could see right through him, and the car, too’” (SW 480; italics in original text) thus turning the plot into a possible ghost and evil spirit possession story. Therefore Amy states in the end that she believes Shooter to be real: “A character so vivid that he actually did become real” (SW 482). Such a real Shooter eventually leaves a message with a strange signature, which is not Mort’s: “Missus – I am sorry for all the trouble…” (SW 482). If Shooter really was real or a ghost manifestation, then he uses Mort’s body, as there is no Shooter body, who is trying to kill Amy, only the body of Mort (and his mind). There is, after all, Mort reflecting on himself as being Shooter. Therefore a split inside is taking place.

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the voice of Shooter is played offscreen, then Mort is multiplying on screen. The actor, who plays shooter, then appears telling Mort “to fix the ending”, which means kill his wife. As Mort is unable to commit the killing himself, Shooter explains, “you created me, so you wouldn’t have to” do the killing himself (chapter 25). The two sides within Mort – Mort and Shooter – now again meet with Mort being now aware of his alter ego. When Mort, in the film as well as in the novel, puts on the hat of Shooter, he becomes Shooter (“He called it his thinking cap”, SW 463) and hence is a very real threat to his wife Amy. While Mort claims to love his wife, he also realizes that Shooter hates her: “He loved her, all the same. It was Shooter who hated her. It was Shooter who meant to kill her” (SW 460). When Amy arrives, the reader knows that Mort is defeated; Shooter has now come up and controls everything: “The hand pulled the shade in Mort’s head all the way down and he was in darkness” (SW 460). Amy reflects Mort’s weakness of not being not able to recognize things (“stubborn…and sometimes almost hysterical”, SW 460) and discovers the word SHOOTER written all over the place. In the film version, Amy stands in front of a door, when the door closes the reading of the name Shooter transforms into the words “Shoot (h)er” explaining that Mort now intends to kill her. When Amy meets Mort in his Shooter mental state, she can hardly recognize him: “It was almost as if this was not Mort at all, but some stranger who looked like Mort” (SW 462). She instinctively recognizes the killer instinct which surfaces inside of Mort: “Mort would not kill her…Then she saw the look in his eyes and understood that Mort knew that, too. But this wasn’t him. She screamed and wheeled around and lunged for the door. Shooter came after her, bringing the scissors down in a silver arc.” (SW 464; my emphasis)

However, Amy is not killed in the novel but Mort is: “He was dead […] He, and whoever had been inside him at the end” (SW 467). The strange behavior of Mort then is finally explained in the epilogue with the theory of a split psyche mixing up schizophrenia and multiple personality, the latter of which is what is actually meant: “‘I know that Mr. Rainey had what was probably a schizophrenic episode in which he was two people, and that neither one of them had any idea they were actually existing in the same body. I know that one of them was named John Shooter.’” (SW 477)

It is Amy who goes on to explain the name of John Shooter and its possible origins: “‘He was two men […]. He was himself…and he became a character he created. Ted believes that the last same, Shooter, was something Mort picked up and stored in his head when he found out Ted came from a little town called Shooter’s Knob, Tennessee. I’m sure he’s right.

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Mort was always picking out character names just that way…like anagrams, almost.’” (SW 478)32

The creation of John Shooter, however, occurred to punish himself, claims Amy, who cannot realize the jealousy Mort felt because of her adultery (“Mort was no killer”, SW 461). Mort knows that Shooter is not only an inside threat because of plagiarism and possible suicide tendencies, but also an outside threat for Amy, whom he wanted to kill: “The last piece fell into place. It had occurred to him moments before in the study that he might have created a fantasy assassin because he lacked the courage to commit suicide. Now he realized that Shooter had told the truth when he said he would never kill Mort.” (SW 459)

Amy is convinced that not Mort but Shooter is the killer. She thinks that Shooter is even real. In addition, the personification of the Shooter personality is therefore so strong in the end, so that Stephen King even points to a supernatural manifestation of Shooter ’s ghost, who is able to write a note to Amy in his distinct style of writing: “I am going back to my home now, I got my story…” (SW 482). Shooter as the secondary personality of Mort is thus so prominent that he is not only inside of Mort’s mind but could also literally manifest himself. But more importantly, the killer inside acts beneath the core personality. The threat of an uncontrollable force as the externalized killer instinct is therefore “outsourced” so that the core personality may be presented as originally innocent and unable to commit such crimes. For a stereotypical presentation of the multiple personality killer, who is completely dissociated into several different persons, the example of Ted Decker’s bestselling thriller Thr3e (2003) is analyzed in the third part of this study. Other popular examples include films like Identity (2004) by James Mangold, Hide and Seek (2004) by John Polson, Mr. Brooks (2008) by Bruce A. Evans, and The Uninvited (2009) by film directors Charles and Tom Guard. These films confirm that the topic of the killer alter ego is predominant feature in movie productions.

12.4 T HE “P ROTECTOR I NSIDE ”: D ISSOCIATION AS C OPING M ECHANISM In Gene Brewer’s novel K-PAX (1995), a psychiatrist – called Dr. Gene Brewer – reports in a first-person point of view on his most interesting patient, who was referred to his hospital unit after the police picked him up at the New York Central station. This patient announces to be an alien from the planet K-PAX. As the identity of the patient is slowly revealed as Robert Porter, the patient insists on being an alien,

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Amy is right. Mort Rainey also tries to figure out how he created the name John Shooter. Accordingly “he did know where the name had come from, didn’t he? One half from the Southern man whose story he had stolen in college; one half from the man who had stolen his wife. It was like some bizarre literary in-joke” (SW 457).

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who will return to his planet on August 17th at exactly 3: 31 a.m. The alien personality calls himself prot (no capitals), who eventually is diagnosed by Dr. Brewer as a protective personality being part of a multiple personality disorder. It occurred after Robert Porter experienced a severe trauma. The Guardian described the novel K-PAX as a mixture of “Starman, Oliver Sacks, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.33 In fact, the novel as well as the successful film adaptation in 2001 by Iain Softley leaves some uncertainty on whether the protagonist is actually a multiple personality or even a real alien. But both interpretations – a possible alien possession or trauma and MPD – are presented quite strongly as supernatural facts slightly counter-playing the trauma-induced mental reaction of dissociation. The most probable interpretation, focalized and offered by the narrator Dr. Brewer, is the explanation of MPD. Porter’s prot identity, portrayed as a super intelligent savant, eventually disappears, leaving Porter in a catatonic state. His reaction is mainly presented in terms of trauma and common MPD. The novel, a mixture between a psychiatric case novel and a science fiction fantasy, is composed of sixteen sessions, which mostly resemble the conversation between the patient prot/Porter (only prot is able to talk) and Dr. Brewer. In fact, it is prot who reports on the philosophy of the planet K-PAX as an ideal world.34 The utopian view of such an alternative system, which is opposed to the human values on earth, is a central theme in the novel. Accordingly, a glossary at the end of the novel provides the explanation of the most important terms in the K-PAX universe together with general psychiatric vocabulary.35 The novel depicts the standard features of multiple personality: there is a trauma, which triggered the split of consciousness, the different personalities are distinct and even contrasting, the newly developed personality has a function (to protect from pain), one personality is unaware of the other whereas the other personality is omniscient, there are no limits to the nature of alters.36 Thus the psychiatrist explains: “It seemed to mean that prot’s delusion had begun extremely early in life; so early, perhaps, as to preclude a determination of its causative events. But suddenly I understood! Prot was a secondary personality, whose primary was the boy whose father had died when he was six!” (KP 131)

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See the book cover of Gene Brewer’s K-Pax (Brewer 1995). Further quotes refer to Gene Brewer. K-Pax. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2001 [1995]; hereafter abbreviated KP. Thus the two worlds in K-Pax resemble a similar image of two opposing worlds as shown in Ursula K. LeGuin’s science fiction novel The Dispossessed (1974). Examples of such a mixed vocabulary of both psychiatric terms and K-PAXian language are: “DELUSION – a false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fear; DRAK – a red grain having a nutty flavour; DREMER – a K-PAXian of prot’s species…” (KP 232). Such alters as already shown could also be from the other sex or animals, even aliens from outer space. There is a variety of stories about alien visitors or possession states with alien alters such as The Body Snatchers and so on (Spanos 1994: 148 ff.).

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Such a second personality, however, seems at first not very valid, as Dr. Brewer is reflecting on the other multiples in his psychiatric ward. Usually, these multiple are fragmented into many alters: “Maria suffered from multiple personality disorder. MPD begins to manifest itself in early childhood, as an attempt to deal with terrible physical or mental trauma from which there appears to be no escape […] Many of the victims harbor scores of distinct personalities, depending on the number and severity of the abusers, but the average is about a dozen, each of whom is able to ‘take over’ under certain circumstances. For reasons that are unclear, instances of a single alter ego are relatively rare.” (KP 86; my emphasis)

Thus, according to Dr. Brewer, such a single alter ego is not typical. Brewer therefore moves with the times as the post-Sybil condition showed usually a variety of alters.37 Yet he draws the right conclusion on the function of such alters: psychological protection. Such a protection is seen in the typical MPD case Maria whose primary self consequently “is seldom in evidence. Most of the time, one of the others is in charge as one of her ‘defenders’ or ‘protectors’” (KP 87). This is also the case with prot. Certainly the very name of prot refers to his function – the patient explains the pronunciation of prot which rhymes with goat – prot is the protector: “He calls me when something bad happens” (KP 132). The co-consciousness of prot and Porter is another feature of the patient’s later condition of multiple personality: “But now I knew he was in there somewhere and prot, apparently, could consult with him” (KP 132). Such conclusions are drawn when prot is under hypnosis. He is therefore highly suggestible, revealing the core existence of Porter, who is unable to face the trauma. Brewer’s attempt therefore is: “Could the host personality be hypnotized while the secondary alter is already under hypnosis?” (KP 182). The revelation of the trauma – Porter’s wife was raped and murdered, Porter catches the killer red-handed and strangles him to death – and the alternative universe of prot are subplots in the novel. While Four Past Midnight: Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990) by Steven King only places the mental fragmentation inside the mind, the novel K-PAX refers to a whole range of societal philosophical views on how social beings – extraterrestrial beings as well as humans – can interact and survive within their structured communities: “The subject then turned to those human beings who seemed most like K-PAXians to him. Here is what he said: Henry Thoreau, Mohandas Ghandi, Albert Schweitzer, John Lennon, and Jane Goodall.” (KP 139)

Despite the social interactivity of such individuals, prot offers another approach to the ideal interaction of the K-PAXians: no interaction at all. The independence of the

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The average number of alters were about sixteen in female patients (cf. Hacking 1995: 77).

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“beings” (KP 28) on the planet makes everyone a teacher, a pupil and everything all together at once also concerning work and play and so on (KP 29). According to prot, “no one ‘owns’ anything on K-PAX” (KP 67).38 Sexuality and love is consequently painful, and prot knows this as his host Porter has traumatic experiences of losing loved ones. Disconnectedness is prot’s possible solution. Thus, the alternative existence of prot also points to the other side of opportunities, which may have been available in theory yet are impossible in the end. Robert Porter without prot is unable to interact; he realizes his inabilities. The savant prot, contemplating about philosophy, astrology and physics, can protect Robert entirely. Robert has therefore created such a protector naming him clearly as what he is. In this sense, there is no alien needed to explain prot’s behavior. The convincing theories provided by prot not only enable Dr. Brewer, especially in the film version, to revise and reestablish his own shattered family structures, but also offer a positive outlook for the other patients in the hospital ward. The appeal of a utopian society is so strong as to overrun by far the conventional treatments of psychiatry. When prot announces his departure from earth on a certain fixed date, he also declares he will take with him one human being, selected from among the patients. This announcement stimulates great an enthusiasm among the “insane” patients, who try to apply for this journey by outdoing each other. For prot, the insane represent also the insanity of society, which creates mental delusion as a logical consequence.39 According to Dr. Brewer, the sane observer, the insane are “unable to function in [human] society” (KP 48). The alien outsider hence offers them an alternative perspective. The alien personality prot translates the awareness of reality and insanity into his own words. When Dr. Brewer, always trying to analyze and interpret by means of his medical terms, asks how abnormal people are treated on K-PAX, prot answers that mental illness is often in the eye of the beholder. The psychiatrist, referring to the inability of the insane to cope with reality, is finally confronted with prot’s notion of the nature of reality: “Reality is what you make it…” (KP 79).40 This idea of reality is based on an autarkic creation of one’s own destiny and grants the patients a sense of agency and autonomy. As Dr. Brewer states: “I realized then what was drawing the others to our alien visitor: the promise of salvation” (KP 96). Insanity needs not to be punished, prot offers the absolute outsiders another universe. When prot finally disappears on August 17th at precisely 3:31 am, one patient is missing (KP 216) as Prot must have taken this patient with him back to planet K-

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The names of the planets are written in capitals, the name of the beings, however, are not. See also the theory of anti-psychiatry which points to schizophrenia as the consequential illness of human minds, which are confronted with a brutal society, especially R. D. Laing in The Divided Self (1960). Accordingly, the human self only transforms because of societal strangeness, thus developing a schizophrenic – what is meant here is split – mind. This statement can be compared to the explanation by the mother figure Balinda in Ted Dekker’s Thr3e (2003). For her, reality can be made up.

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PAX. What remains is Porter, in a catatonic state, unable to function in a violent society that contains rapists, killers and capitalists. The device of protectionist alter personalities is used in a similar way in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Robber Bride (1994). Due to a traumatic experience during her childhood – sexual abuse – the protector inside is born: “Then he falls on top of Karen and puts his slabby hand over her mouth, and splits her in two. He split her in two right up the middle and her skin comes open like the dry skin of a cocoon, and Charis flies out.” (Atwood 1995 [1994]: 262)

Atwood here clearly refers to the prototypical MPD trigger experience, as suggested already in Sybil (1973).41 Charis is Karen’s protective personality: “All she can do is split in two; all she can do is turn into Charis, and float out of her body and watch Karen, left behind with no words, flailing and sobbing” (Atwood 1995 [1994]: 263). The protector figure is therefore more functional than the original self. The alien personality of prot is a savant; Robert is unable to communicate thus also “left behind with no words.” In The Robber Bride, this explanation is again very evident: “She splits herself in two and stays with the cooler part, the clearer part of herself. She has a name for this part now: she is Charis”, and: “Charis is more serene than Karen, because the bad things have stayed behind, with small Karen” (Atwood 2005 [2004]: 264). Atwood therefore stresses the therapeutical mechanism of dissociation – creating another distinct personality – in order to function again without having to remember the trauma: “She remembers everything, or rather Karen does; but Karen is in storage. Charis only remembers when she takes Karen out, from the suitcase under her bed where she has put her. She doesn’t do this often. Karen is still little, but Charis is growing up.” (Atwood 1995 [1994]: 264)

In Mary Higgins Clark’s All Around the Town (1992), the female protagonist eventually splits into five personalities after a sexual traumatic experience during childhood (see Showalter 1997: 166). Ellen Hopkins’ already mentioned novel in verse Identical (2008) portrays the twins Kaeleigh and Raenne who are two personalities inside one body. The other twin appears after a childhood trauma. Shana Mahaffey’s trauma survivor novel Sounds Like Crazy (2009) also uses the protector(s) inside similar to typical and conventional MPD/DID novels.

C ONCLUSION After the revival of MPD characteristics in the novels of the 1950s, further divisions in terms of subgenres developed. Extensive reading of the novels discussed above

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In The Robber Bride (1994) there is no critical view on MPD whatsoever. In chapter 14 of Atwood’s novel Alica Grace (1996), however, manipulation and iatrogenesis are one factor to consider when it comes to the performance of a dual personality.

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revealed four subgenres of multiple personality and dissociation, classified as the following multiple personality and dissociation subgenres: 1. outside forces in the subgenre of the devil inside 2. inside uncontrollable forces in the subgenre of the killer inside 3. artificially induced outside influences in the subgenre of the spy inside 4. psychological mechanisms as a classical concept of post-traumatic coping mechanisms of dissociation in the subgenre the protector inside Instead of referring to the manipulation of patients during therapies, thus offering an iatrogenesis of multiple personality within the private space of therapeutical sessions – which focus on personal traumatic experiences – the novels featuring multiple personality and dissociation offer a variety of subgenres. These subgenres do not explicitly refer to MPD as caused within a therapy but as a general mental development of a plural mind (yet being split into singular or one-dimensional selves). Although two of these subgenres, presenting the protector inside, which is a clear representation of classical patient/therapist encounters and classical post-traumatic theories, and the killer inside, which – in this case – again offers not a societal, but a personal trauma and psychopathological qualities, other subgenres use the metaphor of multiple personality in order to place the protagonists within certain societal structures. Thus the usage of dissociative minds, which are again represented as being split into distinct personalities, points not only to personal problems but also to societal structures. Multiple personality has thus become a literal trope of emphasizing personal struggles of identity within more generalized environments. The split consciousness opposes an equally fragmented society (A Scanner Darkly) or an ego-centered, capitalist society (K-PAX). Hence instead of being exclusively used within the techniques of Gothic, horror and suspense, multiple personality can also – despite therapeutical settings in K-PAX – evolve around alternative views on the given societal structures, revealing itself as an appreciated device to portray an estranged character who is disconnected and displaced. More important, however, is the representation of the other side as a comprehensively externalized or “outsourced” force which is then symbolized as an embodiment of distinct other person(s). Often, such another side remains singular, displaying only an opposite alter ego with a restricted character trait; the performative nature of displaying each of these alter persons is intense transforming it into the commonly known overt disorder. The dissociation is still stressed, however, and clearly depicts the definition of MPD with the “existence of personalities” or persons within one body.

13 “What is your name?”: Dissociation and Psychogenic Fugues in American Film from the 1950s to the Present [Donald Kaufman]: Okay, but there’s a twist. See, we find out the killer suffers from multiple personality disorder. Okay? See, he’s really also the cop and the girl. All of them are him! Isn’t that a fucked-up? [Charlie Kaufman]: The only idea more overused than serial killers, is multiple personalities. On top of that you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person (22)…Very taut. Sybil meets…I dunno, something very taut (24). SPIKE JONZE ADAPTION 20031

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoi Žižek believes the cinema to be the major place of conveying ideologies (Žižek 2009). Thus, the media representation of mental illnesses – such as multiple personality disorder (MPD) or dissociative disorders, for example, the psychogenic fugue – plays a major role in contributing to the public awareness and knowledge about mental phenomena (cf. Byrne 1998, Miller and Philo 2001). Negative images of mental diseases distributed by mass media can even outweigh personal experiences (Philo 1996 cited in Byrne 1998). This has led to schizophrenia and violent behavior to be now closely related to each other, whether this assumed coexistence is correct or not: “ill-informed beliefs on the association of schizophrenia with violence can be traced directly to media accounts” (Philo 1996 cited in Byrne 1998). Despite the fact that multiple personality disorder or MPD (which refers to distinct personalities vigorously interacting with each other) or a dissociative experience of the mind like DID (which refers to an internal disintegration of identity) in the mass media representation is often mixed up with the term of schizophrenia, MPD and DID still embody the meaning of a split personality thus again resembling dis-

1

Abstract from the film Adaption (2003) by director Spike Jones. For the filmscript see: ‹http://.www.dailyscripts.com/scripts/adaption.pdf›. Web. 5 Apr 2009.

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tinct persons interacting with each other (see also Byrne 2001). The transformation of the idea of MPD or DID into film, however, requires another element: the act of visualization. In an HBO documentary in the year 1993, Michael Mierendorf portrays three patients with multiple personality disorder (MPD), who display their personality switches during therapy sessions. The television production presented the mysterious mental disorder, although all three patients can participate in the routine of everyday life, and was broadcast at the peak of the MPD epidemic. It offered a closer look into the outbreak and outside performance of different distinct personalities, which were experienced within the psyche of one person.2 However, transferring the internal consciousness split of a character into a fictional film can be presented in two different ways. The first way is to literally split the character’s consciousness into various roles, which then are played by several actors. The other way is the portrayal of the split psyche with the means of just one actor. This single actor consequently acts differently, on different levels of consciousness.3 Such transformation into an interpersonal level or an intrapersonal level is the most intriguing creative process of presenting multiple personality or dissociation via the film medium. Another important factor is the twist ending of such films. Does the audience know, for example, that two actors interacting with each other on screen are actually only representing one person? The twist ending is a major device in the interpersonal representation of a split personality, for example, in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999). On the other hand, if the audience is to know the internal struggle of a film character – despite the fact that prior to the actual watching of a film, the propaganda via internet or reviews has probably spoiled the ending – it is regularly the case that a traumatic event, which then needs to be revealed, causes a dissociative amnesia. The question here for the protagonist is: “Who am I really?” This applies also to the case of the intrapersonal representation of Number 23 (2007). Jim Carrey, here in a dramatic role, tries to uncover his real self as he is fighting with paranoia and identity struggles after a severe accident which was actually a suicide attempt. The interpersonal multiple personality film genre then personifies the different split personality states, thus referring to the outlined definition of MPD. It defined, as already shown, the disorder as “existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities, each of which is dominant at a particular time” and “each individual personality is complex and integrated with its own unique behavior pattern and social relationship” in the DSM-III (APA 1980: 259). The interpersonal representation thus enables the moviegoer to watch the inside experience on the outside. Another example is the visualization of the former self or the unconsciousness of a character in the film The Machinist (2004). The protagonist finds himself the target

2

3

The documentary film can be watched on Youtube. A voiceover explains: “A college student has many personalities, and one of them wants to kill her.” Multiple_Personality_Disorder. Youtube. 1 May 2013. Both ways of expressing the split psyche are certainly also adapted in literary texts as already mentioned.

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of bullying at his working place as well as being stalked by a stranger. That stranger is the personification of his former self (quite corpulent just like he used to be, but played by another actor), whereas he mysteriously finds himself in a constant state of unexplainable insomnia and dangerous weight loss (an utterly skinny Hollywood star Christian Bale). The solution is the uncovering of a traumatic event, a hit-and-run driving, causing the death of a little boy. This incident then first triggered the dissociative amnesia or repression of guilt. The fat stalker symbolizes the unconscious and the guilt felt by the skinny man. Both personality states are co-conscious, therefore the actors can talk to each other; they are also one-way amnesic as the other side knows more than usual. Just like in The Sixth Sense (1999) the main character is able to see dead persons, only the protagonist Trevor Reznick is able to see the second personality. He is therefore actually talking to himself, although he is unaware of this mental projection onto another person. One of the major recent examples of the interpersonal level is the cult film Fight Club (1999) by David Fincher.4 The film explores the split of the protagonist’s psyche referring to the new term dissociative identity disorder in the novel.5 In the film, the unnamed narrator refers to his two states. Actually, the split of consciousness follows the pattern of the mirror self and doppelgänger theme, as the unnamed narrator and his alter ego Taylor Durden are totally opposite. The alter ego again only appears as a different character for nobody else but for the protagonist himself. He transfers his male ideal into another personality, which in the end seems to be an uncontrollable Mr. Hyde.6 The audience thus watches what the unnamed narrator interprets. He has externalized the very person of Taylor Durden. The total contrast of the two personalities is emphasized by casting them into two major roles. The unnamed narrator is played by Edward Norton, who had already starred in the movie adaptation of Primal Fear (1996), based on the novel by William Diehl (1993), and who was in a way destined to perform the part of a split consciousness.7 In Primal Fear, a young killer avoids a conviction by pretending to suffer from MPD. If he is innocent, only the secondary personality is guilty. Eventually, the last scene of the film reveals his deceit. The film tries to convince the audience of the possible mental disorder of MPD, a psychiatrist explains the trigger (childhood sexual abuse) and records the personality switches. During the trial, the suspect’s inner struggle is explained to

4

5 6 7

This chapter only refers to the film version, especially the visualization of the protagonist's different personalities . In the third section of this study, I shall refer in detail to the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, which was published three years prior to the film. The actual details of the possible self-diagnosis of the protagonist are mentioned in the chapter on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. There are significant differences between the film and novel. The ending of the novel, for example, is not directly translated into the film ending. Predetermined in the Hollywood term, meaning that Edward Norton quite often personifies a character with seemingly mental disabilities, for example, in The Score (2001) presenting an apparent retard character. He also co-produced the new version of The Incredible Hulk (2008), in which Hulk is represented as the alter ego/Mr. Hyde personality of a scientist who suffers from a dissociative identity disorder.

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have occurred after a sexual abuse by a Catholic bishop. The presentation of a fake MPD directly hints at the controversy which surrounds MPD and DID (cf. Byrne 2001). In Fight Club (1999), Edward Norton, who embodies the nice guy next door, is contrasted with the superstar role model Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, who personifies the dark and strong side of the nameless and weak narrator. As the Taylor Durden personality, the narrator is able to convince others to follow his anti-capitalist movement of “Project Mayhem”. The two different characters, who are members in the “Fight Clubs”, where men meet each other to engage in brutal fist-fights in order to escape the boredom of existence, are also competing against each other when the twist of the story reveals the total dissociation of consciousness. Now the narrator attempts to stop Durden’s project, but like Dr. Jekyll he is unable to stop Mr. Hyde. Consequently, he cannot interrupt the operation, but now he is able to realize that the co-consciousness and fist-fights with Durden were actually a self-mutilation. He can therefore integrate his Durden personality, and is again in control of himself. Tyler Durden’s project, however, has become independently active. Even though the narrator recognizes his alter ego to be part of himself and thus being able to extinguish his other personality, the forces, which were first evicted by his alter ego, are not controllable any more. After the narrator shoots himself and therefore kills his darker side, the “Project Mayhem” is accomplished. Nevertheless, buildings are blown up, and Taylor Durden’s imaginary counter-world may have begun. 8 Another personification of several altered personalities as different characters and as the interpersonal level is perfectly presented in the thriller Identity (2003). The film consists of two plot levels, although this is not clear for the audience at first and only revealed with the twist ending, however foreseeable it might be. One plot level is presented as a serial killer thriller. At a lonely motel, several different people, who did not know each other prior to the meeting, become one after the other the victim of a mysterious killer. Strange enough, the bodies disappear. Another plot level reveals the twist: the therapeutic session with a prisoner, who suffers from a multiple personality disorder. The therapy, set in the night before the execution of a death sentence is carried out, is meant to eliminate the personalities inside the psyche of a real serial killer. The success of such a therapy is symbolized by the death of each distinct personality (an FBI detective, a prostitute, a police officer, a little boy and others), played by different actors and displayed within the serial killer plot. As the execution is cancelled due to the fact that the convict suffers from a real mental disorder, the psychiatrist struggles to explain the disorder of MPD, and the little boy – the real killer personality – remains the only person inside killing the nicest personality, the prostitute, in the end. Mr. Hyde is again successful. The violence of male protagonists in films is obvious (cf. Showalter 1996). Another example of a murderous personality inside is the evil other side next to the already mentioned Secret Window (2004) in the film Mr. Brooks (2007). In their earlier

8

The last take of the film displays a scene of a pornographic male nude photography. As Taylor Durden liked to manipulate and irritate others, he – or at least his ideas – may have survived. The novel offers a very different ending (see chapter 15 on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club).

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films the two actors Kevin Costner and William Hurt, who symbolize the two sides of serial killer Earl Brooks, used to embody mainly likable characters. Now they are part of an extremely destructive serial killer. The film depicts the disorder of dissociation without mentioning it. In fact, the film refers only to the problem of addiction, meaning here the addiction of experiencing pleasure when the body produces adrenalin during the act of killing. The characters in the film all have different addictions, which can occur through serial murders or voyeuristic tendencies and so on. As the audience knows that the personality Marshall, played by William Hurt, is the secondary personality of Brooks, the focus on Brook’s inner conversations with Marshall is an essential devise. Marshall, the seemingly strong Mr. Hyde side, regularly talks Brook into new acts of crime: “[Marshall]: [Earl]:

You killed earlier, you will kill again. No I will not. I am going back to the AA meetings and I will control.” (chapter 15)

In the film the cause of the mental disorder is genetic, the young daughter therefore inherits the habits of her father, and both get away because of their very functional masquerade. The film ends with Earl whispering his usual prayer, with which he attempts to control his evil side albeit probably not sufficiently enough. The intrapersonal multiple film genre, however, only visualizes the different behavioral patterns of one actor, who is literally struggling with himself thus engaging the actor in “multiple method acting” (Byrne 2001: 27).9 Reflecting the idea of selfmutilation in the interpersonal Fight Club (1999) with two different actors, an example of the intrapersonal level with only one actor can be found in Me, Myself and Irene (2000). Jim Carrey acts in a parodistic role as he is fighting with him-selves, one personality with the other. If the audience would have known the real disorder of the unnamed narrator in Fight Club (1999), the view of self-mutilation would have been that of Me, Myself and Irene. This wrongly refers to the schizophrenia of the protagonist but explores the idea of multiple personality as two distinct and competing personalities within one body (cf. Byrne 2001).10 Thus, the intrapersonal level can focus on the – comical or tragical – consequences of the mental disorder of dissociation. The experiences of an inner fragmentation therefore are presented to the astonished audiences, which in turn may re-experience the character’s traumatization and mental struggles via an empathetic protection. A similarly bizarre life of an insane person is shown in the blockbuster films of The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and Sybil (1973). The roles of such films, which often win

9

10

The term “method acting” refers to an acting technique introduced by Stanislavsky. According to this technique, actors are to recall emotions form their own lives in order to connect and identify with the role. See also David Krasner. Method Acting: Theory, Practice, Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. In the film version of Fight Club, a surveillance camera shows how this self struggle appears. The unnamed narrator hurts himself. The imaginary second personality is not visible in those scenes.

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the individual actor in question an important award,11 are understood as mental illness parts. In the same way, Rain Man (1988) and Snowcake (2006), which both represent an autistic character, refer to a certain given psychiatric diagnosis and its prototypical presentation within folk psychology. The impact of such films is considerable: “Each film [especially the films on multiple personality] was spectacularly influential…in terms of influencing patients’ and even professionals’ perceptions about controversial diagnosis” (Packer 2007: 122). The translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings (1937) into a tripartite film by director Peter Jackson (20013) transforms the character Gollum/Sméagol, who does not originally display a multiple personality in the novel, into a co-conscious multiple personality constantly having a dialogue between his two selves – a rational and an evil side (for example Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers 2002; even more obvious in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 2012 with a Gollum/Sméagol constantly enacting his two oppositional characters). The first television series, with attempts to represent MPD (now correctly called DID) in a satirical way, United States of Tara (2009), is another intrapersonal struggle of a multiple character visualized via an interpersonal level. One actress presents Tara and her four alter personalities. The switches that occur in private are not directly shown as now each alter may re-appear in different styles. A male personality has no make-up; the gestures and the language are different. A teenage personality is dressed completely different with again different clothes and so on. However, the different personalities are presented very distinctly. The prior knowledge about the insanity of a character is therefore quite important and does not imply a possible spoiler. The attention of the audience can consequently focus on the repercussions of the character’s life. Thus, these films follow the externalized intrapersonal level, that is, the representation of the symptoms of an experienced dissociation and the change into several distinct personalities. Another variation of an intrapersonal level of multiple personality or dissociation is concentrated on the inside aspect, that is, the protagonist does not display different behavioral patterns. Now, the audience is not meant to anticipate the psychopathological disorder of a protagonist. The plot twist therefore offers the elucidation of previously unexplained situations. An example of such an internalized intrapersonal level is presented in the suspense thriller Hide and Seek (2005) with Hollywood star Robert de Niro. The film, just like Fight Club, needs a twist ending, thus presenting the audience merely the view of the central character who is not aware of his mental split. In Hide and Seek (2005), the child psychiatrist David Callaway leaves New York with his daughter Emily after his wife committed suicide. The rural idyll is supposed to heal the traumatized child. The psychiatrist keeps detailed records on Emily’s seemingly imaginary friend Charly, who eventually turns out to be not only a friendly playmate but even a serial killer. The plot twist reveals David Callaway as being split into his psychiatrist personality and the killer personality Charly, who

11

In the year 1957, Joanne Woodward won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role of Eve in The Three Faces of Eve. Sally Field won the Primetime Emmy Award in 1976 for her role in Sybil (1976), which also starred Joanne Woodward as her psychiatrist.

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originally emerged when he caught his wife red-handed – just like Mort Rainey in Secret Window (2004). The unfaithful female character thus imposes again a split in the male psyche, which consequently develops a killer personality. The Charly personality, however, is only presented with a different expression on de Niro’s face and his brutal behavior at the end of the film after the psychiatrist discovers his black outs and nonexistent records on his daughter. When the psychiatrist personality slept, listened to music or focused on the detailed records, the Charly personality would emerge and “play” with his daughter. There is no incest relationship, however, only the revelation that the daughter knows about the father’s secret second side. This side is also genetic, according to one of the various endings of the film.12 The daughter therefore inherits the inner division of her father as she paints herself with two heads. Throughout the film, the audience cannot see the change of the character’s behavior. The blackouts or episodes of amnesia of the psychiatric personality are on the same level what the audience knows. Both the solution seeking psychiatric personality and the audience try to decipher the secret of the mysterious Charly. Certainly even more mysterious translations of the multiple personality or the experience of dissociation are offered by director David Lynch. His universe of cryptic films never leads to a simple interpretation, as the abstract dimensions of his cinematic worlds seem to be endless (for interpretations of his films see: Sheen and Davidson 2004; McGowan 2007, Seeßlen 2007). Nevertheless, his characters in some of his films do share experiences close to dissociation and even display a dissociative identity disorder. David Lynch explicitly refers to the experiences of dissociation and psychogenic fugue. When asked about his knowledge concerning the mental state of psychogenic fugue as a flight from reality (Lynch on Lynch cited in Herzogenrath 1999), Lynch answered that a publicist on the picture Lost Highway (1997) had found the term in “some medical journal or something. She showed it to us, and it was like Lost Highway. Not literally, but an interior thing can happen that’s very similar. A certain mental disturbance” (Lynch on Lynch cited in Herzogenrath 1999: 13). In Lost Highway (1997), the audience is again confronted with a male protagonist whose mental and physical fragmentation originates from the imagined adultery of his wife: Fred, who later changes into a younger man called Pete and eventually changes back into Fred again. The two roles are played by different actors. Both parts, Fred and Pete, represent different levels of the story, and the woman, who seems to be the center of interest, is played by Patricia Arquette with brown hair (Fred’s world) and blonde hair (Pete’s world). Fred’s intention is to discover the past history of his wife Renee, who once was connected with the porn industry. As Alice Wakefield [sic!], she haunts his life as he possesses the body of Pete. The possession of Pete’s body is visualized by close ups of opening body parts. Fred’s soul or con-

12

The DVD edition of Hide and Seek offers different endings of the story. Painting herself with two heads is one of them. The other focuses on the little girl as patient in a psychiatric ward. At night, her second personality might emerge and want to play hide and seek, like her father and her mother used to do with her. In front of a mirror she finds her evil self.

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sciousness thus is transferred not only into the body of young Pete but also through time so he can meet Renee’s former self. A possible interpretation is based on the assumption that the Fred character makes a pact with the devil himself, who is personified by the Mephistopheles like Mystery Man. With the help of the devil, Fred is able to flee from his existence and hence appears to be something like a dissociative fugue without remembering the exact details. This remains a mystery to him and to the audience as well. His escape therefore meets the criteria Dr. Wilbur had explained to Sybil: “‘Don’t be frightened,” the doctor said. “You were in another state of consciousness. You had what we call a fugue. A fugue is a major state of personality dissociation characterized by amnesia and actual physical flight from the immediate environment’” (Schreiber 1973: 70). The film Lost Highway, however, is not quite clear about the realness of multiple personality or psychogenic fugue. There is no final plot twist, which reveals the last secret of the jigsaw puzzle. “We never quite know for sure if Fred’s alter ego, Pete Dayton, is a simple psychological projection of Fred or a real person”, states Eric G. Wilson in The Strange World of David Lynch (Wilson 2007: 114). There are, however, “certain clues [which] lead to this conclusion, to this idea that the movie is a long interior dialogue, a conversation between two parts of one self, unknown to each other” (118). Wilson therefore identifies “Fred’s split personality” (119) and takes even a further step. There are several personalities and characters symbolizing the fragmented self of Fred. The Lacanian interpretation of the fragmented self-experience, where the subject has no concept such as unity, origin, continuity and thus transforms into a split and decentered subject (cf. Herzogenrath 1999), reveals a “convoluted mind” (Wilson 2007: 120): “In this allegory, Fred’s character itself would be Fred’s conscious awareness, that part of him that wishes to reduce the world to solipsistic desire. The Mystery Man would be Fred’s unconscious, the aspect of his psyche that wants total knowledge of and control over the world. Andy, Fred’s rival, would be a manifestation of his paranoia, his jealous fear that the entire world is out to steal his beloved.” (Wilson 2007: 120)

Fred, who seems to have murdered Renee and is jailed, only to awake as Pete, is thus the fragmented figure who experiences dissociation as a literal or metaphysical device to un-experience the uncontrollable world. The fantasy first seems to offer a certain control as Fred remarks: “I like to remember things my own way”. Despite the physical proof of video recordings, Fred escapes into the surreal, its embodiment symbolized by the evil Mystery Man, a figure resembling the typical Faust character. “You invented me”, whispers the Mystery Man, “it is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.” Thus, the “coexistence of multiple fantastmatic narratives” (Žižek 2000: 36) refers to the disintegration of a coherent character that is unable to name himself. Reality is only perverted and dissolved within subjective views of the truth (cf. Bonatz 2005). “What is your name?”, asks the Mystery Man. Such disintegration of film characters (on literary characters cf. Hawthorn 1983) was also shown in other David Lynch films such as Mulholland Drive (2001) or Inland Empire (2008). The latter refers to the inner diversity of personal self-

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experience confronted with the contrary poles of reality versus fiction, original versus copy. One actor, Laura Dern, appears in different roles. One central scene in Mulholland Drive even presents a psychiatrist and a male patient, who talks about his inner demons. Such demons (or maybe secondary personalities) may well be symbolized by other characters in the mysterious plot around Betty and Rita, who are “two halves of one self, it seems” (Wilson 2007: 140). What all multiple personality or dissociative characters, however different the films may be, share is the focus on traumatic events which represent the mental fragmentation as a posttraumatic stress disorder. This again offers “no possibility to unify the dispersed fragments in a coherent encompassing narrative framework” (Žižek 2000: 37) or a unified psyche. Traumatic experiences serve as a “great dark secret myth” (Byrne 2001: 28) and the suspense of the films derive from the fact that such a trauma ought to be discovered. The trauma is now not needed to be explicitly that of a child sexual abuse, but merely needs to be a psychological trauma. Thus, the dissociation is connected to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a device in general highly preferred as a diagnosis of dissociative and other disorders (cf. Merskey 2007). Through cinematic presentation of such topics, the dissociation of the fictional characters may even contribute to the dissociative experiences a cinema audience has when watching a film (cf. Butler and Palesh 2004), similar to daydreaming, thus engaging the audience in a co-experience. Such a “film-going experience” is then “a voluntary engagement in a positive dissociative experience” (61). The dramatization of the trauma-triggered experiences of mentally multiplied or shattered minds eventually lead to a proliferation of multiple personality characters and their experience of dissociation within the film industry, thus representing the correct or textbook way of developing MPD/DID as the unavoidable fragmentation occurring after a traumatic event. Such a template, however, is now critically reflected within the film plots. The scripts now frequently provide a correctional character commenting on the symptoms as being merely iatrogenic. In such a way, the remaking of Sybil (1973) in the year 2008 offers a character referring to a multiple patient as “simply faking”. In the television series of United States of Tara the patient’s sister complains about the fake symptoms. As “DID films tap direct into a rich vein of patient’s preconceptions and therapists’ zeal” (Byrne 2001: 28), the films, such as Primal Fear (1996), sometimes cannot avoid a reflection on “contemporaneous literature” (cf. Fahy 1988). Despite such a more critical view on the phenomenon of multiple personality or dissociative symptoms, the film industry still sticks to the dramatic plots of a hidden and unknown other side.13 This was obvious when in early 2009 Hollywood star Halle Berry was conveniently spotted by paparazzi after leaving her yoga class; she was carrying a book, the cover of the book very visible. It was a book on “Multiple Personality Disorder” presenting not the current valid and more blurred term of dissociative identity disorder, but again the old, more familiar term. At the time, the film called Frankie and Alice was about to enter the cinemas, featuring a female patient

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For a postmodern notion of the self in Hollywood cinema see Booker 2007.

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with two distinct and opposite sides: an African American personality and a Caucasian racist personality. Additionally, multiple personality disorder is now a fixed device in horror movies. As such, the protagonists experience seemingly real persons with whom they interact, but who are really only embodiments of their externalized inner fragments. An example is the horror film The Uninvited (2009) by film directors Charles and Tom Guard. In this film, the violence is of female origin, caused by a mentally ill teenage girl who enacts not only her dead sister but also her father’s new girlfriend, a person imagined as an evil person.14 Spanish director Guillem Morales worked on an American remake of his film The Uninvited Guest (or Uncertain Guest) (2004), which presents a mentally ill protagonist imagining a visitor. Horror films offer a twist ending, just like Session 9 (2002) by director Brad Anderson, whose success with such topics was proved with The Machinist (2004). They display the limited point of view of one protagonist in order to confuse the audience. The film Session 9 refers to MPD and a possible possession with a demonic personality.15 Usually, the plot is visualized as an interpersonal level of multiple personality, which means that various persons are presented as real whereas they are only imagined. Like Brad Anderson’s preference to stick to the theme of multiple personality or a personified hallucination aspect of the inner fragmentation, scriptwriter Diablo Cody, who wrote The United States of Tara (2009), varies the theme with a teenage horror movie called Jennifer’s Body (2009), which presents multiple personality within the idea of (demonic) possession. All this confirms that multiple personality or dissociation is now a fixed and established device in psychological films or horror films, often in the form of interpersonal visualization, with different actors personifying a split mind and therefore creating a solution only by a twist ending.16 These solutions rely on to the technique of the plot unreliability and cinematic narrative.17 Indeed, just like Charlie Kaufman notes on the idea of multiple personality in the opening quotation for this chapter, there is hardly another topic so overused than MPD.

14

15

16 17

The American film version based on the Korean film Tale of Two Sisters (2003), which revolves around a possible multiple personality disorder but also includes a supernatural explanation because of ghost appearances and thus possession. Brad Anderson’s Session 9, however, contains the misdiagnoses of DID printed on a file originally written during the 1980s while the cases were still named and understood as MPD. The film also presents a total and complete split of personalities during the sessions and the corresponding tape recordings via different voices and the mentioning of “entering a dissociative state”. One protagonist in the film is presented as being obsessed with a former patient’s evil side called Simon. For more films on MPD or DID, see the list at the end of this study. For a detailed analysis of the unreliable narration in contemporary films such as Fight Club, Memento and American Psycho see Volker Ferenz. Don’t believe his Lies. The unreliable Narrator in Contemporary American Cinema. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2008.

