BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Thursday, August 29, 2013

Novelists Use Multiple Personality

Many normal people have more than one psychological self, or, what I call, "normal multiple personality" (not just multiple roles). This fact is not new, but most people are not familiar with it. For a good, popular science, review, see:

Multiplicity by Rita Carter. Little Brown, 2008

This fairly common, normal proclivity of the mind is not a mental illness and does not need treatment.
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 The relatively few people who do have this to such an extent that it causes distress and/or dysfunction and is, therefore, a mental illness, and does need psychotherapy—1.5% of the general public, according to DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) (2013)—may, nevertheless, be successful:

I Am More than One: How Women with Dissociative Identity Disorder Have Found Success in Life and Work by Jane Wegscheider Hyman. McGraw Hill, 2007.
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In any case, Dickens’s normal multiple personality is interesting for two reasons:
  1. He was so successful, and still is, with his books in print, movies made of them, world-wide reading clubs, numerous biographies, Dickens scholars and academic studies, Dickens web sites, and the celebration of his 200th birthday last year.
  2. His success was not in spite of multiple personality, but, in part, because of it, since it was integral to his creative process (as discussed in the June 2013 post of this blog).
In short, many people have normal multiple personality, but novelists use it professionally.

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