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Multiple Personaly Disorder/ Dissociative Personalty Disorder

1.) Reasons why the main character's sub conscience produced alter egos

Fight Club
Narrator, whose name we do not know:
The narrator in "Fight Club" is an employee of an unnamed car company specializing in recalls. He is responsible for organizing product recalls of defective models, but only if the corresponding cost benefit analysis indicates that the recall-cost is less than the cost of out-of-court settlements paid to the relatives of the killed. His dissatisfaction, combined with his frequent trips through several time zones, is mentally taxing enough that develops severe insomnia.
Getting desperate the protagonist attends a support group for men suffering from testicular cancer, to "see what real suffering is like". He believes that crying and listening to the emotional problems of suffering people helps him to find some sleep, but he gets dependent on attending these meetings.
It's clear, that the narrator has big psychic problems, isn't lucky with the life he has and commutes (because of insomnia) between madness and despair. His whole life is build on some furniture he loves, which his alter ego burns down, so that he can live with Tyler Durden. So his suffering from insomnia can be connected to his dissociative identity disorder. As the narrator struggled with his hatred for his job and his consumerist lifestyle his mind began to form a new personality, who was able to escape form problems of his normal life and has a very destructive character.
The protagonist doesn't know that he suffers from this sickness until the end, so you have to watch Tyler very close to know what the problem with the narrator is.

Secret Window, Secret Garden:

Mort Rainey, who is the Protagonist of “Secret Window, Secret Garden” can’t take the blame of having plagiarised once in his life when he was a young author. It should be a joke, but the agency to which he send a copy of a short story his student colleague had written, accepted the story and Mort never told them that it wasn’t his. So he became very famous, but had to live with some kind of paranoia, because he was afraid that this colleague would appear on his doorstep one day and claim his right as the owner of the story. Mort would be ruined.
Beside that Mort discovers that his wife is cheating on him and they divorce, what causes a suffering from writers block on him. Living alone in the forest with his cat, which he kills later, Mort slowly starts to get mad…

Tell me your dreams:

Ashley Patterson is an introverted workaholic and the protagonist of Sindey Sheldon’s “Tell me your dreams”. She works at the Global Computer Graphic Corporations and her co- workers are Toni Prescott and Alette Peters, but Toni and Alette don‘t get along with Ashley. Ashley Patterson is accused of murdering many man, but she can not remember doing something so horrible. It later turns out that Toni Prescott and Alette Peters are her alter egos she created in Italy and England when she was a little girl to protect herself from her father, who sexually abused her. Whenever she or one of her alter egos get to know a man, he wants to have sex with her and so Toni and Alette think they have the responsibility to kill them.



2.) The way they lived with their alter ego/s.

Fight Club:
As mentioned before, we don’t know the name of the protagonist. We just know that he suffers from insomnia, has depressions and visits various support groups to “see what real suffering is like”. Going out of himself he cries with the people from the support groups and sleeps well at night.

During a business trip he gets to know Tyler Durden, his alter ego. Tyler works low-paying night jobs in order to perform deviant behaviour on the job. Soon after that the narrator has to live with Tyler Durden, because his apartment explodes. The two of them launch the “Fight Club”, sort of a new support group, where men fight each other. There are strict rules, like one fight at a time, just two men to a fight etc. Although the first and second rules of Fight Club are “You don’t talk about fight club” its membership grows.
During the project Tyler slowly takes the control out of the narrator’s hands and turns the Fight Club into Project Meyham by spreading anti- consumerist ideas and recruiting the members of the Fight Club in increasingly elaborate attacks on corporate America. The narrator describes it as “organized anarchy” .But this time the rules are different:

You don’t ask questions
You don’t ask questions
No excuses
No lies.
You have to trust Tyler

After some time the protagonist can’t find Tyler anymore. Tyler’s gone, just giving orders with the telephone. The narrator searches for him, because he wants to stop him, but on his way he learns that he is Tyler. Tyler’s aim was to destroy human civilisation the narrator hated so much, so he can build up something new. That’s why Tyler learnt to create explosives, which the members of the Meyham Project produced.

In the end the Narrator shoots himself, his first action without being manipulated by his alter ego, who came to the surface when the narrator had his bouts of insomnia.