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C ONCLUSION With all these analyzed film adaptations and fictional texts shown in this film chapter, it is clear that multiple personality and dissociation was presented mainly in terms of externalized distinct personalities or persons. These films present imaginative secondary personalities as real persons acting with each other. Thus, the unreliability of the script is most important. Examples among others are Fight Club (1999) by David Fincher and Identity (2003) by James Mangold. However, there are also films which use the intrapersonal level of the multiple fiction film genre with only one actor presenting still very distinguishable personality states meant as independently acting persons. These films deliver the message of a mental disorder mostly in advantage in order to allow the audience to observe a character displaying strange behavioral patterns. Examples here among others are Me, Myself & Irene (2000) by Bobby and Peter Farrelly or K-Pax (2001) by Iain Softly. Additionally, the inner fragmentation is represented in more ambiguous films by director David Lynch who may form a genre of his own. His journeys into the subjectivity of the characters may display inner worlds of fragmentary existence, dissociation and repression. Examples shown here are Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2008) which all use devices of mental destabilization and dissociation. The genre of films displaying multiple characters is a fixed one now. Whether the disorder may be presented as a cast of complex characters hence stressing the outdated definition of MPD or stress the inner fragmentation, the proliferation of multiple personalities is noticeable. The subjective inner life of the characters is thus presented to the audience who then is able to comprehend what is existent inside the individual characters respectively what reality the characters experience. As in films the visualization is of major concern, how can more contemporary texts deal with such an inner fragmentation? How are their references connected to those former adaptations of partly classical texts? Are the characters, who suffer from a split mind, represented within societal structures or do they suffer from a personal trauma where greater societal movements are not so relevant? Can a reconceptualization of dissociative identity disorder be represented in a different way other than the externalized multiple personality disorder or MPD? Is it then still recognizable? These are questions to explore in the following chapters.

Part III: Contemporary Variations in Selected Novels

14 “This is what Mary would have said…”: Margaret Atwood Alias Grace (1996) Whatever may have happened through these years, God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie. WILLIAM MORRIS THE DEFENSE OF GUENEVERE 18581 Life never works except in retrospect…since you can’t control your life, at least you can control your version. C. PALAHNIUK STRANGER THAN FICTION 2005: 215

The fictionalized historical case of Grace Marks dating back to one of the most discussed murder cases in Canada during the mid-nineteenth century inspired Margaret Atwood to write the novel Alias Grace (1996), in which she draws the picture of a woman within a dominantly male-powered system represented by psychiatrists, a bigoted society, and expectations of a sensation-seeking public.2 The position of the fictional character of Grace Marks within these rigid patterns is seemingly predeter-

1 2

Cited as a prefixed quote from: Margaret Atwood. Alias Grace. London: Virago Press, 1996; hereafter abbreviated AG. Margaret Atwood had already dealt with the case referring more strongly to Susanna Moodie’s historical report Life in the Clearings, which was a contemporary text of the time when Grace Marks was imprisoned. Moodie portrayed Marks as a madwoman and used rather melodramatic expressions for her writings. In the year 1970, Atwood had published the television play The Servant Girl, which presented Grace Marks similar to Moodie’s report. In this play, Atwood stresses the guilt of Grace as being the “instigator of the murders” (Darroch 2004: 117). In Alias Grace, however, Atwood offers another portrait, as “Moodie can’t resist the potential for literary melodrama”, writes Atwood in the “Author’s Afterword” in Alias Grace (Atwood 2006: 538). Here Grace is not – as Moodie had mentioned – “the prime mover” behind the murder (538), but still embedded within the mysterious murder in terms of her real guilt, which is not revealed in this ambiguous text.

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mined, fixed within a certain understanding of the possibly criminal and insane (in this case female) minds, strategies of repressing memory in terms of the psychological force of dissociation and trauma, and even of aspects of personal desire due to societal circumstances. Atwood’s “revision of Canadian history in a postmodern context” (Howells 2005: 140) thus offers a multifaceted narrative that fictionalizes the mysterious brutal murder of a bachelor farmer and his housekeeper, who also was his mistress. Retelling this entirely unsolved historical case, however, the novel Alias Grace refuses to offer a solution of whether the central character Grace Marks is actually guilty of murder and therefore obtains the mystery of an incompletely comprehensible and documented murder case, in which the actual guilt of the sixteen-yearold servant Grace was never totally proved. The novel Alias Grace portrays the central protagonist as a possible victim of trauma and consequently dissociative amnesia, as Grace claims to be unable to recall the events of the murder. Furthermore, Atwood, by telling the story as “pure southern Ontario Gothic” (Howells 2005: 142), suggests that Grace may even have been possessed by the spirit of her former fellow servant and dear friend, Mary Whitney, as such a possession is retold by Grace Mark’s first-person narration. “Writing in the context of a heated debate about the truth or falsity of traumatic memories and amnesia” (Darroch 2004: 103) during the 1990s concerning the controversies around multiple personality and MPD, Atwood nonetheless presents her fictional Grace Marks as either traumatized by a really unspeakable truth of murder, using typical descriptions of multiple personality and dissociation, or plainly as a liar, who constructs a reality of which she is the only remaining witness. Either way, Grace’s first-person narration is contextualized in terms of dissociation, which is due to a spirit possession or a post-traumatic development of MPD, thus externalizing a secondary murderer personality. However, the fictional character Grace, as Atwood suggests, may have well been forced to act with the help of the confidence charlatan Jeremiah during a fake hypnosis only in terms of a trained animal. Additionally, she may only fulfill the theatrical role of a person with a split consciousness whose obscure demon identity hides beneath her otherwise lovely appearance. Externalizing a totally separate personality, an uncontrollable Mr. Hyde, thus functions for Grace to consequently be seen innocent, as only her body in this sense may have been involved in the murder whereas her spirit may have not. Yet her shattered self, traumatized and horrified when confronted with possible new threats, may have committed the murder “in order to survive” (Wilson 2006: 185). Thus Grace – adopting an alias – is literally torn apart. There is no singular valid interpretation of Atwood’s text in terms of her demonstrating the phenomenon of MPD/DID as undoubtedly existing and that Grace was (involuntarily) forced to develop an alter ego after a severe trauma (whether in childhood or not). This ambivalence leaving the reader in uncertainty, however, is the strength this text contains, as the surprising twist of the story is not merely an explanation of the murder perhaps committed by Grace. The purpose of the novel may, however, function as a brilliant translation of a medical mystery and its deciphering within a fictional context, regardless as to whether the syndrome was known or already clearly defined when Grace was put to trial.

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During the centuries, definitions around MPD/DID proliferated, were changed and multiple in themselves, derived from ‘double consciousness’ and innumerable other names. The point here is that the novel creates an uncertainty of whether dissociation is real or merely a public sensation; the text evokes a feeling of an unsolved mystery. Alias Grace therefore offers a superb reading concerning the strangeness and controversy of multiple personality and dissociation. In public, Grace performs her secondary self; in her narration she offers dissociation either seen as possession or trauma. Further examination of the text will try to stress this. Of interest here is Atwood’s account of a possible multiple personality, offering the 19th century term of ‘double personality’ and ‘dédoublement’. Writing from a postmodern perspective, Atwood is critical of a mid-nineteenth century theory of hysteria, dissociation, and spiritualism in terms of Mesmerism. Embedded in the discussions on multiple personality – again here mentioning the definition of multiple personality disorder (MPD) since 1980, which then was re-named dissociative identity disorder (DID) during the 1990s – according to Atwood in her explanatory notes In Search of Alias Grace (1997), “we cannot help but be contemporary, and Alias Grace, although set in the mid-nineteenth century, is, of course, a very contemporary book” (Atwood 1997: 36). To both be contemporary from a postmodern perspective and at the same time offer a mid-nineteenth century point of view however poses certain problems. While Atwood retells a historical case set at a distinctive epoch, the concepts of psychology are manifold and chosen from different periods of the 19th and 20th century. Atwood suggests the relation of double personality understood in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde manner, referring to both a good and a hidden evil person inside. The “alienist” Dr. Simon Jordan tries to recover the lost memory of Grace through the use of certain techniques of psychoanalysis. These are presented as the typical ‘talking cure’, which were used only more than a couple of decades later. Dr. Jordan’s attempt to be another Dr. Freud is not usual during the 1850s. Yet Dr. Jordan seems to be a prototypical psychoanalyst: “If you will try to talk, he continues, I will try to listen” (AG 46). In Grace’s words, Dr. Jordan is “a collector” (AG 45) and the “guessing game” he proposes includes “always a right answer, which is right because it is the one they want” (AG 45).3 Additionally, Dr. Jordan’s reference to the hysterics in the Salpetière (“He’d seen many hysterics at the Salpetière in Paris who’d looked very much like this”, AG 68; and “here he would like to mention the courageous Dr. Charcot of Paris, who had recently dedicated himself to the study of hysterics”, AG 348) again refers to Charcot’s hysteria shows, which began only thirty years later in the 1880s (for a historical view of those hysterics see Showalter 1985 and Ellenberger 1970).4 Although the relationship of hysteria and double personality is correct (cf. Hacking

3

4

This therapeutical concept can be compared to the ‘talking cure’, Anna O. named when in her secondary self-state. Breuer mentions this in Breuer and Freud’s early hysteria studies published in 1895 (Breuer und Freud 2007: 50). Jean-Martin Charcot was born in 1825. The novel is set mostly in the year 1859. It was not until 1862 that Charcot became a practitioner at the Salpetière (Ellenberger 1970: 90). In 1878, Charcot connected hysteria with hypnotism (90).

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1995), Atwood mixes in her novel various psychological theories such as psychoanalysis, trauma theory, dissociation, repressed memory and hypnosis to paint a picture of Grace’s possible mental disorder. Such theories as explanation for Grace’s creation of an alter ego, which led to Judith Knelman’s criticism in “Missing Links in Alias Grace” (1999), are insofar not valid as such explanations “would have been largely unknown at the time and so would not have been readily accepted” (Knelman 1999: 682). Hypnotism, for example, which is used in order to recover Grace’s lost memory, was not linked to mental disorders or repressed memories back then when Dr. Jordan starts his talking cure with Grace in the year 1851.5 Although “Braidian” hypnotism, to which hypnotist Dr. DuPont refers, was known at that time, it was, however, only linked to physical and not psychological topics (682).6 Instead of hypnosis, or Braid’s term of “neurohypnotism”, to which Atwood rightly refers nevertheless, the medical experts would rather have mentioned “automatic somnambulism”. Hence Jeremiah, who later calls himself Dr. DuPont, again rightly states: “Wakley of The Lancet has written extensively on the phenomenon” (AG 470).7 Furthermore, the term “neurasthenia”, which is mentioned by Dr. Jordan (AG 349), did not occur until 1869 when used by George Miller Beard and later by William James, who named it “Americanitis” (cf. Ellenberger 1970: 242). As such references are not historically adaptable to concerning the time of the mid-nineteenth century, Atwood then offers Alias Grace as an account of a historical case understood only in the psychological terms collected during the 20th century. The fictional characters of medical and hypnosis experts are thus reflected with the knowledge of another epoch, as Regina M. Edmonds wrote in “A Contemporary Psychologist Looks at Atwood’s Construction of Personality in Alias Grace” (Edmonds 2006: 217). Moreover, the various psychological explanations plus the supernatural element of possession produce a postmodern pattern – symbolized also by the

5

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Dr. Jordan’s therapeutical sessions with his attempt to waken Grace’s ability to associate when confronted, for example, with an apple, is also linked to the concept of the talking cure: “What does Apple make you think of?” (AG 44). As Hacking writes: “British and American double consciousness was not, in general, connected with animal magnetism and hypnotism” (Hacking 1995: 155). Here Atwood uses her major references among them Ellenberger and Hacking, which she recommends: “I found many books helpful, but most especially: […] Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, Harper Collins 1970: Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, Princeton University Press, 1995” (AG 544). In Rewriting the Soul, Hacking mentions Wakley’s article in The Lancet, 25 March 1843, in which he referred to a separation of the mind in terms of another distinct personality: “But what would they say to the case of a somnambulist who evinces what is regarded as double consciousness – the operation of the mind being perfectly distinct in the state of somnambulism from its developments in the wakeful condition? With reference to such an individual, the proof of his personal identity must rest with others, not with himself, for his memory in one state takes not the smallest cognisance of what he thought, felt, perceived, said, or did, in the other” (Hacking 1995: 221-222).

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picture of the quilts in Alias Grace – and add up to a multifaceted account of a historical criminal case. However, Atwood’s fictionalization of the historical case of Grace Marks in terms of multiple personality evolving around a distinct secondary personality is explained by a very disturbing character in the novel: Jeremiah, the peddler. He is a gifted imitator, who later travels the country as “celebrated medium” called Mr. Gerald Bridges (AG 529). As Mr. Bridges he performs at fairs, meets Grace again at a time when he names himself Dr. DuPont, an expert of neuro-hypnotism and mesmerist trance states. It is with the help of this dubious Jeremiah alias Mr. Gerald Bridges alias Dr. DuPont that Grace can establish an image of herself as being split into two different personalities. Prior to the central session of hypnosis, which functions as the revelation scene and the twist concerning Grace’s commitments in the murder case, Jeremiah, still traveling as a peddler, suggests the young servant Grace to come with him in order to earn money at hypnosis shows “as a medical clairvoyant, and trade in Mesmerism and Magnetism, which is always a draw” (AG 309). Hence, proposing to cooperate with him, he suggests: “You could travel with me, he said. You could be a medical clairvoyant; I would teach you how, and instruct you in what to say, and put you into the trances. I know by your hand that you have a talent for it […] a woman with the name of Grace had mysterious powers. The unknown is always more wonderful to them than the known, and more convincing.” (AG 311; my emphasis)

Jeremiah and Grace can perform such a show when a hypnosis session is eventually realized in the governor’s house where Grace works. As Dr. Jordan has been unable to uncover Grace’s unconsciousness, Jeremiah posing as Dr. DuPont takes this as an opportunity to demonstrate the power of a trance session. The audience anticipates “wonders, but will evidently not be surprised by them, whatever they may be” (AG 459); thus, exactly resembling what Jeremiah meant when he referred to the unknown as being even more convincing. Even Dr. Jordan is tricked. And he is the one who dislikes the hypnotic sleep evoked by Jeremiah/Dr. DuPont because Grace functions as “his [Dr. Jordan’s] territory; he must repel poachers” (AG 350). Dr. Jordan’s imagination of Grace seems disturbed.8 And Dr. DuPont’s theories seem more suc-

8

Dr. Jordan’s fantasy concerning Grace is, for example, described when he dreams of her and when he can relate to her seemingly innocent appearance and her possible evil murder side: “Murderess, murderess, he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but also furtive. He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace toward him, pressing his mouth against her. Murderess. He applies it to her throat like a brand” (AG 453; italics in original text). Similar to this, Grace’s notion of herself as such a fantasy depicts the same emotions: “Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor. Murderer is merely brutal. It’s like a hammer, or a lump of metal. I would rather be a murderess than a murderer, if those are the only choices” (AG 25). Later, after her release, such an appeal would vanish leaving only a normal woman. Grace herself says: “It was very strange to realize that I would not be a celebrated mur-

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cessful than his talking cure sessions. The other side of Grace revealed during the hypnosis, however, might be artificial. Dr. DuPont might collaborate with Grace, to which he first could well have given the corresponding instructions (“I have explained to her”, AG 460). The “neuro-hypnotic sleep” (AG 461) is thus induced. A grey veil is dropped “gently over her head” (AG 462), and the questionnaire begins. During the hypnosis, some interruptions occur; the audience, the governor’s wife and her daughter, Dr. Jordan and Reverend Verringer, constantly comment on Grace’s strange voice that she suddenly displays during her hypnotic sleep. The Governor’s wife, for example, comments and explains on Grace’s hypnosis voice as a “spirit” (AG 467). Thus Grace’s hypnosis, or whatever state she might be in, enables her “spirit” to communicate throughout the session. Interestingly, as Atwood refers to Braidian’s term of neuro-hypotism (“‘This Braidian system is completely logical and sound’, explains DuPont”, AG 460), she lets Grace not close her eyes completely: “Her eyes are open” (AG 462), and a veil is placed onto her head. In his seminal work on hypnotism Neurypnology; Or The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism (1843), James Braid, however, described the procedure of hypnosis, which he called hypnotism, as only being successful when the eyes are closed: “My first object was to prove, that the inability of the patient to open his eyes was caused by paralyzing the levator muscles of the eyelids, through their continued action during the protracted fixed stare, and thus rendering it physically impossible for him to open them (Braid 1843: 17-18) […] most probably the eyelids will close involuntarily, with a vibratory motion. If this is not the case, or the patient allows the eyeballs to move, desire him to begin anew, giving him to understand that he is to allow the eyelids to close. (Braid 1843: 28)

Is Grace then totally transferred into another state of consciousness? Or is the veil necessary to disguise the fraud? This again also recalls the opening of Sally’s eyes in Morton Prince’s psychological case of Miss Beauchamp (Prince 1906: 96) or the reciting of Morton’s case in Shirley Jackson’s novel The Bird’s Nest (Jackson 1954:61). The strange voice9 of the hypnotized Grace eventually reveals: “You’ve deceived yourselves! I am not Grace! Grace knew nothing about it!” (AG 467). It is Dr. DuPont, who refers to the phenomenon as “natural” (AG 467). Grace, in her hypnotic state, somehow confesses to the murder, not as Grace but as another person, Mary:

9

deress any more, but seen perhaps as an innocent woman wrongly accused and imprisoned unjustly…indeed, I am not quite used to it yet” (AG 513). Before that, Grace was aware of the “romantic notion” people had of her being a possible murderess (AG 27). Coral Anne Howells suggests someone else talking instead of Grace. Again it is the dubious character of the charlatan Jeremiah acting as Dr. DuPont, who might have tricked the audience as he has also shown himself to be a ventriloquist. Therefore, Howells concludes that Grace may have no voice at all, as she “is not allowed to speak for herself any more than at her trial, when she had felt like a ventriloquist’s doll and ‘my true voice could not get out’” (Howells 2005: 151).

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“There is a sharp clap, which appears to come from the ceiling. ‘I told James to do it. I urged him to. I was there all along!’ ‘There?’ says DuPont. ‘Here! With Grace, where I am now. It was so cold, lying on the floor, and I was all alone; I needed to keep warm. But Grace doesn’t know, she’s never known! The voice is no longer teasing. They almost hanged her, but that would have been wrong. She knew nothing! I only borrowed her clothing for a time…She forgot to open the window, and so I couldn’t get out! But I wouldn’t want to hurt her. You mustn’t tell her!’ The little voice is pleading now.” (AG 468)

This scene is described in a third-person omniscient point of view and is not presented as Grace’s personal account of the story. Grace’s direct confession is not presented. Thus Atwood avoids a revelation of her guilt, which however is what the reader wishes for though, and leaves the question of guilt again to mystery. Grace only speaks again at the end of the novel when she is eventually pardoned in the year 1872. Her narration shows a letter she writes to Jeremiah, alias Dr. DuPont, in which she declares: “And you may have been telling me to keep silent, about certain things we both know of” (AG 496).10 Maybe then the display of another personality, Mary, was after all a hoax. If Atwood applies a double personality here in terms of multiple personality as MPD with distinct secondary personalities who act as independent persons beside the host personality, then Grace could be understood as innocent as she is “outsourcing” the guilty person. Dr. Jordan, Reverend Verringer, and the dubious Dr. DuPont later attempt to explain what they saw during that session of hypnosis. Thus, the reader is now presented with a – only possible – explanation concerning Grace’s alter ego. As already mentioned, it is the disturbing and obviously treacherous character in the novel namely Jeremiah/Dr. DuPont, who explains the mental condition of Grace in terms of double personality: “‘There have been cases of this kind,’ DuPont says. ‘As early as 1816, there was Mary Reynolds, of New York…he calls it double consciousness, although he emphatically rejects the possibility of reaching the so-called secondary personality through Neuro-hypnotism.’” (AG 470-471; my emphasis, italics in original text)

Reverend Verringer mentions that two hundred years before this experiment, Grace would have been interpreted as “a clear case of possession” (AG 470), whereas Dr.

10

Before her very eloquent letter to Jeremiah, who now adopted even another identity – “Geraldo Ponti, Master of Neuro-Hypnotism, Ventriloquist, and Mind-Reader Extraordinaire” (AG 496) – the novel presents another letter by Grace to Dr. Jordan, which is written apparently in yet another style. This letter begins with the words “I am writing to you with the help of Clarrie, who has always stood my friend, and got this paper for me, and will post it when the time comes in return for extra help with the laces and stains” (AG 488).

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Jordan is initially eager to find a “neurological condition” (AG 470). But Dr. DuPont continues: “‘Nature sometimes produces two heads on one body,’ says DuPont. ‘Then why not two persons, as it were, in one brain? There may exist examples, not only of alternating states of consciousness, as claimed by Puysegeur, but of two distinct personalities, which may coexist in the same body and yet have different sets of memories altogether.’” (AG 471; my emphasis)

Grace – alias Mary – has the ability to speak the truth in contrast to a silenced Grace the reader is first introduced to during the first pages of the novel: “At least I stopped talking altogether, except very civilly when spoken to, Yea Ma’am No Ma’am” (AG 36). But Dr. Jordan’s talking cure enables her to speak or construct her identity through language. Accordingly, Grace’s lawyer Mr. McKenzie (“Our Lady of the Silences”, AG 433) expresses: “Let me put it this way – did Scheherazade lie? Perhaps Grace Marks has merely been telling you what she needs to tell, in order to accomplish the desired end” (AG 438). In terms of her memory loss, McKenzie merely notes that Dr. Jordan would be astonished “how common such lapses of memory are, amongst the criminal element” (AG 433). However, Grace’s narration, which she not only presents to Dr. Jordan but also to the reader who even knows more than the alienist, is not clearly held in terms of dissociation and traumatology, but rather in terms of possession.11 As such, Grace retells her life and her encounters with her only real friend, Mary Whitney, whom she loses so dramatically due to a mismanaged abortion. Through Mary Whitney, who may be distinctively differentiated toward an ignorant and innocent Grace personality, Grace learns to express herself in order to establish herself and her position in the world. As a victim of possession, her body used by a “spirit”, she would fit into the séances, which are held at the governor’s house, where she works as a servant during daytime. As Coral Ann Howells investigates the crucial hypnotic scene as a possible explanation concerning Grace’s guilt, the situation shifts from a hypnotic trance into a spiritual séance (Howells 2005: 146). Speaking now as Mary Whitney, Grace is able to say what is necessary and true (“ability to see in the dark”, AG 471). In her narration while talking to Dr. Jordan during her therapeutical sessions to recover her memory (“to wake the part of her mind that lies dormant, AG 153) she constantly says “Mary Whitney would have said”.12 Mary therefore, or rather the remembrance

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Grace, however, had also access to The Lancet, the most important medical magazine, at the governor’s house, and could very well have read articles about the medical or psychological explanation of somnambulism and double consciousness, as Atwood portrays her as someone intelligent and able to adapt to various situations: “This girl is no simpleton after all” (AG 259). Grace’s encounters with Dr. Bannerling, who believes her to be a liar (AG 504), for example, make her say: “Take your hand off my tit, you filthy bastard, Mary Whitney would have said” (AG 38). If she accused him of any kind of improper behavior, she knows, however, she would not be believed: “A woman like me is always a temptation,

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of her, offers a template of behavior that Grace refers to when in need for advice “for she was never one to refuse a friend in need” (AG 169). “I try to think of what Mary Whitney would say, and sometimes I can say it” (AG 72), she explains to Dr. Jordan. The strong influence of Mary on Grace is established during the very first encounter of the two when the young girl Grace, inexperienced and underprivileged as an impoverished Irish immigrant, enters her first position as another servant in an upper-class household: “Mary took me under her wing from the very first” (AG 174). Mary’s ability to uncover the filthy secrets of the higher classes, and thus society in general, like showing Grace “where the whores live” (AG 175), and to be streetwise in terms of always knowing a witty (Whitney!) reply, teaches Grace: “what I needed to know, and as I was bright enough I would learn it quickly” (AG 181). Now Grace is able to deny her begging father, who wants to collect her wages (AG 181). This shows Grace for the first time as being capable to fight only for herself: “Mary was a person of democratic views” (AG 39). Therefore, it is Mary to tell Grace “that we were no slaves, and being a servant was not a thing we were born not” (AG 182). According to Mary, rich employers are “as useless as a prick on a priest” (AG 182) and “men were liars by nature” (AG 190). Adopting Mary’s system of values, Grace changes internally. When Mary dies after a brutal abortion since she had an affair with the son of her employers, which is an impossible relationship, the circumstances of the death are to be concealed. According to the narration of Grace, she tells Dr. Jordan that Mary’s dying body is lying next to Grace, and prior descriptions of ghosts add up to a supernatural gothic scenery. Images of ghosts and white sheets clearly dominate the narration of Grace. The death of Grace’s mother, for example, on the ship to Canada – “As soon as the sheet was over her face I had the notion that it was not really my mother under there, it was some other woman” (AG 140) – and other uncanny descriptions suggest such a gothic ghost tale. Ordinary white sheets are looking “different, like pale ghosts” (AG 184) as Mary would “press up against” those sheets “ so there was the outline of her face” (AG 184). The death of Mary, who dies next to Grace, is also described as if Mary’s spirit might have possessed Grace’s body. “But I did not open the window. And I ran across the room and opened it, because I must have heard wrong and she was saying Let me out […] I was hoping Mary’s soul would fly out the window now, and not stay inside, whispering things into my ear. But I wondered whether I was too late.” [AG 207; italics in original text]

Thus, Grace furthermore explains to Dr. Jordan her experience of a dissociative state: “Then it was as if that had really happened; I could picture it, the waking up with Mary in the bed right beside me, and touching her, and finding she would not speak to me, and the horror and distress I would feel; and at that moment I fell to the floor in a dead faint […] and that

if possible to arrange it unobserved; as whatever we may say about it later, we will not be believed.” (AG 32).

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when I did wake up I did not seem to know where I was, or what had happened; and I kept asking where Grace had gone.” (AG 208)

Resembling the descriptions of Mary Reynolds and her primary and secondary somnambulistic state in the year 1816 (cf. Kenny 1986), Grace describes a similar occurrence: “[I] tried to run out of the house, because I said that Grace was lost, and had gone into the lake, and I needed to search for her […] Then I fell again into a deep sleep. When I woke, it was a day later, and I knew again that I was Grace, and that Mary was dead.” (AG 208)13

As Grace emphasizes: “But I had no memory of anything I said or did during the time I was awake, between the two long sleeps; and worried me” (AG 209). She later mentions parts of her that never sleep (AG 303) and “that underneath that is another feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful” (AG 79). Underneath such a feeling, there is “another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open” (AG 79). Even at the night of the murder, “Mary Whitney appeared to me in a dream” (AG 363). As Grace claims to be unable to recall the exact details, she offers Dr. Jordan her version, her dreams of Mary, which according to Grace, “were no dreams at all, Sir, I was awake” (AG 365). For the time of the crime, Grace claims to “have lain unconscious for a long time” (AG 385). Her “head was aching” and she finally found her voice again (AG 386), yet “all that time is dark to me” (AG 369). Her accomplice, McDermottt, who resembles a typical rough villain (“dark haired and slender and not very tall”, AG 242) and who was hanged for the murder, attempts to force Grace into a sexual relationship, which was allegedly promised by her in case of a committed murder. Yet Grace claims to not remember such a promise, and later when McDermott and Grace flee the country, Grace establishes another situation typical in terms of multiple personality and dissociation. She cannot remember her promiscuity: “The last I remembered was the feel of him settling the shawl tenderly around my shoulders. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the ground […] Then he was very angry; for he claimed I had asked him to stop the wagon, so I could get down and relieve myself by the roadside; and having done so, that I had spread out my own shawl, not two minutes before, and had invited him to join me on it like the hot bitch I was, at the same time saying I would now fulfill my promise.” (AG 391)

13

Prior to this, Mary had read The Lady of the Lake with Grace (AG 191), which offers a gothic picture of a mad woman. After the death of her mother, Grace fears that the soul of her mother cannot get out of a window to be released as the mother dies within the ship’s hull (AG 139). Grace therefore has, strictly speaking, always access to explanatory terms so that later she can pick up all the pieces – just like a quilt – and compose her story (“herstory”, Howells 2005: 142) and re-tell herself in terms of possession or dissociation as lapses of memory. She can, for example, still feel Mary’s closeness after her death (“could hear her breathing”, AG 229) or hear her voice (“and in any case the voice I had heard, that one time, had not been God’s but Mary Whitney’s”, AG 259).

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Such a description is comparable to the protagonist’s gaps of memory in the novel Sybil (1973), when she loses track of time and finds herself in embarrassing situations. According to the theory of multiple personality, such incidents would occur, for example, when a promiscuous alter personality takes control of the mind (cf. Schreiber 1973). In case of an experienced double personality, which points at hidden desires, all protagonists in the novel are described as being torn apart. Containing a bundle of contrasting Jekyll-and-Hyde emotions, not literally divided into separate personalities though, Dr. Jordan seemingly adapts to everyday requirements as being a gentleman, but inside he also imagines every woman around him as a prostitute: “He has tried to imagine her as a prostitute – he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters” (AG 65-66). His sado-masochistic relationship with his landlady, Dr. Jordan describes her as “to indulge herself in yet another role” (AG 478), displays his other side. The text thus reads: “But at night she’s an altogether different person, and so is he (AG 425).14 Dr. Jordan experiences “uncontrollable desires”, and “apart from himself” there is “another part” (AG 425). The obscure Jeremiah acts according to his then acquired role: “He was doing a very good imitation of a man who is distinguished and at home in the world” (AG 529). Moreover, Jamie Walsh, to whom Grace is eventually married, becomes another man when he is “almost in ecstasies” (AG 530) and later “is back to his usual self “(AG 532). He transforms when Grace re-tells or rather re-invents her experiences with medical authoritative figures, who treat her as a mere object. However, Grace as the most mysterious character remains a Sphinx-like heroine, whose real character may be hidden underneath the image others have of her. She still constructs herself despite the restrictions of others and may develop her possible Other as well. The multiplicity of the postmodern fractured narration in Alias Grace demonstrates the impossible achievement of a singular truth. The construction of Grace by the established elite, for example, to which she is dependent as a female and a possibly insane criminal, is opposed by the first-person narration of Grace herself.15 This narration, however, is again saturated with various views on her as Fiona Tolan has pointed out in detail (cf. Tolan 2007). Her voice then adapts the many different interpretations of her and displays “various manifestations” in her narrative (229). Her impotent voice then can only be heard “when it masquerades as power” (232), describing her in terms of the powerful elite. Grace repeats, for example, what others have told her. This demonstrates her dependence and her inconsistency as shifts in her language appear (231): “I, being left to reflect on my sins and misdemeanors, and one does that best in solitude, or such is our expert and considered opinion, Grace, after long experience with these matters” (AG 37-38; see Tolan 2007). The narration of Grace is then characterized by her ability to transform according to her surround-

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Rachel Humphrey, his landlady, reveals to him her plans of killing her husband. In doing so, she mirrors Grace’s image of a wire-puller. The male characters, however, cannot clearly construct themselves as they are only told in a third-person narrative with individual streams-of-consciousness.

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ings.16 Even her behavior is artificial and – in terms of Judith Butler – a mere performance. After her release from prison, she assumes to act according to expectations: “I have been rescued, and now I must act like someone who has been rescued. It was strange to realize that I would not be a celebrated murderess any more…It calls for a different arrangement for the face” (AG 513). While Grace was re-told literally by society, her narration now serves to establish herself through her own voice, albeit keeping the core truth to herself. Depicting her social construction, Grace states: “I think of all the things that have been written about me – that I am an inhuman demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will…that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper…that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?” (AG 25)

For Dr. Jordan, Grace is also not easy to grasp. Her appearance changes from an almost mediaeval damsel-in-distress to a “different woman – straighter, taller, more self-possessed” (AG 68). Although Grace knows her constructed images, she responds to such constructions with her own constructed narration, thus fighting back, but she also is not able to retell it herself on her own level, but merely in terms of the dominant establishment around her (similar to those hysterics at the Salpêtière!). As Dr. Jordan offers her the talking cure, she slips into the Scheherazade role attempting to please her therapist: “Now Grace, he said, you must do better than that, we made a bargain” (AG 77). And Grace knows: “As long as I say something, anything at all, Dr. Jordan smiles and writes it down, and tells me I am doing well” (AG 79). Instead of curing his patient, the narration of Grace draws a heavy influence on Dr. Jordan. What he later experiences in his dreams is the imaginary told by Grace and her very own descriptions of her mysterious image of a murderess: “Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word – musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.” (AG 25)

Recollecting and adapting himself the words of Grace, Dr. Jordan is eventually composed of Grace’s own words. The power of Grace’s narration thus invades Dr. Jordan’s mind and the liveliness of her story evokes his energies. As Grace observes, turning closer to the reader than to Dr. Jordan: “Dr. Jordan is writing eagerly, as if his hand can scarcely keep up, and I have never seen him so animated before. It does my heart good to feel I can bring a little pleasure into a fellowbeings life; and I think to myself, I wonder what he will make of all that.” (AG 328)

16

This seems similar to Woody Allen’s chameleon man in his film Zelig (1983), who miraculously transforms into the same section of people around him whether they are African Americans, Jews, Asian men and so on. On Allen’s film see Hirsch 2001.

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“All that” is a wild mixture of somnambulistic lost memory, as Grace constructs a scenery of sleepwalking while she dreams. In her dreams, she mingles an exaggerated religious symbolism (“and they were the angels whose white robes were washed in blood”, AG 327) with a description that could hint at an incest scene. While she dreams of men approaching her, Mr. Kinnear, McDermottt, she also tells about another man: “And then I felt it was not any of these three, but another man, someone I knew and had long been familiar with, even as long ago as my childhood, but had since forgotten; nor was this the first time I’d found myself in this situation with him.” (AG 326)

So far Grace has then constructed herself in possible terms of possession, double personality with a promiscuous secondary personality, and finally of incest. Dr. Jordan’s hope, however, was to discover something sensational about the murders by recovering lost memory and thus establishing himself as a distinguished psychological researcher. But he fails. The sudden departure after the hypnotic scene with Grace/Mary, as he is unwilling and unable to publish a single word about the supernatural ideas offered as a possible explanations of the murders, hints at the lack of scientific seriousness of the idea of double personality (although Atwood earlier described it as being published already in the medical magazine Lancet and as part of the hysteria of Charcot’s famous mad women at the Salpêtière): “If the report were to become public, and a matter of record, and widely circulated, he would become an instant laughing-stock, especially among the established members of the medical profession.” (AG 473)

Dealing with such a picture of horror concerning his professional life, he would rather escape – leaving a craving audience behind, which further attempts to gain a pardon for Grace who is meanwhile waiting for Dr. Jordan’s report. He “may be shown an illusion”, he muses (AG 472), yet his imagination of Grace as a desperate heroine was an illusion all the while. Grace’s function as a protean self, individually interpreted by each character in the novel, is thus also multiple. The Mary-part inside Grace, as her possible secondary personality, causes the difference in the narration of Grace. As Grace points out herself without Mary “it would have been a different story entirely” (AG 117). And even Dr. Jordan “cannot get Mary Whitney out of his mind” (AG 216). Mary functions thus not only as a the protector inside, but also as the devil inside and the killer inside, as Atwood is highly ambiguous about the real nature of Grace and offers no clear position as to whether there was a real possession or a double personality. As Jeremiah, the peddler, has told Grace when referring to surviving despite a dominant discourse of elites: “Laws are made to be broken, he said, and these laws were not made by me or mine, but by the powers that be, and for their own profit. But I am harming no one. A man with any spirit in him likes a challenge, and to outwit others; and as to being caught, I’m an old fox, and have been at it a few too many years for that.” (AG 309)

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As Grace is “one of us” according to Jeremiah (AG 179), her need to survive may be the individual adaptation to outside interpretations. The multifaceted narratives of the novel compose a “heteroglossia of voices” (Howells 2005: 143), yet the first-person narration of Grace is the main part of the novel. Her report to Dr. Jordan is also accompanied by passages which are not told to the doctor as Grace seems to interact with the reader in a more conspiratorial manner. She does not, however, display every detail and remains after all a mysterious riddle as the final patch – of the quilt-like narration – is not added. In her letter to Dr. Jordan, however, Grace refers to the truth and writes one sentence, which may point at her possible – and after all still-remembered – guilt of the murders: “It is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble” (AG 531). Yet Dr. Jordan, who later suffers a war injury, is unable to remember his former existence even though he can still recall a woman named Grace (AG 498). The impact of the hypnotic scene is still alive after Dr. Jordan has left town. Reverend Verringer thus explains Grace’s condition “to recover her memory” (AG 501) in terms of double or multiple personality when he attempts to release her from her prison existence: “Grace Marks’ loss of memory was genuine, not feigned – that on the fatal day she was suffering from the effects of an17 hysterical seizure…which resulted in a form of auto-hypnotic somnambulism […] Grace Marks displayed not only a fully recovered memory of these past events, but also pronounced evidence of a somnambulistic double consciousness, with a distinct secondary personality, capable of acting without the knowledge of the first. It was Dr. Jordan’s conclusion…that the woman known to us as Grace Marks was neither conscious at the time of murder of Nancy Montgomery, nor responsible for her actions therein – the memories of these actions being retained only by her secondary and hidden self. (AG 501; my emphasis, italics in original text)

Whoever Grace actually was is never revealed in Alias Grace. Hervey Cleckley, who co-authored The Three Faces of Eve (1957), described in his The Mask of Sanity (1941), the psychopathology of mental disorders with a seemingly normal “mask” as mysterious (Cleckley 1976 [1941]). This mask disguises the inner chaos. However, as such a mask is also consciously used, several behavioral characteristics may classify the psychopath. In case of Grace, her charm and her ability to adapt to her environment could be seen as her performing a normal self although her inner life may be criminal and – in terms of normality versus criminality – insane. She would then be an example of what is generally known as sociopath, someone with the ability to adapt easily to outer rules and is able to manipulate others only to mask the real brutal self within. The usage of double consciousness with a distinctive secondary (killer) personality is shown – mainly in Grace’s own narration – in terms of somnambulism, possession, multiple personality disorder (MPD), trauma induced by incest, and the possibility to perform such phenomena nevertheless. As such, the typical devices of mul-

17

Note: “an” was used in original quote.

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tiple personality and dissociation in Alias Grace are not only presented as a psychological reaction after trauma such as those presented in former writings of Margaret Atwood.18 The subgenres of the killer inside as well as the protector inside are applied. Moreover, the novel enhances the difficulty to decipher the mystery of multiple personality. It describes the uncertainty and controversy of the very theory of multiple personality and dissociation. Yet the plurality of the mind is still stressed. As Margaret Atwood lets Grace explain this inner multiplicity: “You don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in” (AG 37).

18

Such as the already mentioned novel The Robber Bride (1994).

15 “I know this because Tyler Durden knows this…”: Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club (1996) Really, what I was doing was just The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was “apostolic” fiction – where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There are two men and a woman. And one man, the hero, is shot to death. CHUCK PALAHNIUK “AFTERWORD” FIGHT CLUB 1996: 216 The truth was that Jay Gatsby […] sprang from his Platonic conception of himself […]. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD THE GREAT GATSBY 1925: 133 What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate – and immediately forget we have done so. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 1886 : 83

If Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is, according to Joyce Carol Oates, an “autogenetic” text (Oates 1995: 198) for the nineteenth century, which means that it is known to almost everyone although only a few may have read the text, Chuck Palahniuk’s already classic cult novel Fight Club (1996) may most probably be such a text for the late twentieth century. Moreover, the topicality and literal explosive story of the unnamed protagonist and his alter ego, Tyler Durden, continues to be a forceful and deeply comprehensible narration. As Chuck Palahniuk reports enthusiastically in the afterword of Fight Club, he allegedly

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encounters references to his novel throughout American (and probably global) culture. Prior to the hyped Hollywood film and similar to Psycho (1959) by Robert Bloch, a novel signified the beginning of another pop culture phenomenon: “‘There was a book?’ Yes… Before you could walk through airports and hear bogus public address announcements paging ‘Tyler Durden…Would Tyler Durden please pick up the white courtesy phone…’ Before you could find graffiti in Los Angeles, spray painted tags than claim: ‘Tyler Durden Lives’… Before people in Texas started wearing T-shirts printed with: ‘Save Marla Singer’… Before a variety of illegal Fight Clubs stage plays.” (Palahniuk 2006: 212)

This self-induced analysis adds another brick to the wall of Fight Club references. The innumerous academic essays on Fight Club, novel and film version alike, point to such a diverse cultural strength provided by Palahniuk’s novel. The story of the unnamed protagonist, who experiences an inner division to the extent as to create an externalized secondary personality, Tyler Durden, and the “fight clubs”, where men fist-fight in order to regain their self-awareness, has hit a nerve in an extraordinary way. Made into a blockbuster film in the year 1999 by director David Fincher, the success of the contemporary translation of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde division actually multiplied. While the explicit violence of the film was criticized, for example, by Henry A. Giroux as glorifying brutality and fostering a “culture of cynism” and “warrior culture” (Giroux 2003) and by Alexander Walker, who claimed in his article “A Nazi Piece of Work” that the film would “uncritically enshrine principles that once underpinned the politics of fascism” (Walker 1999: 29), Suzanne Clark stated that the story underscores public order (Clark 2001). Yet various critics referred to it as a “Swiftian attack on our consumerist, designer-label-worshipping society” (Taubin 1999: 16) and as the generally too-well-understood postmodern fragmentation of personality within a “dissociogenic culture” (Gold 2004). Furthermore, Chuck Palahniuk’s depiction of a dissociative secondary alter ego was compared to “Oedipal Obsession” (Kennett 2005), existentialism (Bennet 2005; Casado de Rocha 2005) or even “Muscular Existentialism” (Hock Soon Ng 2005), masochism (Žižek 2003), American culture (Mendieta 2005), generally to the crisis of masculinity within a feminized capitalist society (Jordan 2002; Ta 2006), Freud’s theory of melancholia (Ta 2006), the role of religion (Lockwood 2008), and even Rousseau and the post-romantic subject (Burns 2008). The film was even interpreted as an inspiration for terrorists to commit the threats of 9/11 (Petersen 2005). Finally the story is also merely seen as the “experiences of a common guy in late capitalism” (Ferenz 2008: 131). The ideas of the fictitious alter ego character Tyler Durden were compared to sociological and political theories such as Marxism and the theories of Hegel (Lalor 2000), as the estrangement and alienation of the unnamed narrator directly leads into a clinical presentation of a multiple personality disorder or dissociation with a distinct secondary personality acting independently and forcefully similar to Miss Beauchamp’s Sally or even more to Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde. Thus, unlike Dr. Jekyll and

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Mr. Hyde, however, a secondary personality would emerge consequently due to cultural and societal impacts, or even merely as a mental reaction after meeting a strong and independent woman, and not because of a medical experiment. Such experiment, on the other hand, intended to create a second character in order to undermine the morals of a Victorian society. Yet the secondary character in Fight Club comes into being therefore involuntarily instead of a voluntary division and physical difference. The poor guy just cannot help it. As the film is considerably different from the novel, this chapter makes reference on the novel published in 1996, the same year as Margaret Atwood published her historical novel Alias Grace.1 The novel Fight Club heavily relies on the narration of the unnamed protagonist, whose story is displayed in a first-person perspective, which presents the character of Tyler Durden first of all as a real person. The novel emphasizes the model of multiple personality and dissociation in terms of MPD with the stress on an externalized double, or rather alter ego, as a complex and distinct personality. Interestingly, to start here with the relatively late twist in the plot, the author does not refer to multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder but instead to a mixture of both terms and also to a mentioning of any possible term connected with it which could describe the effect: “This is a dream. Tyler is a projection. He’s a dissociative personality disorder. A psychogenic fugue state. Tyler Durden is my hallucination” (FC 168; my emphasis). Thus, Tyler Durden is also a hallucination, the experiencing of the alter ego as another person, which whom an interaction is possible. Moreover the interpersonal representation of MPD clearly hints at the alter ego presenting a distinct character, whose real nature – being part of the unnamed narrator – is not to be discovered until this sequence in the novel: “‘There isn’t a me and you, anymore,’ Tyler says, and he pinches the end of my nose. ‘I think you’ve figured that out.’ We both use the same body, but at different times.” (FC 164)

Despite the incorrect last explanation of the narrator, as Tyler and the unnamed narrator do share the body also simultaneously,2 the narrator is not aware of Tyler being his secondary personality in the first place. In Morton Prince’s terms then, the two

1 2

Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club. London: Vintage Books, 2006 [1996]; hereafter abbreviated FC. In the beginning, they do share the same body alternately when the unnamed narrator seems to sleep, although he suffers from insomnia, as he is working as Tyler Durden “part-time as a movie projectionist” (FC 25). During the daytime, he is still the boring insurance guy, yet “because of his nature, Tyler could only work night jobs” (FC 25). To manipulate the films, Tyler Durden splices “single-frame flashes of pornography” into the films (FC 113). Such splices were said to influence consumers, which is, however, merely another urban myth (Degen 2000: 117). Later Tyler Durden and his Space Monkeys urinate into soups, perfume bottles and so on in order to sabotage the world of the rich. They become “Robin Hood Waiter Champions Have-Nots” (FC 116), “guerrilla terrorists of the service industry” and “dinner party saboteurs” (FC 81).

