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.

— Share site with friends.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

No School of Literary Theory for Multiple Personality

As we saw in the last post, which quoted Margaret Atwood, novelists have long known, or at least suspected, that they have multiple personality. However, novelists only create literature. They are not in charge of literary theory. And of the more than twenty schools of literary theory, not one addresses multiple personality.

What about the psychoanalytic school of literary theory? Classical Freudian theory—whose model of the mind has only one, undivided consciousness—implies that multiple personality is theoretically impossible.

 Multiple personality involves multiple (or divided) consciousness, with each alternate personality defined by its having an autonomous consciousness, a mind of its own. They—autonomous characters, alternate narrators, alternate personalities—think for themselves; therefore, they are. And Freud's single-consciousness model cannot account for how this could ever happen.

The history of Freud’s mistake is discussed in the June 2013 post.
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