2.) Secret Window, Secret Garden

Mort Rainey and John Shooter have a very interesting relationship. John Shooter accuses Mort Rainey of plagiarism and claims that his novel “Sowing Seasons” was his own. Of course Mort Rainey doesn’t believe him and so Shooter causes him many problems, like killing his cat, threatening him and his soon-to-be ex-wife. He even kills two people. Mort wants to prove that he wrote Sowing Seasons and that he did not plagiarise by showing Shooter a Magazine from an earlier date than Shooters novel. Unfortunately this magazine is in Mort’s ex-wife’s house and she has to send him the novel. Of course Shooter burns down the house, so Rainey has to call his agent to send him another copy of the magazine. While he tries to prove that he had not plagiarized Mort often hears his thoughts just as somebody else would tell them, so that he can answer them. These little voice in his head reminds him of John Kintner, whose story Mort had stolen. These little voice tells him that he might be ill and dangerous..

3.) Tell me your dreams
In the opening of the book we meet our protagonist who is a shy and a confused young woman. She thinks that someone is following her to kill her. She is always haunted by her parents' memories of fighting. Her father is a heart surgeon with whom she is not comfortable talking. She suspects her father to be a murderer of her boyfriend in the high school, but does not have any proof to prove it.
Then we meet Toni Prescott and Alette Peters. They both work with Ashley at Global Computer Graphics. Toni is of British origin and she loves to sing. Whereas Alette prefers quiet weekends and is a good painter.
Ashley is invited by a guy who works in hardware to his apartment. Next thing we know is Ashley is some strange place naked. But this guy too is murdered and castrated the same way as her high school boyfriend. She does not files a complain thinking that her father had done it too.
When Ashley reaches home she finds a threatening message which she takes seriously and calls police. She asks the cop to stay with her. But she gets the shock of her life when the next morning she finds the policeman murdered and castrated.
The investigation begins of all the murders and found out that Ashley is the one who is responsible for all of them. Ashley is diagnosed with Multiple Personality disorder. Ashley, Toni and Alette are the same person. Story does not rest here. Her father finds a lawyer to take up the case. She is found suffering of Multiple Personality disorder and sent to sanitarium. So Ashley is not aware of her alter egos until she is confronted with them, she is afraid of them and is very desperate because she did not kill any of this men.

3.) Medical Treatment


Well in Fight Club there is nothing such as a medical treatment. The narrator decides to kill Tyler, shoots himself and wakes up at the hospital without Tyler, but Project Meyham goes on…

Mort Rainey is killed, so he is not able to get any medical treatment.

But Ashley Patterson does. She gets a treatment at a sanitarium, where she gets confronted with her two alter egos. At first her alter egos refuse to talk to the doctor or Ashley. But slowly they start talking with Ashley, so she finds out that she created them to protect herself from her father, who abused her sexually in her childhood. Ashley understands that she does not need them anymore and is cured after some years.

Gothic Authors

Frightening Charakters:

Dracula:
The story starts with Jonathan Harker, a lawyer, travelling from England to Count Dracula in order to do business.
The Count wants to move to England/London and Harker is supposed to plan it.
After arriving he is very impressed by the huge and beautiful castle but soon he realizes that he has become a prisoner. One night while searching a way out of the castle he falls under the spell of three female vampires, the Brides of Dracula.
He is saved by the Count who, however, wants to keep Harker alive just long enough to obtain needed legal advice and teaching about England and London. Harker barely escapes from the castle with his life.

Soon after that a Russian ship, the Demeter, runs aground on the shores of England. All of the crew members are missing and only the body of the captain is found, tied to the ships helm.
The captains log tells about strange events that had taken place during the journey, which led to the gradual disappearance of the entire crew and a mysterious presents on board. The ship came from Transylvania.

Soon Dracula laid eye on Mina Murray and her friend Lucy Westenra, who just accepted a marriage proposal from an asylum psychiatrist, Dr. John Seward, who has to deal with an patient, Renfield, who means to consume insects, spiders, birds and other creatures in order to absorb their “life force”. Renfield acts as a motion sensor, detecting Dracula’s Proximity and supplying clues accordingly.

Soon Lucy becomes ill and Seward calls his old teacher, Prof. Abraham Van Helsing from Amsterdam.
Van Helsing immediately discovers the source of Lucy’s illness, but refuses to disclose it, because he knew that his student’s faith in him will be shaken if he starts to speak about vampires. He tries multiple blood transfusions but they are clearly loosing ground.
When Van Helsing has to return to Amsterdam Lucy and her mother were attacked by an wolf. Mrs. Westenra dies of fright and Lucy dies short afterwards.