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are “co-conscious”. They are also “mutually cognizant” but “one-way amnesic” as Henri Ellenberger explained: “This means that personality A knows nothing of personality B, but the latter knows not only itself but also personality A” (Ellenberger 1970: 136). Therefore Palahniuk’s novel is a splendid example for dissociation in terms of an absolute embodiment of a mental state. Both characters, the narrator and Tyler Durden, are total opposites. As such they are portrayed, and thus they symbolize two different and opposed sides of one mind in a seemingly inferior persona and an idolized version, Tyler Durden, who is “The hero’s Ideal Ego” (Žižek 2003: 113). Yet as many critics have failed to understand, there is also a third mental state. The unnamed narrator changes after the insight into the separateness of the mind. Such a third state evolves the posterior position of the narration, which is embedded in the opening scene when Tyler Durden threatens to kill the narrator (“So Tyler and I are on top of the Parker-Morris Building with the gun stuck in my mouth”, FC 12) and the last scene of the novel when the story of Tyler and the narrator is told with the twist that they are the same man. Correspondingly, the final scene of the story toward the end thus reads: “To God, this looks like one man alone, holding a gun in his own mouth but it’s Tyler holding the gun, and it’s my life” (FC 204). Between Tyler Durden, who was created by the unnamed man in the first place, and the unnamed man the third position is manifested, which is represented by an amalgamation of both personalities being thus able to recognize his state of mind(s) whereas the unnamed man was ignorant of his fragmentation. As Chuck Palahniuk pointed out in an interview, his novel develops around such a tripartite mentality: “With Fight Club I kind of collapsed with characters. Tyler wants to be the rebel, who would be destroyed. Jack, the narrator, was the one who would kill himself and does kill himself, and he emerges as the third character. So it’s collapsed…that three types into a single character. But it’s amazing how much the last century of literature fits the three character model.”3

Such a “three character model” was already demonstrated in this study in Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson”, as the narrator is aware of his inner division into two resembling persons but tells his story from a third point of view (see chapter 10). Also, as Nabokov stated, Dr. Jekyll is divided into Jekyll and Hyde and offers his narration again from a third position. Furthermore, within Palahniuk’s novel, the third position follows his division into Tyler Durden and the unnamed narrator, who adopts the name of Joe in the novel and Jack in the movie when he refers to his emotions. The unnamed narrator depicts the name from old Reader’s Digest magazines with articles on organs told in the perspective of a Joe: “I am Joe’s Raging Bile Duct…I am Joes Inflamed Flaring Nostril’s (FC 59)…I am Joe’s Broken Heart…”(FC 134). The very name of Joe hints at an everyman’s experience, as “some Joe on the street” (FC 119) may be anyone. Whatever the narrator’s real name is – is it Tyler Durden? – he presents Marla, the female object of desire, his driving license with another

3

See ‹http://www.metacafe.com/watch1786089/book_smart_chuck_palahniuk_snuff,/›. Web. 10 June 2009.

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name to prove to her he is not Tyler Durden: “I take out my wallet and show Marla my driver’s license with my real name. Not Tyler Durden. ‘But everyone knows you’re Tyler Durden,’ Marla says” (FC 172).4 Marla Singer is the woman, the femme fatal, who may have also evoked the alter ego Tyler Durden when the narrator points out: “I know why Tyler had occurred. Tyler loved Marla. From the first night I met her, Tyler or some part of me had needed a way to be with Marla” (FC 198). To be with Marla was not possible for the unnamed narrator in the first place: “There’s Marla, and she’s in the middle of everything and doesn’t know” (FC 193). It is Marla, who disturbs an achieved ability to sleep (FC 22). Marla evokes the insomnia again after the unnamed narrator feels really connected to others when faking a terminal illness in self-help groups: “I can’t cry with this woman watching me” (FC 22). The creation of Tyler Durden after the encounter with Marla is also the symbolization of opposing the former self, which has lost touch not only with others but also with himself. The dissociation moreover points not only at a personal level, but is also settled within societal structures of postmodernism and capitalism. Understood as a counter model of a dump consumer, Tyler Durden consequently represents the vital revolutionary rebel and another outcast similar to Marla, a male Marla as it were.5 Because of a feeling of disconnectedness and a fragmentation within a spiritually poor society, where consumerism and greed replaces attachment and affiliation thus only evoking loneliness and isolation, the self-mutilation proposed by Tyler Durden’s “fight clubs” also becomes a sub-cultural sensation despite the first two rules of these clubs, which include the prohibition to talk about them, their legendary status spreads like an invisible virus. Such fist fights, as well as self-mutilation, thus function as a solution to heal what is caused by “the closure of capitalist subjectivity” (Žižek 2003: 116) and thus overcoming a status of a Hegelian “servant’s masochistic libidinal attachment to his master” (117). A release is only gained when everyone “hit[s] bottom” (FC 70). Some critics such as psychotherapist Steven N. Gold stress the psychological theory of dissociation in terms of DID and thus enhance societal circumstances as “dissociogenic”, referring to inner fragmentations caused by consumerism, technology, and rapid mobility: “It is argued that a major theme of the novel and film Fight Club is that contemporary technological society fosters dissociative modes of experience” (Gold 2004: 13). Gold then refers to Robert Lifton’s concept of “doubling”, which he used in his book Nazi Doctors (1986) and again in The Protean Self (1993), where Lifton connected the forces of multiple personality directly with “collective patterns of dissociation” (Lifton 1993: 208). Yet citing Lifton’s passage may stress not only societal forces of consumerism, but also “group ideologies” (207), which

4 5

The driver’s license, however, could also be a stolen one as Tyler Durden’s homework for his space monkeys includes the theft of twelve of such licences (FC 151). A similar way of adapting someone else’s style or aura on the basis of literal multiple personality is demonstrated by Woody Allan’s film Zelig (1983). Ironically, Zelig’s message to the world is to “be yourself” while at the same time his transformations are more a symbol of being not himself or anyone at all.

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develop in the novel especially within the formations of “fight clubs” and later within the structure of the “Project Mayem” and the “space monkeys”. A society gone mad in Fight Club was also wrongly connected to the psychological model of schizophrenia caused by societal forces. 6 Such explanations were, for example, used within the anti-psychiatric criticism such as R. D. Laing’s concept of an inner schizoid self-condition formulated in The Divided Self published in 1960 (cf. Ta 2006).7 Most interestingly, again the concept of MPD or DID understood as split personality concerning the presentation of a mental fragmentation in Fight Club is thus mixed up as inner fragmentation represented by what is generally understood as schizophrenia. Critical texts such as the wonderful analysis of contemporary capitalist society Pretend We’re Dead (2006) by Annalee Newitz, refer to both disorders at the same time. Analyzing the film version, she notes: “In a twist ending, we discover that the narrator is schizophrenic and has a split personality” (Newitz 2006: 48). Yet, the mental illness of the narrator symbolized in the externalized secondary personality of later cult leader Tyler Durden seems more vital and convincing and hence more productive. Schizophrenia as total delusion is something else. The externalized force of Tyler Durden then is a much healthier, or rather more vital, force than the original state of the narrator. The mental reaction of creating him may hint at a mental disorder such as the delusion of schizophrenia as far as the hallucination of another person is concerned.8 Yet what Newitz meant was the split personality in terms of multiple personality and dissociation and not schizophrenia (cf. Hacking 1995: 9). In this sense, Tyler Durden surely represents a counterpart, an opposition against the capitalist structures of an alienating society; as such, he develops into a legend and consequently into a male ideal created to impress his female counterpart Marla. The author Palahniuk furthermore uses several references pointing at multiple personality and presents his character within the distinct culture of multiple personality and dissociation: he mentions both Psycho (FC 173) and even the classic Sybil (FC 196)!

6 7

8

Schizophrenia is often used as a slang word for multiple personality disorder. For a detailed differentiation see chapter 2. For a critical reading of R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self (1960) see Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady (1987), in which she also expresses her hopes concerning a newly understood psychiatry which should focus more on women’s need instead suppressing them only by therapy. Interestingly, the movement of MPD, however, did stress a possible feminist approach as women seemed to expressed their suppression by creating secondary personalities, yet the difficulties of the new concept of MPD caused instead another re-creation of hysteria and suppression by therapy (Acocella 1999); a fact on which Showalter consequently commented in her study on Hysteries (1996). Both Showalter’s and Acocella’s stances are similar to what may be called the imperative of therapy. MPD caused more trouble for women than advantages (see also Piper 1999 and 2004). The female malady here in Fight Club, however, is a male malady, a fact which makes Steven N. Gold refer to the experience of dissociation within every human being (Gold 2004). The same condition of hallucinating the other side applies to another novel using also the device of unreliable narration: in Ted Dekker’s Thr3e (2003), the other side(s) are perceived as real persons.

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The success of a powerful Tyler Durden character separated within the system of multiple personality is also based on his efforts to represent an alternative way of living and thus act against the structures of society and the established rich elite. As such, he needs to be seen within the tradition of otherwise non-violent organizations like Attac, which is “an international organization and network in the global justice movement”.9 Not to be compared with Tyler Durden’s “fight club”, however, the revolutionary ideas of the “Project Mayhem”, at first, point in some way to the problems imposed by consumer ideology and the division of society into rich and poor, and dependent classes. Marla again represents an independent female rebel. Ideologically, Tyler Durden proposed first an idealized alternative, anti-consumer-oriented society and later develops violent patterns.10 As the narrator in the novel and Tyler Durden in the film, state: “Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you” (FC 44). Yet a possible strength of such freefrom-consumerism views turns into violence and a totalitarian view of an ideology in opposition to the ideas of Attac. However, Tyler Durden first establishes an alternative world of a utopian ideology and idyllic and authentic nature experience in Rousseau-like scenery: “You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.” (FC 124)

However, in this sense it is nature that needs to be controlled, even if it paradoxically means to lock human beings away. Recalling the ongoing discussions on climate change, Taylor Durden’s commitment to save the world is assumed with the help of his Project Mayhem: “It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover” (FC 125). While the

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For further information on Attac see ‹http://www.attac.org/en/what-attac›. Web. 15 June 2009. A quite similar and equally critical approach to contemporary consumer culture is established in the successful non-fiction and ecological books Endgame: The Problem of Civilization and Endgame: Resistance (both 2006) by American author and activist Derrick Jensen, in which he philosophizes on the difficulty of pacifistic views on civilization. He even draws on a resistance concerning violence. For Jensen, the civilized person is a slave and chronically traumatized. He postulates a post-civilized society based on a precivilized existence and hence can be connected to Tyler Durden’s ideals. Furthermore, the influence of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is very much manifest in John Zur’s relatively unknown novel The After Hours, which could well have been written by one of Tyler Durden’s space monkeys as it represents the desperate existence of a waiter fragmented into several personalities called “The Group”. Eventually, some computer game inspired violent scenes with pump guns erupt while civilization is doomed (Zur 2005).

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unnamed narrator felt trapped within the forces of consumerism, the essentials of Tyler Durden’s pastoral scenery of a new autarkic human species paints a picture of a post-capitalist society: “‘Imagine’, Tyler said, ‘stalking elk past department store window and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.’” (FC 125)

Such a positive, because vital alternative world refers to the contemporary movements or lifestyles of so-called “Lohas”, who stress a “lifestyle of health and sustainability”11 and who are understood as well-educated and connected to “green” and ecological topics, as well as organic and socially responsible consumerism (although Tyler Durden denies responsibility for others and does not “care if other people got hurt”, FC 122). Additionally, the lifestyle of “Lovos” attributes even more to Tyler Durden’s theory of being part of the nature, thus emphasizing his characteristics as an animalistic side of the narrator’s psyche. The lifestyle of Lovos underlines a “voluntary simplicity” such as minimizing consumerism and private property. Such an anti-consumerist movement is based on a considerable tradition of thinkers such as Duane Elgin, whose book Voluntary Simplicity (1981) pointed to the very idea of this concept. Henry David Thoreau’s seminal book Walden (1854) drew on transcendentalist philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and circled around the ideas of being autarkic and living as part of nature against a consumer or materialistic world: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind” (Thoreau 1854: 7).12 However, Tyler Durden’s theoretical and initially apparently idyllic visions are opposed by the negative alternative world of his “Project Mayhem”, which is described in the novel as an absurd and overemphasized cult project with secret membership, a leadership/dictatorship organization, and strict codes. The rigid hierarchy

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12

This expression refers to a term established by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson in their seminal book Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing The World. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000. It can, however, be argued that the meaning of the term ‘Lohas’ may only hint at a still practiced consumerism as long as the products concerned are adequately “greenwashed” and thus hold a certain status of “good consumerism” and sustainability. For further readings on Henry David Thoreau and the philosophy of transcendentalism, especially Emerson, see Robert Sattelmeyer. “Thoreau and Emerson”. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Joel Myerson . Cambridge: University Press, 1995. 25-39. The reality behind Thoreau’s attempt to paint the perfect balance of nature and mankind is another question. The image is after all the ideal of such a harmony.

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of Tyler Durden’s “space monkeys” and the secret they share also point at the secret of the narrator’s insurance formula. Tyler Durden’s abilities to apply the “firstworld” marketing strategies into his counter-world of mimicking the consumers (selling their lipo-sucked fat as expensive designer soap, creating the brand of the space monkeys), hints at a strategy concealed from the narrator to beat the consumer society with its own weapons and thus stress the vitality of mockery in a very Bakhtinian variation of ‘carnival’. In her book on “resisting the corporate control of culture” called Ourspace (2007), Christine Harold comments on brand politics and consuming politics stressing the possibility of mocking and sabotaging brands through parody as an example. Her reference to a counterculture myth concerning mainstream marketing and consumerism could be linked to Tyler Durden’s status as a revolutionary rebel among capitalist brand politics: “I suggest that, given the market’s appetite for edginess, the countercultural rebel is indeed something of a myth, which in no way voids its importance as a story that inspires people. Countercultural rhetoric, mythological or not, continues to win converts generation after generation because it affords powerful creative possibilities. It provides rich political fodder.” (Harold 2007: xxi)

Although Harold hinted at the image of brands, especially in this context at the internet platform MySpace and its perceived authenticity, a “counterculture rebel” versus “‘the Man’ in mainstream commercial culture” (Harold 2007: xxi) serves as an excellent reference to the position of Tyler Durden and the nameless narrator. The opposing forces of Tyler Durden and the nameless narrator – who is no brand at all and thus actually doomed to be not recognized – are described in Fight Club as two totally different positions, which in consequence embody two distinct personalities. The narrator’s position is defined similar to Harold’s “the Man” within mainstream commercial, feminized culture. While the narrator feels alienated within a hysteric consumer society, Tyler Durden’s animalistic vitality forms a total contrast. The impossibility to feel embedded in human relationships and thus feel connected is stressed by the narrator’s comment on his “single-serving” life: “The charm of traveling is everywhere I go, tiny life. I go to the hotel, tiny soap, tiny shampoos, single-serving butter, tiny mouthwash and single-use toothbrush…Dinner arrives, a miniature do-it-yourself Chicken Cordon Bleu hobby kit, sort of a put-it-together project to keep you busy.” (FC 28)

The following abandonment of associations with others leads to isolation and loneliness. The narrator’s occupation additionally requests a denial of connectedness with other human beings as its ethically questionable duty demands indifference and mere mathematical scheming. The job of the narrator revolves around a “simple arithmetic” (FC 30) as he is working as a recall campaign coordinator. If an accident with one of the company’s cars occurs, the following formula is applied:

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“You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall. If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt. If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall.” (FC 30)

Moreover, trapped within his loneliness and the application of the secret cost-recall formula, the narrator isolates himself even further by creating his very own yet definitely not individual escapism by means of mainstream products: “Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The marketing brochure promise a foot of concrete floor, ceiling, and wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned-up television. A foot of concrete and air conditioning, you couldn’t open the windows so even with maple flooring and dimmer switches, all seventeen hundred airtight feet would smell like the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom.” (FC 41)

In addition to his concrete floors, the consumption of the globally identical furniture of IKEA – the Swedish company’s yearly updated catalogue is the most popular print next to the Bible13 – makes the narrator a “slave to my nesting instinct” (FC 43). Instead of experiencing a vital force inside, all that is left is a sense of artificial numbness: “The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue” (FC 43).14 The solid condominium is contrasted by Tyler Durden’s residence at a ramshackle house in Paper Street (FC 57). Occupying his mind with various impersonal items of products for the masses, the estrangement of the narrator is obvious. Such alienation is described by various theorists, among them is Marx in his early writings in the “Paris Manuscripts”15 and

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According to a wikipedia reference, the IKEA catalogue has even surpassed the popularity of the Bible. Each year, more than 200 million people in Europe receive the new catalogue. See ‹http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_Catalogue›. Web. 1 Jan 2010. As already described in several essays on the film version, the sequence in David Fincher’s film adaptation of Fight Club (1999) offers a fascinating view of the actor Edward Norton, who plays the narrator, wandering inside a pop-up IKEA catalogue stressing the act of ordering the furniture via telephone and placing the pieces according to the pictured rooms. There is no individual touch anymore, only a copy of prefabricated spaces. Interestingly, the IKEA catalogue version of the year 2010, and a sociology of IKEA catalogues seems to be a striking task insofar as how the zeitgeist is reflected, offers an attempt to oppose the anti-individualism of mass production. Therefore it reads in the introductory notes: “‘You’ is the secret ingredient that gives your home that little something extra” and later on pages of mix-and-match furniture it is stated: “One wardrobe – many personalities” (IKEA catalogue 2010: 170; my emphasis). See Karl Marx and his “Zur Kritik der Nationalökonomie – Ökonomisch-Philosophische Manuskripte” (Marx 1962: 506-665).

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Erich Fromm in his seminal book The Sane Society (1955), in which the consumer oriented structure of society may lead to an inner life of emptiness.16 Erich Fromm also stressed the alienation of “post-consumer human” beings (FC 109) resembling waste within a shallow consumer-oriented society in his comments on “Values, Psychology and Human Existence” (1959): “The other obstacle to the achievement of well-being, deeply rooted in the spirit of modern society, is the fact that man’s dethronement from his supreme place. The nineteenth century said ‘God is dead’; the twentieth century could say “Man is dead”. Means have been transformed into ends, the production and consumption of things has become the aim of life, to which living is subordinated. We produce things that act like men and men that act like things. Man has transformed himself into a thing and worships the products of his own hands; he is alienated from himself and has regressed to idolatry, even though he uses God’s name. Emerson already saw that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind”. Today many of us see it. The achievement of well-being is possible only under one condition: if we put man back into the saddle.” (Fromm 1959: 9)17

The expression “back into the saddle” and the death of God (Nietzsche) are weak points where Tyler Durden can establish his macho-masochistic forces. The male identity and manhood itself is shattered in a post-feminist age after the patriarchic structures were destroyed by industrialization, and thus the male figure experienced a considerable crisis, explains Peter N. Stearns in Be a Man! Males in Modern Society (cf. Stearns 1990). And Palahniuk notes in his afterword to Fight Club that his book was there “before Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man published in the year 1999 (FC 211), where she hinted at the crisis of manhood (Ta 2006: 273) stressing his ability to forecast the future or rather understand the decline of patriarchic domination. Considering a strong secondary self as only suitable to resolve the weakness of the unnamed narrator, Tyler Durden is everything the unnamed narrator wants to be: “I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.” (FC 174)

16

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See Fromm 1998 [1955]. For further readings on the term of “alienation” connected with Marx, collective and individual neurosis and ideology see Udo Leuschner’s detailed study Entfremdung, Neurose, Ideologie. Eine Studie über Psychoanalyse und die Entfremdungs-Theorie von Karl Marx (Leuschner 1990). A further analysis concerning Marxism and sociology provides Martin Shaw (Ed.) in Marxist Sociology Revisited (Shaw 1985) and Simon Clarke in Marx, Marginalism & Modern Sociology (Clarke 1991). Erich Fromm. “Psychologie und Werte“. Sozialistischer Humanismus und Humanistische Ethik. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1959. 331-342. The original version is titled “Values, Psychology, and Human Existence”. See also ‹http://www.erichfromm.de/d/index.htm?/d/play.php?shownews=81›. Web. 15 June 2009.

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But discovering Tyler Durden to be his secondary personality evokes the wish to regain his former boring life back: “I am not Tyler Durden” (FC 174). Yet the destructive forces of Tyler Durden are, similar to the dynamics of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as shown in chapter 10, not only helpful and seemingly stronger than the narrator’s first state, but they are also eventually uncontrollable and overtly exaggerated. The forces of Tyler Durden, released on a personal level, aim at society itself and its inhabitants. By creating the “fight clubs” and later the terrorist collective hysteria of “Project Mayhem”, Tyler Durden becomes a legend, just as he wanted to be: “This isn’t really death, Tyler says, We’ll be legend. We won’t grow old” (FC 11). The very last pages of the novel reveal this assessment as a realistic one. Although, in the novel only, the narrator tries to commit suicide – that is, he actually wants to get rid of Tyler Durden – and the legend of his secondary personality, but no matter how imaginative it may be, it will live forever and haunt him: “‘We miss you Tyler Durden.’ Or somebody with a broken nose pushes a mop past me and whispers: ‘Everything’s going according to the plan.’ Whispers: ‘We’re going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world.’ Whispers: ‘We look forward to getting you back.’” (FC 208)

In contrast to the novel, the ending in the movie shows the unnamed narrator expressing his superiority over Tyler Durden by saying “My eyes are open”, which suggests Morton Prince’s most famous patient, Miss Beauchamp, whose Sally consciousness wanted to become the dominant personality. Sally wanted to open her eyes in order to be born and thus be real. The same expression is also used by Shirley Jackson in The Bird’s Nest (1954), when the hypnotized Elisabeth and her secondary evil personality Betsy is eager to open her eyes and thus be born into the world (Shirley Jackson 1954: 61; see chapter 11.1).18 The other side wants to be born, be alive, and recognized. With regard to the awareness of selfhood, the novel can be also connected to the different levels of selfconsciousness which are provided by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). His chapter on “Self-Consciousness”, where he states the necessity of being selfconscious with the means of being recognized, read like a certain – yet surely not entirely literal – notion of doppelgängers or double consciousness.19 The act of being

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The film version suggests that the unnamed narrator is able to reintegrate Tyler Durden into his psyche and thus also to adapt his coolness. After all he is the symbolic leader of a rebellious group. The novel character, however, admits that he loved his IKEA life more than his existence in Paper Street. He also admits to respecting his boss and his seemingly orderly life. Yet he is unable to restore the old order: “I sort of liked my boss…Except Tyler didn’t like my boss” (FC 186). The term of ‘double-consciousness’, for example, formerly mentioned by William James in his publication of The Principle of Psychology (1890), was connected to Hegel’s phi-

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recognized then is a “duplication” (Hegel 1977: 111) as “self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself” (111; italics in original text). Hegel finally concludes that there are three relationships of the self-consciousness (“the third relationship of the process of this consciousness”, 135). Concerning the positions of self-awareness (or selves-awareness) of the unnamed narrator I/Tyler Durden/unnamed narrator II relationship, Hegel’s theory is helpful insofar as he may meet the criteria of what I suggested with a “third position of narration” or what Palahniuk said about the “three character model”, and which is also connectable with Hubert Zapf’s triadic model of “cultural ecology” – ‘culture-critical meta-discourse’, ‘imaginative counter-discourse’, and ‘reintegrative inter-discourse’ (cf. Zapf 2002; 2006). Being his former self means an experience of a death-in-life position. He is an unhappy, alienated being. The emergence of his alter ego, Tyler Durden, can be understood partly within societal structures of the mass production culture of brands and consumerism, yet also as reaction following the encounter with the femme fatale Marla. Creating the male counterpart of Marla symbolizes an act of being recognized – seemingly logical – as an irresistible super-male version of the rebellious Marla; thus, creating a literal, imaginative counter-discourse to his former self. The third level of self-consciousness is reached when the realization of Tyler Durden’s real existence is completed; hence, being reintegrated. On the three relationships of the process of self-consciousness, Hegel writes: “In the first relationship it was merely the notion of an actual consciousness, or the inner feeling of heart which is not yet actual in action and enjoyment; the second is this actualization as an external action and enjoyment. Returned from this external activity, however, consciousness has experienced itself as actual and effective, or knows that it is in truth in and for itself.” (Hegel 1977: 135)

The self-consciousness of the unnamed narrator after the discovery of his dividedness can be understood as what Hegel claims to be “a third term” or “middle term” as being “the mediator” (Hegel 1977: 136). Thus, this mediator represents “the two extremes to one another, and ministers to each in its dealings with the other” (136). Certainly, there is only the unnamed narrator now fighting against his opponent, Tyler Durden; yet his new position against his alter ego, consciously now, needs to be understood as the result of reintegration, of understanding his true nature. On the term of alienation, Hegel wrote: “The world of this Spirit breaks up into two. The first is the world of reality or of its self-alienation” (Hegel 1977: 296f.). The moment of truth, the revelation of his double nature and the discovery of the mental split and thus the third phase of self-consciousness is also manifested when the unnamed narrator states: “This is like a total epiphany moment for me” (FC 204). Ex-

losophy of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by W.E.B. Du Bois during his studies at Harvard University and with the publication of his seminal writing of The Souls of Black Folks published in 1903. Thus he developed his theory of double consciousness concerning the societal notion of the individual especially concerning ethnical categorization (cf. Zamir 1995).

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plaining the need to break into two different personalities, the unnamed narrator had noted that “at the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves” (FC 52). The unfulfilled existence of the unnamed narrator might have been merely what Horkheimer and Adorno referred to as “the economic mask” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 175). The first dreamlike encounter with his secondary idealized self is described considerably differently in the novel compared to the film version evoking an internal landscape. While in the film version of Fight Club (1999), Tyler Durden first appears within the world of the unnamed narrator at an airport, nevertheless presented as a place of transportation, transition and only momentary stay, the novel reveals a totally different place: the beach. Such a place of liminality, an in-between or conjunction of the two elements of land and sea, with Tyler and the narrator naked (“a nude beach”, FC 32), symbolizing the two contrasting parts of the narrator. This first meeting, however, was not planned, it just happened: “And somehow, by accident, Tyler and I met” (FC 32). The narrator, asleep and therefore unconscious, yet remembers Tyler to have “been around a long time before we met” (FC 32). Tyler therefore is already a part of the narrator, whose imagination begins to float at that beach describing the extraordinary experience: “You wake up at the beach. We were the only people on the beach” (FC 32). The term of liminality refers to a definition concerned with primitive initiation ceremonies (van Gennep 1960 cited in Hall “The Watcher”, 1991: 34), which would be understood as divided in three stages: “1) separation, 2) liminality (or transition), and 3) incorporation (or aggregation) (34; italics in original text). As such a liminality of “betwixt and between” (34) refers perfectly to the three-character model or mental condition the unnamed narrator finds himself in, although he cannot understand such a position yet: “The state of the ritual “passenger” or laminar is ambiguous, neither here nor there, not described by the usual points of social classification, devoid of the status insignia of both the old state and the not-yet-required new state. (Turner 1974: 232 cited in Hall “The Watcher” 1991: 35; my emphasis)

The status of in-between, however, is not entirely required here as the narrator now differentiates his old state from his new state of being Tyler Durden. The ritual symbolizing the coming into force of Tyler Durden is shown by the hand Tyler creates on the beach, a hand which later is Tyler’s absolute symbol when he literally brands (“chemical burn”, FC 73) his devotees: “What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatulong and thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute, Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he’d created himself.” (FC 33)

The narrator muses: “If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?” (FC 33). Postmodern identity games may offer a suitable template. Comparing the fragmented self or self-notion of a multiple person-

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ality and the mechanism of dissociation, however, is difficult according to James M. Glass in Shattered Selves (1993). Therefore he explains: “The postmodern critic or philosophy, in focusing primarily on texts and not survivors or victims, creates a highly intellectualized self, a textualized self, a self made up of letters and words, not feelings and psychological fractures. In its ideological abhorrence of psychoanalysis, the postmodernist transforms the self into a caricature, a copy of a copy of what exists around it. The actual self, the self living multiplicity (what appears in clinical reality), however, is infinitely more complicated.” (Glass 1993: 26; my emphasis)

Insofar, the author Chuck Palahniuk presents a fictional character not only with a personal psychological trauma, albeit the experiences of the unnamed narrator are unarguably traumatic and nightmarish, but also a portrait of the dilemma of postpostmodern human existence and a self or selves beyond control. Thus “everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy” (FC 21; my emphasis) and “everything becomes an out-of-body experience” (FC 19). This reciting of the copy passage could hint at Palahniuk’s knowledge of Glass and his seminal study Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World (Glass 1993).20 The universal dilemma of the postmodern or contemporary identity – torn apart by “the consequences of instrumentalism” (Taylor 1989: 500), that is an “instrumental society” without the opportunity to be not influenced by a “utilitarian value outlook” (500) – is defined in a seminal book by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor on modernity and identity called Sources of the Self (1989). Determining and also criticizing such inescapable instrumentalism of the zeitgeist rhythm, Taylor emphasizes in his concluding chapter: “The society’s action can also be seen as more direct and forceful. The charge may be that the instrumental mode of life, by dissolving traditional communities or driving out earlier, less instrumental ways of living with nature, has destroyed the matrices in which meaning could formerly flourish.” (Taylor 1989: 500)

The effects of such a modern society, as Max Weber formulated, may be experienced therefore as an “iron cage” (see Taylor 1989: 500). This is summarized by Taylor: “Or else it can be formulated in terms of division or fragmentation. To take an instrumental stance to nature is to cut us off from the sources of meaning in it. An instrumental stance to our

20

Certainly Chuck Palahniuk is familiar with the pop and professional psychology of multiple personality and dissociation. In his second book Survivor (1999), for example, his protagonist Tender Branson mentions the now current diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID): “For about three months after I first met the caseworker, I was a dissociative identity disorder because I wouldn’t tell the caseworker about my childhood” (Palahniuk 1999: 208). Marla understands the mental fragmentation the unreliable narrator refers to in an instant and connects it with “Tony Perkins’ mother in Psycho” (FC 173). The film version refers to “You’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass?”

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own feelings divides us within, splits reason from sense. And the atomistic focus on our individual goals dissolves community and divides us from each other.” (Taylor 1989: 500 f.; my emphasis)

Such a division from each other is demonstrated in the novel Fight Club by the statement of the unnamed narrator on how people actually hold monologues when talking with each other. A real connection to others may only be found within small groups of people with terminal illnesses, although the unnamed narrator and Marla only fake their illness: “People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak” (FC 107).21 The inner fragmentation into two separate personalities symbolizes the detachment not only from society and other people but also from the self. “Nothing is static”, the unnamed narrator declares, “everything is falling apart” (FC 113). A balance cannot be found in the end even when the unnamed narrator attempts to control his Mr. Hyde side – “I have to take care of Tyler Durden” (FC 197). His explanation to others that Tyler Durden is the evil force and a possible threat is based on his self-notion as a multiple personality: “I didn’t kill anybody, I say. I’m not Tyler Durden. He’s the other side of my split personality. I say, has anybody here seen the movie Sybil [sic!]” (FC 196; italics in original text, my emphasis). Talking to his secondary personality for the first time after he is aware of his multiplicity, the unnamed narrator thinks to himself “I was here first” yet Tyler Durden, reading his mind, exclaims: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, well let’s just see who’s here last.” (FC 168). But whereas the penultimate scene of the movie presents collapsing skyscrapers and a newly established romantic relationship with Marla, the novel presents the unnamed narrator lost within his mental delusions after he prevented the final explosions (“Nothing explodes”, FC 205). While in the film Tyler Durden is destroyed by the unnamed narrator by shooting himself – and thus Tyler Durden – in the head just to survive while the unnamed narrator holds hands with Marla, the unnamed narrator in the novel can reintegrate Tyler Durden “fast as a magic trick” (FC 204) only by looking at Marla, who wants to keep him from shooting himself. He knows that he loves Marla because “if Tyler Durden loves Marla. I love Marla” (FC 199). And Marla even states that “I know the difference” between him and Tyler Durden although she can only admit to “like” the unnamed narrator (FC 205). However, even by pulling the trigger, he still cannot evade Tyler Durden. Awaking apparently in a psychiatric ward, the unnamed narrator uses the house metaphor to express that he still is internally divided: “In my father’s house are many mansions” (FC 206). What is left is the naked self, the core self of existence: “We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens” (FC 207). Yet the ghost, the image, the brand of Tyler Durden is still alive. “We look forward to getting you back” says someone, who “brings me my lunch tray and my meds” (FC 208) hinting at Tyler Durden to be the stronger force and the image, which is able to survive as an uncontrollable idol. The other side may still be stronger. The reference again to the classic

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Due to her poverty, Marla is in fact an outcast and later is not able to afford a real doctor when she discovers two lumps in her breasts (FC 107).

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prototype of multiple personality and dissociation thus demonstrates how Palahniuk translates the psychiatric diagnosis into a parable of societal complexity and the individual trapped within it. The inner fragmentation is presented with the device of unreliable narration in order to express the subjective feelings and experiences of the main character as well as surprise the audience with a twist ending.22 Both personalities presented are complex and embedded in a typical environment and ideology, fighting a feminized consumer world, fighting his desire for Marla, the “big fake” (FC 24). The novel and the film both use the interpersonal a posteriori level of multiple personality both on societal and personal themes and still refer to multiplicity in terms of the former definition of MPD and the secondary personality as a mixture of an uncontrollable killer and yet a helpful albeit dominating protector inside.

22

On the film version and unreliable narration see Ferenz 2008; on the novel and unreliability see Church 2006.

16 “ ņ textbook MPD”: Matt Ruff Set this House in Order (2003) The others had a strength in forging reality out of dreams that Sybil lacked. The lost house had many mansions, many barricades against remembrance of things past and to come. How sweet, Sybil thought, to be in a house, held and caressed in a house that was hers, in which the earth mother could gather her children to herself and call them one! SCHREIBER SYBIL 1973: 367 I have this interesting case of Siamese twins with split personalities. I’m getting paid eight people. WOODY ALLEN ZELIG 1983

In Matt Ruff’s third novel Set this House in Order (2003), the reader encounters a veritably complex army of secondary personalities. With a manifold fragmentation into several so-called ‘souls’, the phenomenon of multiple personality disorder is described here most accurately in the meaning of not just double personality but actual multiple other selves. Whereas novels such as Love of Seven Dolls (1954) by Paul Gallico and the more recent Mockingbird (1998) by Canadian author Sean Stewart vary the theme of multiple personality in terms of transferring certain characteristics of one protagonist onto several symptomatic (puppet) selves, Ruff’s novel serves as an apparent description and literal translation of a psychiatric definition into an everyday experience of being and thus handling multiplicity. The novel stresses the model of the protector inside as the innumerous secondary selves serve as protection evoked after traumatic childhood experiences. And so the reader is invited into a multifaceted universe of a seemingly “tiny cast” (cf. Fried 2003 n.pag.) who, however, signify relatively crowded minds of two protagonists with multiple personality disorder. As such, the novel meets the criteria of an a priori interpersonal multiple personality and dissociation novel since the reader knows in advance about the mental “over crowdedness” of each character. Consequently, it is no surprise that Matt Ruff presents his sympathetic protagonists Andrew and Penny within an absurd and humorous daily life routine struggling with

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various personalities inside their bodies; more manageable for Andrew as he is able to balance his inner souls, whereas at the beginning of the novel Penny, also called Mouse, is still unaware of her condition. Matt Ruff won several awards for his novel Set this House in Order.1 Apart from being nominated a New York Times Notable Book, the novel won the James Tiptree Jr. Award (2003), the PNBA Book Award (2004), the Washington State Book Award (2004), and also the nomination for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It is no wonder that the reviews on Set this House in Order where usually very positive in the Anglo-American countries. Thus Matt Ruff posted several of these reviews on his website.2 The Telegraph depicted it as a “peculiar thriller”, a Thomas Pynchon “dizzyingly readable” and an “exceptional piece” of literature of “breezy and entirely absorbing style which carries it through its 500 pages”; and the New Zealand Herald confirmed it proved that one of the “greatest, scariest, weirdest adventures of all is the voyage inside the human mind”; the Seattle Times affirmed that the novel is written “without voyeurism or sensationalism, in fact with incredible sensitivity and grace”.3 Another review in a psychiatric specialist journal, however, mentioned the problem with – and this is already indicated with the term of multiple personality disorder – the usage of MPD instead of the current and valid term of DID: “As a psychiatrist, I had some concerns about this book. I was bothered by the consistent use of the term ‘multiple personality disorder’” (Hackman 2003: 1660). The literal translation of the former definition of MPD stressing the “existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities” (Hacking 1995: 10) in the former DSM-III is, as already stated, replaced in the DSM-IV-TR with the emphasis on merely “presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states” (APA 2000: 529). The importance of such identity states refers to the idea that there are no distinct entities within one body anymore, that the disorder is not to be understood as a personality disorder, and that misconceptions about the former definition required rewriting the definition and renaming it into dissociative identity disorder stressing its inner fragmentation rather than literal persons. What Matt Ruff’s novel requires, however, in order to function as a strange and somewhat really humorous encounter with multiple protagonists, are distinct personalities inside the body of each of the two multiple characters claiming their own individual rights. Each of these personalities needs to be complex and therefore offers a special pattern of behavior, yet each of the souls actually resembles stereotypical and one-dimensional characteristics. Why Ruff eventually used the more familiar term of multiple personality disorder is answered by him in a special section of frequently asked questions on his website. There he provides the following explanation to the

1 2 3

Matt Ruff. Set this House in Order. New York: Harper Collins, 2003; hereafter abbreviated SHO. See the author’s website: ‹http://home.att.net/~Storytellers/sethouse.html›. Web. 5 Feb 2010. For additional news and information on several more reviews on the novel see the website: ‹http://home.att.net/~Storytellers/setrevs.html›. Web. 5 Feb 2010.

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question “If the official psychiatric term of MPD is ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’, how come you don’t use that phrase?”: “Mainly for clarity’s sake. I’m addressing a general audience, and to most non-psychiatrists, ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’ doesn’t mean anything. Say “multiple personality”, though, and folks know what you’re talking about. Within the context of the novel, there’s also the issue of verisimilitude: I want the characters to talk the way they really would talk. While some real-world multiples do use the DID label, my sense is that it’s much more common for them to refer to themselves as ‘multiple’ than as ‘dissociative.’” (my emphasis)4

When it comes to the question whether MPD is more popular than DID, the study again is able to confirm that the novelists sticks to the former definition. And the author here even translates the idea of personalities into another special term. As already mentioned, Matt Ruff names them souls. As Ruff’s multiples, at least the more rebellious or individual Andrew (among other souls inside the body) shares the opinion of a functional multiplicity, which as a consequence requires the souls to be able to exist independently and not merely as fragments of personality states. The new term of souls meets the fictional criteria: “It seemed intuitively obvious to me that multiples who rejected this way of looking at themselves (or their selves) [as mere fragments] would also reject the language. So I needed to come up with another word, and ‘souls’ seemed right”.5 The subtitle to his novel Set this House in Order then is logical as it reads: A Romance of Souls thus referring to the personalities within those multiples as whole entities.6 The major question raised in this novel is: What happens if two multiples interact with each other? The answer simply is that the room is overcrowded. The two characters with a number of souls inside them, Andrew and Mouse, are also understood as “classic survivor multiples” according to Ruff. Therefore, the novel again depicts the most typical multiple personality and dissociation genre: traumatic childhood experiences with sexual abuse. The split into different personalities – or souls – represents a switch into distinct personalities or persons as whole entities with distinct characteristics; here, the reader is informed about the disorder in advance in order to observe the consequences within a daily life routine. There is, however, also a twist within the story, which depicts the first-person narration of Andrew, despite all his explanations, partly told by an unreliable narrator. I shall refer to this twist later in this chapter. As such an a priori interpersonal version of the MPD and DID genre, Matt Ruff therefore begins his novel with the general explanation of his protagonist and firstperson narrator Andrew. In a kind of prologue to the novel, Andrew therefore attempts to clarify some important details:

4 5 6

See ‹http://home.att.net/~storytellers/setfaq.html›. Web. 20 July 2009. Ibid. On an entirely detailed view on philosophical musings about personalities or persons as whole entities see Gunnarsson 2010.

