How Many Personalities Do We Have?

I am more patient with my students than I am with people in general. I have virtually never, in my 12 or so years as a professor, gotten upset with them. I wish I could slide into what I can only describe as my “educator personality”—a calm and composed version of me—at will. But the truth is that while complete equanimity comes to me naturally in the classroom, I have to work to remain calm in certain other contexts.

You too probably exhibit something like this type of personality fragmentation: you may be a perfectionist when it comes to your interior design projects yet sloppy when writing emails; practice the violin for 10 hours a day but find it difficult to floss regularly; be funny and gregarious as a stand-up comedian on stage but depressed and reticent behind the curtains. We are all fragmented. There is hardly a person so unified as to not display traits and tendencies that seem to be in tension with each other.

If this is right, however, then what are our personalities like? Is it a bad thing we are fragmented? And how can a person have several personalities?

We can adopt a cynical view and say that people’s real traits and dispositions are their worst ones. Everything else is hypocrisy, a façade.

The cynical view, no doubt, captures a real truth. It is probably not an accident that many seem better and more agreeable when you first start dating them than they do two years into a relationship, or twelve. It is reasonable to think that a person may be trying harder at first, working more on impression management, but drop the act once the other is “hooked.”

Yet the cynical interpretation provides only a partial explanation even where it is plausible. For while it may seem that the person you began dating appeared very nice at first and then changed on you, chances are that you too behaved better at first. Neither of you dropped the mask in the course of the relationship. Both of you were reciprocating all along.

This is not to say that there aren’t cases in which only one party is very agreeable at first but not later while the other’s behavior remains constant. That happens, but unless one, per chance, gets involved with an actual psychopath, those cases are the exception rather than the rule.

Moreover, there are cases in which the cynical view is altogether implausible to begin with. Novelist Marcel Proust describes a fascinating case in point in the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, one that involves a man named Charles Swann. Swann is an aristocrat of refined taste and manners. He wouldn’t do or say anything boastful. For instance, he would never mention to his friends that a princess has invited him to lunch as that would be bragging. However, Swann falls in love with and marries a former courtesan—Odette de Crecy. After his marriage, his personality bifurcates, or rather, he acquires a new personality on top of the old. While the old Swann would consider boasting vulgar, the new Swann would shout from the rooftops that the wife of a mid-level official has paid his own wife a visit. Swann continues to be his former self with his old friends, but he is very different in the circles his wife moves in. Proust writes:

…To the original Swann, our old friend had added a fresh personality…that of Odette’s husband… it was astonishing to hear him, who in the old days, and even still, would so gracefully refrain from mentioning an invitation to Twickenham or to Marlborough House, proclaim with quite unnecessary emphasis that the wife of some Assistant Under-Secretary for Something had returned Mme Swann’s call.

A cynical view is implausible here. It is clearly not the case that Swann was always a boor and a philistine but that somehow, his real personality came to the fore only after he married Odette de Crecy. But if not the cynical view, what is the explanation of Swann’s metamorphosis?

Proust suggests that Swann was unprepared for the new situation he found himself in. The new circumstances did not, so to speak, activate the virtues Swann had displayed on prior occasions. Proust says:

Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we make it our duty to practice them, that, if we are suddenly called upon to perform some action of a different order, it takes us by surprise, and without our supposing for a moment that it might involve the bringing of those very same virtues into play.

It is unclear that Proust’s own interpretation of Swann is correct. For Proust suggests here that Swann is so confused by the new situation, it somehow does not occur to him that the way in which he now behaves shows lack of manners. This is implausible. To see why, we need to look at Swann's motive for action. Swann acts out of devotion to his wife. He likely recognizes all too well how his new behavior would look to his old friends, but his wife is more important to him. But let me set Swann’s case aside.

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The suggestion Proust makes is nonetheless a very important one. While I don’t think it explains Swann, it can help explain much of the character and personality fragmentation we observe in ourselves and others. Different circumstances and people may draw different propensities out of us. At times, the novelty of a situation may, indeed, confuse us and we might find it difficult to be ourselves with a new group of people at a new company or in a new city or country.

Novelty of this sort may be used to one’s advantage also. The new people don’t know us any more than we know them, so it’s up to us to show whatever side of ourselves we like and try to establish a new persona.

Importantly, it is often quite appropriate that we would display different tendencies in different contexts. If you are exactly the same person in a business meeting that you are with your small children, you are probably failing to be either a good executive or a good parent or both.

At other times, however, we may be fragmented in ways that are less helpful. Unhelpful, disharmonious fragmentation may or may not have to do with the novelty of a set of circumstances we encounter. It is true that if you are suddenly thrust in a new place, with a new group of people, or assigned a role you haven’t played before, you may be disoriented for a while. What you say and do might seem inauthentic to you, as if you’ve lost your voice and identity.

But disharmonious fragmentation need not have anything to do with the unfamiliarity of the context. My students but not the person who cuts me in line regularly draw my most patient side out of me. That’s true despite the fact that both types of situation are familiar to me and that, moreover, I would prefer that patience come to me easily under all circumstances.

Perhaps, a more pertinent question is not that of why we are fragmented in these ways, but whether there anything we can do about what I here dubbed disharmonious fragmentation. Is there?

I believe that there is. In fact, there is a hopeful message in fragmentation. While you—the whole of you—may not be as good or likable (in your own estimation, and not only in that of others) as your best side, neither are you as bad as your worst. We can, perhaps, learn to tap into our better propensities. We need not try to emulate or channel some mythical paragon of virtue. We can simply try to channel our own better selves. I, for instance, can, if I experience frustration when someone cuts me in line, remind myself of how my educator personality would react in that situation. Would she get upset? Surely not! She is wiser than I am. She knows that the 30 seconds delay at the checkout don’t matter to her day. I too must know this because she does, and she is me though not the whole of me. We are all of our—however disjointed—selves.

There is a final thought I wish to share here. It is unclear how deeply fragmentation actually runs. There is often unity beneath the multiplicity of a person’s selves. On the one hand, we have moral boundaries. There are things we wouldn’t do no matter what situation we find ourselves in. We may have friends we would never betray or means of achieving a goal we’d never resort to. On the other hand, we often have dominant motives that we act on across a variety of situations. For some—it is competitiveness and ambition. For others, pleasure. Still others live for a cause. For Proust’s Swann, to display good manners appears to be the dominant motive at first, but that's overtaken first by infatuation with a woman, then by devotion and commitment to that woman as his wife; and perhaps, there is the motive of love or at least, of the idea of love.

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