Anurag Jain's Blog
Sunday, January 30, 2005

Insights into Split-personality

My favorite comic strip is Calvin & Hobbes. I love the way Hobbes is a real tiger to Calvin. There was a neat editorial in Times of India on Jan 22, 2005 titled Divided Selves, which talks about all such matters. I loved this piece for explaining all-matters-doppleganging so subtly:

"A secret identity is not necessarily a bad thing
That everybody has a secret is no secret. That a lot of people, in addition, harbour an undisclosed facet to their identity, however, is not so well known or understood outside of comic book superheroes and some classic protagonists of fiction like Dr Jekyll or Walter Mitty. And like Mitty, the middle-aged, middle-class man who escaped from the routine drudgery of his suburban American lifestyle into fantasies of heroic conquest, behavioural scientists are now discovering that a divided self is more the norm than the exception. According to psychiatrist Dr J S Kwawer, director of clinical education at the William Alanson White Institute in the US, a person's double life is an extreme example of how mental anguish can cleave an identity into pieces. He cites the case of a respected New York real estate developer who for more than 10 years kept his alternative persona — that of a person habitually dealing with prostitutes and drug peddlers — out of the ambit of his normally evident life till an accidental discovery drove him to seek therapy. Pioneering American aviator Charles Lindbergh, for example, led a double life for decades. With one family comfortably ensconced at home, he fostered another in Germany, fathering three illegitimate children in the process which only DNA tests conducted in 2003 finally confirmed as fact.

But the interesting thing is, a significant majority of psychologists maintain that the ability to hold a secret is fundamental to healthy social development and that we don't really have a self until we have an elective subterfuge to reassert our identity as someone apart.(emphasis added) This seems natural given the constant tensions, conflicts and contradictions — and even boredom — we have to deal with in our social lives, at work or inside many marriages. As a result, gentle reactive daydreams soon turn into full-fledged fantasies which manipulate many of us into reinventing at least a part of ourselves as a form of hidden wish-fulfilment. Some take music lessons on the sly, yet others foster covert friendships on the Internet. As long as it doesn't involve anything criminal or violent and doesn't have the potential to degrade into a psychiatric disorder but remains a mildly (or even wildly) salacious and spicy personal activity, it's probably harmless. At least it's more rewarding than some of the meaningless overt roles we're sometimes forced to play by dint of being social beings."

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