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“I suppose I should explain about the house. Aunt Sam says that a good storyteller only reveals important information a little at a time, to keep the audience interested, but I’m afraid if I don’t explain it all now you’ll get confused, which is worse than not being interested. So just bear with me, and I promise to try not to bore you later.” (SHO 1)

Thanks to Andrew’s explanation, the reader can understand the metaphoric and yet literal use of the “house” inside Andrew’s mind where all souls are assigned to their room. With the image of the house, the souls can manage their balance. To be more exact, it is Andy Gage’s body and head, although Andy (the original soul) was “murdered not long after by his stepfather, a very evil man named Horace Rollins” (SHO 2). Andrew, as another soul, now controls the body. The traumatic events caused Andy’s soul to die and “when it died, it broke in pieces. Then the pieces became souls in their own right, coinheritors of Andy Gage’s life” (SHO 2). The fragmentation of Andy leads to further souls: “There was no house back then, just a dark room in Andy Gage’s head where the souls all lived. In the center of the room was a column of bright light, and any soul that entered or was pulled into the light found itself outside, in Andy Gage’s body, with no memory of how it had gotten there or what had happened since the last time it was out…By the time they got free of Horace Rollins, there were over a hundred souls in Andy Gage’s head.” (SHO 2)

Such a chaotic condition is later managed by the creation of a somewhat stable inner landscape and a house with several rooms. A balcony represents the place to step out for each soul, which then is in control of the body or has “body time”. Therefore, Andrew, eager to make his condition clear to the reader, draws a helpful picture of his inner counter-world. Such an inner geography is needed for Andrew and especially of course the body in general since “somebody has to run the body…The trick is to make sure the body is in a safe place, a place where, if bad stuff starts to happen, it will happen slowly and with a lot of warning” (SHO 95). Quite some way through the novel, Andrew therefore provides the reader with a view of his inner world. “The map of the geography inside Andy Gage’s head looks like this” (SHO 95):

Fig. 1: Map of the inside geography by Andy Gage

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Furthermore, the explanation of such an inner geography is given by Andrew: “The X at the bottom of the map marks the spot where I appeared, beside the column of light that is the conduit between inside and outside. The column of light touches down on the crest of a hill above the south shore of the lake…Colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations are all exactly the same inside as they are outside. The house looks and feels just like a real house…Because the geography doesn’t really exist, certain things are possible inside that are not possible outside – but because I am used to these impossibilities and consider them normal, it’s hard for me to list them on demand.” (SHO 96-97)

In order to be “co-conscious”, the term established by Dr. Morton Prince (cf. Prince 1906), the souls can meet within the imagined house. Such meetings inside are described in detail as with the help of such an imaginary world with special physical impossibilities the outside life can be managed. Therefore, the different souls may meet: “Many of these were souls who, like my father, had grown weary of dealing with the outside world, and only rarely occupied the body anymore” (SHO 99). Others are souls we encountered earlier, such as Andrew himself or “The Father”. The details of the interior of the imagined house are again symbolized by a drawing within the text (SHO 99):

Fig. 2: The interior of the imagined house

Andy Gage’s souls are also differentiated by quality, which means that some of them are in fact merely inside; some of them are only fragments called “the Witnesses…fragmentary souls” (SHO 99). The inside meeting is held within the house because Andrew encounters another multiple, Penny, and his souls decide to help her.

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Yet the other multiple, Penny, is still totally unaware of her condition and hence has not yet developed a manageable system. The narration in the novel is partly told in first-person by Andrew and third-person describing the experiences of Penny. The structure of the novel is complicated yet systematic: “First Book: Andrew” “Second Book: Mouse” “Third Book: Andrew” “Fourth Book: Mouse” “Fifth Book: Andrew” “Sixth Book: Mouse”

chapters 1-3 (SHO 7-48) chapters 4-6 (SHO 49-79) chapters 7-9 (SHO 81-137) chapters 10-12 (SHO 139-192) chapters 13-15 (SHO 193-242) chapters 17-18 (SHO 243-279)

The alternating chapters therefore compare the different experiences of Andrew’s multiplicity which is seemingly in balance as contrasted to Mouse and her inner imbalance. The whole first part of the book is consequently headed “Equilibrium”, referring to the calm before the storm (SHO 5-279). The second part, when Andrew’s inner balance falls apart again, is called “Chaos” (SHO 281-456) with the following chapters: “Seventh Book: To the Badlands” “Eight Book: Lake View” “Ninth Book: Homecoming” “Tenth Book: Chief Bradley’s Tears”

chapters 19-21 (SHO 283-321) chapters 22-25 (SHO 323-359) chapters 25-27 (SHO 361-401) chapter 28 (SHO 403-456)

Within this part of the book, the individual chapters are told either in Andrew’s firstperson narration or Penny’s third-person experience. This second part is mainly focused on Andrew and Penny’s road trip of back to Andrew’s childhood hometown to set his past in order. During that road trip into the past, the several souls within Andrew and Penny interact with each other. Some of them get along fine, while some of them hate and fight each other. The secret about Andrew’s past is told in a more serious and suspense thriller genre setting when finally it is revealed that Andrew is really not the killer of his abusing stepfather, but it was instead another (real!) character, Chief Bradley. The third part of the novel carries the title “Order” and contains the “Last Book: Epilogue” with the chapters 29-30 (SHO 457-479). The final part of the book concentrates on the impact of the recalled past events. In chapter 29, for example, the narrator’s voice seems to be intermingled with the first-person narration by Andrew and another “I”-narrator. Chapter 30, concluding on such an exchange of narrating voices inside Andy Gage (“Surprised? I couldn’t resist including that…”, SHO 465) ends with a description of Mouse’s/Penny’s new found manageable multiplicity, which is predominantly based on reintegration of the single souls into one consciousness. Andrew, however, remains a functional multiple. According to the different parts and chapters of the novel’s structure, there are different plot levels which evolve a) around Andrew’s life as the “soul Andrew” controls the body and manages the other souls inside; b) the inside world with its own

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dynamic, such as opposing or hidden forces; c) eventually Penny and her mysterious sufferings. While Penny is only unaware of her mental condition of a multiple and is very conscious about her abusing mother – she strongly resembles the mother figure from Sybil (1973) – Andrew is aware of his mental condition and yet unaware of the actual cause of his inner fragmentation. He remembers his stepfather, but there is another twist in the story which eventually reveals that Andrew, although described as a boyish man, actually resides within a female body. The secret of the stepfather’s death, however, and the actual circumstances explore the genre of suspense and thriller and oppose the more experimental and humorous beginning of the novel when the absurd situations of managing a life as a multiple are described. Consequently, what is explored by Matt Ruff with Set this House in Order is also how a life as a multiple, containing several souls, would look like if understood literally. The descriptions, for example, of the difficulties of fulfilling normal daily routine tasks such as having breakfast and so on are most convincing and comical. Different souls claim their rights to make use of the body. As indicated, the souls are “co-conscious” (cf. Prince 1906) plus “co-aware” or “mutually cognizant” (Ellenberger 1970: 131). Granting the souls equal rights also on the outside (“Aunt Sam’s easel, brushes, and paints…Adam’s skateboard; Jake’s stuffed panda; Seferis’s kendo sword”, SHO 10), the daily routine is demanding; yet still, Andrew is really the head of the team: “I got us out of bed and into the bathroom to start the morning ritual. Teeth came first, Jake really enjoys brushing for some reason, so I let him do it, stepping back into the pulpit and giving him the body. I stayed alert…This morning there were no accidents…I took the body back and had a quick squat on the toilet…After the toilet came exercise. I stretched out on the bath mat beside the tub and let Seferis run through this routine…Next I gave Adam and Aunt Sam two minutes each under the shower…My father came out on the pulpit to help me pick clothes…I sat down not to one meal but to a hybrid of several, each serving carefully proportioned.” (SHO 10-12; my emphasis)7

Andrew’s environment and the closest friends, the landlady Mrs. Windslow and the psychiatrist Dr. Grey, seems supportive and the disorder is not felt as a hindrance, but as a positive challenge. Before Andrew gets control of the body – or rather “running the body” (SHO 17) – it was the Father (or merely called the father), who responsible for “working as a restocker” (SHO 17). Thus, each soul has its functions. Explaining the philosophical details of his souls, Andrew claims: “This is one of those metaphysical issues that people who aren’t multiple have a hard time grasping” (SHO 17). To take it for granted that Ruff (or Andrew) understands the souls as entities, each of them has individual characteristics: “Aunt Sam’s understanding of French, Seferis’s martial-arts prowess, and Adam’s knack for lie-detecting” (SHO 17). While Andrew,

7

Later in the text, when Andrew drives to his former therapist Dr. Grey, the absurd situation of pleasing all his souls makes Andrew order “two entrees, four side dishes, and three beverages. Most of the food remained on the plates, of course, but even so, by the time we were done, I was stuffed” (SHO 106; my emphasis).

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for example, avoids alcohol when he first meets his new employer Julie, who runs the virtual computer company “Reality Factory”, the teenager Adam might take over and gets drunk (SHO 26).8 Julie is interested in Andrew’s mysterious disorder and thus Ruff attempts to connect the idea of multiplicity with virtual realities. Creating such secondary lives within artificially constructed worlds – for example the virtual world of Second Life in the Internet (cf. Grodin and Lindlof 1996) – may profit from people’s experience of imaginary worlds within themselves: “I had firsthand experience with what virtual reality was ultimately meant to be: an imaginary universe” (SHO 36). The selfdepiction of Andrew and Penny – they meet because Julie picks Penny as another multiple for her company as she considers them as exceptional creatives – is mirrored when they also encounter within the virtual worlds of “Eidolon”. To establish the idea of Eidolon, Julie hopes to profit from Andrew’s imaginary house. The first part of the novel therefore explores the idea of looking at a situation from several points of view. Andrew’s version (SHO 41ff.) is mirrored later on by the version of Penny (SHO 69 ff.). Yet Andrew and Penny dislike each other (“Mouse decides that she doesn’t like Andrew”, SHO 71); they only befriend each other when certain souls take over their bodies.9 When Andrew steps back to let another soul, say Samantha, control the body, whereas Mouse transforms into Loins and later into Maledicta, a friendship may seem possible. Samantha and Maledicta enjoy each other in doing forbidden things: “and as for Sam, Maledicta kind of likes her” (SHO 329). This opposes Andrew’s earlier uneasiness with Penny: “I didn’t like Penny” (SHO 84). During their road trip to Seven Lakes, where Andrew was born, occasionally Samantha and Maledicta – some of the personified Sally or Mr. Hyde sides of both multiple characters – would consume alcohol and nicotine. During such a seemingly delightful situation, other souls take sudden control of the body. Andrew – or rather another soul – comes back and is only detected because he suddenly acts like a child. On the outside, the body remains the same, only the inside soul in charge changes: “Mouse opens the door a little wider. ‘Andrew?’ ‘Sorry,’ he says. He looks at her, a smirk playing on his lips, and Mouse thinks: him! But then he says: ‘Don’t worry, I’m not Gideon. He’s with Aaron and Andrew right now, playing King of the Mountain…By the way’ – he glances around the room – ‘is there a minibar in here by any chance?’” (SHO 326)

8 9

Within Andrew’s first-person narration, Adam is perceived as someone else: “I tried to wrest the body back from him” (SHO 26). Penny’s souls – or rather as she points at it as the “Society” (SHO 166) – consist of the Navigator, the twin-sisters Maledicta (the Foul-Speaker) and Malefica (the Evil-Doer), the obsequious Drone, the promiscuous Loins and Brain, a technically talented soul who fixes computers, and Thread, the evil side within Penny’s Society. Penny, calling herself Mouse, is an inconspicuous young woman haunted by her traumatic past.

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The soul emerging inside Andy Gage’s body is supposed to be Xavier (savior), seemingly a helper of Gideon, the uncontrollable and totally evil side of Andrew symbolizing a counter-force within his geography and other more content souls.10 Meanwhile, Mouse, reacting on Xavier, transforms into Loins, her promiscuous soul: “Loins, stepping forward past Mouse’s horror” (SHO 327). During the conversation between Xavier and Loins, Xavier changes into Samantha. Responding again to that change, Loins becomes Maledicta: “He pats the back of her hand, affectionately but with no passion. ‘The thing is, dear,’ he says, his voice gone feminine, ‘you’re just not my type.’ He plucks Loins’s hand off his leg, and deposits it on her own lap. ‘Now that we’ve got that straight, would you happen to have a cigarette?’ ‘No,’ says Maledicta…‘You were smoking Winston yesterday.’ ‘Winston.’ He – she – makes a face. ‘Not my favorite brand.’[…] ‘You want to get some more?’ ‘Yes, that would be lovely.’ Offering a hand: ‘Samantha, by the way, Sam to my friends.’” (SHO 327)

The smoker Samantha is aware of her delicate position with Andrew being able to step ahead of the body’s consciousness and pushing her back into the inner geography again: “‘Please,’ says Sam, hanging on. ‘If there’s trouble I might not be able to stay outside. And if Andrew comes back, he’s not going to want to smoke with you’” (SHO 328). Thus some of the emerging souls suit each other more conveniently, yet when Maledicta leaves Samantha for a short time, a child soul emerges inside Andy Gage’s body and the “party’s over” (SHO 323). The other souls namely Penny and Andrew, although not quite as drunk as Samantha and Maledicta, eventually gain control over their bodies: “‘And get Sam back out there…’ He blinks, and switches – to Andrew. ‘Penny?’ Andrew says, confused…Mouse comes out gasping. Her last memory is of the TV in the motel room, and now, as she reawakens, her eyes naturally gravitate to the set above the bar… ‘Maledicta?’ Andrew says, still a step behind. ‘Andrew?’ says Mouse.

10

Another plot level later focuses on the imaginary world inside Andy Gage’s mind with Gideon as evil force, who uncontrollably even attempts to murder Andrew (SHO 429). Later when the novel transforms into a suspense thriller genre, Gideon can be detected on the outside, for example, by using the left hand of Andy Gage’s body while Andrew uses the right hand (SHO 449ff.). As the personified evil side of Andy Gage, Gideon can only be controlled by self-mutilation. Unlike in Fight Club (1996) with the unnamed character and his co-consciousness embodied in Tyler Durden, self-mutilation prevents the body of Andy Gage of being totally managed by the evil Gideon. Self-mutilation in Fight Club evokes Tyler Durden, makes him literally essential.

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‘Penny,’ says Andrew. And then, in unison: ‘Where are we?’” (SHO 332)

The different souls thus experience also memory loss. Penny especially resembles the experiences of Sybil (1973); she also experiences a life of memory loss and mind gaps as she awakens at strange places without the knowledge how she got there: “She doesn’t know what day it is, or what city; she has no idea how she got here” (SHO 51). The only constant in her life is inconsistency and even “no sense of having lost consciousness” (SHO 51). “Losing time” (SHO 51) therefore is, as she senses it, “a symptom of insanity” (SHO 51) and indeed, Andrew’s father, who was in charge of the body before, was created as another soul to control the body so not to lose time (SHO 77). In the passages about Penny, there are already references to her souls like “the Navigator” (SHO 52), “the Brain” (SHO 70), and “Maledicta, the Foul-Speaker” (SHO 56), who refers to Penny as “you worthless piece of shit” (SHO 57), a phrase originally used by Penny’s mother (SHO 150). Through the third-person narration, Penny’s horrifying childhood with an apparently insane mother is told.11 The description of Penny’s nightmarish past depicts her as being “under her mother’s power” (SHO 143) as the mother is “always sneaking up on Mouse” as her “favorite game” displaying a “vicious humor” (SHO 146). These disturbing circumstances are handled, for example, by sending herself letters from an imaginary “English Society of International Correspondents” (SHO 142). This imaginary society seemingly delivers letters in purple envelopes in order to keep the letters a secret from the mother, who is afraid of the color purple (“Purple, her mother’s unlucky color”, SHO 158). The physical abuse by the mother is so severe – the text indicates even sexual acts against the daughter (SHO 151) – that only the mechanism of dissociation offers an escape: “Mouse was leaving her body, sliding down into darkness. She curled up in the dark and went to sleep, and whatever else her mother did had nothing to do with her” (SHO 151). The actual abuse is not remembered in detail, though: “One drawback to blacking out during her mother’s rages was that Mouse could never be sure what sort of closure, if any, had been reached” (SHO 151). Even Andrew himself – or rather the father soul – has had experiences with such blackouts (SHO 164). In order to keep track of his life, he was also used to produce lists just like Penny does when she finds messages like “LISTEN TO HIM” (SHO 160) to indicate to take advice from Andrew. Andrew’s suggestion is the building of a house as an imaginary place to visualize and thus organize the inner selves (SHO 165). Yet Andrew’s own behavior seems quite strange, displaying a Fight Club-like scenery when interacting with his several co-conscious souls: “Andrew is talking to himself…This is crazy behavior, but Andrew seems completely unself-conscious about it” (SHO 162). Andrew seems also ignorant to one major fact: he depicts and describes himself as male, and he will continue to do so after the reader learns of

11

Thus the mother of Penny resembles Sybil’s mother and all the nightmarish mother figures, which could be detected in various MPD novels within this study such as in Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate, The Bird’s Nest, Thr3e, Chasing Sophea, probably Fight Club as the men were all raised by women but without fathers.

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such a false assumption since the body of Andy Gage is actually female. This question of gender is the major twist in Matt Ruff’s novel. While Andrew is only described as a male character (for example by Penny’s point of view: “a boyish looking man”, SHO 69), he actually knows that the body he dwells within is female: “The body’s female, that’s all” and thus explaining during an intimate scene with Julie: “His body was female, but his soul was male” (SHO 237).12 While Penny still considers her state confused – or rather her states as she is already referring to her selves as Maledicta, Brain and so on – Andrew stresses the creativity of multiplicity: “You did something creative. And that’s great” (SHO 170). In order to overcome such confusion, Penny accepts a therapeutic session with Dr. Grey, Andrew’s lesbian psychiatrist, and eventually meets her other selves, the Society, during a hypnotic session. The hypnotic session is equipped with a safety helmet and an attached miner’s light. Entering her imaginary cave, Penny is able to meet the others: “And she has a sudden impression of a huge crowd of people asleep on the floor of a cavern, the sleepers arranged in rows and exhaling in unison” (SHO 176).13 The relationship between Andrew and Penny seems to be complicated because both are multiples and only some of the souls agree with each other whereas other combinations cannot. Yet Penny – “she never mystified [Andrew] the way Julie had” (SHO 468) – seeks to deal with her condition in a different way than Andrew: she attempts to reintegrate her different souls and merge into a functional sole character. The final chapter presents another Penny, now influenced by her therapy and observed by Andrew. Andrew’s opinion on the possibility of such a model of reintegration is different. He considers such a merging or blotting out of souls as counterproductive as he believes in a functional multiplicity: “‘Reintegration?’ I said, not sure I’d heard right. ‘Penny, that’s…’ ‘…a shock, I know,’ she said.

12

13

The central character therefore is actually female, although the soul of Andrew considers himself male. Yet Ruff attempts to focus also on female topics and female characters. In his novel Mockingbird (1998), the Canadian author Sean Stewart created a central female character, which is sometimes possessed by six voodoo puppets and their characteristic abilities. Mockingbird also explores female topics written by a male author and picks up the topic of multiple personality and dissociation in terms of possession. The image of the cave during a “guided meditation” (FC 20) is also used in the film version of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1999). In Matt Ruff’s novel it is seen as a personal place to meet the other souls or the “Society” inside. The novel Fight Club (1996), however, relies on the metaphor of a palace with endless doors in order to talk the participants “into the garden of serenity” (FC 20). An imaginary place for the secondary personalities is also used in the autobiography A Fractured Mind by Robert B. Oxnam (2005): “I live in a Castle” (Oxnam 2005: 55), see chapter 9.4 of this study.

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Crazy, I was going to say; like opting for lobotomy. I tried for a more tactful phrasing: ‘Reintegration doesn’t work, Penny. It doesn’t work, and if it did, it’d be like dying. You wouldn’t be you anymore.’” (SHO 469)14

The difference between Andy Gage’s souls and Penny is described by Andrew as “with Penny, the basic personality split, as profound as it seems, just isn’t as severe: the original Penny Driver still exists, and still wants to exist” (SHO 470). Penny explains her decision to reintegrate as she does not desire to lead a “life as a timesharer” (SHO 470): “I want to be one person” (SHO 470). Andrew argues against such a view; he still wants to resist such a re-union: “I’m never going to reintegrate” (SHO 470; italics in original text). Observing the new and partly reintegrated Penny and her hybrid mental construction – who now refers to herself or her selves first in singular (“I know this must be weird for you”, SHO 471) then in plural: “we’re all still here, just, less separate than we used to be” (SHO 471) – Andrew concludes that “her body language confused me” (SHO 471): “As we approached, she was smoking a cigarette, ordinarily a sign that Maledicta had control. But when she looked up and saw us coming, her reaction – the look on her face, the slightly tentative way she waved hello – said ‘Penny’ to me…and then, without changing expression, she took a last draw on the cigarette and stubbed it out with an impatient gesture that was pure Maledicta.” (SHO 471)

The former chaotic multiplicity of Penny is now experienced as a co-existence: “We don’t have to occupy the body one at a time now”, and “I can also just let them flow together” (SHO 471; my emphasis). Such a merging of separate and characteristic personalities, however, seems incomplete. Andrew accepts Penny’s “half a dozen souls simultaneously”, yet “there were times, more often in moments of stress and great emotion, but occasionally in calmer moments too, when a single soul seemed to predominate” (SHO 473). The final passages of the novel furthermore reveal the possible strength of different souls inside Penny as she sends an e-mail to Andrew as Penny with a postscript stating : “PS tell Sam I fucking said hi…M” (SHO 478). Although Penny’s multiplicity therefore seems to remain on typical MPD terms, the former unproblematic and sudden diagnosis of Penny by a non-professional earlier in the novel seems illogical, a fact which is also mentioned by a critical review in a German literary magazine (cf. Küchemann 2004) and Ann L. Hackman, a psychiatrist (Hackman 2003: 1660). Julie, the employer of the computer company Reality Factory, for example, instantly diagnoses Penny with “ – textbook MPD” (SHO 75). Andrew on the other hand explains in detail that the average case of MPD needs years to find the correct diagnosis:

14

A literal dying of the various personalities inside is visualized in the film Identity (2003) mentioned in the film chapter.

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“Statistically, the average multiple goes through something like eight psychiatrists before being correctly diagnosed. And that’s only half the story; even after you get the fight diagnosis, you may have to go through another eight psychiatrists before you find one who knows how to treat it properly.” (SHO 106)

Typical for fiction of multiple personality and dissociation is the mention of the case of Sybil as a reference: “You know, like in Sybil [sic!]” (SHO 106; my emphasis). Yet Andrew’s understanding of MPD (“or ‘dissociative identity disorder’, as they call it now”, SHO 106) is slightly different. Comparing the case of Sybil to the metaphor of a broken vase with, as a consequence, “shards and fragments of the original personality” (SHO 106), an image that is actually more reminiscent of Penny, comprehends such fragments more as persons and thus entities being alive and “changing even after they get smashed to bits” (SHO 107). The image of a torn rosebush is more adequate, as it may be scattered around the garden after a storm but grows many rosebushes after a certain time and symbolizes therefore much more “than a simple collection of puzzle pieces” (SHO 107).15 Andrew’s experiences are acquired “the hard way” (SHO 107). He mentions a Dr. Kroft – thus clearly referring to one of the most powerful defenders of MPD theory: Dr. Kluft, who still is in charge of advising Hollywood and television productions like The United States of Tara (2009). Dr. Kroft first diagnoses him with MPD back in the year 1987: “Together they spent four years trying to merge my father with the other souls in Andy Gage’s head” (SHO 107); this makes Andy Gage an old-school multiple. As according to that painfully received therapy, “reintegration was the only way to go” (SHO 107). Andy Gage tries other possibilities as she does not intend to merge into a singular being. Several psychiatrists then seek to heal the patient with their individual seemingly multiple concepts and theories. Accordingly, a Dr. Minor believes in MPD not as the result of an ordinary child abuse, but of a ritual, nationwide conspiracy of Satanic cults; Dr. Bruno focuses into past-life regression; Dr. Whitney on assault by extraterrestrials; Dr. Leopold recommends suing the parents (SHO 108). Eventually, Dr. Danielle Grey offers a more convenient solution as she “approached multiplicity as a condition to be managed, rather than as a pathology to be cured” (SHO 108).16 The main point of Dr. Grey’s access to MPD is the elimina-

15

16

Such an understanding of the souls as entities of their own can be compared to Leif Gunnarsson’s concept of entities in multiple personalities and thus the defence of coexistence theory in his study Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality: “Each of us is fundamentally an entity, of which there could exist two or more in one body”, states Gunnarsson according to the theory of co-existence (Gunnarsson 2010: 126). On such a concept of also healthy multiplicity see also Rita Carter in Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality (2008). The difficulty with such concepts is that they make multiplicity, although in contrast to a diseased multiplicity of MPD or DID, a plausible concept for everyone. Such concepts, however, are always used to re-value or explain MPD or DID. If MPD and DID hence are artificial artefacts – one has to remember that thereupon another level of uncontrollable consciousness is understood – how could such

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tion of “the confusion that resulted from uncontrolled switching: to impose order” (SHO 109; my emphasis). The result of the therapy then is the coordination within Andy Gage’s mind by means of the imaginative house and regular meetings with the other souls. Describing such a notion of multiplicity, Matt Ruff’s novel does offer a different view on MPD as being not merely experienced as pathological despite its being trauma-induced, yet also as creative and sustainable. Although the plot revolves around the usual ingredients, also partly because the reader is forced to recognize the disorder, the first half of the narration – when Andrew and Penny offer their different points of view on certain situations, such as the first encounter within a virtual reality – evolves around the explanation and description of MPD. The second half of the book, when Andrew and Penny share the narration or experience the plotline together, the intention is to uncover what really happened in Andrew’s past. Penny’s ability to remember the gruesome past with her insane mother is opposed by the enhanced mind gaps within Andy Gage’s mind, which means that the functional multiple suffers from dissociative amnesia whereas the uncontrolled multiple is able to remember the traumatic past. When Andrew’s house of his childhood is finally destroyed (SHO 456), mainly by his evil soul, Gideon, the re-establishment of a new house by means of Mr. Winslow’s petite house as a little idyll now owned by Andrew hence symbolizes also the re-establishment of a mental stability within in quite a sugar-coated way. Ruff enhances the personalities of his characters as complex and characteristic. He still uses consciously the former diagnosis of MPD and not DID. Andrew, diagnosed in the year 1987 and therefore faced with the concept of MPD, still sticks to the self-depiction of being multiple. The narration evolves around real multiple selves, that is that there is not only one – preferably evil – other side but many entities inside one body. The other side here functions as the protector(s) inside. Although the novel does not contain concrete references concerning societal structures causing a split or metaphorically comments by the multiple personality and dissociation, Ruff’s readable novel itself contains several genres such as slight hints of fantasy, science fiction, and suspense thriller. The narration attempts to focus on inner dia-

a multiplicity, for example, also experienced within the terms of postmodernism and multiculturalism, be plausible? Such concepts, as Rita Carter’s, are catching, certainly because they still refer to the fascinating and mysterious concept of MPD or DID. Recent studies, for example, Mergenthaler 2008 and Gunnarsson 2010 differentiate the everyday notion of a post-postmodern human being from the pathological form of MPD or DID (mainly because they refuse to use MPD, the disorder and its controversial history, and stick to the neutral term of ‘multiple personality’ for their own sake of application). Yet the understanding of everybody’s experience of being not singular in a Cartesian unitary notion of the self may not be helpful to decipher the controversy of MPD and DID. The idea of postmodernism, for example, made concepts of dissociation plausible for a broader range of people, yet this does not explain the difficulties of a disorder which may only be a social construction or artefact or, if accepted as a mental illness, sees multiplicity still as a malfunction. On the delicacy of valid diagnostic practices in psychology especially on DID, see also Shaffer 2005.

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logues and observable inter-communication of different selves as well as placing the concept of multiplicity within an outside and an imaginary inside world. As far as the ongoing controversy goes, this novel mainly focuses on a literal, and also absurd and comical, translation of MPD. It can thus be widely accepted by a pop culture educated audience since the typical features are obvious.

17 “Three! Three personalities in one…”: Ted Dekker Thr3e (2003) According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse – fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual selfsacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable. None of it had been real, as it turned out. PETER WATTS BLINDSIGHT 2006: 1541

In Ted Dekker’s thriller Thr3e (2003), the theme of multiple personality and dissociation is realized in absolute terms. With the presentation of different unlike personalities, who represent the evil side and the good side of human nature, the opposing characters resemble again the conventional and therefore established definition of MPD within the genre of pulp or mainstream thriller. As Dekker sees himself as writing within the tradition of Christianity, the story of the thriller Thr3e is meant to symbolize the human nature as torn between the good and caring forces, and the evil and destructive forces. Thus the thriller Thr3e represents the a posteriori and unreliable interpersonal model of multiple personality and dissociation narration. The central character Kevin, a twenty-eight year old student at the Divinity School of the Pacific, South, is stalked by a stranger called Slater. Slater never reveals himself to Kevin but contacts him frequently by a cell phone to make Kevin confess his sin or else he would detonate bombs. As Kevin is unable to recall his real

1

Canadian writer Peter Watt shows in his science fiction novel protagonists who travel in a space ship. Due to space capacities, the corporation funding the flight engages also multiple scientists. A similar approach provides Walter John Williams with a science fiction novel series (starting 1995 with Metropolitan).

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sin, Slater’s threat is fulfilled as several explosions follow each phone call. Furthermore, Slater poses six riddles to make Kevin eventually discover his real nature and therefore confess his sin. As Slater displays the same modus operandi as a serial killer named “the Riddle Killer”, his true identity is finally revealed with the help of FBI agent Jennifer and Kevin’s childhood friend Samantha. With the final twist in the novel, the seemingly real characters of Slater and even Samantha are revealed as being merely part of Kevin. Kevin therefore displays a tripartite fragmentation of a multiple personality disorder. The decision to include Ted Dekker and his MPD thriller Thr3e in this study is mostly due to the considerable success of the more than thirty novels including suspense and mainstream thrillers Dekker has written so far. As a best-selling author, Dekker is well-established and widely read.2 The thriller Thr3e (2003) won the Christy Awards in the category Suspense in the year 2004 and also the ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award for Fiction and was a Christy Award Nominee for Suspense/Mystery in the same year. Being such a productive and well-known writer, Dekker’s notion of MPD in the thriller genre is an excellent example of how the outdated diagnosis MPD is now fixed and established within contemporary and popular American mainstream fiction.3 The storyline of Ted Dekker’s Thr3e in fact seems to be quite similar to another concept of multiple personality disorder within the thriller genre. Ted Dekker’s thriller was first published in June 2003. In December 2002, a movie by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who had considerable success with his former script for the Hollywood production of the film Being John Malkovich (1999) varying the topic of subjectivity and individuality, was first released, which he called Adaption (2002). In this movie, the fictional yet somehow autobiographical character of Charlie Kaufman and his totally fictional and naïve twin brother, Donald, try to each write their own film script. While Charlie attempts to focus on a novel about orchids, Donald, who has never written a script before, focuses on the genre of the serial killer thriller and eventually comes up with the idea of a killer with multiple personality disorder. Explaining the plot and the final twist to his brother, Donald’s idea of such a killer with MPD – he calls the script The 3 – strongly resembles Ted Dekker’s thriller Thr3e (2003). While in the film Adaption, Kaufman parodies the development of too common ideas on multiple personality (“The only idea more overused than serial killer is multiple personality”, chapter 11), Dekker’s psycho thriller is not to be understood as mocking the genre but to be seen as another example of too serious and suspenseful MPD convention. Ted Dekker’s use of MPD, however, while presenting the central character being torn apart into three different personalities and thus again representing the former not valid definition of multiple personality also hints at one personality as being merely an imaginary friend and personified hallucination. In order to be recognized as MPD

2 3

The enormous productivity of Ted Dekker can be seen at his website at ‹http://www.teddekker.com›. Ted Dekker. Thr3e. Nashville/Tennessee: WestBow Press, 2003; hereafter abbreviated Th.

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genre with the corresponding necessary rules, the thriller Thr3e draws again on the typical topics: the protagonist needs to have experienced a trauma, preferably a childhood trauma and again an overwhelming mother figure causing the split; the split of personality into separate personalities needs to be complete through the personalities that are supposed to represent different types of persons; the reader is not to know the twist ending, therefore the unreliability of the narration is necessary. For example, in the film version of Thr3e this means that different actors play the separate personalities and thus the interpersonal level of MPD films is applied. In case of Thr3e, the author offers even two twists as the first revelation of the central character’s MPD is not entirely the core of the problem. Although the final twist, revealing that even another character in the plot is really a part of the inner proliferation of secondary personalities, also refers to the MPD of the central character, it is actually the personification of an imaginary friend that is presented as the third personality. In the movie Adaption (2003), the fictional Donald Kaufman explains the plot of his serial killer script: “There is a serial killer, right? And he is being haunted by this cop and is taunting the cop right, sending clues who his next victim is. He is already holding her hostages in his creepy basement. So the cop gets obsessed with figuring out her identity and in the process falls in love with her. Even though he’s never even met her. She becomes like unattainable. Like the Holy Grail…But here’s the twist. We find out that the killer really suffers from multiple personality disorder, right? See, he is actually really the cop and the girl. All of them are him.” (chapter 11; my emphasis)

The final revelation of the unreliable thriller narration in Ted Dekker’s Thr3e (2003) displays a quite similar idea. Not only is the sympathetic central character Kevin linked to the allegedly dangerous serial killer Slater – who is in fact the personification of the evil, the Mr. Hyde side of Kevin and therefore solemnly his evil secondary personality or alter ego – there is yet another twist to be uncovered: the adored childhood friend Samantha, who is presented in the text as a real character, is actually the third personality living inside Kevin’s body or mind. Therefore, Ted Dekker presents “three in one”. Throughout Dekker’s narration, it is unclear which of his characters might be real and which merely imagined. Donald Kaufman’s exclamation of “all of them are him” also applies in the end to Ted Dekker’s tripartite figure Kevin/Slater/Samantha. Although the reader is really meant to focus on the question whether Kevin is indeed a multiple personality or not, the observer of Kevin’s fragmentation, Samantha as focalizer, interprets Kevin’s opponent as real. Her observation is not correct as she is also only Kevin’s hallucination and is not aware of her real status. Throughout the text, Samantha’s story was therefore only imagined by Kevin. With the representation of Kevin being Slater and being Samantha, Dekker attempts to translate the multiple personality disorder theme with the formerly available definition of distinct and complex personalities and persons within one body in a way that mingles MPD with imaginary fantasy play and hallucination. Kevin’s fantasy playmates developed back in his childhood days are not felt as within himself, but

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outside of him. The secondary personalities are therefore again “outsourced” as coined earlier in this study. Imaginary friends, however, are not included in the definition of MPD, but are instead especially mentioned as not representing a symptom of the disorder. As Kevin displays the personification of imaginary childhood playmates, both Slater and Samantha, the application of MPD by the author may cause some irritation. The older definition of MPD did not mention such imaginary playmates, yet in the DSM-IV-TR, the then current definition of DID does: “In children, the symptoms are not attributable to imaginary playmates or other fantasy play” (APA 2000: 529). Yet the embodiment of evil (Slater) and the good (Samantha) and Kevin as the human soul struggling in between is meant by Dekker to point to a Christian tripartite system: “The man created in God’s nature, the beautiful man, struggling between the good and the bad” (Th 3). With the reference to evil and good, Dekker’s translation of multiple personality disorder within the structure of a pulp or rather mainstream thriller touches upon rudimentary questions of philosophy and religion. The philosophical, or as mentioned in the novel, explicitly Christian terms of the evil and good forces within human nature, are essential subjects for innumerable thinkers such as Saint Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey, Erich Fromm, and others. In his Confessiones (400), for example, Saint Augustine debates the opposing forces of his desires within. In his The Religion within the Borders of mere Rationality (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft) published in the year 1797, Immanuel Kant discusses the idea of evil forces within human nature. Analogous to the struggle of the fictional character Kevin, who fights his destructive forces that desire to surface and take control of him, Kant discusses the existence of the human nature being torn between good and evil: “Therefore the question arises: if not a middle is at least possible, that is: that the human being could be neither good nor evil, or at most both the one thing and the other, partly good, partly evil?” [So ist die Frage: ob nicht ein Mittleres wenigstens möglich sei, nämlich: daß der Mensch in seiner Gattung weder gut noch böse, oder allenfalls auch eines sowohl als das andere, zum Teil gut, zum Teil böse sein könne?] (Kant 1997: 666; my translation)

According to Kant, the experience offers the answer to whether human beings might be good or evil and therefore in the middle of such absolutes (Kant 1977: 668), the animal and evil force inside (673) refer to the fragility of human nature (“Gebrechlichkeit der menschlichen Natur”, 686), and it is essentially moral what constitutes the human being as he chooses between these opposing forces of good and evil (694).4 In Beyond Good and Evil (1896), Friedrich Nietzsche mentioned the “multiplicity and art of disguise” (Nietzsche 1973: 128) within us human beings when we get lost “within our labyrinths” (128). The hint at expressions of virtue, good conscience and

4

On the term of “human nature” or “man’s nature” (homo sapiens) see also Erich Fromm. “Man’s Nature”. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973. 219-229.

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the like is translated into Dekker’s Thr3e, however, in absolute terms. As such, Kevin can be the innocent and totally ignorant entity; Slater the evil, destructive side, the abyss, the monster (see also Nietzsche 1973: 84). The multiplicity of selfhood is, for example, mentioned by John Dewey in Human Nature and Conduct (1922). When Kevin eventually discovers the Other(s) being actually also himself and therefore part of himself, he resembles what Dewey said on the “Classification of Instincts”: “We arrive at true conceptions of motivation and interest only by the recognition that selfhood…is in process of making, and that any self is capable of including within itself a number of inconsistent selves, of unharmonized dispositions” (Dewey 1948: 137).5 Almost reciting Freud and his ‘death drive’ (Todestrieb), the inner force of uncontrollable destructiveness, the German holistic philosopher Rudolf Steiner mentioned the struggle of the human being between good and evil. Behind the mirror of our memories (“Spiegel der Erinnerungen”, Schroeder 1984: 241), the evil forces need to be repressed. Ted Dekker’s central character Kevin externalizes what the normal human being experiences only inside: “Yet what is experienced has to remain, if it is not to be displayed in a pathological manner, within the human being. [Was aber da erlebt wird, das muß nun, wenn es nicht in einer gewissen Weise krankhaft auftreten soll, durchaus im Innern des Menschen bleiben“ (Steiner cited in Schroeder 1984: 487; my translation). On the evil forces inside, Steiner concludes: “This source of evil, actually is constantly existing within us. We may not surrender to the illusion that the source of evil is not within us. It is, if I may say so, beyond our imagination of life. It may not at all infect our imagination of life or else the imaginations become motives of the evil; it must remain beneath.” [Diese Quellen des Bösen, er ist eigentlich fortwährend in uns. Wir dürfen uns keinen Augenblicken der Illusion hingeben, daß der Quell des Bösen nicht in uns wäre. Er ist, wenn ich so sagen darf, unterhalb unserer Vorstellungswelt gelegen. Er darf nur nicht das Vorstellungsleben infizieren, sonst werden die Vorstellungen Motive zum Bösen; er muß [sic!] unten bleiben.] (Steiner cited in Schroeder 1984: 487-88; my translation)

It is the decision between good and evil which is the choice of every human being. Accordingly, Karl Jaspers also points out: “Man only awakes when he distinguishes good and evil” (Jaspers 1971: 49). Only his decision and his deeds make human beings truly aware of their nature as real human beings ( 49). Making reference thus to the myth of the evil as Paul Ricoeur recounted in detail in Le Mal (Ricoeur 1986), Dekker carries a heavy load. While, for example, the uncontrollable forces of evil inside are presented in fiction with the means of a voice hunting and haunting Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), thus embodying not only the other side of himself yet additionally referring to another, the mother (see Bronfen 1998), and Matt Ruff’s Set this House in Order (2003) with exclusively inner selves as taking control of the body, the philosophical musings about the devilish and destructive forces against the good will inside, Dekker’s thriller Thr3e (2003), externalizes the personified Other which in recount needs to be presented

5

To compare the theory of entities within multiple personality disorder and dissociative identity disorder, see also Gunnarsson 2010.