Lucy is buried but soon rumours of a lady stalking children in the night came up. Van Helsing, knowing that Lucy has become a vampire inducts Seward her relatives and together they stake her heart, behead her and fill her mouth with garlic.

After finding put about this coalition, Dracula bites Mina and feeds her his blood in order to create a bond between them so he can control her. So she sometimes is telepathically connected with Dracula. This connection is used to detect Dracula which is only possible when Van Helsing puts Mina under hypnosis.

Dracula returns to his castle where Van Helsing and the others kill him by stabbing him with a Bowie knife. Dracula crumbles to dust and Mina is freed from the spell, the survivors return to England.

Dracula’s appearance is very frightening. His skin is very pale, nearly white, his eyes are blood red, he wears black clothes and a black cape. His rather cruel-looking mouth, with the sharp white teeth, was buried under a white moustache. Furthermore his fingernails are long and pointed, just like his ears.
He is able to move very strangely, for example he is able to climb a wall like a lizard and sometimes it seems like he is floating. He is a master of telekinesis and so he is able to move things just by the power of his mind for example he opens and closes the castle’s door in this way. In addition he is able to control people whom he fed his blood due to telekinesis.

Dracula’s castle is entered through a big wooden door with large iron nails but without a bell or knocker. The windows are tall and black and no ray of light could come through them. The door can only be opened by the Count with his telekinesis powers. The floors were made of stone on which every step rang heavily and which are lit by only a few candles.
The surroundings of the castle were very creepy. There were dark woods in which wolves lived, there was just a small street that led to the castles entrance and the forests were so thick that you were not able to look about.

Frankenstein’s Creature:
It was made by Frankenstein, in order to create the perfect human being, from dead body parts. After Frankenstein gives life to it, he flees because of the terrifying appearance of it. Frankenstein was disgusted by his own creation.

The monster becomes afraid of humans after several harsh encounters with them and hides near a small cottage, observing the people who live there.
It tries to make friends with the family but they are afraid of him, and it suddenly realized that he is a monster and seeks revenge by his creator.
It travels to Geneva where it meets a little boy. Because the kid is still young and unaffected by the prejudices of old it thinks that it could kidnap him and keep him as a companion. But soon it finds out that the boy is a relative of Frankenstein and so he kills him for revenge.

After hearing about the death of his younger brother, the little boy, Frankenstein returns to Geneva and sees his creation in the woods where the boy was killed. So he is sure that his creation coursed the death of his brother and gets a really bad conscience because he created it. He decides to hide in the mountains by his own to find peace. It is there that the monster approaches him, asking him to create a female counterpart because Frankenstein made it and is responsible for it. It demands that even a monster like itself has the right to find happiness, and that no human being will ever accept it. It promises to never reappear if Frankenstein does so.
At fist Frankenstein agrees and began to build a second creation but he soon realises that he can’t risk building a second monster that will cause trouble and so he destroys the unfinished project.

When Frankenstein returns home he marries Elizabeth and wants to fight with the monster, but instead of face up to Frankenstein the monster kills Elizabeth.

After that Frankenstein swears that he will chase the monster till one of them dies. They meet again at the Arctic where Frankenstein got killed by his creation which soon after that kills itself so none would ever know about his existence.

The monster is build from parts of dead bodies, and it is so ugly that even his creator does not dare to live together with it. Although its scary looks it is very intelligent.
Even though his limbs are in proportion and Frankenstein selected his features as beautiful it bid a frightening view.
Its yellow skin covered its muscles and veins, his hair was black and flowing, his teeth were perfectly white but all of that formed a horrid contrast with his watery eyes and his black lips.
The monster is about eight feet in high and proportional large.

The Laboratory of Victor Frankenstein is a very creepy room of his castle, very dark, only lit by few candles and full of strange machines and tools. in the middle of the room there is a huge table on which the monster is placed.

Analysis:
At one point the creature explains his feelings of isolation and abandonment, but Victor Frankenstein does not see that he is the one that abandoned his creation, that he was supposed to love and take care of. Victor never felt like a parent towards the creation he gave life to, because in his childhood he never learned to grow up and take responsibility for his actions. Because he rejects the monster it feels like an outcast which causes it to act violently and murder Victor’s beloved ones. It feels kind of jealous because Victor never takes care of it but loved so many other people.

