Writing Problems: Multiple Self States

In January 1856, Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Elizabeth Holland about being “out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

Dickinson’s account is both literal and figurative. In late 1855, Dickinson reluctantly moved with her family from North Pleasant Street in Amherst back to the house on Main Street, her birthplace. She takes account of her “several senses” as well as her hat, coat, and best shoes. 

Perhaps her feeling of dislocation addresses an effort to retain a sense of self or to generate the unspeakable (the unspeakable being a key feature of most of her approximately 1,775 poems). Dickinson was “out with lanterns” looking for herself because of what psychoanalytic theory called “multiple self states.” This theory says the self is composed of many different self-states. These self states are all perceptual and cognitive; they each experience feelings and allow sometimes conflicting desires and wishes to present simultaneously. 

I’m interested in, the way poetry can stand in the spaces between these various separate selves, and the ways poems can help us see distinctions between the selves.