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straightforward and therefore simple. While there is seemingly no sympathy for the evil side called Slater, whose purpose is merely the power over and eventual destruction of Kevin, the competent and good will of Samantha as the personified angel differs considerably from Kevin’s naivety and innocence. Consequently, as Dekker wants to make unequivocally clear, Slater is egocentric, Samantha is self-confident and self-sacrificing. She thus meets the criteria of a true Christian life as Nietzsche defined it: “The Christian faith is from the beginning sacrifice” (Nietzsche 1973: 57). The trauma, however, is only known by Slater, whose aim is to name and reveal it as Kevin seems ignorant of it (experiencing a nightmarish childhood plus creating imaginary friends). But Samantha, angel-like, is willing to help, although she is also ignorant of Kevin’s past. When Dekker’s omniscient point of view with individual focalizers offers Kevin as a diligent student and future priest, the description of the bookshelf makes it clear: “Two hundred novels…Kevin scanned the fiction titles. Koontz, King, Shakespeare, Card, Stevenson, Powers – an eclectic collection” (Th 29). True indeed, as Koontz, King (Secret Window) and Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Hyde) clearly also varied the subject of the inner division in a clear way, whereas Shakespeare and (Richard?) Powers probably represent the more complex and sophisticated fictional works. The dilemma and drama derives from the fact that Kevin, who does not “understand his past” (Th 19), needs to write an essay on “The True Natures of Man”. Mentioning a “not conventional” (Th 3) explanation of such natures, Kevin’s mind falls apart. MPD is mentioned in the novel for the first time by the imaginary friend of Kevin, Samantha, who frequently talks to FBI agent Jennifer on her own cell phone. Two thirds into the novel, Dekker lets Samantha establish a conviction about Kevin’s real inner nature: “I would like you to consider the possibility that Kevin and Slater are really the same person” (Th 220). Kevin’s imaginary friend, understood in the novel as another secondary personality, offers MPD as an explanatory model: “Multiple personality disorder may not be out of question” (Th 221). This little step ahead of the general investigation team of the FBI is a characteristic of Samantha. She seems to be omniscient yet unaware of her status as only imaginary or as a protector inside. The FBI fails to observe the stalker victim or possible suspect, Kevin, because throughout the novel he is able to let bombs detonate, deliver messages, and talk with three different cell phones. It is Samantha who solves the riddles, she has these abilities since she apparently works for the California Bureau of Investigation.6 Her hints drive the storyline straightforward. Samantha’s detailed knowledge is astonishing as she turns out to be another personality of Kevin, yet the reader is kept in the dark about her solemn imaginative existence. The separation of the personalities is therefore absolute. They in no way share anything together. All three are therefore “completely unaware of each other” (Th 345). Such an unawareness, which turns out to be total as Slater is also ignorant of

6

Samantha acts within her (only imagined by Kevin) world of the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI) within a secret “Alpha Division” (Th 159) where she interrogates terrorists from Pakistan etc. Thus she is established as a very complex character not at all to be seen merely in the mind of Kevin, who actually only fantasizes such a police reality.

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his true existence within Kevin, is actually atypical. As already shown with the case of Miss Beauchamp and Dr. Morton Prince, the historical case from 1906, the secondary personality might know the primary personality and even mock its ignorance and innocence (cf. Prince 1906). In terms of Henri Ellenberger’s classification, however, the tripartite Kevin and his mutually unaware personalities might meet the definition of “mutually amnesic” multiple personality with “personality clusters” (Ellenberger 1970: 131). The criteria of MPD, however, are mingled with the hallucinations of schizophrenia – at least understood so in the novel – and the notion of a posttraumatic stress disorder.7 However, what is meant and transported is the idea of entirely MPD with different personalities or persons of distinct characters sharing only one body. The role-playing of Kevin is also mentioned especially when during his childhood a boy is imagined, who caused Kevin to be jealous of Samantha. Kevin’s attempt to get rid of his second imagined friend – called merely the boy, who is also Slater, which consequently again makes him also an imaginary friend – results in Kevin’s fear of having committed a crime, his real sin, the murder of the boy. As Dekker offers his text based on or linked to Christian beliefs, he lets Jennifer explain Kevin’s inner adaptation to trauma: “So you’re thinking Kevin, as a young boy, simply struggled to make sense of the conflict within him, between basic good and evil. He dealt with it the way he learned to deal with all reality. He creates roles for each persona and plays them out without knowing that he’s doing it.” (Th 347)

7

In the text, Dekker explains the disorder of Kevin in very special terms. MPD here – although later correctly mentioned as dissociative identity disorder – may not meet with the criteria Dekker attributes to Kevin. The mixture of several features of disorders is even stated when FBI agent Jennifer eventually concludes: “Patients who suffered from dissociative identity disorder typically required years of therapy to pull themselves free of their alternate personalities. For that matter, even the diagnosis would take some time. Kevin’s admittedly enigmatic behavior didn’t fit any classical disorder. Dissociative identity disorder, yes, but there were no cases of three personalities carrying on a conversation as she herself had witnessed. Posttraumatic stress disorder, perhaps. Or a strange blend of schizophrenia and DID. The scientific community would undoubtedly argue over this one” (Th 398). There is no doubt that with the last remark, Dekker is definitely right. In case of MPD and usual descriptions in autobiographies, as already shown in detail in chapter 9, they do show such interpersonal conversations. Dekker’s thriller is a definite example of using the MPD metaphor of completely divided selves including the corresponding unreliable narration in order to irritate the reader. Dekker may not have been entirely secure about a clear description of MPD or DID and therefore included even PTSD which is, in fact, a bit of a stretch, although anything and everything may nowadays be understood in posttraumatic terms, as Merskey notes (cf. Merskey 2007).

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Therefore, the role-playing, as Kevin’s teacher Dr. Francis sees it, then “may not even be classical dissociative identity disorder. Could be posttraumatic stress disorder, which is even more likely for this kind of unconscious role-playing” (Th 347). Role-playing is consequently understood as an individual fantasy constituting and therefore creating reality. Such a fantasy becoming reality as an individual mind’s creation is already established with Kevin’s nightmarish childhood companions: first of all, there is Balinda, his surrogate, insane mother who is actually his aunt; the strange Eugene, who collects and cuts out newspaper articles from the 1960s; and finally Bob, Balinda´s retarded son. Balinda, who prefers to be called Princess, is convinced that reality is not what surrounds us but what can be created. Therefore her world in her house at Baker Street is only functioning and existing at her will. What is not convenient, for example, in the newspapers, is burnt behind the house in the garden. Still, MPD, understood in absolute terms, is the central diagnosis. The validity of MPD is never questioned or discussed as controversial, save Dr. Francis, who briefly mentions that it may also be understood as spiritual possession: “As you know, not everyone acknowledges such an animal. Some spiritualize the phenomenon – demon possession” (Th 344). It is a given and existing diagnosis, although only once brought up as now known as dissociative identity disorder (Th 344): “Multiple personality disorder. It’s referred to as dissociative identity disorder these days, isn’t it? Where two or more personalities inhabit a single body” (Th 344). Certainly, such a description is, as already proven in detail, not only incorrect but misleading; and yet, it is probably necessary to transport the message via the unreliable narration of the thriller genre and the twist ending. There are therefore some differences between the novel and the moderately successful film version of 2006. The film shows an interesting visualization. Kevin’s imagination shows different actors as different persons whereas (real and not imagined!) police officer Jennifer’s observation offers the truth: only Kevin exists talking to himself in again a very Fight Club-like setting. Similarly, the film version of Fight Club (1999) presented flashbacks of fist fights between the unnamed narrator and Tyler Durden. Now the scenes display only one man fighting alone. Kevin acts out his several personalities inside, which makes only himself visible. Jennifer, the only reliable observer, can offer a valid interpretation: “But she knew that Kevin wasn’t seeing what she saw” (Th 391). Another shot of the final scene in the film version of Thr3e then shows the three different actors and therefore Kevin’s reality. Samantha merges with Kevin’s body when she is finally told to be merely his imagination. Her good will consequently felt by Kevin as being part of him, and he can get rid of his evil side by shooting Slater. Prior to that final scene, none of the personalities knows about their real existence, and the reader is therefore also left ignorant of that fact. Yet Slater’s intention is to reveal Kevin’s true nature, in this case he does know the reality which was merely constructed (“Whoever Slater was, he seemed to know everything”, Th 71). Slater knows that Kevin is hiding something. But Slater is unaware of his true nature. There are, in consequence, no hints or indicators within the texts which could refer to the psychological split as the novel Fight Club (1996) by Chuck Palahniuk does when the unnamed narrator mentions several times “I know this because Tyler

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Durden knows this…”. In Ted Dekker’s mainstream thriller, the narrative offers no such clues. Each character is therefore presented as real. The text examples of such personalities presented as persons with an entire individual life or complexity is, for example, shown in the following passage when the three personalities meet up with each other and the twists are not yet revealed: “‘You okay?’ Kevin’s eyes darted over her shoulder and then settled in hers. Trails of sweat glistened on his face. The poor man was terrified. ‘Not really.’ ‘It’s okay, Kevin.’ She smiled. ‘I promise you, it’ll be okay.’ ‘Actually, it won’t be okay, Kevin,’ Slater said, walking briskly to her right. He wasn’t the monster she’d imagined. No horns, no yellow teeth, no scarred face. He looked like a jock with short blond hair, tight tan slacks, a torso cut like gymnast’s….Only his eyes gave him away, they were far away, like grey eyes, like a wolf’s. If Kevin’s eyes swallowed her, Slater’s were the kind she might bounce off of.” (Th 367)

The eyes are – certainly due to their symbolic and emblematic powers – what constitutes the three characters, who after all are only Kevin. Kevin is described by Dr. Francis, who acknowledges “those blue eyes” that “hid a deep mystery” (Th 1) with a “beat of a hidden drum behind his blue eyes. Some might consider the idiosyncrasies annoying, but Dr. Francis saw them as nothing more than enigmatic clues to Kevin’s nature” (Th 2). Kevin and Sam (“We’re like secret lovers”, Th 74) struggle against Slater, whose force is to overcome this unique togetherness: “There is no way they can possibly win” (Th 68). Contrasting the grey eyes of Slater, Kevin and Samantha seem to be eye-twins: “…her eyes. They were the kind of blue that seemed to swallow whatever they gazed upon – brilliant and deep and haunting...as if illuminated by their own source” (Th 83). Although Slater’s eyes are grey, his appearance nonetheless seems amicable. When Hannah Arendt wrote about the Banality of Evil (1963)8 she referred to this inconspicuous evilness, and Erich Fromm notes in the same vein: “Hence, as long as one believes that the evil man wears horns, one will not discover an evil man” (Fromm 1973: 432). However, Dekker is eager to emphasize the speciality of Kevin and Samantha as there is no “romantic love” yet “something much stronger” (Th 374). Samantha knows that she was “born for this” (Th 366) as the most dramatic scene with Slater/Kevin/Samantha is solved when Samantha can be reached – again by cell phone – by FBI agent Jennifer and is eventually told that she is actually merely a personality part of a MPD within Kevin: “I know this may sound impossible to you, but you’re one of Kevin’s personalities” (Th 382). When the scales suddenly fall from her eyes, Samantha knows that the separateness is not real. Being shot by Slater, she can see her wound, yet Kevin “didn’t feel the pain, because in his mind it hadn’t happened to him. Their personalities were completely fragmented” (Th 387). However, Saman-

8

Hannah Arendt. Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 2006 [1963].

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tha’s determination is to demonstrate Kevin his “good in him” (Th 387), and she therefore is reintegrated smoothly into Kevin: “She reached out and touched his hand. Her finger went through his skin, into his hand. Kevin watched, mouth gaping. Samantha stepped into him, her knee into his knee…She was him! She’d always been him! The realization fell into his mind like an anvil dropped from heaven. And she was gone, wasn’t she? Or maybe closer than ever. A buzz circled his mind.” (Th 394)

Thankfully, Samantha’s purpose is thereupon fulfilled, and Kevin can realize that he can easily get rid of Slater as in reality no such stalker exists. Kevin shoots at Slater and, resembling the final scene with the nameless narrator and Tyler Durden in Fight Club (1999), the secondary personality disappears: “Suddenly there was no target to hit. Slater was gone” (Th 395). Although Slater is not (re-)integrated or felt as another part of human nature, the author intents to hint at Slater being part of Kevin, similar to Mr. Hyde being part of Dr. Jekyll. Yet the societal references of Dr. Jekyll as member of the Victorian society and its double moral standards and therefore his symbolic representation is not entirely reflected in Ted Dekker’s mainstream thriller. The unreliability of the narration does not point at societal taboos or repressed societal circumstances but merely attempts to bewilder the audience with the final twists. Kevin’s inner complete dividedness, again unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is also caused by a very personal trauma – according to MPD fiction genre by a traumatic childhood dominated by a sadistic mother figure, Balinda. In her nightmarish house, Balinda resides with the retard Eugene and Bob. They are exaggerated figures: “Aunt Balinda wore a white dress, high heels, and enough costume jewellery to wind a battleship…Eugene stood in riding boots and what appeared to be a jockey’s outfit. Bob wore plaid knickers…” (Th 206). The environment of the little house in Baker Street seems to be part of a strange phantasmagoria: “The hall directed her into what appeared to be the living room, but again, its dimension had been altered by floor-to-ceiling stacks of paper. Newspapers alternated with books and magazines and the occasional box. A foot-wide crack between two of the stacks allowed light in from what had once been a window. For all of its mess, the room had an order to it, like a bird’s nest.” (Th 206; my emphasis)9

Balinda’s effort to create her own value system around her and let children also not understand the truth or reality of the outer world results in the yard of the house being black as she burns the articles and pictures she prohibits Eugene to collect: “Whatever didn’t fit neatly into the world Balinda wanted went up in smoke!” (Th 210). Eugene’s reality, composed by newspaper articles of the 1960s, is Balinda’s creation. This well-ordered and controlled counterworld of Balinda is opposed to the

9

Since interestingly there is no reference to the classic fictional texts of MPD like Sybil, Dekker uses the expression of the bird’s nest, which could hint at Shirley Jackson’s MPD novel The Bird’s Nest (1954).

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outer “chaotic world” (Th 210). Her purpose – and eventually the trauma of Kevin – was to isolate him “with the truth and they [the children] will shine like the stars” (Th 213). Kevin’s existence of a Kaspar Hauser or innocent child thrown back to only himself in order to find the true prelapsarian language (as Paul Auster describes it much more complex in The City of Glass in the New York Trilogy) only made his mind go mad and escape within his fantasy, which in return would be his own reality. The imitation of reality is also symbolized by Balinda’s decoration of fake plastic flowers in her garden: “the red roses in the flower beds were imitation” (Th 203).10 Kevin’s creation of multiple personality disorder, or his own reality and value system of selves is finally explained by such a childhood experience as Balinda does not accept “the flaws of nature” (Th 203): “They had created a world out of their newspaper and all of this paraphernalia – shaped to fit their lives (Th 208). Kevin describes Balinda and her manipulation: “I don’t know her story, but Balinda creates her own reality. We all do, but Balinda only knows absolutes. She decides what part of the world is real and what part isn’t. If something isn’t real, she makes it go away. She manipulates everything around her to create an acceptable reality.” (Th 271)

Nevertheless, Dekker also emphasizes Kevin’s desire to be loved by his tormenter Balinda. It is his Slater personality, who wants him to “smell his true self. It will destroy him” (Th 286). When Slater takes Balinda hostage in the basement, Kevin still desires her maternal love: “He only wanted to be held by Princess” (Th 299). The evil side, personified by Slater, is therefore evoked by the traumatic events during Kevin’s childhood. The occupation with the essay “The True Natures of Man” has, according to Thr3e, aroused the tripartite total separation of Kevin. Kevin’s teacher Dr. John Francis knows it, and it his insight into the human mind which offers the central explanation of Kevin’s multiple personality disorder: “The deepest questions can drive a man mad” (Th 5). In Dr. Francis’s explanatory words, Kevin’s nature is divided into three parts and is composed as such a model: “The three natures of man. Good, evil, and the man struggling in between. ‘The good that I would, that I do not, but that which I would not, that I do.’ There are really three natures in there! One, the good. Two, that which I would not. And, three, I!” (Th 380).11 The separation of the personalities are seen as a rare “clear fragmentation” (Th 400) because “the personalities Kevin spun off were so diametrically opposed” (Th 400). Thus the obsession with the number three is stressed throughout the novel: “Three…our guy’s tripping over his three. Progression. Three, thirty, sixty. And opposites. Night and day, life and death” (Th 128). Earlier the FBI muses about such an

10

11

In his second novel Survivor (1999), Chuck Palahniuk also used the image of the fake plastic flowers in gardens: “I steal the fake flowers for sticking out in the garden. The people I work for only look at their garden from inside so I stick the bare dirt full of fake greenery, ferns or needlepoint ivy, then I stick in fake seasonal flowers. The landscaping is beautiful as long as you don’t look too close.” (Palahniuk 1999: 257). The quote here is taken from Roman 7: 14-21.

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obsession: “We have three minutes, three calls, three rules, a riddle with three parts,12 three months” (Th 106). Slater is described as preferring “cold, dark, wetness, mildew, and chocolate sundaes with equal portions of ice cream and fudge” (Th 183). He likes “fascination” as he “has to dispense with the expected and deliver only what they don’t expect” (Th 183). He considers himself “the Dark man”: “He knows that the dark man is most fascinating when he moves in complete obscurity. Hidden. Unknown. That’s why he is called the dark man. That’s why he has started in the dark. That’s why he does all of his best work at night. That’s why he loves his basement. Because for all practical purposes, Slater is the Dark Man.” (Th 184)

Kevin on the other hand is constantly characterized by his entire innocence and even naïveté: “Kevin is the walking testimony of God’s grace” (Th 197). The character is therefore not presented as dynamic, even when in the end Kevin merges with Samantha and gets rid of Slater. Kevin is thus “innocent, either way. That he’s an exceptional man. That he’s nothing like Slater.” (Th 357). The reason for Kevin’s dissociation into three personalities is given by Samantha herself. Although she does not recall details of Kevin and his surrogate mother Balinda, she knows about the traumatic childhood: “She also knew that Kevin was a prime candidate for multiple personalities. Balinda had taught him how to dissociate from the beginning” (Th 385). With Ted Dekker’s mainstream thriller Thr3e and its attempts to place the notion of absolute inner fragmentation in terms of the former definition of MPD, the concept of multiple personality and dissociation as a subgenre convention within the thriller genre is realized. The unreliable narration focuses on the several characters to be thus represented as real persons, whereas they are actually only imagined alter egos of a mental disorder. Although Dekker mixes MPD with the idea of imaginary friends – not actually valid any more with the definition of DID – the translation of MPD into fiction is a fixed device. The metaphorical usage of MPD as representing good and evil within the human being’s true nature is established with the absolute personification of spiritual, emotional or psychological forces within the human psyche. Yet the individual characters lack dynamics that can be observed in the states the unnamed narrator in Fight Club develops. Again, the former definition of MPD, mentioned throughout the novel as the basic explanatory model, is once more established as relying on the presentation of two secondary personalities as the killer inside (Slater) and the protector inside (Samantha).

12

This “riddle with allegedly three parts”, however, is the following: “What falls but never breaks, what breaks but never falls” (Th 9). The answer to that riddle are the opposites night and day. The other riddles are: 2. In life he’s a friend, but death is the end. (Kevin’s dog); 3. What takes you there, but takes you nowhere? (a bus); 4. What wants to be filled, but will always be empty? (an abandoned warehouse); 5. Who escapes their prison, but is captive still? (kidnapping); 6. Who loves what he sees, but hates what he loves? (Sin). The answers in brackets are all given by Samantha, who helps the FBI via her cell phone.

18 “Recall what had been lost…”: Gabrielle Pina Chasing Sophea (2006) Visions and memories of the past did not penetrate there, and he had drifted in color of smoke, where there was no pain, only pale, pale gray of the north wall by his bed. LESLIE MARMON SILKO CEREMONY 1977: 15

The process of recalling what has been lost is connected to pain, but reliving such pain is subsequently connected to the ability of healing. Concerned with such an attitude, Gabrielle Pina’s novel Chasing Sophea (2006) represents multiple personality and dissociation in typical terms of a personal trauma which was repressed in the first place and has to be rediscovered in order to facilitate an inner reintegrative process:1 The text reveals that “Dahlia recalled a lifetime in a span of eight short minutes, and the knowledge so overwhelmed her that she collapsed under the weight – weight that she’d been carrying for twenty-five years” (CS 279). When eventually one of the many characters in Gabrielle Pina’s novel Chasing Sophea is able to remember the cause of her inner split into two separate personalities, her soul is at ease, and with her rediscovery of a family secret and her personal involvement even the cluster of the Culpepper family can overcome long hidden and repressed memories of a traumatic event in the past. In Gabrielle Pina’s second novel, the reader encounters a typical genre setting of multiple personality and dissociation – now correctly referred to as dissociative identity disorder (DID) – without a general reference to societal circumstances, rather to a personal tragedy and trauma thus varying the model of the protector inside who becomes a threat. The characteristics of such a standard multiple personality and dissociation setting often refer to a single traumatic event, which causes a mental dissociation and hence multiple selves. The trauma occurs after the suicide of her mother Reva, which was actually an attempt of murder-suicide in order to take her three children with her, and the fictional character of Dahlia is understood as an example of

1

Gabrielle Pina. Chasing Sophea. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006; hereafter abbreviated CS.

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experiencing DID as a coping mechanism. Splitting off the personality of Phoebe, who is aware of her opposition toward the host body, Dahlia (or Dahlia/Phoebe) is able to continue her life on one side; and yet, literally on the other side, she reaches a point of total exhaustion. Thus, the story of Chasing Sophea is spun around the theme of multiple personality and dissociation associated with personal trauma and tragedy reiterating it as a psychological model of trauma. As such, the topic is the classic translation of the idea of MPD and DID connected to a traumatic trigger during childhood, although interestingly here without a sexual connotation.2 Such a – repressed and therefore mentally not available – memory of the past haunts the soul of Dahlia and lets a secondary self emerge, Phoebe, who is obviously leading an independent life beyond Dahlia’s knowledge or control. Gabrielle Pina explores here the classic topos of a trauma-triggered inner split in terms of a novel within the African American culture. Unlike Toni Morrison’s likewise traumatized characters especially in Beloved (1987), although a comparison with the Nobel Prize winner is considerably difficult, Pina’s characters are established and recognized members of society. While Morrison’s characters in Beloved also face a shattered identity because of their traumatic past of slavery and abuse, Pina (unlike Morrison) does not connect her traumatized characters to societal structures of suppression and racism. Within the universe of the African American Culpepper family of morticians – they have been running their business for several generations – Pina settles the tormented soul of her character Dahlia, who repressed a severe childhood trauma and consequently splits into two different personalities within. In order to glue the shattered mental condition, the task is to uncover the whole trauma and thus uncover simultaneously the existence of another personality inside. The pattern of the novel is similar to another text on trauma written in the year 1977, which already explored the experience of a traumatized character: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Silko’s novel, published shortly after the seminal and sensational novel Sybil (1973), serves as another descriptive narration of a posttraumatic dissociation felt within the terms of multiple personality. In Ceremony, the protagonist is traumatized by the Vietnam War and displays a typical self-awareness of multiplicity as MPD. In an interview

2

It is certainly legitimate to state that during the 1970s and 1980s a reference to sexual abuse was not only common in order to establish multiple personality and dissociation within feminist terms but even essential (cf. Hacking 1995). The novel Sybil (1973) hence draws a picture of sexually connected actions against the victim whereas nowadays such a thematically restricted trauma is not needed. Multiple personality and dissociation is nowadays (more so only DID) connected to the idea of a trauma in general without a sexual background. Such a restriction would limit the psychological reaction to only a number of traumata and could, in regards to the controversy around MPD, even restrict the general theory of dissociation after trauma. Thus a reaction within the medical professionals toward Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) was very positive as this novel offered the idea of societal circumstances proliferating self-alienation, a notion of inner fragmentation and reactionary trauma (cf. Gold 2004).

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with an unusually ignorant psychiatrist, he uses another pronoun system within his language to describe his inner fragmentation.3 Such a language would normally be linked to a self-notion of multiple personality and dissociation (cf. Harré and Gillett 1994). When psychiatrists Mayer-Gross, Slater and Roth first published their voluminous edition of Clinical Psychiatry in the year 1954, the entry on “multiple and double personality”, concluded even before the books and films of The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and Sybil (1973), they state that the audience could be considerably influenced, and that “there are many novels on this theme” (Mayer-Gross, Slater and Roth 1969: 113). Moreover, the description in Clinical Psychiatry mentions mental manifestations of a disturbed consciousness where the patient “describes herself at different times as being one or another of several different personalities. These different personalities may be endowed with superficially different character traits, and may or may not be aware of each other’s existence” (113). Despite the fact that MayerGross, Slater and Roth also went to concluded that “it seems that these multiple personalities are always artificial productions, the product of the medical attention that they arouse” (113) and that insofar they correspond to a recent opinion of one of the leading psychiatrists in the United States, Paul McHugh, who stated that MPD or DID was merely an artificial sociocultural artefact (cf. McHugh 2008), Gabrielle Pina’s novel on the subject serves as an excellent example of how the notion of traumatriggered multiple personality and dissociation survived – no matter how strong the controversy may have been – and that multiple personality and dissociation is still used to demonstrate how a singular yet devastating moment is meant to change a mental stability in terms of singularity and multiplicity inside the mind. This sociocultural feature is thus sustainable. Furthermore, Pina’s description of multiple personality and dissociation meets yet another criterion of MPD and DID used in fiction: the diagnosis is given almost immediately or rather early in the text without any problematic or detailed explanations of diagnostic methods4 as it seems to be sufficient to display different modes of

3

4

In Ceremony, for example, the traumatized Tayo creates an inner landscape similar to the imaginary places describes in many MPD and DID texts (such as the autobiography of Robert B. Oxnam A Fractured Mind published in 2005 or the novel Set this house in Order by Matt Ruff published in 2003). Tayo thus is not haunted by his painful remembrances: “Visions and memories of the past did not penetrate there”. When Tayo talks about himself during a therapy session, he also states: “He can’t talk to you. He is invisible. His words are formed with an invisible tongue, they have no sound” (Silko 1997: 15; my emphasis). Concerning the validity and “epistemological concerns” about diagnostic practices and methods on DID see especially Shaffer and Oakley (2005). Usually, when institutes and hospital or trauma centers such as the Sidran Institute, accept the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, several tests such as the Structured Clinical interview for Dissociative Disorders (SCID-D) and the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) are applied (Shaffer and Oakley 2005: 10). Such a questionnaire takes time in order to reach the di-

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behavior by the patient and thus the psychiatrist is able to find a suitable diagnosis. Notable is here that the psychiatric community is apparently not in need of such a clear display while enhancing the life-long existence of DID in patients (cf. Spiegel 2011). In other fictional texts and film adaptions, which concentrate more on the metaphorical level of a multiple or rather double consciousness as realized with Fight Club (novel 1996, film 1999), K-PAX (novel 1995, film 2001), A Scanner Darkly (novel 1977, film 2006), Kornwolf (novel 2005)5 and many others, the inner fragmentation or externalized personification of an alter personality is experienced due to a disturbed self-notion within societal power structures. The horror novel and film The Exorcist (novel 1971, film 1973), on the other hand, draws heavily on how to diagnose the possessed girl. Therefore, as Pina does not explore such a diagnosis too deeply, the author seems to expect the reader to understand what MPD or DID is all about and it seems to be sufficient that only the occurrence a single traumatic event, the posttraumatic psychological reaction afterwards, and the splitting into two different personalities in terms of multiple personality and DID (rather as MPD) offers the necessary explanation. Even the plausibility of multiple or double personality and dissociation in Chasing Sophea as caused by a trauma is never questioned entirely, although the psychiatrist in the novel at first seems to express some difficulties with DID: “Dissociation. Trauma. Emergency defense system. Trancelike behavior. The signs had been in front of him the whole time, and he had missed them entirely…He knew, albeit subconsciously, that this would be a controversial diagnosis, one that would make or break his solid reputation” (CS 110). When Dr. Kelly first mentions the diagnosis of “DID” (CS 110) in chapter 29, the diagnosis is not further explained and is only more closely examined six chapters later: “He knew that the vast majority of DID patients have documented histories of repetitive, overwhelming, and often life-threatening trauma at a developmental stage of childhood…” (CS 131). The acronym, DID, however, is only explained as “dissociative identity disorder” (CS 135), a chapter later in the conversation between two psychiatrists; Dr. Kelly muses on Dahlia and “someone else walking around inside her brain” (CS 134), and asks: “Were there others?” (CS 134). Consequently, Dr. Kelly concludes: “‘Something traumatic occurred in her childhood, Lionel, which caused her to dissociate, if you will, detach herself from reality and take on an alter. And what’s most bizarre about this case is that the subject herself isn’t aware of her condition. I’m still trying to determine just how long she’s had DID or MPD. I assume the creation of the alter correlates with the traumatic experience.’” (CS 135)

5

agnosis. Therefore a “hybrid strategy” (10) is needed. Yet the validity and effectiveness of such tests is quite controversial (1). The novel Kornwolf (2005) by Tristan Egolf explores the topic of dissociation in terms of the werewolf motif, which symbolizes not only the central character’s genetic disposition to dissociate into a human and animal existence, but also hints at an analysis of societal and religious structures. As such, Kornwolf is a highly recommended read, but is not considered in detail in this study.

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With the help of former texts it was already shown that usually the host personality, in this case Dahlia and in the case of Fight Club (1996) the unnamed narrator, is generally unaware of the secondary personality. Consequently, the author is able to develop an unreliable narration with a later twist ending. Dr. Morton Prince explained such an inability of co-consciousness, which can only develop into a mutual awareness during therapy (cf. Prince 1906). In the novel Chasing Sophea, the reader is again confronted with the means of a circular narration.6 The prologue to the novel thus offers the story of eleven-year-old Dahlia telling partly what happened twenty-five years prior to the beginning of the novel. Yet the reader, eager to find the solution to the strange behavior of the adult Dahlia, only learns at the end of the novel: “Ignoring the enemy within seemed to be less difficult. She railed against herself, straining to recall what had been lost” (SC 243). Additionally, it is only at the end of the novel when the entire traumatic event is told in detail: Dahlia’s mother intended to kill herself and her children; Dahlia is the only survivor. Understanding the inner fragmentation for Dahlia herself is finally reached when she realizes how the traumatic event of her mother’s suicide and the father’s first words to her after she awakens from a coma have effected her: “Why didn’t you come get me…You were supposed to come get me!” (CS 267). Overwhelmed by her feelings of guilt, Dahlia’s mind at the age of eleven splits into fragments because of her alleged guilt concerning the mother’s deed: “Now, at the core of her soul, Dahlia believed that she was the cause of her mother’s madness and that it was her fault that everyone in the car was dead. Her father blamed her, and this was more than her heart could bear and much more than her mind could hold. She would live, but she couldn’t face him the way she was. At eleven years old, she protected herself the only way she knew how. Her mind splintered into a million pieces, and when they came together again, Phoebe was born.” (CS 268)

The inner fragmentation causes Phoebe to be born. Phoebe is Dahlia’s secondary self; she is vital, seemingly stronger and healthier than Dahlia. The character of Phoebe appears throughout the novel. During the first part of the novel, Phoebe acts just like another real person within the story. The different plot levels introduced with the relatively short chapters also evolve around Phoebe and her diary entries. She seems to oppose Dahlia as she envies her very life and consequently attempts to gain her position over Dahlia and all her belongings. Commenting on Dahlia’s para-

6

On a blog by a writer connected to script writing, the typical setting for such a circular narration within the film industry was explained: “We open with the ending, there’s a cliffhanger, because something’s at stake, and then a character tells his/her story through voice overs. We go through the entire story (filled with voice overs) until we come full circle back to where we started at the ending. There’s usually a twist and then the story’s over” (see ‹http://www.myerymanonfilm.blogspot.com/2008/03/review-dablo-codysbody.html›. Web. 20 Aug 2009.). Such a circular narration, as mentioned, is used in Fight Club (1996 and 1999), The Machinist (2005), Jennifer’s Body (2009) and also partly in Chasing Sophea (2005).

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lyzing feelings of guilt, Phoebe considers such a reaction as a “kindergarten concept” (CS 35; italics in original text).7 Chapter 7 introduces the first diary entry of Phoebe, where she establishes her analysis of Dahlia’s mental state and the suppression of the past trauma: “I swear that woman has turned denial into a one-act on Broadway. She just doesn’t want to put the past behind her…She is plucking my last nerve with this piss-poor, melancholy attitude. Whine, whine, whine, moan, moan, moan, bitch, bitch, bitch.” (CS 36-7)

Phoebe is thus the stronger force within Dahlia, as Dahlia is unable to remember the moment of trauma and what happened to make her feel so desperate as a grown up woman. It is Phoebe who decides to control Dahlia or to “take over if need be” and therefore “pick up the pieces when Dahlia crashed. Simply do whatever was necessary if her friend’s mind spiraled in a thousand different directions” (CS 36). Phoebe is thus understood as a protector inside as she is established, unconsciously by Dahlia, as another mental state within Dahlia’s mind. In another diary entry, Phoebe declares: “All I have ever done is protect her, keep her from harm’s way, and remind her that she was not alone. For years, I’ve been there” (CS 78). Yet like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, Phoebe is a Mr. Hyde force and demands a life of her own: “I deserve to live my life free of Dahlia” (CS 78). Phoebe is the omniscient narrator as Dahlia represents the typical first state of consciousness, which is ignorant and blind. Phoebe, however, seems to function more sufficiently focusing more on the vital forces including her sexuality and her claim to functioning on a more robust level: “From now on, I’m looking out for me, paying attention to what I want what I need. That doesn’t make me psycho, does it? Right now, I figure it makes me sane, focused…” (CS 79). Phoebe is “tired of being a nonentity, a ghost in the land of the living. And more importantly, she was tired of craving someone else’s life” (CS 31). The seemingly real character of Phoebe, who stalks and endangers Dahlia, is later to be understood as not another real character in the novel, but as Dahlia’s alter ego. Yet the reader only learns little by little that Phoebe is Dahlia’s protection personality, which actually becomes a threat herself. This personal and deeply inhaled trauma thus recalls of what James M. Glass meant with his differentiation of postmodern fragmentary experience and existence, which is to be seen opposed to “traumas hidden from public view, whose core sense of self has been shattered by very specific actions” (Glass 1993: 17). Furthermore and in stating this, Glass sets the difference that also needs to be understood within the fictional translation of multiple personality and dissociation: there are societal and philosophical metaphors of inner dividedness and otherwise personal tragedies, the latter mostly told within psychological cases of trauma survivors such as shown in the novel Chasing Sophea. Glass consequently points out: “The languages, then, of those victims, these survivors, signifies more than reflection on ideology, practice, biophysical structure, or the decadence of modernity” (Glass 1993: 27). Being shattered within is thus a personal trauma and not a concept of postmodern existence.

7

All further quotes in italics are statements by Phoebe.

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A philosophical deconstruction of the self is therefore not the primary interest within the narration of Chasing Sophea. Although the notion of the self may be not only demonstrated by the presentation of the character of Dahlia/Phoebe – after all, both must be understood not so much as being two parts of one consciousness rather than opposing forces – but also via the imaginative setting of a complex family system, that of the Culpeppers, whose members all display inner disintegration and even isolation, although the entire dividedness is never as complete as in Dahlia herself. The very names of other characters such as Aunt Baby and Uncle Brother, for example, point to the different functions of each character and underline that characters are not only one-dimensional. The disability to integrate Phoebe into Dahlia corresponds with the disability of the family members to name and therefore accept the traumatic event of Reva’s suicide. Her attempt to take her three children with her has left a substantial stain within the psyche of every single Culpepper family member. Yet the eventual opportunity to be confronted with the repressed and silenced trauma – positive insofar as such a confrontation helps the Culpeppers to come to terms with themselves and face the demons inside – not only helps to Dahlia to regain her inner stability but enables the whole family to stop hiding a secret and therefore find harmony and peace again. Additionally, every character has been struggling considerably with long kept lies and desires, which then can be faced, solved, and soothed. In Shattered Selves (1993), Glass also contributes to the classic notion of multiple personality and dissociation, understood as total separation of personalities as in MPD, as a coping mechanism within a traumatized psyche: memory gaps, individual experience of each alter, “outsourcing” the trauma. Therefore, “the host personality suffers from blackout and memory lapses” (Glass 1993: 52). Although Glass refers to repeated child sexual abuse, Pina, as already explained, connects Dahlia’s DID to a singular event. DID furthermore is again actually understood as MPD, when “separable and distinct personalities” (52) take control of the character. In the year 1993, Glass contributes to the notion of MPD understood at that time in terms of the then valid definition, and the meaning of dissociation as a generally understood “idiom of distress” (Nichter 1981 cited in Antze 1996: 5) or as a “cultureembedded syndrome” has typical vocabulary, whether it is defined as distinct personality syndrome of MPD or inner fragmentation of DID. Fictional texts adopt this typical vocabulary. As a consequence, it is of fundamental interest to detect a vocabulary within Pina’s text in order to analyze her use of the terms of MPD or DID. First of all, the reader encounters the character of Phoebe as a seemingly real person. She maintains her own chapters within the novel (for example, she is first introduced in chapter 5 when she awakens after a one-night stand with another man). Phoebe’s purpose – “as the alcohol began to wear off, the reality of her situation overwhelmed her” (CS 29) – is to gain independence or as she understands it: “she wanted to survive” (CS 29). This struggle of survival has its origins in the opposition to the person Dahlia: “Maybe Dahlia would try to silence her, but Phoebe was the strong one. She was the survivor, and in her gut, Dahlia had to know that” (CS 30). Phoebe is portrayed as a stalker, she knows that “having carte blanche access to Dahlia’s life had always been necessary” (CS 30). Therefore, she realizes that “suddenly her life wasn’t about Dahlia’s survival anymore. It was high time she battled

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for her own” (CS 30). Her Mr. Hyde existence focuses on the necessity to win the sole control of the body. Pina’s understanding of multiple personality and dissociation is again connected to the dominant texts of The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and the novel Sybil (1973), which established the popular notion of MPD with distinct personalities of their own. The psychiatrist Dr. Kelly therefore links Dahlia’s symptoms to that of other famous multiples considering at the same time the controversy around their mental multiplicity: “And some practitioners in the field of psychiatry refused to believe such an affliction existed at all” (CS 173). However, the function of dissociation is not questioned as it resembles “fairly common effects of severe trauma in early childhood” (CS 173). The alternative self-state for Dahlia is established by the persona of Phoebe. As this character seems to be as real as the other various characters in the novel, Phoebe herself is presented as an opposing force toward Dahlia, to whom she defines herself as a kind of counterforce or rival as Phoebe attempts to acquire Dahlia’s life. Dr. Kelly therefore concludes that his observations of the secondary mental state of Dahlia is to be understood as such a counterforce as “the alter was clearly becoming more and more aggressive, and that meant that Dahlia was in jeopardy”, a danger which may result in “the alter taking over the original personality completely” (CS 134). The solution is only offered by a complete healing, and Dr. Kelly knows he needs “time and cooperation” (CS 173). The novel, however, draws two different approaches of such a healing: Dr. Kelly’s more conventional Western approach of common psychiatry and Aunt Baby’s, Dahlia’s grandmother, approach of a more intuitive help. Those two approaches again reflect opposing theories as Dr. Kelly’s understanding of healing is not that of Aunt Baby’s: “Aunt Baby would be disgusted with her wasting her money on such foolishness, and on a crazy people’s doctor no less” (CS 32). Nevertheless, one fact is beyond doubt: facing the family and recalling the past seems to be the essential task. Different plot levels eventually compose the whole story behind the trauma and are waved together in order to reveal the family secret around Reva. Reva herself, Dahlia’s “nutcase mama” (CS 263), is portrayed as a mentally ill woman, probably schizophrenic. Her sickness is also silenced within the family as “she had the kind of sickness that people don’t like to talk about around her” (CS 251). Notable is the ability of Aunt Baby to instantly recognize “the other” – Phoebe – within Dahlia. Aunt Baby, the “formidable woman” (CS 33) represents a deeper and more intuitive ability to heal. She is described as a woman of knowledge and spiritual powers in contrast to Dr. Kelly as representative of conventional Western psychiatry. His position of a therapist requires a diagnosis within the terms of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); he correctly relates Dahlia’s behavior to the disorder of dissociative identity. Aunt Baby, however, derives from a different background. Her genetic disposition – “born to a very shrewd black father…and a full-blooded Choctaw Indian mother” (CS 105) – hints at her mental abilities, and thus she is also “quite well-known for quirky one-liners and recipes for life” (CS 33):

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“She was famous for having a recipe for anything that plagued your mind, body, or soul. Whether your man left you or your hair was falling out at the roots, Aunt Baby had the solution. Although her recipes were somewhat unconventional, people back home still religiously wrote down every word.” (CS 33)

Aunt Baby remembers the day of Reva’s accident too well as this incident traumatized the whole Culpepper family. Aunt Baby intends to eventually end Dahlia’s and also the family’s fragmentation: “She’d made a decision long ago on that awful day that before she left this earth, she would do all that she could to glue the fragments of her family’s life together – even if it meant shattering it to pieces all over again” (CS 54). In order to do so, the family secret around Reva’s death has to be uncovered and faced, not only by Dahlia herself but by all of the members of the Culpepper family. It is Aunt Baby, who eventually creates a situation of healing by taking Dahlia back to her family. Although she “didn’t have any fancy Harvard degree” she knows “what had to be done here” (CS 218) and that means confrontation with the past: “Home is where you began,” she states (CS 222). The subjective view of Dahlia’s inner experiences is represented in the text with the contrast of the inner world, were Dahlia is able to meet her other side, Phoebe. When Phoebe is in control of the body, Dahlia cannot be reached as she is “gone to a place that neither of them could reach” (CS 221). Yet a clear understanding of her other side is not given instantaneously as Dahlia slowly has to uncover the distance toward her other side. Similar to DiPrete’s notion of “the foreign body” in her study (cf. DiPrete 2006), the other side is the foreign body within Dahlia; it must therefore be adapted or reintegrated in order to also overcome and understand the traumatic experience, which has caused the mind to split. Similar also to Sybil (1973), Pina’s protagonist therefore must encounter and embody the trauma and her other side.8 The repression of the trauma is also experienced and actively kept hidden underneath by various family members. Yet while they still remember the trauma and therefore may repress the uneasiness they connect with the day when Reva committed suicide,9 Dahlia unconsciously dissociates her knowledge into another personality. As Phoebe, she knows exactly what happened, yet as Dahlia, she can only feel that something is wrong in her life. The encounter with her other side is classified within another state of consciousness in between the two distinct personalities, Dahlia and Phoebe, thus evolving again the symbol of a tripartite fragmentation. This inner place is described as a place

8

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This can be compared to Dr. Wilbur’s explanation concerning reintegration when she mentions in Sybil: “It is only by getting to know the others that you can make them part of you” (Schreiber 1973: 323). This ability to remember and repress the traumatic memory is shown, for example, when Percival Tweed, an old albino, admits that “there was plenty left unsaid” (CS 178) and that “I can remember it all” (CS 195), and Mercy, the second wife of Dahlia’s father Lucius Culpepper, still feels the weight of guilt concerning her role within the Culpepper family as she did not stop the apparently insane Reva from driving away with her children.