The essence of this story is loneliness and the effects that loneliness has on humans.
The monster is abandoned by the man who should love it, and is rejected by every other human being he meets. It has no one that cares for it, everybody is afraid of it and wants to kill it. Even its “father” was disgusted by it and left it alone.
So in this story it is not really the figure that is frightening but the situation it is in.
Every human being is afraid of being alone and hated, you could say it is the most horrible idea to be all alone and by yourself.
Being pushed away and rejected the monster sees no other way than to kill those people who get so much attention from the man who should be caring for it. All the creature wants is to have someone who loves it and to not be alone, so he wants his creator to build a second monster, but he refuses and the monster turns even angrier.
When Frankenstein dies the monster starts to grieve over his dead body which shows that it never really intended to kill its creator. In the end it kills itself, maybe because it has a bad conscience about killing all those people, but more likely because he can’t bear being alone anymore. After the death of Frankenstein the only thing that gave his life any meaning is gone and so he has no intention to love on.


Dr. Henry Jekyll/Mr. Edward Hyde:
At the start, readers learn that a Mr. Hyde attacked a young girl. A respected doctor has written a will giving all his possession to this violent man, which puzzles the doctor's friends. People haven't seen much of Dr. Jekyll lately. Utterson, a friend of Jekyll, looks into Mr. Hyde and finds that he hangs out at a laboratory at Jekyll's home. Utterson is amazed at how ugly Hyde is. He questions Jekyll, who tells him not to worry about Hyde. Years later, Hyde beats up a parliament member and a client of Utterson, who brings the police to Hyde's apartment. No Hyde. Jekyll is questioned, but says he no longer knows Hyde. He shows a note from Hyde saying goodbye – but Uthe handwriting is very much like Jekyll's. Jekyll gets more social for a few months, but then refuses to see visitors. After the death of an acquaintance, Jekyll shuts himself up for several weeks. Utterson breaks in to the laboratory and finds the body of Hyde, dead by suicide, but wearing Jekyll's clothes. A letter reveal's that Jekyll created a potion that was able to transform him. The potion allowed Jekyll to become free of conscience, unconcerned with people's views and society's standards. At first, Jekyll liked being that free, but then it became scary. Then Hyde was taking over even without the potion. Jekyll found it necessary to end his life in order to end Hyde.


Analysis:
This story represents the inner conflict of humanity’s sense of good and evil. It reflects the duality of human nature and shows that good and evil exist in every human being and the fear of loosing control over the evil side.
Mr. Hyde represents the evil and bad side of every human being, and Dr. Jekyll, the good side, tries to eliminate him, because he is afraid.
At first Dr. Jekyll is able to control Mr. Hyde, because he only appears when Dr. Jekyll drinks the potion he mixed himself, but after some time Mr. Hyde approaches without Dr. Jekyll drinking the liquid. This stands for the loss of control of Dr. Jekyll which represents the fear of mankind to loose the control over their evil side.
Humans are afraid of their evil side, and most of the people deny the existence of it.

That Mr. Hyde only commits evil in an effort to extinguish the perceived evil that has been projected onto innocent victims shows the disunion of the human nature to decide if evil should be accepted to prevent evil, or not.
Like in the case of Dr. Jekyll, the bad side of a human being is even more likely to take over the control when the person wants to banish all evil in an attempt to be completely good, because duality is a part of humanity and to deny its existence is like to deny the existence of humanity itself.

So what makes Mr. Hyde so frightening is that he stands for the inability to control the bad side of oneself. Nobody can deny that there is a evil side in every human being and that everybody is afraid of losing control over it, so the idea of an second personality that takes over the control of body and mind is very frightening to anybody.

Dr. Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde
A doctor who has covered up a secret life full of very bad and cruel deeds. He feels as if he is constantly battling within himself between what is good and what is evil, and is pushing away people dear to him. After drinking a potion of his own creation, Jekyll is transformed into the cruel, remorseless, evil Edward Hyde, representing the hidden side of Dr. Jekyll's nature brought to the fore. Dr. Jekyll has many friends and has a friendly personality, but in the nature of Mr. Hyde, he becomes mysterious, violent, and secretive and as time goes by, Mr. Hyde grows in power. After taking the potion repetitively, he no longer relies upon the potion to unleash his inner demon.
When Mr. Hyde is in charge he often sits in dark bystreets and downs one drink after another.
Mr. Hyde is described as a displeasing appearance, and something about him seems to be wrong. Nobody really can tell what it is, but he gives a strong feeling of deformity. He’ an extraordinary looking man but it is impossible to name something out of the way.



