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.

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Friday, October 4, 2013

Stephen King’s and Toni Morrison’s
Characters With Multiple Personality

Stephen King has characters who have multiple personality, such as the novelist with multiple personality in “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (Four Past Midnight, 1990). Toni Morrison also has characters who have multiple personality, according to Diana Kindron’s “Deacon Morgan and Multiple Personality Disorder in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” (http://voices.yahoo.com/deacon-morgan-multiple-personality-disorder-in-256432.html?cat=72) (2007), although most reviews of Paradise (1997) make no mention of it.

One of the main things that gives credibility to the multiple personality of King’s novelist character is that the novelist hears several distinctive, rational voices in his head. Hearing such voices is not a well-known feature of stereotypical multiple personality, but it does happen to be clinically realistic. These voices would be from several hidden personalities, speaking from behind the scenes. However, judging from the text, it is not clear that King, himself, realized that these would be voices of other personalities, and not just the thoughts of the regular personality. So he probably did not learn about voices in multiple personality from reading a textbook. Yet, he is somehow familiar enough with the mind of a person with multiple personality to include these realistic details.

 Do King and Morrison write such characters because multiple personality is an easy gimmick? No. Writing credible characters with multiple personality is not easy. So there must be another reason.

King and Morrison, like Dickens, write such characters, because, apparently, they know multiple personality, and write what they know.
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