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where “it was raining” (CS 223). Dahlia is “folded in a corner unprotected from the elements with nowhere to run” (CS 223). Within this imaginary place, Dahlia can meet her past. The “space that didn’t allow visitors” (CS 224) transfers her back to the age of eleven and produces a hallucination of her mother Reva. These inner dream landscapes enable Dahlia to overcome her dissociation when “then, like magic, memories from her life that she’d believed were long gone danced all around her” (CS 224). The meditative meaning of Dahlia’s imaginative inner landscape is welcomed by Aunt Baby as she understands that “to cure an illness, you had to get to the root cause of the problem” (CS 237). During the flight back to the family house, Dahlia experiences her encounter with the past within her inner landscape, while outside Phoebe is still in control of the body. As the inner landscape symbolically changes into a room filled with mirrors, Dahlia has to face her several images and understand who she really is. Now she is able to open another imaginary door and reclaim her life back: “‘Move, Phoebe,’ she said to the figure blocking her path. ‘Move the hell out of my way. I’m coming for you, and I’m going to get my life back’” (CS 256). While one plot level explores the incident of the day Reva tried to kill herself and her children during the tornado Sophea by crashing her car into a train, other chapters focus alternately on Dahlia’s inner world, thus slowly retelling the trauma. Facing the trauma with Reva, Sophea and the destruction of her family, Dahlia is able to succeed over Phoebe. She now “felt distinctly different” and “her head was free of noise”. Thus, Dahlia “integrated it with the rest of her fledging emotions. She began to experience various states of mind almost simultaneously: fear, love, pain, sorrow, and anger” (CS 278). Thus, by internally reintegrating her other side and physically returning to her former home, Dahlia can finally acknowledge: “I’m home” (CS 280). During several sessions, Phoebe directly speaks to Dr. Kelly while Aunt Baby is also present. Obviously no hypnosis is needed, as Dr. Kelly notes in an instant that he “stared into the angry eyes of a woman he was determined to know” (CS 190). In one of these sessions, Phoebe expresses her fear of being deleted: “You’re both trying to destroy me” (CS 208), a typical angst connected with other selves ever since in 1973 the novel Sybil established these features for multiple personality disorder: “[Sybil] feels a responsibility toward us and doesn’t want to destroy us” (Schreiber 1973: 397). Phoebe is considerably younger than Dahlia as she is understood as having been created only after the traumatic event when Dahlia was eleven (CS 207). Phoebe’s language is rough and relatively impolite. Therefore, she also functions as a counternarrative and is able to name what is wrong within her family (“how fucked up everyone in that house is”, CS 209). Whereas Dahlia is numb and ignorant, Phoebe’s analysis of the circumstances is clear: “Crazy is in your blood” (CS 209), which emphasizes the instability of her family.10

10

For example, Dahlia’s father has married a much younger woman, Mercy, who betrays him with his younger brother. Percival is secretly in love with Aunt Baby. The real mother of Dante Culpepper is not Aunt Baby but another woman etc. Each of these incident adds up to a death-in-life situation for all characters, which needs to be overcome by

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Dahlia needs to face her inner demon, the reality of Phoebe and the traumatic event which had caused the inner fragmentation. Not only is Dahlia finally confronted with Phoebe as her other self but also with her self as a child. The grown up Dahlia therefore meets her existence as a child when she relives her trauma: “She looked down at herself again. She was some kind of strange child-adult construct. She resembled a child but was starting to feel more like a grown-up with every passing moment. It was frightening and liberating at the same time” (CS 242). Dahlia’s final encounter with her inner world is established within a spatial notion: “a room was opening in her mind – a room that had been sealed for most of her life” (CS 243). In this mental room the confrontation of Dahlia and Phoebe takes place with Dahlia realizing eventually that “the voice” inside really is Phoebe: “‘Over here, crazy’, the voice continued, but wasn’t just a voice anymore. The sound was emanating from the mouth of a woman standing in the doorway. ‘Who are you?’ Dahlia asked. ‘What, you haven’t figured that out yet? Christ, you’re slow.’” (CS 244)

Dahlia remembers the voice as being “her friend”, hinting at Phoebe’s function as a protective force inside, yet this friend is “not a friend anymore” (CS 244). Being Phoebe thus seems to be much more comfortable, but Dahlia needs to survive by not “ignoring the enemy within” (CS 243), but by facing its nature as being part of herself. Aunt Baby at least is convinced that Dahlia is able to overcome the inner fragmentation and thus overcome the evil force of Phoebe’s attempts to regain her sole existence: “Her Dahlia was strong, and Baby senses that she was trying to climb out of whatever hell she had put herself in” (CS 237). Whether “it was all coming together now” (CS 236) might be true, the very last sentence of the novel, however, evokes a nightmarish prospect. The inner split created two distinct personalities who share one body. Although the confrontation with the trauma revealed the true nature of Phoebe, the inner split is not healed: “Thank you for the both of us” (CS 282), says Dahlia in order to stress the realization of her multiple selves, yet the possible process of reintegration has not yet started. There are still two forces within. With Chasing Sophea, Gabrielle Pina wrote a typical trauma-focused novel of multiple personality and dissociation. The first part of the novel is written in an interpersonal level with unreliable subjectivity as the character of Phoebe is only Dahlia’s other side and not a real person, although Dahlia does experience her other side as another entity. Nevertheless, the other side is felt as the protector inside. During the narration, the reader is confronted with the still controversial trauma concept of repressed memory and dissociation as dissociative identity disorder. The former definition with complex personalities and persons is still applied. The trauma is reflected as personal and not connected with a societal trauma, alienation or estrangement.

naming the trauma of Reva’s suicide. Only after naming this trauma may the family be able to cure the falling-apart.

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The example of another personal and not metaphorically societal experience of multiple personality and dissociation is also shown in Shana Mahaffey’s debut novel Sounds like Crazy (2009), which again presents the idea MPD with distinct personalities and persons inside. Once more, the text correctly refers to the disorder now known as DID, a mere internal fragmentation, which is not quite what the author means when he attempts to enhance the disorder. Quite the reverse, really, as five simultaneously acting and mutually experiencing persons or “people” live and act inside the protagonist’s body: “I have five people living inside my head” (Mahaffey 2009: 1). The experience is again linked to a traumatic event during childhood and is slowly revealed in the course of the novel. Similar to Matt Ruff’s Set this House in Order (2003), the reader learns in advance about the disorder and even a reference to the classic prototype of Sybil is made (Mahaffey 2009: 2), a fact that therefore defines it as an interpersonal a priori model of multiple personality fiction dealing again with distinct and independently acting secondary personalities similar to Gabrielle Pina’s Chasing Sophea. The vocabulary of the novel is clearly fixed and always instantly recognizable, the changes of the diagnosis totally irrelevant.

19 “It’s almost like there are two of me…”: Jess Walter The Zero (2007) Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts. Because the dead are free, absolute; they cannot be seduced by blitz. To speak to you, the dead of September, I must not claim false intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed just in time for a camera. I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say – no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become. TONI MORRISON “THE DEAD OF SEPTEMBER 11” Many things are over. The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative. DON DELILLO “IN THE RUINS OF THE FUTURE” Just two hours after that, the smoke of three thousand incinerated bodies would drift over toward Brooklyn and come pouring down on us in a white cloud of ashes and death. PAUL AUSTER THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES 2005: 304

The events of that legendary September in the year 2001, now commonly known as 9/11 or ‘nine-eleven’, resemble a collective trauma for the United States and the Western world. The images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center in New York have become a deeply engraved iconic picture in everybody’s mind whether they are Americans or from elsewhere in the world. Especially for the eyewitnesses in New York, the events evoked a “stifling depression that set over the city” according to Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher, who happened to be in New York at the time (Boradorri 2003: 26).

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Dealing with the extreme impact of nine-eleven within art and especially literature is still a delicate task. What is expressed within literary texts is the attempt to meet a traumatic event with words, although, as Toni Morrison expresses, words seem to be hard to find. A child character in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007), for example, can only adequately use his language after nine-eleven by talking in monosyllables while watching the sky for more planes to crash. Additionally, the traumatized character Keith, the child’s father, can only summon his feelings with the conclusion that the world is different after the events he experienced himself when running away from the WTC: “Nothing seemed familiar, being here, in a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now because he was watching” (DeLillo 2007: 82). Feeling strange to oneself, as Keith does, is also the key to another character of a nine-eleven novel thus rewriting what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in its fourth edition (DSM-IV-TR) understands as one feature of a posttraumatic disturbance stating a “feeling of detachment or estrangement from others” (APA 2000: 468) or even oneself. The DSM-V now explticitly mentions risk factors such as a traumatization during war or through events such as acts of “terrorism” (APA 2013: 295). In The Zero (2006), Jess Walter introduces a protagonist, Brian Remy, whose identity and self-awareness is shattered profoundly after the traumatic experiences.1 Becoming himself the Zero – referring to the Ground Zero which remained after the towers of the WTC collapsed – means nothing more than a blur concerning the definite knowledge of what constitutes the self. The mental remains of Brian Remy are therefore portrayed as fragments which cannot be put together again. Remy is consequently an unsolved puzzle to himself, being literally split into different levels of consciousness and identity. In contrast to other early nine-eleven novels (see Holloway 2008: 107), such as Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), and Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic scenery of The Road (2006), in his third novel The Zero, which was also nominated as a finalist for the National Book Award, the writer and journalist Jess Walter offers yet another view on the trauma of nine-eleven now on a satirical and nonetheless cynical level. While the events themselves are still considered to be the cause for the protagonist’s posttraumatic disorder understood possibly as a dissociation process in terms of dissociative identity disorder, the novel also depicts the notion of a grotesque and noir reappraisal of the trauma as it displays the events after as a nightmarish delusion, while at the same time, a greedy commercialization reduces nine-eleven to a topselling brand and obscure government agencies compete with each other when fighting against terrorism (which they even might have supported in the first place). The collective traumatic experience is mirrored by very personal traumata, and nearly every character in the novel develops such a subjective dilemma while the nation is shocked and the political system tries to prevent further threats with ‘homeland secu-

1

Jess Walter. The Zero. New York: HarperCollins, 2006; hereafter abbreviated TZ.

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rity’ and ‘patriot acts’.2 And referring also to the political panic and paranoia after nine-eleven, President Barack Obama declared that “nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases it let us act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.”3 In the novel The Zero, the reader is confronted with a society and the central protagonist Brian Remy in shock, who seems to reawaken within dreamlike states and strange mind gaps, hence possibly addressing again what the DSM-IV-TR furthermore defined as other features of a post-trauma, namely the experience of “illusion, hallucinations, and dissociative flashbacks” (APA 2000: 468): “‘Hallucinatory images,’ Remy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Rieux was saying. ‘What you’re describing is textbook PTSD. Visions. Stress-induced delusions. Dissociative episodes. Maybe even Briquet’s syndrome.’” (TZ 194)4

Without the traumatic events of nine-eleven, “we would have been safe” says Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer 2005: 326), but the nationwide trauma of nine-eleven destroys the security or self-notion of a stable identity both on a personal and national level. The attempts to express and formulate the events where considered to answer the “question of healing from collective trauma” (Kacandes 2003: 180; italics in original text). Referring to Judith Herman and her account of trauma in Trauma and Recovery (1992), such an attempt is the act of “remembering and telling the truth about terrible events” and is therefore to be understood as “prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims” (Herman 1992: i cited in Kacandes 2003: 180). Yet a healing seems far from possible for Brian Remy in The Zero as the damage is already done. The monster of Ground Zero and the incredibility of being almost devoured by it both mean a confrontation with a situation that may cause a disorder, which is defined in the DSM-IV-TR as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to the definition of PTSD the essential feature is understood as “the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity; or witnessing an event that

2

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The Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Acts where introduced by the government of former President of the USA George W. Bush. In his State of the Union speech on 29 January 2002, President George W. Bush announced the now beginning battle against international terrorism when he declared that hostile states “and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”. See ‹http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/01/29/bush.speech.txt›. Web. 8 Feb 2010. President Obama mentioned this in his famous speech in Cairo on June 4th 2009. See the entire speech at ‹http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/Remarks-by-the-Presidentat-Cairo-University-6-04-09›. Web. 31 Aug 2009. The term ‘Briquet’s syndrome’ is an outdated diagnosis of somatization within the hysterical disorders.

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involves death, injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of another person; or learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury experienced by a family member or other close associates. (Criterion A1)” (APA 2000: 463)

The current DSM-V explains the various aspects of PTSD and includes a vocabulary that refers to trauma and stressor related events within the complexities of war experiences (“military personnel, being a perpetrator, witnessing atrocities, or killing the enemy”, APA 2013: 278) or shock and trauma after an incident (“first responders collecting human remains”, APA 2013: 271). Connecting the syndrome of PTSD to the mechanism of dissociation, the DSM-IV-TR furthermore states that “in rare instances, the person experiences dissociative states that last from a few seconds to several hours, or even days, during which components of the event can be replayed or otherwise represented (Criterion B2)” (APA 2000: 464). It may also be the case that there is an “inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma” (464). The events of nine-eleven were described closely as such an extreme traumatic stressor in a considerable number of medical studies,5 for example, by psychologist and psychoanalyst Donna Bassin: “Being inside this violated and dismembered space of ground zero evoked terror and anguish. I lost all sense of scale, of embodiment, all sense of myself as a human being with resources. It felt like life in a nightmare that is real. The rubble screams the collapse of individuality, security, and mastery that is impossible to represent…It is all gray at ground zero. Life becomes not a range of color but only its absence.” (Bassin 2003: 198)

The faded gray non-color of Ground Zero is the essence which destroys the selfawareness of Jess Walter’s character Brian Remy, who notices that now “all is covered in that same dust” and that “everything [is] the same shade of gray now” (TZ 39). The people, muses Remy, look “broken” and “busted up and put back together with pieces missing” (TZ 9). And later, Remy concludes “that the whole world would

5

Several studies focused on the correlation of nine-eleven and PTSD, describing rates of PTSD due to the attacks and also long-term impacts. These studies showed a slightly higher risk of developing PTSD for residents of New York City near Canal Street and health relief workers, yet detected a significant percentage of people without such symptoms (80%) and even lower rates of PTSD (for example 6,4%) from more than six months after the event. Such studies include the following: G.A. Bonanno et al. “Psychological resilience after disaster: New York City in the aftermath of the September 11 th terrorist attack”. Psychological Science (2006) 17, 181-186; S. Galea et al. “Psychological sequelae of the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City”. New England Journal of Medicine (2202) 346, 982-987; W.E. Schlenger et al. “Psychological reactions to terrorist attacks: Findings from the National Study of American’s Reactions to September 11”. Journal of the American Medical Association (2002) 5, 581-588; R. Zimering et al. “Posttraumatic stress disorder in disaster relief workers following direct and indirect trauma exposure to Ground Zero”. Journal of Traumatic Stress (2006) 19, 553-557.

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swim in dust – finer and finer until there was nothing but an absence of substance and meaning” (TZ 44). Working as a police man, who is sent to clean the ruins of the WTC, he is in fact – despite his inner fragmentation and loss of control – meant to symbolize the brave American hero, or at least an also traumatized population desires such a symbolization of American bravery. But in describing the real situation of the clearing-up operations, however, the glorification of such bravery in actual fact also produced a consumer brand of nine-eleven: “Although members of the audience ostensibly clapping for the heroic firemen, it also seemed like they were clapping for CBS’s heroism in broadcasting the film. It’s frightening to see how easily the image of September 11 can be attached to a commercial enterprise in order to boost its credibility. It seems all the more urgent to find ways of documenting September 11 that don’t feed the machines of the culture industry.” (Cvetkovich 2003: 62)

Brian Remy’s internal fragmentation and trauma is opposed by what he is considered to represent. He is supposed to be another undestroyed hero to rescue the remains of the United States and therefore resembles perfectly what Dana Heller described in The Selling of 9/11 (2005): “What advertisers and marketers did give us was a new breed of American hero. Firefighters, police, and emergency medical workers – ordinary working-class people doing their ordinary jobs – emerged in American culture as extraordinary” (Heller 2005: 11). Remy and his colleagues are adored as such American heroes, for example, when “people on line applauded” (TZ 11) whenever they enter Ground Zero, which is “humming” (TZ 15) like a hill full of ants (TZ 16). There, the workers collect the body pieces left after the attacks, some of them not “big enough pieces for body bags” (TZ 13). These images of heroes do not fit together with what Remy encounters at Ground Zero. Yet the myriad images displayed by the mass media – such as the new American hero, whose picture in The Zero is used to sell a new brand of hero cornflakes (“The breakfast of heroes”, TZ 284) are, according to a psychological study on posttraumatic stress, also involve the risk of developing more substantial symptoms of trauma and depression as the exposure to such mass media images might force an interactive effect on the psyche of those people who were directly affected by the attacks (cf. Ahern et al. 2002). Being confronted with such media exposure, Remy’s notion of reality and fiction is blurred, or doubled, when he finds a detective series on television resembling his own life situation (TZ 283). The commercialization of nineeleven as a brand is, for example, demonstrated when even lawyers claim a special fee for “Vicarious Trauma” and “Comparison Fatigue” (TZ 174) when representing victims of nine-eleven (such as Remy’s newly widowed girlfriend April). Remy’s colleague Guterak first seems to be enthusiastic about being a hero: “You can’t tell me that ain’t the best feeling, them people treating us so good like that. That’s all I’m saying, Bri. That’s all” (TZ 11). PR agent develop concepts of a “homefront” hero with a “subtext” of memories as “stockpile material”, which actually means that companies are “looking for cops and smokers to cut ribbons and salute flags and throw out pitches and read poems and shit” (TZ 150), and television shows are called “From the Ashes”. Guterak states enthusiastically:

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“‘Do you know why we call it ‘reality’? Do you? Because it’s best when it’s…real. The realer the better. That’s what our show is about. Taking these stories of tragedy and letting people inside.’” (TZ 207)

Yet the essence of things seems to remain elusive as there is always something that is left unsaid unsaid and thus not assimilated: “But there are things we can’t say now” (TZ 12). Remy refuses to talk at Ground Zero (TZ 13) while at the same time, for example, his colleague Guterak copes with his work by applying new characteristics. Guterak seems to develop a “Touretic insensitivity” as he keeps talking all the time but cannot regain normality (TZ 16). Remy’s psychiatrist is unable to decipher the real causes that made Remy feel disintegrated: “What gaps?” (TZ 196). Guterak, however, is also traumatized. Guterak’s reaction toward a possible assessment of psychological reactions is almost like a Catch-22: “‘And if he asks how I’m doin’, you just say fine. Nothin’ else. I don’t want no problems. Tell ’em you haven’t seen any weird behavior, no mention of nightmares, nothing like that…unless…you know…they think it’s weird that I’m not having nightmares. Then tell ’em I’m totally fugged up…can’t sleep…cryin’ all the time.’” (TZ 47)

Later on, Guterak further admits that he sometimes hears “people use that word – hero – and I feel…sick” (TZ 306). Obviously, without remembering it, Remy has reported to his best friend Guterak (TZ 55) and his girlfriend, whom he then calls “Subject A” (TZ 180), and is even admired by the Boss: “And this thing you’re doing…” (TZ 55). What thing is he doing? Remy never knows what the Boss means when referring to Remy’s ability of being “a pioneer, a bridge between two worlds” (TZ 54). To set Remy free as a secret agent, the Boss and a psychiatrist consider pretending Remy’s disability. Although he is actually slowly losing his eyesight literally and metaphorically (“Remy had to look away”, TZ 8), Remy’s claim that he is experiencing severe eye problems are ignored: “Disability loves back” (TZ 55). This cover story is maintained throughout the novel, even though Remy attempts to be recognized as someone with eye/I problems and gaps of memory. The visits to medical experts or a psychiatrist himself unable to consider the real problem, reflect the absurd situations Remy can no longer put into context. Honestly naming his real problems – trouble focusing, losing track of things, memory gaps, eye problems, a son who declares the death of his father and shooting himself in the head – the truth, if there is one, is denied: “After a moment, the man chewed his pen and looked down at the file, running his finger down a list of some kind. ‘Chronic back pain, he said’” (TZ 65). On a more context-oriented level therefore, the novel The Zero is not only concerned with the personal dilemma of its protagonist Brian Remy and the PTSD syndromes of other characters. The circumstances of now being forced to treat the posttrauma of nine-eleven requires the whole nation to suffer from strange fragmentary symptoms and hence being internally split into different levels (of class, for example) and thus different forms of consciousness presented by various agencies and the desperate need to regain a feeling of wholeness and control and consequently overcome a new zeitgeist of dissociated feelings of angst and insecurity. Similar to the general

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societal context in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1996), and even earlier texts on dual or multiple personality such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Jess Walter’s The Zero finds a correlation with the traumatized individual within a traumatized society. Thus, relating the symptoms of MPD/DID – now merely mentioned and described symptoms of dissociation – not only to a human mind but also to the condition of the United States after nine-eleven could be described with what Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel C. Dennett remarked in their essay “Speaking for Ourselves” (1989) on multiple personality disorder comparing it to the United States: “Consider the United States. At the fictive level there is surely nothing wrong with personifying the USA and talking about it (rather like the termite colony) as if it had an inner self. The USA has memories, feelings, likes and dislikes, hopes, talents, and so on. It hates communism, is haunted by the memory of Vietnam, is scientifically creative, socially clumsy, somewhat given to self-righteousness, rather sentimental. But does that mean…there is one central agency inside the USA which embodies all those qualities? Of course not. There is, as it happens, a specific area of the country where much of it comes together. But go to Washington and ask to speak to Mr. American Self, and you’d find there was nobody home: instead you’d find a lot of different agencies…operating in relative independence of each other.” (Dennett 1998: 40)

However, the “many subsystems” (Hacking 1995: 225) of such a multiple fragmentation require a central device or a “figurehead” (Humphrey and Dennett 1989) as a “unifying control” (Hacking 1995: 225). The central character in The Zero, however, lacks such a central control. The memories of the collapse of the WTC result in the feeling of a “world inside out” (TZ 3) and the literal zero instead of a center: not a whole but “a hole” (TZ 3). Brian Remy’s gaps in memory refer to such a loss of central control. The experienced mind gaps from the very beginning of the story to the open ending hint at a force, which is hidden not only to the reader but also to Brian Remy himself: “Okay. This was the problem. These gaps in his memory, or perhaps his life, a series of skips – long shredded tears, empty spaces where the explanations for the most basic things used to be. For a moment he tried to puzzle over it all, the way he might have considered on the job.” (TZ 5)

The inability to entirely know himself (or himselves) and hence being able to merge his entire memory into one singular being, is expressed in the text with abrupt endings of paragraphs, marked with dashes, followed by new paragraphs and the sudden awareness of Remy to be in the middle of another situation. Such mind gaps and hard cuts concerning the action of the story are certainly typical devices of multiple personality and dissociation. In Sybil (1973), the role model for further multiple personality and dissociation fiction, the reader already met a character, whose failure to “piece together” (Schreiber 1973: 26) all incidents, marks the dissociative mechanics of a fragmented psyche. “Time. She could never be sure about time”, remarks Sybil (60) just like Aaron, who successfully pretends to suffer from MPD in William Diehl’s courtroom thriller Primal Fear (1993): “I lost time” (Diehl 1993: 238). Simi-

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lar to Remy in The Zero, multiple Penny in Set this House in Order (2003) and her dissociated segments are stressed with dashes hinting at the mind gaps, the passed time, and her own helplessness to remember: “It doesn’t look like they will be stopping anytime soon, however, and as the miles drag on, it gets harder and harder for her to stay alert – – and then she is back in the body.” (SHO 296)

The paragraphs in The Zero are displayed quite similarly: “He lifted the dusty glass but it slopped out of his hand and with it slipped the moment, Remy reaching for the falling glass and finding – TWO YANKEES, it turned out, were all that showed up to take the tour that day, much of Guterak’s apparent dismay. Remy looked back…” (TZ 22)

The whole novel is constituted of such shifts. The lack of coherence these memory gaps leave can never be filled throughout the story. As Remy notes: “These were the most common gaps that Remy had been suffering, holes not so much of his memory but in the string of events, the causes of certain effects” (TZ 43). And the tour referred to is a tour around the remains of the WTC on Ground Zero. There, Remy and his colleague Guterak are police officers, whose other main task is to help with tourist tours for Senators while they are also trying to clean up what is left after nineeleven. In order to piece together again what has been shattered by the terrorist after the attack, every little part needs to be collected, restored and analyzed. But Remy’s very existence in the flow of time is also shattered as he re-experiences – so it seems to him – some events retrospectively again and again. Those repeated moments seem like continuous loops of absurdity, for example, when Remy’s work at the Ground Zero is composed of such recurring incidents: “Were the gaps moving him backward now? Skipping like a record?” (TZ 27). The description in The Zero of the actual moment of these attacks, which seem to have caused such a fragmentary existence, is very similar to that in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2006) – “Seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past” (DeLillo 2006: 3) – as a shattered world being burnt into paper fragments: “And then close enough to see that it wasn’t a flock of birds at all – it was paper. Burning scraps of paper. All the little birds were paper. Fluttering and circling and growing bigger…” (TZ 3). The vulnerability of personal identity is thus stressed not only by the actual appearance of burnt paper pieces after the attacks but also by its metaphorical meaning of sensitive and thin-skinned mental stability. Therefore, when Walter describes the aftermath of nine-eleven and the loss of thousands of family members, he empowers a strong picture of paper clippings, notes and photographs of the missing persons (“a makeshift bulletin board, covered with desperate flyers, the whole storefront papered

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with pictures of the missing”, TZ 72) reflecting also a society not of coherence but of difference:6 “He noticed distinctions on the wall, too, that he couldn’t help making. Remy had read once that America was a classless society, but the walls of missing and dead disproved this. These walls were testaments to class, and even though the pictures were all jumbled, Remy could mentally break them into three strata.” (TZ 73)

The three strata resemble three classes: the upper class such as bankers and lawyers, brokers and the like, the second “comprised mostly of firefighters, a few cops” etc. (TZ 73); the last stratum showing workers “who had been mostly invisible before” (TZ 73). The strict hierarchy is also stressed by the fact that Remy is part of a closed system of authoritarian superiors such as “The Boss”, more “sub-bosses”, and the others as recipients of orders. Instead of guaranteeing a stable system again, the hierarchy appears to be something superficial: “Remy vaguely remembered thinking it was a corrupting and cruel system” (TZ 14). Furthermore, paper and records on papers are felt to constitute the identity of the United States themselves. Huge airplane hangars are filled with “tables of burned and dirty paper” (TZ 95) and decorated with more slogans and proclamations: “Our enemies should know this about the American people, which will not rest until Evil is defeated” (TZ 157). Therefore, the collection and recovery of all paperwork is essential to regaining the full national strength. Accordingly, the novel The Zero includes constantly recurring propaganda news broadcasted by cable television: “There is nothing so important as recovering the record of our commerce, the proof of our place in the world, of the resilience of our economy, of our job, of our lives. If we do not make a fundamental accounting of what was lost, if we do not gather up the paper and put it all back, then the forces aligned against us have already won. They’ve. Already. Won.” (TZ 19; italics in original text)

Such catchy slogans as attempt to re-establish self-confidence both on a general and national or individual level. The Boss as one of the exaggerated characters is proud to release Remy into a faked disability in order to enable him to fully work as a secret agent and throws at him what he considers an “inspiring speech”: “Your commitment and sacrifice…courage...liberty…reconstruction…resilience…faith.”(TZ 55) Thus, with the aim to restore the former order, several new agencies commence their work: “the Office of Liberty and Recovery, with its two independent bureaus: the Remaining Recovery Department, the R&Rs…and the even more secretive Doc-

6

Many displays of the missing persons “sprang up spontaneously after the attacks” reports David Holloway in his book on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Holloway 2008: 130). Furthermore, the participation of mass audiences was central to both the critical and popular success of 9/11 exhibitions such as "here is new york and Joe McNally’s Faces of Ground Zero – a remarkable collection of life-size images of survivors and rescue workers” (130; spelling according to original text).

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umentation Department, the Double-Ds” (TZ 19) and curiously, Remy, who has no orientation at all, seems to be part of it.7 The establishment of such – merely fictional! – departments and the organization of work at Ground Zero are portrayed again in the novel as a strict hierarchy.8 In reality, hundreds of cops and helpers worked among 108,342 trucks and barges which transported the material left from the WTC. The team, whose members sorted the remains of WTC, were organized under the WTC Evidence Recovery Team.9 Recovery and coherence, however, are both impossible targets for Remy himself. He is desperately trying to keep track of his life – “Maybe the gaps were going away, the crack in his mind – or wherever it was – was sealing itself” (TZ 20). The alternative life or existence of his secondary personality as a dubious agent begins when the “baby-faced Markham” (TZ 21) recruits him and confirms him as “someone with your experience” (TZ 22) although Remy never recalls such an experience. Yet what is so dubious about the character Remy himself is the ambiguous knowledge of a secret existence of an underground agent. Although Remy is unable to decipher his actions, he is obviously able to perform as someone who knows how to use obscure techniques such as interrogation (“that silent thing”, TZ 115), an ability which gains him the respect of Markham. Remy, however, never finds the clue behind the situations where he is challenged to do work for a government agency, let alone to feel comfortable enough: “Remy opened the car door and sat down, trying to catch his breath, trying to remember…He felt sick” (TZ 116). Later, Remy hires Guterak to record each day of his life in order to regain some orientation whenever he seems to suffer from his memory gaps. Earlier, Remy had already concluded that “life would be much easier if we all had a coach watching us, looking for any sign of fatigue or confusion” (TZ 26). The gaps cannot be consciously triggered or induced (TZ 29) and therefore controlled. Nothing in Remy’s life is controllable. He is divorced and his teenage son Edgar, who partly immerses himself in the alternative world of a computer game (“Like an alternate world…Just like the real world”, TZ 30), insists on proclaiming the death of his father: “I’m grieving my dead father” (TZ 33). When Edgar philosophically announces “Don’t tell me I shouldn’t be devastated by the death of my father just because he isn’t dead!”, Remy feels it would strangely be easier to be dead and that, if he tried hard enough, he might “imagine another life in which he’d never met” any of his former family mem-

7

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9

The new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was organized with twenty-two separate agencies under its control. Critical voices now claim that it was highly insufficient. See Charles Perrow. “The Disaster after 9/11: The Department of Homeland Security and the Intelligence Reorganization”. Homeland Security Affairs (2006) 2:1, April 3, Winter. See ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=2.1.3›. Web 13 Oct 2009. In an interview, Jess Walter noted that he is constantly asked whether such agencies weren’t real. See Jess Walter’s website at ‹http://www.jesswalter.com/disc.htm›. Web. 12 Oct 2009. To read more facts about Ground Zero, the sorting process and other works after nineeleven see ‹http://www.nysm.mysed.gov/wtc/recovery/groundzero.html›. Web. 13 Oct 2009.

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ber (TZ 36). Edgar later mourns his father’s alleged or felt death on stage during a night with “one-act, student-written and student-preformed plays and monologues” (TZ 108). Remy had explained to Edgar his position as “halfway between things” and thus, Edgar confirms what he calls the “unfinished half” of his father’s life (TZ 108). Remy’s self-notion corresponds to that uncertainty. He feels he is “shifting from one place to another” (TZ 186) and he admits “I haven’t been myself lately” (TZ 188). His perception of the world is marked by his memory gaps as “this was a tentative match, that the moment could slip the way so many moments slipped now” (TZ 78). He therefore concludes: “Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what’s happening to me. Or why” (TZ 95). Not trusting himself entirely, he writes notes to remember strict rules: “Don’t Hurt Anyone. Grow Up” (TZ 190). Yet such attempts to gain more control of his actions – he cannot recall the writing of these notes – is futile. When Remy discovers blood stains on his shoes, he is unaware of what happened (TZ 189). Remy is shocked to find out he must have killed the Arabian suspect Assan (TZ 251 and 293). For Remy, not only his notion of self is shattered and a strange Mr. Hyde side seems to have control without his knowledge – maybe his former self as Remy seems to have changed after he attempted to shoot himself at the beginning of the novel (“I shot myself in the head last night”, TZ 15), but the whole world seems to fall apart, the past appearing as something “like a repressed memory” (TZ 7). His office resembles the surreal and Kafkaesque craziness of those images visualized in Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil (1985) and the description of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby” and his miserable workplace: “his windowless office”, which is placed in the middle of “a wainscoted corridor that stretched above forty feet in either direction” and stuffed with “paper with the word SECURE” and a “manila envelope” (TZ 156). Those envelopes, handed over to a “Middle Eastern man” in his sixties (TZ 273), are the clue to what Remy really did as an agent because now the terrorists buy explosives with the money Remy gave them (TZ 290). The erosion of the central “I”, the zero, points at the unreliability of everything. Even the whole story might be told in terms of unreliable narration – unreliable even for Brian Remy – as the first pages of the story show Remy’s attempted suicide of (TZ 15). When the apparently most dangerous terrorist “Jaguar” defines two kinds of people in the world – “those whose every day is a battle to rise up, and those whose every day is a battle to fit in” (TZ 74) – the correlation to Remy’s two existences is striking. Remy I, the former ostensibly normal police officer and father, who is damaged now after the trauma and the attempted suicide, tries hard to focus on his fitting in and, whereas Remy II, the obscure Mr. Hyde agent existence, seems to have tried hard “to rise up.” In his changed existence of a Remy, who cannot cope with his former actions, the life after the shot in the head revolves around a threat to be uncovered which is actually only himself. Remy is astonished when he is told that he is behaving according to this fragmented self-notion: “You switch sides indiscriminately” (TZ 291). Remy, however, seems to find himself in the middle of an absurd espionage plot and he cannot figure out what kind of role he ought to play. The historical incidents and personal lives hence become a thriller plot and Remy, in the middle of it, has no idea of what is really happening. As the secondary plot of Remy as a secret agent un-

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ravels, he finally seems to be in total control of the situation although he has no clue at all what he is actually doing. As if he is mistaken as someone else. Yet this ignorance pays off well, and Remy’s supposed inexperience is understood as an extraordinary technique to disguise his abilities: “‘Hell, I don’t even know who you are.’ Markham seemed momentarily startled, then smiled. ‘Wow. Yeah. That’s good. You could be in one of our training videos.’” (TZ 56)

Encountering his memory gaps, finding himself within a political parallel universe of secret agents and his superpower abilities, Remy suspects he is split into two different states of consciousness. The thriller plot seems dreamlike and is composed of hallucinations or people like Markham, who can read his mind (TZ 57). Remy is eventually convinced he is going crazy (TZ 128). He is almost an actor within a fictional script (“Sometimes the gaps came like cuts in a movie”; TZ 96): “Maybe that was the answer. To float in this life, like paper on a current. Just lie back and let himself go…Maybe this was not some condition he had, but a life, and maybe every life is lived moment to moment. Doesn’t everyone react to the world as it presents itself? Who really knows more than the moment he’s in? What do you trust? Memory? History? No, these are just stories, and whichever ones we choose to tell ourselves – the one bout our marriage, the one bout the Berlin Wall – there are always gaps. There must be countless men all over the country crouched in front of barbecues, just like him, wondering how their lives got to that point.” (TZ 160)

For Remy, the central problem is how to understand himself in the middle of a strange puzzle. He cannot remember his other side, his dubious existence as a secret agent (“What am I doing in those moments I don’t remember”, TZ 181; italics in original text), the seemingly evil or unscrupulous part of his personality or Mr. Hyde, which he may have repressed: “He wondered how you undo what you don’t remember doing” (TZ 55). “A dream. That’s what it seems like to be, like a kind of fever dream”, says his girlfriend April, with whom Remy was able to experience a short episode of escape with no gaps at all (TZ 101). In April’s words: “Maybe we’re all like people in dreams now…aware that something isn’t right, but unable to shake the illusion. And maybe we could save each other, but we just drift pass, bending each other, moving through our own dreams like loosed worries” (TZ 103; italics in original text). The novel The Zero still evokes a dubious secondary personality beneath a host personality, yet it actually focuses more closely on the inner fragmentation of its protagonist, who experiences his shattered self within a traumatized and also fragmented society. The revelation of an evil force inside, portrayed both as personal and societal, suggests that the novel is a sharp comment on recent American history when everyone was a suspect, a formerly normal daily routine becomes something entirely political (“The ghosts of people who used to go out to dinner, before it became a form of patriotism”, TZ 183), and terrorism might have occurred not only outside the United States but seems staged with double agents everywhere: “Is there anyone in this

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cell who happens not to be a government informant?” (TZ 294). It is possible that Remy denies his other side, attempts to eliminate his darker self by a suicide. By “outsourcing” his possibly evil other side now mentally, Remy can only deny what his former self might have established: “Remy found that he was smiling, not exactly remembering, but wanting to, and thinking there’s not such a difference, that the best memories might be those you don’t remember” (TZ 94). The denial of his other side is both a mixture of dissociation, that is a passive forgetting and therefore apparent impossibility to reintegrate into one whole being, and of repression as an active force to avoid reality. “It’s my eyes” (TZ 195) – or translated as multiple egos? – Remy must say. “Reconstruction under way from Partials” (TZ 159), one office is called, yet such an operation seems impossible just like an attempted escape from reality with April (“They bought new clothes in a store called Fugue”, TZ 240; my emphasis).10 The only secure object is the “wasabi marinated duck”, a Chinese meal which Remy orders wherever he goes and which is available everywhere. And beyond that it seems that everything fades after a while (TZ 148) and what is left is merely “an absence of substance and meaning” (TZ 44). The author Jeff Walter explains the uncertainty, the fictional character Remy experiences: “Sometimes I think fiction writers are the only ones who can make sense of what has happened to us since 9/11…We have responded to an increasingly serious world by becoming surreally superficial. We live in a world that could only have been dreamed up by Graham Greene and Franz Kafka on a weekend bender, with George Orwell along to write slogans […] From the first day I began writing I knew this wouldn’t be a 9/11 novel. It’s more a 9/12 novel.”11

Whereas the former examples analyzed in the third part of this study explicitly mentioned an interpersonal level of multiplicity and thus referring to MPD with distinct personalities and persons rather than stressing the inner fragmentation, the novel The Zero meets, relatively speaking, the changed criteria of dissociative identity disorder (DID). The pronoun system of Remy sticks to the “I”, yet it is blurred. Thus, it explores the notion of the “inner fragmentation rather than a proliferation of separate personalities” (APA 2000: 519) or the “disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states” (APA 2013: 292). If Brian Remy is really suffering from DID (or a repressed former existence of an evil-doing agent), he cannot remember what happens between his mind gaps, he furthermore cannot discover why he has a certain knowledge or if he was once subject to brainwashing, for example, to create an alter identity which is then able to commit murder or threaten presumed terrorists. Unlike the possible explanation of the “outsourced” evil within the MPD definition, the DID patient is internally fragmented, the evil is therefore himself yet felt as vari-

10

11

The term for such fugue states refers to former descriptions of dissociative states (cf. Ellenberger 1970 and Hacking 1995). In the DSM-IV-TR, the term “dissociative fugue” means “a sudden, unexpected travel away from home” (APA 2000: 523); compare this to Siri Hustvedt’s novel Sorrows of an American in the following chapter. See ‹http://www.jesswalter.com/disc.htm›. Web 13. Oct 2009.

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ous selves, too. Remy’s other side is felt in terms of an accumulation of selves: “I’m losing track of everything…I do things I don’t remember. It’s almost like there are two of me” (TZ 202; my emphasis). The DSM-IV-TR also defines DID as a “failure to integrate various aspects of identity, memory, and consciousness” (APA 2000: 526), and Remy clearly suffers from such a failure, involuntarily or in terms of repression or a refusal to know. The gaps he experiences also meet other descriptions of DID: “Individuals with this disorder experience frequent gaps in memory for personal history, both remote and recent” (526). It is also important to note that now the DSM-V states on the causes of DID, which are called “risk and prognostic factors”: “Prevalence of childhood abuse and neglect in the United States, Canada, and Europe among those with the disorder is about 90%. Other forms of traumatizing experiences, including childhood medical and surgical procedures, war, childhood prostitution, and terrorism, have been reported.” (APA 2013: 294-5; my emphasis)

Remy’s impression of a world upside down consequently evokes what Pierre Janet meant with the original French expression of “desaggregation mentale”, a “forced separation of elements that would normally aggregate, which is actually a better description” (Spiegel 2006: 566). Remy cannot integrate his hidden side or knowledge – whether as a possible evil agent whose interactions Remy actually dismisses or as a victim of posttraumatic stress due to the experiences of nine-eleven. But throughout the text, no references to another pronoun system are made which could clearly indicate another personality state. As already mentioned in chapter 11.1 on Shirley Jackson’s A Bird’s Nest (1954), such an alternate pronoun system, for example in The Discursive Mind (1994) by Rom Harré and Grand Gillett, would offer Remy’s other personality fragment within the definition of the older but more popular definition of MPD or even DID, which still allows the disorder to be experienced with several personality states with “distinct personal history, self-image, and identity, including a separate name” (APA 2000: 526). In contrast to such an alternative pronoun system or image such as Mr. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) with a silenced other side, there is merely the insecurity of Remy and his innumerable mind gaps. To stress the inner fragmentation, the image of the eye (or I) and Remy’s problems with his ability to see and understand are symbolized by a macular degeneration, a “muscular vicious disintegration” (TZ 26), which best describes what is wrong with Remy. His center of the self is blurred and therefore uncertain and the eye sight degeneration therefore symbolizes the zero or nothingness of identity. Similar to the escapism the unnamed narrator in Fight Club (1999) desires in order to avoid the strength of his alter ego Tyler Durden, the novel The Zero shows its central character Remy as unwilling to face whatever reality may offer. The final eye operation – certainly perfectly symbolizing his mental condition – may have been successful yet

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Remy refuses to open his eyes: “but he squeezed them as tight as he could” (TZ 326).12 This unwillingness or impossibility of facing the core of the problem, for example, to recognize the evil side of his personality as that of a killer, may also correspond with how the whole society of the United States attempts to deal with terrorism. In the novel, the terrorist cells are composed not only of foreign or Arabian looking immigrants but of American double agents, who eventually chase each other. The craziness and absurdity of such actions – again the macular degeneration now as a national disorder – merely results in the conclusion that “the recent bounce in The President’s popularity was entirely due to the recent victory over a terrorist cell” (TZ 325) while the American agents merely chase each other. Describing Remy’s obvious but yet seemingly super-talented abilities as an agent stresses even more the Kafkaesque nihilism and absurdity of fighting terrorism by selling bombs to alleged terrorists (TZ 290) or cataloging burnt paper pieces in the form of the Australian continent (TZ 193). Thus the characters in The Zero claim to “live in a divided world” (TZ 298) and what is left is merely a “slipping insanely from one reality to another” (TZ 325). However satirical and yet too serious the situations may be, the novel never fails to portray the psychological consequences of traumatic experiences. The trauma may even double when heroes seem to crack internally and a repression of the central trauma means that one of them, Remy, does not want to open his eyes, therefore not wanting to see. Nonetheless, the dissociation is clear and the center is chaos. The novel depicts the politics of fighting the foreign terrorism just to reveal the so defined outside threat of terrorists only as a force that originates from within: the official othering of the enemy conceals the fact that the threat comes from inside America. In terms of multiple personality and dissociation and the diagnoses of MPD versus DID, the latter is more explicitly adapted in the novel The Zero. A shift from distinct personalities or persons to the stress of inner fragmentation, yet still felt as the presence of personality states or identities, as seemingly “killer agent inside” or killer inside versus spy inside presented with an intrapersonal level, can be detected thus presenting a more contemporary understanding of dissociation and identity blur.