Dr. Lanyon
A former friend of Jekyll's. Hastie Lanyon disagrees with his scientific principles. He is the first person to whom Hyde's identity is revealed. Helps Utterson solve the case when he describes the letter given to him by Jekyll. When he finds out about Hyde's identity he then becomes critically ill, and later dies of shock.

Mr. Utterson
The lawyer Gabriel John Utterson is the character the narrator follows in his quest to discover the identity of Hyde. In most adaptations of the novel, he is omitted and replaced by Dr. Lanyon. Utterson is described as a measured, and at all times emotionless, bachelor, who is nonetheless believable and trustworthy in his accounts of the events of the story.

Poole
Poole is Dr. Jekyll's butler who, upon noticing the reclusiveness and changes of his master, goes to Mr. Utterson with the fear that his master has been murdered and his murderer, Mr. Hyde, is residing in his chambers.

Inspector Newcommen
This Scotland Yard inspector is joined by Mr. Utterson, after the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. They explore Hyde's loft in Soho and discover evidence of his depraved life.


The Masque of the Red Death:
The story takes place at the castel of Prince Prospero who has, together with one thousand other nobles, taken refuge in this walled abbey to escape the Red Death, a terrible plague that has swept over the land.
The symptoms of the Red Death are horrible: the victim is overcome by convulsive agony and sweats blood instead of water. It is said to kill within half an hour.
Prospero and his court are intending to await the ending of the plague in luxury and safety behind the walls of their secure refuge.

One night Prospero holds an masquarade ball to entertain his guests in seven coloured rooms of the abbey. Six of the rooms are each decorated and illuminated in a specific color: blue, purple, green, orange, white, and violet. The last room is decorated in black and is illuminated by a blood-red light; because of this chilling pair of colors, few guests are brave enough to venture into the seventh room.
The room is also the location of a large ebony clock that ominously clangs at each hour.

At the chiming of midnight, Prospero notices one figure in a blood-spattered, dark robe resembling a funeral shroud, with a skull-like mask depicting a victim of the Red Death, which all at the ball have been desperate to escape.
Gravely insulted, Prospero demands to know the identity of the mysterious guest so that they can hang him, and when none obey, pursues him with a drawn dagger through the seven rooms until the mysterious figure is cornered in the seventh room, the black room where the windows are tinted scarlet.
When the figure turns to face him, the Prince falls dead at a glance.

The enraged and terrified revelers surge into the black room and remove the mask, only to find both it and the costume empty. To the horror of all, the figure reveals itself as the personification of the Red Death itself, and all the guests suddenly contract and succumb to the disease. The final line of the story sums up: "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."

Analysis:
The most frightening thing in that story is the unability to obstruct the inescapable. the Red Death is a illness and Prospero tries to hide from it by blocking himself up in his house. The castle is meant to be a closed space but the stranger is still able to get in, suggesting that control is an illusion, and you can’t escape a disease.
Prospero tries to egoistically safe his own life by blocking himself up, but he can’t escape the Red Death, which shows that it’s impossible to flee or hide from an illnes, a desease or a problem. You have to face it, even if you’re going to die doing it.

The Red Death:
The desease is a fictitious one, but it might have been inspired by Tuberculosis (Poe’s wife and his mother died because of tuberculosis) or cholera ( Poe witnessed an epidemic of cholera in Baltimore, Maryland in 1831).
Others say that it is actually Bubonic plague or the Black death, because the Red Death takes action in the black room.

The seven rooms:
Because of the duke’s love of the bizarre the rooms in his house were so irregularly disposed that you could only see one room at a time. There were seven rooms each one in an other coloure with other decoration: blue, purple, green, orange, white, and violet and black.
Every romm has got one Gothic window which was painted in the color of the room.
Only in the seventh, the balck room, the color of the windows didn’t match with the color of the room; they were scarlet- a deep blood coloure.

In none of the rooms was any kind of light, but in the corridors that followed the rooms there stood a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that glaringly illuminated the room.
The big ebony clock that stood in the black room gave a shiver to Prosperos guest every hour when it rang.
It was so frightening an chilling that every hour the orchestra stopped playing and the jolly crowd stood still passed their hands over their as if in meditation.