12

The opening of the eyes applies here again as in Morton Prince’s study on Miss Beauchamp. It symbolized the birth and thus establishment of a secondary personality (Prince 1906) and in Shirley Jackson’s novel The Bird’s Nest (1954), the protagonist and her secondary personality wanted to open her eyes.

20 “It’s all staged…”: Siri Hustvedt Sorrows of an American (2008) His voracious desire for attention forced him to reinvent himself regularly. Change is news, and he delighted the press in spite of the fact that his art was constructed from images that had long established themselves as trite conventions in more popular genres. SIRI HUSTVEDT WHAT I LOVED 2003: 241 The strangeness of a duality in myself remains, a powerful sense of an “I” and an uncontrollable other. SIRI HUSTVEDT THE SHAKING WOMAN 2010: 47

In Siri Hustvedt’s novel Sorrows of an American (2008),1 dissociation and all connected dissociative disorders are presented as an accumulation of various psychological concepts of the fragmented psyche. Recounting all available subtypes such as dissociative fugue, posttraumatic stress, trauma-induced dissociation, and even dissociative identity disorder (DID) as well as psychoanalysis, the novel synthesizes psychiatry, psychology, and literature. The central character Erik Davidsen, who works as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst,2 tells the story of his life. Reflecting his own past after the death of his father, he also contemplates on his present and future, and his constant feeling of (dis-)connectedness from others: “What used to be doesn’t leave us” (SoA 11). Recording several plot levels, the novel establishes a nonlinear and noncoherent narrative mode but consists also of a more fragmented and complicated

1 2

Siri Hustvedt. Sorrows of an American. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008; hereafter abbreviated SoA. Siri Hustvedt is influenced by ‘neuropsychoanalysis’, a field which attempts to derive its explanation of human behavior with the means of a combination of neuroscience and psychoanalysis. For further readings on the topic see Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms. Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis: Introduction to a Depth Neuropsychology. New York: Karnac, 2002.

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construct. Erik’s account of his experiences structures the novel, and it is this act of narrating what is essential to him: “This need to document myself” (SoA 22). Narrating therefore works insofar “as we make our narratives, and those created stories can’t be separated from the culture in which we live” (SoA 86). As far as dissociative disorders are concerned, Hustvedt proves to be close to contemporary readings especially when it comes to current concepts of neuropsychoanalysis, posttraumatic stress disorders, critical psychiatric theories, and more controversial disorders such as DID.3 Similar to another novel about memory, identity and self-perception, namely Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006), Hustvedt also delves into the notion of not only a singular Cartesian self and a unitary existence of mind and body, but also of a dynamic self and a changing awareness of it and its vulnerability. The text, which displays no chapters, is divided into different sections dealing with: the past of Erik’s father, whose diary notes are printed in italics and are actually the memories of Hustvedt’s own father; the childhood in Minnesota; the present life in New York with Erik’s tenant Miranda, whom Erik secretly adores, and her little daughter Eglantine; the encounter with Miranda’s dubious ex-boyfriend and artist Jeff Lane; various psychiatric patients; Erik’s sister Inga and her attempt to protect the commemoration of her famous recently died writer husband Max; and eventually the uncovering of a secret in the life of Erik and Inga’s father (he helped with burying a stillborn baby). Concerning dissociative states of the mind, it is Erik’s father who displays typical symptoms. He seems to initialize an escape from his environment (or himself) being traumatized by the Second World War as he regularly walks away from home mostly during the nights; a habit which is referred to as a form of dissociative fugue, thus being reminiscent of one of the major historical cases of dissociation in the United States: the case of Ansel Bourne. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) refers to “Dissociative Fugue” as a “sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one’s customary place of daily activities” (APA 2000: 523).4 For Erik, the father’s strange habit may suggest such a disturbance, referred to

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A convenient co-text to the novel might be her recent publication of The Shaking Women. In this text, autobiographical experiences are mixed with a variety of psychological concepts concerning the fragmented self. Hustvedt also particularly mentions multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder (Hustvedt 2010: 45ff.). Erik defines his father’s fugue as being possibly also something else: “Yes, but I can’t help thinking that it was another form of fugue, one we haven’t named” (SoA 34) as “Papa knew who he was” (SoA 34). Yet the DSM-IV-TR also concludes: “Most fugues do not involve the formation of a new identity. If a new identity is assumed during a fugue, it is usually characterized by more gregarious and uninhibited traits than characterized the former identity. The person may assume a new name, take up a new residence, and engage in complex social activities that are well integrated and that do not suggest the presence of a mental disorder…The onset of Dissociative Fugue is usually related to traumatic, stressful, or overwhelming life events” (APA 2000: 524-5). See also the chap-

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as “the walking” (SoA 32). Attempting to analyze this behavior, Erik muses: “I think he had to flee. Emotions would build up in him, and then he couldn’t stay” (SoA 32). And considering a dissociative fugue, Erik declares: “‘There was a moment in medical school when I thought Pappa might be a fugueur…it got a lot of attention in the nineteenth century, and it’s still diagnosed as dissociative fugue. I’ve never heard it happening to a woman. It’s always men, who suddenly run off and vanish for hours or days or weeks, even months, and then wake up somewhere without remembering who they are or what happened to them. It’s extremely rare.’” (SoA 33)

For Erik, within a more psychoanalytic explanation, it is clear that for such a mental state, “there aren’t any drugs for it, just talk” (SoA 33) hence, understanding a cure as ‘talking cure’.5 In his dreams, Erik walks beside his father during the fugues on “Dunkel Road, our road” (SoA 58). In the novel, dissociative identity disorder (DID), now with the contemporary label, is connected to one of its characters, artist Jeff Lane. The most controversial disorder in American psychiatric history is thus introduced with the novel’s most ambiguous character, similar to Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (1996). The narrative is limited to Erik’s point of view, who can merely hypothesize what the not at all sympathetic artist Jeff Lane intends to express with his installation art. Lane moreover functions as a counterpart to Erik as a psychiatrist, thus juxtaposing prevalent psychiatrist theories concerning mental disorders or trauma studies with art concepts of using DID especially as a form of creativity for an art show. Lane’s work of art is again presented as an action close to humiliating Erik’s private life. Throughout the novel, Lane is constantly stalking Erik and Miranda and he vigorously takes photos of both.6 He follows Erik everywhere and even breaks into Erik’s house overtly harassing him in order to provoke an apparently violent gesture, taking immediately a photo and showing it later as part of an art exhibition called “Jeff’s Lives: Multiple Fictions, or an Excursion into DID” (SoA 260). This exhibition is described in detail in Erik’s own words, yet no general comprehensive comment or explanation of this art show is offered. This show bewilders Erik. It seems to be Lane’s attempt to present his feeling of being composed of vari-

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ter 5.4 on the case of Ansel Bourne and chapter 10 on the fictional characters of Wakefield and Rip van Winkle. As mentioned before, the term of the ‘talking cure’ was coined by Anna O., the patient of Josef Breuer (Breuer and Freud “Mechanismus” 2007: 42-65). Anna O. talked only in English when in her “condition seconde” (51); she also called it “chimney-sweeping” (51). Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud explained her behavior of two alternating states of consciousness in their study on hysteria (Breuer und Freud 2007 [1895]). For example, on several occasions, Jeff Lane places his photographs right in front of Erik’s house just to watch him pick up those pictures. The first time, “there are four lying on the house steps” (SoA 28); the second time, the pictures are altered and the eyes are cut out (SoA 35); on the third occasion, seven pictures are spread in front of Erik’s house (SoA 73); then there are “a hundred pictures” and “self-portraits of Lane” (SoA 209).

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ous selves and of his self-perception of the different age stages of his life. The reader is guided through the exhibition similar to those descriptions Hustvedt had already used in her former novel What I loved (2003), where the character Leo Hertzberg, who briefly reappears in The Sorrows of an American (SoA 96), recounts the various exhibitions of artist Bill Wechsler and his art shows that are also presented in several minutely described rooms. Erik visits Lane’s exhibition because he knows he will be part of it after Lane has stalked him and Miranda: “There was more than one room in the gallery, and despite my urge to rush around looking for myself, I decided to move systematically through the exhibition and started with the first room” (SoA 260). Three rooms display Lane’s artistic view on DID or a re-telling of himself in terms of being and feeling multiple. The first room contains “four blank rectangles” with the caption “No documentation of Grandparents” (SoA 260; italics in original text; all other further mentioned titles are in italics in original text) as well as blow-ups of father and mother (“Early documentation of Mother…Father”, SoA 260), and an “Early documentation of Me”, which resembles a picture of Lane as a boy (SoA 260). Next to blurred black-andwhite photos, several smaller color snapshots show Lane in different stages and situations of his childhood. A divorce degree is placed on the opposite wall. The second room presents “a giant color photograph that had been subjected to some kind of digital distortion. It was Lane as a Francis Bacon painting, but in neon colors, his impossibly long chin dragged to a sharp point, his mouth undulating in a howl. The caption read: The Break.” (SoA 261)

Six identical photographs of an adult Lane complete the room. Each of the identical pictures has a different name: “Good Student, Druggie, Lover, Stalker, Patient, Father” (SoA 261). A video installation plays and replays (“reenact its destruction”, SoA 261) the scene of a car crash thus resembling the death of Lane’s parents in a car crash, which really happened as an exhibited newspaper article reports on it. In the third and last room, “collages of some sort” of “thin rectangles of combined pictures” are presented again with each named either “Good Student”, “Druggie” or “Lover” using the names from the second room once more (SoA 261). Erik recognizes photographs of himself with the contours of his body cut out. Those pictures are presented in the Stalker section with titles such as “Excised Shrink Boyfriend” (SoA 262). His image, however, is clearly seen in the Father section: “I spotted it right away. It was an eight-by-ten photograph, mixed in among many other pictures with the caption Head Doctor Goes Insane” (SoA 262). Erik notifies the “invasive nature of the project” (SoA 261) as the “intimate pictures” (SoA 262) document each moment of, for example, Lane’s love affair with Miranda using her as object on each photograph. This “documentation of a real love affair” evokes sadness in Erik (SoA 202). When he discovers himself in the “Stalker series”, however, first as a cutout and in the Father section with his images shown, the invasiveness of the project overwhelms him: “But in that first moment, I wasn’t sure who I was looking at. Anger had contorted my face to such a degree that I was almost unrecognizable” (SoA 263). Lane has altered the setting of the angry Erik, who also holds a hammer in his hand: “But the photograph made it appear as if I had

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been raving half naked in the street, wielding a hammer” (SoA 263). Lane had taken the picture when he broke into Erik’s apartment and nearly scared him to death. Beside the altered picture, “was an image of Lane with a large bruise on his forehead” (SoA 263). Erik is shocked by his appearance in the show, only remembering later vaguely the other images Lane also uses in his exhibition: “Near my own image, I saw one of Lane’s father, a photo of George Bush, the Twin Towers, a hospital corridor, and war images of Iraq. But I didn’t stay to study them. I backed away from the pictures, suddenly nauseated, and staggered out into the bright light of Twenty-fifth Street, where I squatted on the sidewalk for a moment with my head lowered to prevent the oncoming faint. Fathers.” (SoA 263)

With these images of Bush, the Twin Towers, and Iraq, Lane quotes widespread images of the post-nine-eleven trauma, which soon became pop culture and were heavily used in several art forms;7 with these images Lane also composes the Father section. Moreover, he also includes a picture of a hospital corridor. Lane therefore mixes personal trauma (divorce and death of parents, the end of a love affair) with collective trauma images (New York images of 9/11 and so on). The exhibition takes place in November, yet Lane had already contacted Erik four months earlier to invite him to his show. After already offending Erik with various photographs he took of him together with Miranda and Eglantine, Lane explains, or rather shortly mentions, his concept of the exhibition: “‘I want to invite you to my show. Family photographs. That’s the theme. It should be interesting material for a shrink. DID. That’s an acronym you throw around, isn’t it? Dissociative identity disorder, used to be multiple personality. My pictures are DID. It’s not for some time yet, but I wanted to make sure you put it down in your calendar.’” (SoA 156-7; my emphasis)

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Artist used the images of American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, the Twin Towers, and former American President George W. Bush (“Bush-Bashing”) for their art. For example Abu Ghraib images of tortured prisoners in “The Prisoner” by Àkos Birkás” (Lange und Matzner 2006: 59) and paintings by Colombian painter Fernando Botero (see Fernando Botero. Abu Ghraib. Prestel: München, 2006); George W. Bush in Xiang Yang’s installation “The Truth People Are not Willing to Face: Bushism vs. Saddamism” (2007, see ‹http://www.weburbanist.com/2008/08/18/george-bush-artwork-portraits›. Web. 5 Nov 2009); or the absence of the Twin Towers in Luc Tyman’s painting “Demolition” of the year 2005 (see ‹http://www.artjournal.com/man/2007/09/911_luc_tuymans.html›. Web. 5 Nov 2009); the Twin Towers presented as light blue monolithic tower touched by a tiny plane by Tom Friedman (see ‹http://www.artjournal.com/man/2007(09/911_tom_fried man.html›. Web. 5 Nov 2009). Furthermore, art responses on 9/11 were either seen as “art is used as healing, and for memory, and for telling stories” (Radhira Subramaniamsee, see ‹http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/arts/20050909/1562›. Web. 5 Nov 2009) or even as embarrassing attempts of a folklore of kitsch and therefore a disaster for art itself (see Peter Schierig in “Soziale Plastik: Die zeitgenössische Kunst nach 9/11!”, ‹http://www.artnet.de/magazine/features/schierig/schierig09-11-06›. Web. 5 Nov 2009).

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Lane reveals himself as very conscious of dissociative identity disorder, which is, as already shown in this study, one of the major psychiatric disorders to have become a central device within popular culture due to (over-)use both in literary and visual art forms. Lane therefore has been able to absorb all images of MPD or DID, as he correctly notes (“you throw around”; although it is definitely not Erik who enforces such a circulation; rather, it is folk psychology!). And he knows how popular and controversial the disorder was. An extensive use, however, cannot be adapted to Hustvedt or her fictional character Erik in the novel, whose patients do not resemble this controversial disorder whatsoever, although Ms. L. later in the novel does display certain performative symptoms. It is Lane himself, seemingly critical toward DID, who uses it in an art exhibition. Additionally, he mixes every available image, Bush, the Twin Towers, Iraq, and eventually DID to compose his show. Lane is a dubious character insofar as he thus manipulates several popular images and pop psychiatry diagnoses as well as any person around him in order to create his artwork. His final attempt to be institutionalized by Erik and thus prove the system of psychiatry to be authoritative is, however, not successful. Lane is also eager to earn Erik’s attention as a psychiatrist as he intends to explore dissociative identity disorder and psychiatry, especially how it treats mental disorders and people; he uses the image of the hospital door possibly resembling the authority of mental institutions. When Erik confirms to Miranda that Lane constantly quotes a certain Thomas Szasz, Hustvedt mentions a critical American psychiatrist, whose numerous books on The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), for example, added considerable arguments against a too confident psychiatry movement. Szasz even went so far as to state that there is no such thing as mental illness (Szasz 1991: 12). Consequently, Miranda explains Lane’s concept: “‘He’s investigating insanity because he thinks psychiatry is a mechanism of control, that madness is a form of creative being that’s squashed in hospitals and clinics. He says the whole discipline’s a fraud.’” (SoA 220; my emphasis)

Insofar, the novel may depict Lane’s concept as a notion of madness – the definition of insanity as disorder – as being defined by authoritative forces and thus restricted to abnormality and to something mysterious and unacceptable. Madness, however, may function even as a way of questioning accepted norms, and may be understood as a valid variation of human mental processes. Within a power system of psychiatric diagnoses, to use Lane’s perspective, critical voices may be labelled as something that cannot be taken seriously and cannot be acknowledged as unique, but something that needs to be treated and eliminated. Limiting mental abilities and processes of madness to something abnormal would fail to recognize the creativity beyond societal norms and conventions, and the opportunities of a mind not normal, sane, clean or boring and conventional. Scientific models, for example, or psychiatric theories, are thus never able to grasp the strength of the counter-narrative of creativity, abnormality, and its possible revelation of the truth. These features may be inherent to madness or the unconventional being as ‘carnival’ (Bakhtin), ‘imaginative counter-discourse’ (Zapf) or as vitality because of its uniqueness and freedom from restriction (Narrenfreiheit). Lane’s attempt to display himself or act out and therefore reveal the simula-

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cra of mental illness as a disorder corresponds to a comment on hysteria (to which multiple personality and dissociation was and is strongly connected) again by Thomas Szasz in The Medicalization of Everyday Life (2007). Szasz identifies hysteria as a “form of rhetoric”. He furthermore states that such a “language of illness is more effective as a rhetorical device than the language of everyday speech” (Szasz “Hysteria as Language” 2007: 78).8 Additionally, Szasz explains hysteria and its performative act and the acting out – in terms of Judith Butler – what could be connected to Lane’s understanding of his art and his compulsive concentration on his photography and documentation: “To identify a person, we use his photograph or fingerprint, not a verbal description of his appearance. The hysteric uses a similar principle. If one person seeks the attention or help of another individual, he can achieve his aim best by a dramatic display of messages…This goal is better accomplished by displaying the image or icon of illness – a seemingly sick body – than by simply stating that one feels ill. A picture is worth a thousand words. A hysterical symptom is worth two thousand. That sums up the rhetoric of hysteria.” (Szasz 2007: 78; my emphasis)

Lane can only communicate via pictures. He documents everything and everyone around him. He therefore produces signs and signals.9 Thus, Lane’s contradictory self (claiming to plan his funeral and smiling at the same time, SoA 216), his expression of himself/himselves to the point of exhaustion and his attempt to act a malingering patient – interestingly closes the circle of hysteria connected to dual personality, multiple personality disorder (MPD) and eventually the understanding of dissociative identity disorder probably as an act of performance or malingering. The mystery of multiple personality and dissociation all began with hysteria and the dubious secondary state of consciousness, which was provoked under hypnosis (cf. Ellenberger 1970; Hacking 1996). “Hysteria was theater, not medicine”, states Szasz (Szasz 2008: 26). In the year 1911, Eugen Bleuler noted on hysterical cases that they inhabit

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On hysteria as (female) rhetoric see also Logan Dale Greene’s The Discourse of Hysteria: The Topoi of Humility, Physicality, and Authority in Women’s Rhetoric (Greene 2009). This attempt to communicate with images and not verbally, as language may not be sufficient enough to express trauma, was also mentioned in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) by Cathy Caruth. She combines psychiatric theories with cultural studies and bases her concept on neurological studies by Bessel A. van der Kolk. Together with Mark S. Greenberg, Bessel A. Van der Kolk published an essay concerning the advantage of a “painting cure” with “private iconic images” (cf. Leys Trauma 2001: 249); accordingly, patients could uncover their traumatic experiences with drawn images (cf. Greenberg and Van der Kolk 1987). For a critical approach to Caruth’s concepts see Ruth Leys’ interesting recount of trauma theory (Leys “The Real” 2000: 266 – 297). Leys detailed analysis opposes the idea of the unspeakable and unrepresentable trauma. The DSM-V includes both concepts of trauma and PTSD, inability to recall (“inability to remember an important aspects of the traumatic event(s)” and “ avoidance of or efforts to avoid distressing memories, thought or feelings” (APA 2013: 271).

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a certain kind of method in contrast to pure insanity such as schizophrenia (Bleuler 1988 [1911]: 263). On hysteria and its connection to malingering, Thomas Szasz also notes: “Malingering was thus transformed into hysteria, hysteria was generalized into neurosis, and neurosis proliferated into the 350 distinct ‘psychopathological’ entities now recognized as mental disorders by American psychiatry” (Szasz 2008: 14).10 As the most controversial disorder in American psychiatry (cf. Showalter 1997, Acocella 1999, Piper 1999, Rieber 2006), dissociative identity disorder (DID) serves Lane well for expressing his anger with psychiatry, but at the same time this may hint at what he also considers to represent the creativity of a mind to cope with personal traumatic events or what he sees as a possibility to simply express the notion of the self as not being graspable in terms of normal/norm and a corresponding singularity but instead of being a plural, vital ergo sum(us). Thus, the mechanism of DID may be understood as not merely a clinically relevant disorder but as a “form of creative being”, which is, however, classified among the symptoms constituting malingering and therefore, again in Szasz’ terms, a social custom of language use or a “language game” (Szasz “Hysteria as Language” 2007: 76). Lane consequently makes reference to the anti-psychiatric movement which understood insanity not as a state provoked by an insane environment such as the family or society in general, but also as an expression of creativity in contrast to a dull and seemingly “normal” mind.11

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Lane’s behavior could be summarized as roughly resembling what the DSM-IV-TR understands as “Malingering”: “The essential feature of Malingering is the intentional production of false or grossly exaggerated physical or psychological symptoms, motivated by external incentives” (APA 2000: 739). Interestingly, the DSM-IV-TR version even offers a suitable mental diagnosis for Lane after all. Lane’s intentional attempt to produce what he considers to be typical symptoms of, for example, stalking, depression and dissociative identity disorder (DID) and so on would well meet the criteria. He admits it as the staging of everything, the simulacrum is the center of his work: “I’m trying on my various personas for the work. It can’t be simple, and it has to be dangerous. I have to go as far as I can” (SoA 218). Thomas Szasz, again, opposes the idea of a “medicalized concept of malingering” (Szasz 2008: 24) concerning the diagnosis of the DSM-IV-TR. Szasz explores the idea of defining illness or disease when it comes to mental disturbances opposed to biologically observable phenomena. In the chapter “Malingering”, Szasz concludes: “If we limit the use of the term illness or disease to observable biological – anatomical and physiological – phenomena, then, by definition, the term mental illness is a metaphor. Mind is not matter, hence mental illness is a figure of speech” (Szasz 2008: 25). For further readings on the “anti-psychiatric movement” see also R. D. Laing and his seminal book The Divided Self (1960), Aaron Esterson and R. D. Laing’s Sanity, Madness, and the Family (1964), Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la Folie (1961), and Erving Goffman’s Asylums (1961). See also Elaine Showalter. “Women, Madness, and the Family: R. D. Laing and the Culture of Antipsychiatry”. The Female Malady. London: Virago Press, 2007, 220-247. Showalter, however, criticizes Laing’s notion of schizoid and schizophrenia in terms of a “existential-phenomenological method” (Laing 1960: 16).

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Thomas Szasz especially may be understood as the theoretical framework behind Jeff Lane’s art work. Yet Hustvedt merely mentions him once briefly (“‘He keeps quoting someone.’/‘Thomas Szasz?’/‘That’s it. Anyway.’”, SoA 220) without explaining his theories in detail, let alone mentioning them at all. American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, however, is a productive critic opposing a concept of psychiatry that remains uncritical toward itself, even referring to psychiatry as a science of lies. In his book Psychiatry: The Science of Lies (2008), for example, he blames the “Church of Psychiatry” and its claim to “psychiatric infallibility” (114). “Diagnosis”, Szasz explains, “is a product manufactured by persons, in the same sense that works of art are” (2), hence theoretically offering a quotation the fictional Jeff Lane could well have used. In his seminal book The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), Szasz made it clear that in his opinion “psychiatry, as a theoretical science, consists of the study of personal conduct – of clarifying and ‘explaining’ the kinds of games that people play with each other; how they learned these games; why they like to play them; and so forth” (7). Hysteria is therefore understood as a kind of “protolanguage”, which is a form of communication “by means of bodily signs and complains” (12). In staging his drama of hysteria or malingering, Lane opposes Erik – or considers Erik to be his perfect concept of an enemy within his theater of hysteria/DID art with Erik as the psychiatrist/rival/father, all at the same time. In Szaszian terms, this opposition is a game of “impersonated roles” which “count on some form of resistance against their role-taking. The resistance may be put up by various persons or agencies. Malingerers, for instance, will be opposed by physicians; actors by drama critics and audiences” (12). Even Erik’s sophisticated sister Inga admits that everybody “plays a role” (SoA 253). By professionally marketing himself (via a blog on the internet), representing an aggressive form of contemporary art of provocation, scandal, and humiliation of others for the sake of artistic self-expression, which Hustvedt had already mentioned in What I loved (2003), Lane – “simulating a stalker” (SoA 220), although he is, in fact, a perfect one – is eager to reveal “Jeff’s Lives” while referring his work to the theory of “simulacra [Beaudrillard] and superconductivity and the psychotic sublime” (SoA 220). Thus, Lane embeds his fraud art in simulation and also in sophisticated postmodern theories: “It’s documentation, man, it’s my whole splendid mess on film. Digital magic. Jeff’s life. Warty, sad, but there it is. Moi. Giving that up would be impossible. The world’s going virtual anyway; there’s no reality left. Simulacra, baby” (SoA 217). The self becomes an agglomeration of fragments, fashioning a postmodern existence (cf. Glass 1993). At the same time, Jeff Lane displays his inner self to the art world and any visitor of his exhibition, an exhausting presentation of his soul or his inner selves. Jeff Lane’s approach toward his own concept of art is also reflected in his attempt to manipulate Erik in order to be transferred to a mental hospital (SA 219). Such a concept of contemporary event art or performative art as an attack on the authoritative establishment of psychiatry, whatever, resembles a fraud the Swedish artist Anna Odell performed in August 2009 when she impersonated a hysterical and suicidal woman in order to be committed to a psychiatric ward where she was kept for one night. Jeff Lane likewise explains his approach: “It’s all staged, if you see what I mean. I’m staging it. You’re one of the players. So is Miranda” (SoA 218). Anna

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Odell’s “performance”, a repetition of former experiences, not only gained international attention for her art project “Unknown – Woman 2009-349701” but was heavily criticized for producing as mere sensationalistic art and even incurred some serious legal problems.12 For Jeff Lane, everything can be transformed into art or (mis-)used in his artwork, like the photos that document people’s emotions concerning him. Even when exhibiting others (Erik or Miranda), he actually wants himself to be portrayed. His different selves may also be explained, since he refers to DID, which, in turn may be only staged as Lane attempts to act out what he thinks is the most acted-out mental disorder (not necessarily as a disorder). His attempt to unmask the power of psychiatry and the pattern it represents for Lane is not successful as Erik does not act the way Lane planned. Erik may have been manipulated insofar as he does not call the police when he recognizes that Lane broke into his house (“He must have believed I wouldn’t take any action”, SoA 263), but Erik refuses to respond according to Lane’s plan when it comes to sending him to a hospital. Miranda at least tries to explain what Lane might have actually planned: “I think he was hoping you’d admit him to the hospital, so he could see what it’s like” (SoA 219). The situation with Erik, when Lane might have tried to manipulate him in order to be transferred to a mental ward, revolves around several points: Lane stages his seemingly suicidal tendencies (“I’m planning my funeral”, SoA 216), but smiles at the same time; he also irritates Erik when he confronts him with the latter’s deepest emotional trauma, his divorce and his exhaustion when he treats his patients (“My heart beat faster. I hated the man”, SoA 217). The simulacra therefore – imitation of emotion, provocation of reaction – is what Lane is at. He may create his own fake biography, although it is real or at least documented: “‘It’s not what you think. I’m an explorer taking trips into the wilderness, documenting what he finds, and then remaking the trip when it’s over…Every biography, every autobiography is make-believe, right? I’m creating several in real time, but it’s all staged.’” (SoA 218)

The “make-believe” of biography, the truth behind what may be staged or hidden is another theme in The Sorrows of an American when, for example, the life of famous author Max is reduced to a mere sensational retelling by a journalist. Facts or fakes thus become acknowledged reality. Such discrepancies are also explored by Erik’s sister Inga. She studies philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and his book Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843), where he approaches the choice of living either in an “ethical” or “aesthetical” attitude – a choice between good or evil? In Either/Or, Kierkegaard hints at another attempt to reveal the inner fragmentation or, more positively, diversity of the human self. As Kierkegaard himself declared that the “self contains a rich concretion, a multitude of determinate qualities, of characteristics” (Kierkegaard 1992: 523). The self is therefore to be understood as influenced by a dynamic process of self-discovery. Man thus “becomes himself…and yet becomes another, for the choice permeates everything and transforms it” (523). In Kierkegaard’s definition of

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mature and good (ethical) versus selfish and evil/fragmented (aesthetical), Hustvedt’s characters may be understood as portrayals of one category or the other. “The truly ethical individual has, therefore, an inner calm and assurance because he does not have duty outside him but inside him” (546), which may point at Erik, Inga, and her daughter Sonia – at least their symbolization of true and dedicated characters – whereas Jeff Lane and a sensation seeking journalist, “the Burger woman”, may belong to the purely aesthetical or evil forces, that merely aim at superficiality versus a deeper truth. Yet the hidden truth beneath, the core or true self may never be found. Both categories settled by Kierkegaard may be part of the self: “that both good and evil belonged to me equally essentially” (525). A person can be constituted “with all these multiple characteristics, he has seen as part of the way of the world” (528).13 In the novel Sorrows of an American, the term of identity is never a fixed one but dependent on a dynamic evolution. Other terms such as self and memory are treated likewise. Every character in the novel displays more than one identity/self. Hustvedt’s psychoanalytic protagonist is able to spread his view on various characters he encounters and consequently and logically due to his profession, analyzes and places them as being influenced by their fluent self-discovery. In the words of Inga and her studies of Kierkegaard, such fluidity of the self is clearly depicted: “Either/or, a doubling or internal dialogue, two inner voices in one, the Seducer and the Ethicist combined. Aside from the ironic unveiling…it’s true, isn’t it, that we’re always looking for one person when there’s more than one, several contentious voices in a single body.” (SoA 253)

As another aspect of such dynamic identity states, Hustvedt introduces Jeff Lane as an artist, whose addiction to presenting himself, via the psychiatric condition DID, with an art exhibition focuses on multiplicity also described as a means to understand the self as not merely one dimensional but plural and manifold.14 The different selves of Lane are literally exhibited in the art show of his “multiple fictions” (SoA 260). Different pictures represent different selves, one section may be composed of many images, yet even the same picture may symbolize such multiple selves when each similar image is named differently (SoA 261). Thus the inner fragmentation, or composition, to phrase it positively, of the “I” mixes the various complex personalities of multiple personality with the internally fragmented/composed self.

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As these quotations are a translation into English, another translation may be of interest as this section then reads as follows: “Himself, this personality with its whole multiplicity of categories, he has seen as something belonging within the course of the world” (Kierkegaard 1986: 206-7; my emphasis). During a workshop at the University of Augsburg on 28 January 2010, Siri Hustvedt mentioned her view of the contemporary self as plural. Concerning Jeff Lane and his art, she mentioned that “he also wants to express something”. During a workshop in May 2013, Hustvedt also mentioned Lane’s usage of multiple personality or the concept of DID. She mentioned that her new novel The Blazing World (to be published), which incorporates several narrative voices, might be seen as multiple personality fiction in a certain way.

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Hustvedt offers various explorations of other current and established psychoanalytical and psychological theories besides the concepts of dissociation. She mentions Burton’s interest in various seminars with the Institute of Neuropsychoanalysis (SoA 143) and thus “Freud’s 1895 idea of Nachträglichkeit” or belatedness as “remarkably similar to the far more recent notion of reconsolidation in neuroscience” (SoA 144; italics in original text), and adds further ideas on memory function and its possible dynamic alteration throughout lifetime. The theory of ‘memory reconsolidation’, for example, is understood insofar as “our memories are forever being altered by the present – memory isn’t stable, but mutable”, as Burton rightly states (SoA 144). A recent study on the term of reconsolidation notes that “established memory, once reactivated, becomes transiently labile and undergoes another consolidation phase in order to be maintained” (Alberini and Taubenfeld 2008: 236). Memory is not fixed; it alters, too. Belatedness as a Freudian term concerning the re-experience of trauma is again contrasted with Lane’s favorable opinion of Thomas Szasz, who criticized Freud and his concept of psychoanalysis as “Freud’s pseudomedical adventure” (Szasz 2008: 27).15 What concerns Erik, however, is that he senses traumatized people around him. Posttraumatic experiences haunt several characters in the novel. Erik’s father Lars, for example, suffers from a sort of “shell shock”, a trauma caused by the Second World War, and in his journal the father confirms: “It is the only wartime experience that returned to me in troubling ways by reliving it in dreams” (SoA 83; italics in original text), which describes a single incident when a Japanese officer is shot to death (SoA 84). Erik therefore attempts to explain this traumatic experience: “Trauma doesn’t appear in words, but in a roar of terror, sometimes with images. Words create the anatomy of a story, but within that story there are openings that can’t be closed” (SoA 85).16 Being able to interpret traumatic memory in such a clear way, it is astonishing that Erik, although still in shock because of his appearance in the art show, is not able to understand the images used by Jeff Lane in order to work his very own trauma: “I couldn’t understand what Lane had meant by the pictures” (SoA 264). Erik also muses on his father as “the absent-minded professor” (SoA 89) and “I suspect my father’s devils were legion” (SoA 121).17 Later, Lars is still haunted by “horror

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Another book by Thomas Szasz, Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry published in the year 1976, is also rather interesting. It refers to various critics of Freud, among them the philosophers Karl Popper, Karl Jaspers, Eric Voegelin and the previously mentioned Karl Kraus, an Austrian publisher, whose writings and essays condemned Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (cf. Szasz 1990). Confirming this, Erik might have understood Lane’s obsession with images as excellent representation of such a traumatic experience. And indeed he does concerning the trauma after the death of the parents (SoA 261). Yet certainly this more positive consideration is endangered by Lane’s offensive behavior. One of the several characters in the X-Men movies on people with supernatural power, the person Legion is said to suffer from multiple personality disorder. Certainly, the sophisticated character Erik did not have that in mind.

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images of the unnecessary killing of the Japanese officer” (SoA 136), and Erik concludes: “Traumatic memory arrives like a blast in the brain” (SoA 137). Other traumatic memories are mentioned with the context of nine-eleven, which for Erik himself was a remarkable and haunting experience: “That day we waited for the injured in emergency rooms all over the city, but they never arrived. They came to us later with their wounds of indelible memory, the images that were burned into them” (SoA 137).18 Likewise, Sonia is traumatized by nine-eleven and encounters her inner demons by banning them with poetry she writes, referring to another self inside her: “A twin ablaze inside of me” (SoA 189). Describing the fragile nature of self-perception and the difficult work as a psychiatrist, who empathizes with the suffering of his family and patients, Magda, Erik’s psychiatrist colleague, seems to find the explanation of the inner fragmentation so many characters in Hustvedt’s novel display: “‘Erik, we all go to pieces with our patients at one time or another…you know I’ve always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We’re fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.’” (SoA 139)

The narrator Erik encounters all kind of dissociative disorders, whether it is Sonia’s posttraumatic symptoms after nine-eleven, the father’s fugues or Inga’s secondary states, Jeff Lane’s variation of DID in his art show or – more generally and not only in terms of a mental disorder – the perception of people, be they are ordinary or famous persons (with in the latter case, also display competing private and the public selves). The most controversial dissociative disorder of DID is, as now shown, linked to the dubious, and not at all genial, character of Jeff Lane. Even another aspect of the controversy of DID is mentioned in the novel: repressed memory. Repressed memory, especially early childhood and possible sexual abuse, added much discussion to DID (cf. Brainerd & Reyna 2005).19 The term referred to childhood amnesia, which one of Erik’s patients claims to have recovered from. As shown earlier in this study, during the 1980s and 1990s, childhood amnesia and recovered memory played a major role in developing MPD or DID, which then was understood as a mental copying mechanism. Yet like Truddi Chase in her autobiographic text When Rabbit Howls (1987), Erik’s problem patient Ms. L. is finally convinced that she has discovered her real trauma of child sexual abuse. She remembers events when she was “about two” (SoA 109): “The memory had returned to her all at once” (SoA 109). Erik then correctly informs the reader that something seems to be wrong with that story: “Infantile amnesia prevents explicit memories from such an early age, although sometimes people mistake later events for earlier ones” (SoA 109). And he

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Lane’s exhibition also burns his image of Erik into the mind of the patient Ms.W. (SoA 263). On childhood amnesia and dissociative identity disorder see also the chapter on When Rabbit Howls in chapter 9.1. The victim claims to remember the abuse during early childhood.

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continues that even if “this kind of dissociated vision can happen when people are severely traumatized” (SoA 109); he feels that the sensationalized language of Ms. L (“her grandiose daydreaming”, SoA 87) is again a merely made up story. Later, Ms. L. performs what a specialized therapist would instantly recognize as a typical feature of DID still understood as MPD in terms of performance and not as ‘covert DID’ (Dell 2009b: 423), the existence of several complex and recognizable personalities inside and their phenomenology. She suddenly talks with a different voice: “It wasn’t her voice; I knew I was hearing someone else” (SoA 215). Erik’s comment that she sounds “like a grown-up reprimanding a child” only ends with the comment by Ms. L: “I’m lost. I’m cold. I’m all alone” (SoA 215). Finally, Ms. L. cannot bear to be a patient of Erik anymore, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who cannot identify the staged scenario. As a logic consequence, she actively seeks help within the self-help group of “survivors of abuse” (SoA 234), where she finds soul mates who “had perfect memories from when they were one and two years old” (SoA 234). The need to be recognized, as Erik understands it, and be among others with similar (made up) stories, is met with “clichés of popular culture, but that day I realized that the primitive distinctions trumpeted in the press and on the Internet fed her split world” (SoA 234; my emphasis). Even more, she already incorporates a “quality of ready-made diction, the language of propaganda, demagogues, and newsman on television” (SoA 234; my emphasis), which is also something to be thrown around.20 In that sense, Ms. L., and even Lane’s exploitation of DID, sums up everything concerning that pop culture of performing MPD or DID and also her urge to absorb everything in terms of it. These clichés feed and help both Ms. L. and Lane to perform whatever needs to be recognized. Yet in both cases, Erik is not a thankful audience. He spoils Lane’s effort to be hospitalized, and he spoils Ms. L.’s need to stage her variation of a “split world”. Somehow therefore, the meaning of dissociation and DID is used in a variety of meanings and connections in Hustvedt’s philosophical and psychological novel. There is no absolute restriction of the metaphorical usage of DID in terms of suspense or description of a dangerous other side. Yet Lane’s artistic exploitation of DID is admittedly egoistic and sensational. His self-perception derives from the fact that he mirrors himself through the eyes of others and therefore establishes himself differently. He describes his various selves as good student, druggie, lover, stalker,

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This description of a “ready-made diction” and a “language of propaganda” exactly meet my criteria for defining some of the hysterical performances of multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder as a cultural embedded syndrome. There seems to be no availability of a protolanguage (Szasz) anymore, let alone a possibility of expressing what is actually marginalized. Rather, it seems to me that certain features of a mental disorder are to be understood as imperatives so that patients are expected to act in a certain way and thus are caught in a prefabricated behavioral pattern. In a recent study on dissociative disorders, DID is especially mentioned as considerably influenced by mass media representation. Patients would also perceive themselves within a given matrix of “expressions of dissociative psychopathology”, thus resembling common presentations among North America and Western Europe (Dell 2009a: 395).

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patient. As Hustvedt herself, as an implied author next to the narrator’s voice of Erik, does not offer easy definitions of what she is actually referring to, she also only hints at several philosophical and psychological theories such as Szasz, Kierkegaard, Freud, neuro-psychoanalysis and others, and therefore establishes a very sophisticated text with innumerous references. With a solid understanding of the history and pop culture of multiple personality and dissociative disorders, the novel is a pleasure to explore as Erik’s journal entries depict a deep knowledge of all theories. Dissociation and especially dissociative fugues are placed among the dynamic development of different self-stages such as child or adult. Furthermore, the imagination and fictional existence of others – imagined and dreamed – add another idea of how the self or selves may be established. Finally, Lane’s art exhibition on DID – somehow central to the novel yet somehow detached from Erik’s total understanding of Lane’s psyche – still displays DID as a multiplicity of selves, but it is now also meant as an exploration of the “I” within different age stages of life or functions, which makes it not autarkic but dependent on others. Lane operates within a wild mixture of academic theories and popular culture. But everything is filtered by Erik’s description. And Erik is, after all, a psychiatrist and more of a psychoanalyst who renders reality with the means of understanding the other side of the human mind within the poles of consciousness and subconsciousness. In Lane’s eyes, DID is merely a fad and the most controversial diagnosis in psychiatric history, a scandal and acronym thrown around but yet useful to express his self-percpetion, the various roles or tasks life acquires. However, pictures – or imaginations of others, for example – are strong. They shape what people think they know about others. Such a Kantian perception is explained by Inga when she states that “we don’t experience the world. We experience our expectations of the world” (SoA 131). Lane’s art therefore remains stronger than its possible clear statement. Its images may be stronger than a real explanation. When Erik’s photo in the exhibition is seen by one of his patients, Ms. W., who discovers in it Erik’s darker side, his potential Mr. Hyde or forces of rage underneath his restrained being seem to subside and oppose Erik’s common self. At least so in Lane’s words as Erik is seen as “a little on the tame side” (SoA 158). Yet the essential character is still Erik and his perspective on the “mad diversity of human life” (SoA 37). He is in the center of the novel although Erik himself seems to have lost his own center: “I’m so lonely” (SoA 69). In the end, however, he seems content and changed: “We have different selves over the course of a life” (SoA 303; italics in original text). His description of others and the vocabulary he uses point to the fragmentation of life, and such different selves. Identity is never onedimensional. In consequence, each character in the novel offers a variety of selfimages or rather is retold in Erik’s descriptive language. In Miranda’s voice, Lane is a “writer/visual artist/performance artist, the all-in one” (SoA 221) and “half artist, half paparazzo” (SoA 78). Erik once becomes the “all-purpose fix-it man, science paper advisor, speedy pot washer, and general consultant” as a brother, husband, uncle (SoA 19). Inga’s husband, cult author Max Blaustein consists of “two Maxes”. Inga remarks: “My Max and the one out there” (SoA 19). Erik’s father is described as “a history professor, but he also remained a ‘farm lad’, and I don’t think he ever reconciled the two” (SoA 38) and is later again “his old self” (SoA 182). For Erik, the other

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side of the psyche, the unconsciousness, results in insights, which “would sometimes come to mind unbidden” (SoA 23). Therefore, the past feels “dreamlike and unreliable” (SoA 175). Miranda is the “wolf woman”, who co-exists in her dreams within an imaginary world resembling Goya and his monsters (SoA 23 and 103), and she remarks on her conflicting identities of a graphic designer versus and artist: “I make money from one. My heart is in the other” (SoA 40). Inga experiences “spells” and in her youth “would lose herself” (SoA 24) transforming into a trancelike state not unlike those of “a saint or a witch” (SoA 26). She describes herself “becoming another person” (SoA 48) after odd childhood experiences or later says “You think it’s my epileptic, hypergraphic, euphoric, angel-feeling self coming out” (SoA 56) or is in “her diva mode” (SoA 96). Burton’s mother “changed personality” (SoA 233); Burton himself feels strangely comfortable when later dressed like a woman. Actress Edie Bly is also the fictive character Lili Drake (SoA 209). Sonia, tormented by the trauma of nine-eleven, perceives herself within blank states (SoA 127). The secrets of the past and these varieties and multiplicities of the self seem “all so familiar, it’s strange” (SoA 160), and even meanings multiply (SoA 264). As Inga states: “Which I and which you? There are too many” (SoA 255). “All inner worlds have their codes”, Erik writes (SoA 172). The atmosphere of sorrow and melancholia is caught in Erik’s professional musing on the function of memory and identity, self-perception and the ability or disability to (re-)tell the individual story of life and therefore find a narration and to meet the “need to document myself” (SoA 22): “Every memoir is full of holes. It’s obvious that there are stories that can’t be told without pain to others or to oneself, that autobiography is fraught with questions of perspective, selfknowledge, repression, and outright delusion.” (SoA 8)

In telling his life, Erik attempts to regain his loss of wholeness. After his divorce, he feels lonely and disconnected both to himself and to the world. The (hi)story of his family life, the grandparents, the parents, the sister, and her daughter means “repeat pain”: “What used to be doesn’t leave us” (SoA 11). Inga also refers to the organization of “perceptions into stories with beginning, middles, and ends, how our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re reimagined in words” (SoA 47); or in Lane’s world in images both functioning as narratives. The perception of reality thus seems to derive from what journalists – presenting real stories – believe to be the telling of both sides, “as if the world is always split in two” (SoA 47). The narration on nine-eleven again is an “almost instantaneous construction of a heroic narrative to gloss the horror” (SoA 48) thus also confirming the ability to reconstruct events and experiences (SoA 48) when the horror of nine-eleven manufactured its “own fiction of heroic martyrdom” (SoA 49). Trauma, however, “isn’t part of a story; it is outside story. It is what we refuse to make part of our story” (SoA 52). For Erik, such an experience – “they called it soldier’s heart, and over time it changed its name into shell shock, then war neurosis. Now it’s PTSD” (SoA 52) – “history is made of amnesia” though (SoA 51). It is “the story hidden” (SoA 54), which may constitute everything. Erik cites none other than Descartes, and furthermore refers to Kierkegaard and quotes Wittgenstein: “There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They

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make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (SoA 55; italics in original text). Inga states that “we make our narratives, and those created stories can’t be separated from the culture we live in” (SoA 86). Yet still “real meaning, true insight is rarely dry” as “we all love our figments” (SoA 55). Memory, moreover, is not “a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words” (SoA 81). Trauma may cause a kind of “dissociated vision” (SoA 109). Erik’s attempts – as I would like to express it – to ban his demons, his inner traumatized loneliness with the means of narration, Lane may attempt to ban his own demons with images. Writing down thoughts and musings about life, experiences and the mental disruption of his patients may offer a way of overcoming an internal struggle in order to transform the idea of the ‘talking cure’ into a ‘writing cure’ or ‘image cure’.21 Thus, the writing and self-narrating serves what Lyotard mentioned as “writing as anamnesis and working through” (Lyotard 2000: 136). The text itself seems to be fragmented into several plot levels, yet it finally comes together to constitute one novel. As the girl Eglantine attempts to reconnect all fragments later in the novel, in order to understand that everything is connected to everything else, she metaphorically is able to string all things together (SoA 270). In this sense, it is the innocent child who is able to reconnect the loose fragments in her very natural, unspoiled way. Hustvedt’s knowledge of dissociative disorders and their connection to posttraumatic theory is extremely up–to-date and very profound.22 The novel depicts the professional psychiatric approach (Erik is still skeptical of the disorder displayed as MPD by one of his patients), pop culture notions of MPD or DID, and the controversy around it. The most controversial disorder within the theory of dissociation, is symbolized by DID, and thus the connection of DID to the more dubious character of the artist Jeff Lane seems to be correctly and logically established. Yet Hustvedt’s character of Erik narrating his story among other stories – the historical diaries of the father (both Erik’s and Hustvedt’s), Erik’s account of his patients, Lane’s attempt to present his self-image through an art show, the sensational story of Max and so on – offers only a limited view on the lives of others as Erik can only attempt to grasp a deeper meaning. Lane’s craziness in terms of manic agitation and his posing as and

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On banning the demons see also Hustvedt’s novel What I loved (2003) where Leo Hertzberg rearranges objects to gain a certain control or even put things in order again (“game of mobile objects”, Hustvedt 2003: 364). Her knowledge is both profound and fundamental as she attended neuroscience lectures at The New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the Mortimer Oslow Neuropsychoanalysis Discussion Group (until Oslow’s death in the year 2006). She is also a member of a neuropsychoanalysis group led by Maggie Zellner at Rockefeller University New York. See her website at ‹http://sirihustvedt.net›. Furthermore, her non-fictional book The Shaking Woman: A History of my Nerves (2010) displays the psychological theoretical framework to many of the mentioned theories in Sorrows of an American. Especially multiple personality and dissociation is mentioned (Hustvedt 2010: 45-6).

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being a stalker, an announced suicide, quoting Thomas Szasz, using DID in his art show mixes all kinds of strange (or even mentally disturbed) behavior. Dissociative identity disorder itself, however, is on the one hand not appropriate enough for the psychological expert Erik to understand it as the central disorder of trauma, as he does not reflect on its coping mechanism when he mentions the traumatized minds of his patients. On the other hand, DID is still used in the novel as a reflection on the self as being literally torn apart, many selves in one as Lane uses it to understand himself (or again himselves). Accordingly, Lane displays a variety of connections with other people that each give rise to another self just like Lane attempts to evoke Erik’s other side (or to keep track of a more vital or obscure Mr. Hyde side) when he attacks Erik and even takes a picture at the same time. Similarly, Miranda evokes another Lane and so on. The three rooms in Lane’s exhibition all resemble the theory of multiple personality and dissociation being transferred into visual art. The same picture is named differently. MPD (two or more complex personalities inside) may be presented by the same portrait yet with different names; DID, understood as inner fragmentation may be presented by many pieces of photographs composing the shape of a rectangle, which again are titled with different names. All these images represent the multiplicity of the self. DID is thus embedded in a sophisticated novel captivating the fragmentary existence of contemporary minds. Dissociation and DID still are closely connected to trauma experiences and, due to its metaphorical meaning of (post)postmodern humans, available as something popular that can be used as a fluid to express the artistic self/selves. Yet it is also connected to dubious self-perceptions of patients believing the rhetoric of early childhood sexual abuse and repressed trauma and the need to express or perform distinct alter personalities. The two opposing definitions may be presented within the art reprocessing of art and an exhibition, as there is hence both multiple personality (same image differently named) and dissociative identity (many small images composing one image).23 Yet these variations of the self remain, based in one person with a strong ego who uses the diagnosis and criticizes it at the same time. This hints both at the fad of psychiatric history and its undoubtedly strong symbolization of a “lack of a coherent identity” (McNally 2003: 16) and its strong metaphor which has become a part of popular culture and still remains widely available.

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This composition or collage of many images forming one could definitely be compared to the collage technique used by American photographer and painter David Hockney, for example, his photo-montages or photographic collages of Paris or “Pearblossom Highway” from 1986 which displays an American highway landscape or “Merced River, Yosemite Valley” (1982). Other photographs include his “composite polaroids” such as “Mother” (1982), a collage of 112 polaroids. For further references on David Hockney see ‹http://www.hockneypictures.com/works_photos.php›. Web. 10 August 2013.

21 Voices of Imagination: Valid Cases of Fiction Fugues and Storytelling Selves The world of the books comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. PAUL AUSTER CITY OF GLASS 1987:8

An ever recurrent variation in literature and film, with novels, stories and films offering their individual narrative of multiple personalities, identity changes and dissociation, the retelling of multiple personalities and dissociation proves the vigor of the topic of the divided self/selves and establishes its relevance as a major trope of imagination and fiction. The encounter of the other side(s) both in so-called lowbrow culture and distinguished intellectual narratives repeatedly marks its observable spectrum. While the motif of the uncanny abysms of the human psyche is detectable first and foremost in the genre of the psychological horror genre – a recent film example may be seen in The Ward (2010) by director John Carpenter here presented as an unchanged diagnosis of a stereotypical MPD with distinct persons inside one body –,the otherwise ambitious fiction that deals with more than mere shock effects present a depth of the human soul that might also reveal its non-singularity and its ability to negotiate subjectivity in a broader sense. More complex works thus, as shown in the analysis of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club or more prominently in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Jess Walter’s post-nine-eleven novel The Zero, embed the syndrome and its symptoms of dissociation in societal and cultural coherences. Nevertheless, stereotypical narratives with MPD as the central device continue to endure enhancing the culture, cultivation and cult of MPD/DID. However and despite such recurring fixed one-dimensional settings, it is also the strength of imaginative works to foster questions of identity, individual and community and thus philosophical issues of epistemology while scrutinizing allegedly given forms of agency and identity that may not be exclusively one-dimensional. Undoubtedly the forces of modernity and the effects of postmodern self-fragmentation seem an evident substratum for such a negotiation. A prominent and most suitable example for such an inner fragmentation and abandoned one-dimensionality is with Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. Auster’s (meta)fictional character in City of Glass, is

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called Quinn who eventually reveals several identities that clearly question the singular self and the experienced subjectivity. Quinn publishes detective fiction as William Wilson, whose “private-eye narrator” Max Work additionally becomes another part of him; later he will adopt the name Paul Auster. In City of Glass, Auster writes of the “triad of selves” (6) and Quinn is therefore lost “not only in the city, but within himself as well” (4). Doppelgängers, second selves, invented and independent identities, all can be encountered in Auster’s New York Trilogy and other novels such as Leviathan, Moon Palace, The Book of Illusion to name just a few. None of these novels distinctively deals with the diagnosis of MPD or DID, yet the illusion of a singular self is exemplified and illustrated. Similar to questions of postmodern identity games, the field of literary texts that may be understood in the realm of postcolonial fiction clearly understands notions of agency and identity in a more complex way. Characters that travel from one culture to another while struggling with their own (cultural) core identity may successfully develop a merged transcultural self yet they may also obtain an inner uncertainty and a culturally inflicted fragmentation with various selves engaged in various cultures. The motif of multiple personality is evidently fruitful and was adopted by several writers who experienced opposed and even contradictory environments. To become, in the term of Fernando Ortiz, a body and mind of transculturation and thus merge different cultures may be an impossible act for them. Their psyche consequently is a battlefield of cultural belonging, memories and trauma. Examples in this field include Leslie Marmon Silko’s character Tayo in Ceremony (1977), a novel that was published some years after the non-fiction book Sybil had swept over the United States like a Tsunami. In the beginning of the novel, Tayo is inwardly torn apart; he is traumatized by war thus internally fragmented and shattered by symptoms of “battle fatigue” while unable to cope with the oppositional worlds of native Americans versus white America which provides the dominant structures. A more evident example is to be found in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989) about a young woman from India who eventually travels to the United States where she ends up in a marriage with an American who prefers to call her Jane. Images and stereotypes of Indian and American identities merge and combat inside her, thus creating a constant loss of clear self-determination and (cultural) belonging. Jasmine/Jyo/Jyoti/Jane/Jassy, with all names indicating also different roles or yet another self-perception is caught in predetermined social and cultural roles, the inside reflection battlling with outside clichés: “Plain Jane is a role, like any other” (26). Becoming all-American is a matter of losing the Asian self. Former traumatizing circumstances must be dissociated, or rather repressed, in order to allow a psychological and also physical survival: “For me, experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill” (33). Jasmine is thus “shuttled between identities” (77) and feels “suspended between worlds” (76). In conjunction with her environment or the relationship with men, Indian or American, Jasmine’s identity or names change accordingly: “He gave me a new name, Jasmine” (76); “That Jyoti is dead” (96); “Prakash had taken Jyoti and created Jasmine” (97). As she “phantom[s] [her] way through the three continents” (101), she has to travel the United States to gain a stable identity while surviving a traumatizing rape and even the murder of her violator. Her inner life, however, is

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constituted by various (reborn) selves constantly competing within various conceptions of Asian and American cultural settings: “Jyoti of Hasnapur was not Jasmine, Duff’s day mummy and Taylor and Wylie’s au pair in Manhattan; that Jasmine isn’t Jane Ripplemeyer having lunch with Mary Webb at the University Club today. And which of us is the undetected murderer of a half-faced monster, which of us has held a dying husband, which of us was raped and raped and raped in boats and cars and motel rooms?” (127)

Traveling the United States surely metaphorizes also a fluidity and transformation of her character, from her subordinate Asian woman identity to “artificially maintained Indianess” (145), from alienation to a coping strategy after “what they call posttraumatic syndrome” (158). While being influenced by outside rules and roles, the question remains an internal one: “How many more shapes are in me, how many more selves, how many more husbands?” (215). While Jasmine is caught between “the promise of America and old-world dutifulness” (240), she also creates her image of being “Jane with my very own Mr. Rochester” (236) thus referring to a fictional feminist heroine of British fiction, Jane Eyre. For Jasmine, the selves may eventually merge into her own transcultural being. An even more evident example of multiple personality and clear dissociation, however, in the very terms of Sybil can be detected in the novel Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China by novelist Hualing Nieh. The novel was completed in the early 1970s (see Wong 209). As Wong stated, this novel exemplifies “madness as a form of spiritual transcendence in a world gone mad” (209). The border-crossing of the two women, who are only the two sides of one mind, reveals a violent identity transformation and a “cultural schizophrenia”.1 Mulberry is a Chinese woman who splits off her secondary self Peach, the violent opposite of Mulberry, when she lives in the United States. The novel works through traumas “in recent Chines history and [the protagonist] ends up what is clinically known as multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder” (Wong 210). The fragmentary text metafictionally uses “epistolary and diary forms” (Wong 210) thus visually capturing the internal fragmentation of Mulberry/Peach. To clarify the inner split of the character, the novel fits into the genre of a priori multiple texts. It is in the first chapter, which follows a prologue titled “The Man from the Immigration Service”, that the reader is informed of the mental condition: “PEACH, one half of the split personality of the woman Mulberry-Peach” (11). In a surreal narration, Peach will be the dominant self while Mulberry is the weaker part that is ignorant of Peach’s increasing violence. Peach’s words certainly exemplify her as the Hyde self, the stronger evil one, when she exclaims: “You’re dead Mulberry. I have come to life. I’ve been alive all along. But now I have broken free. You don’t know me, but I know you. We are temporarily inhabiting the same body. How

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Publishers Weekly printed on the back of the book.

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unfortunate. We often do the opposite things. And if we do the same thing, our reasons are different.” (183)

Signifying the urge to control the body, Peach describes “the world’s two superpowers” inside the body (183). Mulberry eventually realizes her inner split and notes: “I really have gone crazy. I’m afraid of that other self, her only purpose is to destroy me” (195; italics in original text). Mulberry as an Asian force opposes Peach, the American born secondary personality. In both novels, in Mulberry and Peach as well as Jasmine, fixed (American/Asian) identities make way for subjectivity as fluid and obscuring. They ventilate the question of subjectivity and thus offer “states of perpetual identity change” (Chiu 19). As in Jasmine, Monica Chiu noted, Mulberry’s split is an “advantageous method of survival” (20); it therefore again qualifies what here has been called the protector inside or dissociation as a coping mechanism. Multiplicity, surely more evident in a psychiatric sense in the novel Mulberry and Peach, appears due to cultural circumstances and thus transforms the inner fragmentation into a cultural level and metaphor. The personal becomes the political, or, as Pai notes “the personal dissolution [becomes] a paradigm for political disintegration” (Pai quoted in Chiu 20). By positioning the individual in a postmodern, societal and transnational context, imaginative literature also offers a valid voice that may question whether a so-called psychiatric diagnosis may point to human madness or an insane society. It thus clearly needs no absolution as valid diagnosis from a psychiatric point of view; it also does not question a diagnosis as a hoax or a myth. What seems relevant are the paradoxes of a tension-filled existence that requires a space beyond singularity. Yet using these psychiatric diagnoses works completely as an “idiom of distress” (Nichter). The question here is also whether madness is a personal dilemma or an outside paradigm. Therefore Monica Chiu asks: “if the nation-state is potentially more insane than its subjects…then is insanity a necessary tool for survival? Or, more simply, is multiple personality a sane answer to insane conditions?” (25). Here a reference to the anti-psychiatric movement may be valid too. There seems then an inherent logic to the fact that insane structures require an equivalent state of mind. Split identity will nonetheless be met in various qualities. Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy (2009) also contains a split character whose trauma causes the inner split. The girl Sorrow develops her secondary self with the telling name of Twin: “Sorrow wept, but Twin told her not to” (121). While Nieh’s Mulberry/Peach character seems to unravel two levels of narration each telling its own perspective while suggesting that a complete healing might not be at hand, Morrison’s Sorrow may state in the end: “Twin was gone… My name is Complete” (132). When in the year 2002 football star Hershel Walker was diagnosed with DID, he admitted to have never heard of that diagnosis. Yet once he was told that it was formerly termed as MPD, he continues that “immediate images of the movie Sybil sprang to mind” (Walker 2008: 12). His instantaneous association with the prototypical multiple Sybil enhances what is also meant with this study: how popular images of disorders are woven into the collective consciousness and exist autonomously in an undisturbed mold. How narrations (and Sybil might be nothing but a told story),

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shape a universal understanding of human multidimensionality. Here, however, one might assume lies also the “danger” of narratives, their strength of shaping reality. However, Sybil’s multiple personalities are also always connected to traumatic events of childhood sexual abuse and (sexual) assaults. While fictional texts, and no less so films, absorb such prototypical patterns, a translation into literature may include also a meaning beyond such exemplary trauma references and thus oppose features of myths of repressed memory or artificially produced traumas as such narrations offer an insight into the character’s inner worlds. On an emphatic level it is possible to create a relationship to fictional individuals, thus connecting to the reader. This process may offer a space beyond psychiatric diagnoses and their validation, beyond a mystification or a fixed understanding of agency, identity and subjectivity.

Conclusion A stranger in my own house. STEVENSON DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 1886: 55 I am in charge of the house now. RUFF SET THIS HOUSE IN ORDER 2003: 476

The phenomenon of the most controversial psychiatric diagnosis in the United States, multiple personality disorder (MPD) or dissociative identity disorder (DID) not only appears within mysterious or dubious medical cases but with extraordinary strength and presence within fictional works such as novels and films published and released until today. On a more general level the concept of multiplicity, plurality and changing identity shows a flexibility of self-notion and its contemporary transformation into various notions of diverse inner selves.1 While using a so-called mental disorder that still is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in its fifth edition (2013) as a cultural metaphor or personalized metaphor in order to highlight a multilayered identity, the psychiatric term is still referred to and seems to have established a culture, cultivation and even cult of its own. The hyperbole of hollywoodization in terms of an overt and clear performance of secondary personalities or alters on the one side – establishing its exaggeration within a frame of old-school MPD performativity – still serves on the other side as a template for identity games within a post-postmodern society without highlighting the features of a disorder or sickness too much. A restriction to only one self and consequently one image of oneself seems antiquated. Whether different moods are conceptualized as a signifying

1

In a global campaign launched in September 2009, the international fashion company of Dolce&Gabbana introduced new fragrances by means of describing them in terms of multiplicity of the self thus answering allegedly the contemporary questions of human existence: “Who am I? Who do I want to be?” The self was furthermore seen as existing “in a beguiling state of flux”. Thus the concept of the perfumes to be mixed was understood as to captivate “by possibility, the wearer [to have] the freedom to discover his or her identity from a pantheon of legendary archetypes. The question ‘Who am I?’ receives that most captivating and contemporary of answers: ‘Anyone one desires to be’”. See ‹http://www.dandgfragrances.com›. Web. 3 March 2010.

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another self-image, the strength of the Sybil-concept (that relied on a fake) of inhabiting distinct identity states or even persons in one body is still prevalent especially when the disorder DID is applied within a cultural context. This “celebritization” of multiple personality and dissociation or this process of turning a former seemingly rare and obscure mental disorder also into a trendy lifestyle proves the widespread application of MPD/DID when it comes to define or understand deliberate identity experiments that contrast personal trauma and distress. Multiple personality and dissociation show the characteristics of being a valid “idiom of distress” on the one hand and also being a positive reflection of a modern society that allows its citizens more than one imposed identity. Yet indicating that one suffers from DID may also mean to produce empathy or even sympathy as the audience or the environment may always draw on well-known prototypical cases. These narratives provide the core concepts of DID in terms of a medical or psychiatric condition as no other diagnostic tool is available other than an interview with a person or possible patient. Yet the controversy around this most debated psychiatric disorder still is very much alive which shows how paradoxical the permanent reference to MPD/DID is.2 This study is the attempt to summarize not only the most famous American cases but it especially focused on the presentation of MPD and DID in fictional and classic texts, which additionally are understood to have contributed considerably to the public notion of multiple personality and dissociation. Multiple personality and dissociation are thus defined as a “culture-embedded syndrome” referring to a culture of its own, which consequently presents the syndrome as intraculturally self-referential using intertextuality and corresponding references typical to the syndrome. The hypothesis that the now outdated definition of MPD still serves as template for innumerous fictional texts and films having thus developed into a fixed device of understanding and representing multiple personality has proven right. The second hypothesis that the newer definition of DID, which stresses the inner fragmentation rather than a proliferation of real personalities or persons within one body, evolves other modes of narration in terms of stressing the internal disintegration of the psyche was shown in the novel The Zero (2006) by Jess Walter and partly in Sorrows of an American (2008) by Siri Hustvedt, where the inner fragmentation and the plurality of the self is presented. While in The Zero, the main character experiences such an inner fragmentation pointing at the dissolving certainty of the centered “I”, which is symbolized by the macular degeneration as this eye/I-sickness is manifested mainly by a blur of the very center itself, the artistic exhibitionism described in The Sorrows of an American presented the question of self-identity and self-expression by using the multiple personality metaphor both understood as MPD, many persons in one, and

2

The short film “What is Dissociative Identity Disorder?” describes the usual causes and symptoms and offers various references to celebrities claiming to suffer from the disorder such as MTV starlet Tila Tequila. The film is available online and embedded in an article referring to actors like Johnny Depp and even Marilyn Monroe using the MPD/DID metaphor. ‹http://www.examiner.com/article/celebrity-alter-egos-multipledissociative-identity-personalities-or-possession/›. Web. 10 Aug 2013.

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DID, each personality state internally fragmented or composed of innumerous other images. Hustvedt’s novel moreover understands the inner plurality not only as sickness but as necessary within contemporary societal settings and personal beings. The two novels furthermore not only emphasize the inner plurality of the self being both influenced by internal and external forces, they also conclude that the image of multiplicity, mentioned as multiple personality and dissociation, is a suitable metaphoric device to place the texts into a contemporary culture of distress or a cultural illness experienced collectively. In Jeff Walter’s novel The Zero (2006), the protagonist states that he and his friends all suffer from dissociative disorders or posttraumatic stress disorders: “This was a cultural illness we all had“ (264). Yet the controversy of MPD and DID is insofar included as, especially in The Sorrows of an American, the corresponding character connected to the disorder seems to be rather dubious. As the narrator expressed additionally, the disorder has evoked a certain “quality of ready-made diction, the language of propaganda” (Hustvedt 2008: 234), which established a public notion of a mental disorder given a fixed template of expression and display. The narrative perspectives or techniques of the analyzed texts show how the metaphor of MPD and DID is adapted concerning the application of a twist or presenting the disorder directly. Either the reader knows in advance about the mental disorder and can thus concentrate on the detailed description of what the writers consider to be the correct or most effective presentation of multiple personality and dissociation. Such an example of the a priori multiple text is presented with Matt Ruff’s novel Set the House in Order (2003). Or the reader is surprised by a twist ending, which reveals the true nature(s) of the protagonist(s) after the story has been told in the form of unreliable narration presenting the alter ego(s) as real persons interacting with each other. Such an example is offered by Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1996) or by crime writer Ted Dekker in Thr3e (2003). These texts are typical a posteriori multiple texts. The various models of representing the mental split of the fictional characters is used either with the intrapersonal level displaying mostly one protagonist, who is internally fragmented. Such an example is mainly used within the film genre as only one actor is needed to display the multiplicity of the personalities inside him. The interpersonal level uses a number of actors, who resemble the various alter personalities and who therefore function in representing the subjectively experienced inner division of a multiple character. With the interpersonal level, the audience is often tricked again by the technique of unreliable narration. Throughout this study, two models of the metaphorical translation of multiple personality and dissociation could be defined: either the fictional work evolves merely on a psychiatric case and thus a personal psychological fate; or multiple personality and dissociation is understood as pointing at societal circumstances and the zeitgeist of modernism, postmodernism, or post-materialism and is thus used to demonstrate a collective psychological fate. This more generally understood application of multiple personality and dissociation points to a highly comprehensible psychological experience of a fictional character acting within societal structures which evoke the internal split. The notion of a traumatizing environment as being thus a depiction of the contemporary society as “dissociogenic” (Gold 2004) is demonstrated by nov-

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els such as Fight Club (1996) and The Zero (2006), which are therefore in a sense connected with classic texts of multiple or dual personality, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). The disparity of society forces the self to disintegrate and literally split off the Other, a force mostly stronger than the seemingly original state of consciousness, yet the self may already contain evil forces. In the terms of literary theories, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘carnival grotesque’ (Bakhtin 1968) and Hubert Zapf’s tripartite model of the ‘cultural-critical metadiscourse’, ‘imaginative counter-discourse’, and ‘reintegrative interdiscourse’ (Zapf 2002 and 2006) enhance the secluded other sides, which are displayed as independent personifications. Yet while Bakhtin’s carnival represents a “second life outside officialdom” (Bakhtin 1968: 6), an officialdom which may not include a critical metadiscourse but understands itself as sufficient and not questionable, the secondary personalities within the analyzed text point more to the imaginative counterdiscourse of Zapf. Thus, the inner dividedness or multiplication of the selves may serve not as a mere pathological translation of an otherwise unified and healthy psyche, the multiple personality and the mechanism of dissociation may even be understood as a form of logical response to postmodern or general societal structures. In that sense, the proliferation of the selves or the lack of a coherent self may represent moreover the general notion of the lost “I” in quest of its unique individualism, which, for example, in Woody Allen’s satirical film on the postmodern disintegration of a chameleon-like human individual, Zelig (1983) may not constitute an original self but like in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) rather a lack of a self as “one respectable person” (Carroll 1994: 19; italics in original text). The understanding of multiple personality as MPD, however, is not to be misinterpreted as the ultimate form of the (post-)postmodern ego dissolving into egos and thus representing real plurality. Rather such forms of plural selves may be presented as mere flat characters or clichés as the many selves may thus solemnly accentuate one-dimensional versions or states of consciousness. The notion of dissociative identity disorder suggesting an inner fragmentation may still aim at the healthy psyche to be shattered, disparate but unified. Using MPD or DID as MPD is still conceived in this study as critical, as it pronounces and repeats stereotypical forms of mental illness as a given form of traumatization. It was therefore also of importance to stress the social factors of the multiple culture, at least in the United States as there is no such thing in Germany. The idioms of distress become a culture of distress that is not really questioned. The unconscious forces inside the mind, according to the theory of dissociation as a mental ability to cope with traumatic events insofar as to be able to not remember trauma or store it in the memory – thus as proposed in this study also rather “outsource” the evil forces as not being part of the whole self – may metaphorically express a discontentment with the culture, even in Freud’s understanding of the tripartite system of the ego, superego, and the id in Civilizations and Its Discontents (cf. Freud 1946 [1930]). Although the theory of dissociation has its origins within the theory of hysteria as representation of the other side as a double or altered state of consciousness, Freud constitutes the self itself being organized on different levels. Janet’s notion of the other side dissociated as a passive movement of denying a trauma or mental obstacle was understood as originally detecting another self within the

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theory of a secondary state of the self as a seemingly other side or other personality thus resembling it as a “multiplex personality” (Myers 1886), “disintegration of the ego” (Maudsley 1883), man consisting of two minds (Stead 1893), “alteration of personality” (Binet 1896), and “dissociation of a personality” (Prince 1906). It was a historical summary published in the 20th century, namely Henri Ellenberger’s Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), which recounted these various theories of the split mind as multiple personality and which was the major text for rediscovering the phenomenon. Before this seminal study by Ellenberger, multiple personality had been forgotten beside the concepts of psychoanalysis, understanding the human mind as complex, and schizophrenia, understanding the sick mind in terms of dysfunction. Following sensationalized cases in the second half of the 20th century such as Sybil, which refers strongly to Morton Prince’s case of Miss Beauchamp and Ellenberger’s study, the fixed idea – in Janet’s term – of multiple personality was established within popular culture especially in the United States. However, this study was able to demonstrate that different forms of a dissociative counterforce could be identified within fictional texts, which adapted this fixed idea of the other side, thus resolving into the embodied Other. To uncover typical metaphorical adaptations, the analyzed texts were chosen because of their relevance and popularity and not because of their merely intellectual value or their acknowledgement within an academic canon or because the author grants them special qualities. Besides typical narrations of autopathographies, various fictional adaptions revealed a translation of the diagnosis into subgenres. These different metaphorical subgenres can therefore to be named concerning the function and the origin of the multiplicity. Four different forms could thus be detected; those were sometimes applied in their very pure form, sometimes combined with another subgenre: 1. The function of the devil inside refers to an outside foreign threat, symbolizing the embodied Other, which is totally uncontrollable in terms of psychology or medical explanations. 2. The function of the spy inside refers to an inside threat, which was artificially manufactured by authorities or drugs and which needs to be controllable and functioning but remains beyond one’s experiences. 3. The function of the killer inside is seen as the inside threat attempting to outsource evil impulses, which are uncontrollable in the end. 4. The function of the protector inside, which strongly refers to the psychological theory of dissociation as a mental mechanism to repress and cope with traumatic experiences. This understands the dissociation as an inside mechanism, which is therefore psychologically triggered and also externalized in terms of embodiments into other persons. This subgenre uses stereotypical models of multiple personality and dissociation in terms of trauma. The close reading of American fictional texts from the middle of the 20th century onwards, treating explicitly MPD or DID, distilled these four different functions of multiple personality and dissociation. It was interesting to compare the contemporary novels to these fixed forms and analyze whether the outdated and controversial diagnosis of MPD was explicitly treated and, if so, how these texts challenge the contro-

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versial history of multiple personality and dissociation. The more complex novels, which attempt to avoid a simplified reduction to one of the major metaphorical adaptations, could still be compared to the various forms of these subgenres. Such examples were found in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), which evokes a pattern of different possible interpretations of a mysterious, sphinx-like female character within a patriarchal society, who staged and displayed her sensational second murder personality during a session of hypnosis. This may point to the killer inside but also to the protector inside. Another example here is Siri Hustvedt’s Sorrows of an American (2008), which hints at the controversy of MPD or DID by connecting the disorder to a dubious character, who partly uses the popular culture of multiple personality and dissociation to express his critical view of psychiatric powers and at the same time his feelings of displacement by exhibiting images which vary the expressive language of both MPD as clear distinction of personalities and DID as inner fragmentation. Thus, the novel may point mainly to the function of multiplicity as the protector inside and at the same time mental plurality and multiplicity of the contemporary dynamic self. Therefore Atwood’s and Hustvedt’s characters are still ambiguous and mysterious, resembling the most controversial psychiatric diagnosis in a very appropriate and sophisticated way. Other texts, which employ the metaphor of multiple personality and dissociation as a pure and simplified template using clearly one or more of the four subgenres named in this study to demonstrate a more prototypical character suffering from MPD (sometimes correctly renamed DID), still stick to the clear definition of MPD with the existence of complex personalities as embodiments of the other side as the Other. Such examples could be found in texts which make use of unreliable narration, especially Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) with the protector or killer inside, Ted Dekker’s Thr3e (2003) with the protector and the killer inside, Matt Ruff’s Set this House in Order (2003) with the protector(s) inside, and Gabrielle Pina’s Chasing Sophea (2006) with the uncanny protector inside. While Matt Ruff offers an explanation of the mental disorder understood as the outdated MPD to arrange a sometimes comical view of his characters intermingling with their alter egos as distinct secondary persons, the other novels attempt to trick the reader by presenting the alter ego as a seemingly real person. Although Jess Walter used the metaphor of the possible secondary self in his novel The Zero (2007) as an expression of inner fragmentary dissolution after a traumatic event, such clear dis(as)ossciations of a core self and other side still remain typical of the genre of multiple fiction. Each analysis proved that a distinct language of MPD and DID exists and that it is contrasted to mere schizophrenic notions of the insane mind. The most important and regularly recurrent references are the classical texts of Dr. Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality (1906), Dr. Corbett H. Thigpen and Dr. Hervey M. Cleckley’s The Three Faces of Eve (1957), and especially the superwoman of MPD presented in Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil (1973). Hence the singular texts move within the typical pattern of multiple personality and dissociation formerly defined as old school MPD with complex secondary personalities or persons. This study is thus also considered to present a comprehensive study of multiple personality and dissociation within fictional works. As Christina von Braun suggested in her study on MPD, further detailed examinations of the literary device of the

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multiple character were necessary (Von Braun 1999: 38). Whether the mental disorder of multiple personality or dissociative identity may be subject to further transformations of the core definition; whether the psychiatric field may in future be more careful in terms of adapting a therapeutical understanding of dissociation as split-off parts of the psyche understood as having a life of their own; whether the popular notion still sticks to MPD although it is an outdated and highly controversial (and cultural) definition; whether future understandings may attribute more to the inner fragmentation rather than the proliferation of dozens of alter personalities as distinct persons, whether all this is the case, one conclusion may be confirmed: the fictional adaptation will continue to use the trope of the other side in more absolute ways thus enhancing the other side within the original definition of MPD. Some fictional works have manifested and strengthened the general notion of multiple personality and dissociation in those absolute ways. Some will use other forms of presenting the inner fragmentation. It is naïve to consider the topic of multiple personality and dissociation merely as a historical theme or curiosity. Quite the reverse. Although the scandal around the prototypical case of Sybil might have revealed the sensitive nature of the syndrome, future fictional works will prove that the metaphor of multiple personality and dissociation is vivid and consistent. This culture seems to be a fixed one and deeply rooted in the collective culture. The embodied other side is a factor to be dealt with. Beware of it!

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Filmography

This filmography is a list of a selection of American films and TV series with characters who display multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder. The classification in the etiology section (meaning cause of the diagnosis) is shown here partly according to a list provided by Lisa D. Butler and Oxana Palesh in their article “Spellbound: Dissociation in the Movies” published in the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation in the year 2004. Yet some causes or the display of disorder is often classified differently here as Butler and Palesh examined a more general experience of dissociation in film. Films indicated also in their list are marked with *. If the classification or etiology differs significantly here as the diagnosis is conceived otherwise, Butler and Palesh’s classification is indicated in brackets with italics. Various multiple characters appear regularly in TV series such as Pretty Little Liars, Lie to Me, Criminal Minds, Heroes, Psych, ER, Beavis and Butthead, Melrose Place, American Dad or the specific United States of Tara indicating again the culturally embedded nature of the phenomenon and a popularization and hollywoodization of the syndrome. This list is not complete, TV series from Great Britain such as Whitechapel are not included although they might also contain a prototypical multiple character. Film (director)

Year

Differential Diagnosis of Dissociation

Etiology with Subgenre

The Three Faces of Eve* (Nunally Johnson)

1957

MPD

Traumatic experiences in childhood; “the protector inside”

Lizzie (Hugo Haas)

1957

MPD

Traumatic experiences or societal oppression of women; “the protector inside”

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Psycho* (Alfred Hitchcock)

1960

MPD

Sociopath “the killer; Inside”

The Manchurian Candidate* (John Frankenheimer)

1962

Hypnotic control of behavior

Brainwashing and drugs (Exogenous manipulation); “the spy inside”

The Exorcist (William Friedkin)

1973

Various impersonifications

Possession; “the devil inside”

Sybil* (TV) (Daniel Petrie)

1976

MPD

Traumatic Experiences in childhood; “the protector inside”

Dressed to Kill (Brian de Palma)

1980

MPD

“the killer inside”

Zelig (Woody Allen)

1983

Multiple personalities

Satirical version of socially induced MPD; lack of identity

Rising Cain (Brian de Palma)

1992

Multiple personalities

Experiments by mad scientist, the father; “the killer Inside”

Color of Night* (Richard Rush)

1994

MPD

Traumatic experiences in childhood; “the killer and the protector inside”

Primal Fear* (Gregory Hoblit)

1996

MPD

Malingering; “the killer and the protector inside”

Lost Highway* (David Lynch)

1997

Multiplicity, possession, psychosis

Pact with the devil, imagination, hallucination

F ILMOGRAPHY

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Lost Highway* (David Lynch)

1997

(unknown); “the killer and protector inside”

Fight Club* (David Fincher)

1999

“Dissociative personality disorder” (novel), MPD, double, alter ego

Quest of male identity (societal forces); “the killer and protector”

Being John Malcovich (Spike Jonze)

1999

Multiple identities

Philosophical question of identity

Me, Myself and Irene* (Bobby and Peter Farrelly)

2000

Split personality, called schizophrenia

Repressed forces (frustration); “the protector inside”

Mulholland Drive* (David Lynch)

2001

Multiplicity, doubles, possible dissociative identity (amnesia)

Mysterious drama, personifications, unclear etiology (organic injury)

K-Pax* (Ian Softly)

2001

MPD as dual personality (posttraumatic functioning)

Traumatic experiences, PTSD; “the protector inside”

Session 9* (Brad Anderson)

2001

MPD indicated as DID before its validation in 1994

Childhood trauma or possession (childhood events); “the devil and the protector inside”

Cypher (Vincenzo Natali)

2002

Doubly identity

Hypnosis, brainwashing, artificially induced identities; “the spy inside”

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Peter Jackson)

2003

Dual Personality

External influences, addiction (emotional conflict); “the killer inside”

452 | BEWARE OF T HE OTHER SIDE( S)

The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme)

2004

Hypnotic control of behavior

Brainwashing and drugs; “the spy inside”

Sybil (TV) (Joseph Sargent)

2007

MPD

Traumatic childhood; “the protector inside”

The Bourne Identity* (Doug Liman); all further films in the Bourne series

2002

Dissociative Amnesia

Organic injury; “the spy inside”; “the spy inside”

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers* (Peter Jackson)

2002

Dual Personality

External influences, addiction (emotional conflict); “the killer inside”

Adaption (Spike Jonze)

2002

MPD

Mocking the topic of MPD serial killer movies; “the killer inside”

Inside (Trevor Sands)

2002

MPD

Classic MPD

The Hulk* (Ang Lee)

2003

Dual Personality, no dissociation

Organic, poison

Identity* (James Mangold)

2003

MPD

Traumatic experiences in childhood; “the killer and protector inside”

Tale of Two Sisters (Andrew Douglas)

2003

MPD

Emotional impact, “the killer inside”

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Hide and Seek (John Polson)

2004

MPD

Traumatic trigger – adultery; “the killer inside”

The Machinist (Brad Anderson)

2004

Dual personality

Embodied guilty Conscience; “the protector inside”

Secret Window (David Koepp)

2004

MPD

Second self as killer; “the killer Inside”

The Skeleton Key (Ian Softley)

2005

Multiple personalities

Possession, voodoo culture; “the devil inside”

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Scott Derrickson)

2005

Multiple personalities, impersonifications

Possession, various demons; “the devil inside”

Thr3e (Robby Henson)

2006

MPD

Traumatic experiences in childhood; “the killer and protector inside”

X-Men: The Last Stand (Brat Rattner)

2006

Split personality

Artificially Induced; “the spy inside”

Mr. Brooks (Bruce A. Evans)

2007

Split personality,

Murder genes, “the killer inside”

Reborn: The New Jekyll and Hyde (Nick Stillwell)

2007

Dual personality, double

Drug induced; “the killer inside”

A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)

2007

Split brain syndrome, dual Identities

Drug induced; “the spy inside”

The Incredible Hulk (Louis Leterrier)

2008

Dual Personality, no dissociation

Experiments

454 | BEWARE OF T HE OTHER SIDE( S)

My Bloody Valentine (Patrick Lussier)

2009

MPD

“the killer inside”

Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama)

2009

Possession

Demonic Possession; “the devil inside”

The United States of Tara (TV series) (Executive producer: Steven Spielberg)

Season 1: 2009 Season 2: 2010 Season 3: 2011

Prototypical MPD now called DID

Traumatic experience; “the protector inside”

The Uninvited (Charles and Thomas Guard)

2009

MPD

Traumatic experiences, mental illness; “the killer inside”

The Dollhouse (TV series) (Todd Solondz)

2009

Multiple Personalities

Artificially produced alters; “the spy inside”

Pandorum (Christian Alvart)

2009

Multiple personalities, hallucination

Madness; “the killer inside”

Inland Empire (David Lynch)

2009

Dissociative identities

Inner multiplicity, mysterious selfreception, identity games

Shutter Island (Martin Scorcese)

2010

Split personality, hallucination

Psychiatric experiments; “the killer inside”

Black Swan (Darren Aronofksy)

2010

Split personality

Ambition, “the killer inside”

Frankie and Alice (Geoffrey Sax)

2010

MPD

Traumatic Experience; “the protector Inside”

The Ward (John Carpenter)

2010

MPD

CSA, “the killer inside”

F ILMOGRAPHY

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Southpark Episode “City Sushi” (TV series)

2011

MPD

Iatrogenic, during therapy; reference to Psycho; “the killer inside”

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson)

2012

Dual Personality performed as prototypical co-conscious MPD

External influences, addiction (emotional conflict); “the killer Inside”